Nazir Jinnah

Sept 22nd 2017 President Donald Trump plans to nominate Dana Baiocco, a partner at Jones Day in Boston, to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the White House said in a statement Sept. 21. Baiocco, a product liability and regulatory compliance attorney, has defended Vibram USA, Honeywell Safety Products, and Yamaha in high-profile litigation, according to the firm’s website. If the nomination proceeds and Baiocco is confirmed by the Senate, she’ll take the seat held by Commissioner Marietta Robinson, whose term expires in late October. Robinson is part of a 3-2 Democratic majority on the commission. A Trump administration appointment here would give the edge to Republicans. Baiocco obtained an undergraduate degree in journalism from Ohio University in 1988 and her J.D. from Duquesne University in 1997, according to the Jones Day website. She clerked for Judge Gustave Diamond of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania from 1996-98, according to...

Editor’s Note:   The author is the Louis Stein Chair at Fordham Law School, where he directs the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics . By Bruce A. Green, Fordham Law School The public is accustomed to traveling, including internationally, with electronic devices (cell phones, laptop computers, etc.) that potentially store, or provide access to, vast amounts of personal information. As the Supreme Court recognized in a 2014 decision,  Riley v. California , a cell phone holds “detailed information about all aspects of a person’s life,” and consequently “a cell phone search would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house: . . . a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form – unless the phone is.” Lawyers in particular have grown accustomed to traveling not only with their own information but with clients’ information – attorney-client emails, documents relating to legal representations, etc. Lawye...

September 1, 2017 By Ryan Beene and Margaret Cronin Fisk, Bloomberg News Volkswagen AG’s top U.S. lawyer and the leader of its emissions-testing lab in California are among the employees whose mobile devices were either lost or erased as the company’s diesel cheating scandal emerged, according to court records made public on Thursday. David Geanacopoulos, VW Group of America’s senior vice president for public affairs and public policy, reported he lost his phone while en route to Los Angeles International Airport on Dec. 1, 2015, according to the records. He was VW of America’s general counsel at the time. The documents also show that the company cell phones of Anna Schneider, VW’s senior vice president of industry and government relations, and Matthias Barke, senior director of VW’s emissions test center in Oxnard, California, were “wiped” or erased of data in the months after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced VW had rigged its vehicles to pass pollution tes...

By Kimberly Strawbridge Robinson, Bloomberg BNA The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court signaled Aug. 29 that they may be interested in reviewing the display of controversial Confederate symbols. The high court asked Mississippi Gov. Dewey Phillip Bryant (R) to respond to a lawsuit challenging the inclusion of the Confederate Battle Flag on the state’s standard. The request makes it more likely that the court will agree to take up the case — but it is still an uphill battle. The court hears less than 1 percent of the thousands of cases brought to it each year, according to the court’s website. The request comes amid unrest nationwide over the public display of Confederate symbols. The planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was the stated reason for white nationalists’ protests in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 11 and 12. Those protests led to violent clashes with counterprotesters that resulted in one death, and an uneven response from President Donald Tr...