"David Shapiro is a truly extraordinary legal scholar and lawyer, with whom we already have had the privilege of working on important matters for Manatt clients," said Chad Hummel, Chair of Manatt's national Litigation Division. "From our successful prior collaborations, we know that Professor Shapiro fits perfectly with our firm's national litigation practice and especially our expanding appellate and U.S. Supreme Court practice. We are honored and thrilled that Professor Shapiro has agreed to become a consultant to Manatt."

Professor Shapiro clerked for Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan, and he joined Harvard Law School as an assistant professor in 1963. Professor Shapiro served as Associate Dean of Harvard Law School from 1971 to 1976. In 1986, he was named the William Nelson Cromwell Professor at Harvard Law School. Professor Shapiro has also been a visiting professor at various law schools around the country and internationally, including Stanford, Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, University of Arizona and New York University.

From 1988 to 1991, Professor Shapiro took a leave of absence from Harvard Law School to serve as Deputy Solicitor General for the first Bush administration. As Deputy Solicitor General, Professor Shapiro argued 10 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Throughout his career, Professor Shapiro has participated in over 60 U.S. Supreme Court cases, and in 2006 he contributed to three amicus briefs in Supreme Court cases.

Professor Shapiro received his B.A. from Harvard College, magna cum laude in 1954 and his LL.B. from Harvard Law School, summa cum laude, Fay Diploma in 1957. At Harvard Law School, he served as Note Editor for the Harvard Law Review.

http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/facdir.php?id=65

A federal judge said on Friday he would issue an injunction barring Vonage Holdings Corp. from using Internet phone call technology patented by Verizon Communications Inc., but delayed signing the order for two weeks.

Vonage shares fell sharply after the ruling, falling 16.8 percent, or 68 cents, to $3.37 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The two-week period gives Vonage time to try and convince U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton to stay his injunction while it appeals the entire case. "I will sign the injunction at the time I rule on the stay," he said.

Hilton agreed with Verizon that it would suffer irreparable harm if he allowed continued infringement of the voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies that allow consumers to make calls over the Internet.

He rejected arguments by Vonage that the harm to Verizon was outweighed by other factors, including the public interest.

A jury on March 8 found Vonage had infringed three patents owned by Verizon. The jury said Vonage must pay $58 million plus 5.5 percent royalties on future sales.

"They could not have been commercially successful if they had not taken these patents we have and put them into their technologies," Dan Webb, an attorney for Verizon, said at Friday's hearing on the injunction request.

Webb also cited documents Vonage filed with the court under seal, saying an injunction would cause "enormous business difficulties" for Vonage. Webb said the Vonage filings suggested that "they can't live with an injunction because of the way their technology is designed."

However, Vonage's chief lawyer, Sharon O'Leary, told Reuters that Vonage customers would not be affected by the case. She declined to comment on the sealed, or secret, documents the company filed with the court.

O'Leary also she was pleased that the judge gave the company two weeks to try and stop the injunction.

"We will get the stay, either through the district court or the federal circuit court of appeals," O'Leary said. She said Judge Hilton himself raised the possibility that he could be overturned on appeal during arguments on Friday.

O'Leary said she was optimistic the company could get an appeals court to overturn both the injunction and the jury's verdict.

He declined to specify the loss. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.

"We believed green onions may have been the source based on the presumptive positive testing, so we immediately removed them from our products to put public safety first," the statement said. "We later learned they were not the source of the E. coli outbreak."

The lawsuit alleges Taco Bell officials probably knew by Dec. 9 and certainly by Dec. 11 that tests for E. coli in the green onions were negative. The company and FDA officials said Dec. 11 that the green onions were not the source of the disease, and Taco Bell posted a press release Dec. 13 on its Web site that said lettuce appeared to be the most probable source of the outbreak, according to the suit.

Creed also said Taco Bell would no longer include green onions as a food ingredient. The lawsuit noted that lettuce remains in about 70 percent of Taco Bell‘s food selections.

Activist groups sued Viacom Inc. on Thursday, claiming the parent of Comedy Central improperly asked the video-sharing site YouTube to remove a parody of the cable network's "The Colbert Report."

Viacom responded by saying it had no records of ever making such a request.

Although the video in question contained clips taken from the television show, MoveOn.org Civic Action and Brave New Films LLC argued that their use was protected under "fair use" provisions of copyright law.

With Viacom identified by YouTube as the source of the removal request, they said Viacom should have known the use was legal and thus its complaint to YouTube to have the video blocked amounted to a "misrepresentation" that is subject to damages under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The challenge, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, came about a week after Viacom filed its own, $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube, claiming that the wildly popular Web site is rife with copyrighted video from Viacom shows, including "The Colbert Report."

Neither YouTube nor its parent, Google Inc., was named in the latest lawsuit, filed on the plaintiffs' behalf by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.

In a letter to the plaintiffs' lawyers, Michael D. Fricklas, general counsel for Viacom, said the company had no record of sending YouTube a complaint, despite YouTube's identification of Viacom as the source. YouTube had no comment about the discrepancy.

The complaint contends her gray tabby, Gumbie, became ill after eating food from an Iams Select Bites pouch in early February. Gumbie became lethargic, refused food and lost weight, she said, and a veterinarian diagnosed acute renal failure. The cat was "pet-hospitalized" and prescribed intravenous fluids.

Johnson told CNN she considers herself lucky. "Thankfully we got her to the vet in time. My cat was very ill, but there are lots of people around the country whose pets have died or been euthanized."

Since coming home, Gumbie has required a great deal of care. "It is stressful to have to stick a needle in the cat every day," said Johnson, who has had to administer daily subcutaneous fluid-and-drip injections since bringing Gumbie home.

Gumbie is likely to require medical tests and monitoring every few months, and Johnson expects this will increase her expenses considerably. She said she already has paid more than $3,000 in veterinary bills.

Johnson's attorney, Frank Jablonski of Progressive Law Group, said more than 95 people have joined the suit since it was filed, and he expects many more.

"We have all the clients we need," he said. "We wouldn't bring a lawsuit that we are not confident we will win." The lawsuit is seeking an unspecified amount of damages. Courts will have to certify the class and what venue will hear the case.

Menu Foods spokesperson Sam Bornstein declined to comment on the lawsuit but said the company has received tens of thousands of consumer inquiries and is doing its best to respond to them. "Our hearts go out to many thousands of pet owners, some of them for their losses and some for their worry," he said.

Menu Foods announced the precautionary recall March 16. The recall affects dog and cat food manufactured between December 3 and March 6, and is limited to "cuts and gravy" style pet food in cans and pouches produced at its plants in Kansas and New Jersey. The food is packaged under a wide variety of brand names.

Both the Food and Drug Administration and Menu Foods have been unable to identify the root cause of the problem, but the FDA said Tuesday that officials were focusing on a recent supply of wheat gluten as the likely culprit.

Pfizer Inc. said Thursday that a federal appeals court has overturned a lower court decision that upheld the patent protecting its widely-prescribed hypertension drug Novasc, a move that opens the door to early generic competition.

In a statement, Pfizer said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed a lower court ruling in favor of Pfizer, which found the Norvasc patent to be valid and enforceable. The appeal was brought by Apotex, which has been seeking to have the Pfizer patent nullified in order to put out a generic version of the drug.

Pfizer added that it is "reviewing the decision and is considering all its options, including seeking reconsideration."
Other generic drugmakers have also been seeking to put out generic versions of the drug, including Mylan Laboratories (MYL) . Norvasc is slated to lose patent protection later this year.

Prudential analyst Timothy Anderson said in his note Thursday that the appeals ruling could allow for the introduction of generic versions of Norvasc as soon as next week.

"We did not anticipate this ruling, but it will probably only have a muted impact on Pfizer which is already a washed-out, low valuation name," wrote Anderson.

"Earlier generic entry is a negative and could cost the company $1 billion in sales or so in 2007, but given Pfizer's size and cash generation this it not very material to the company's future outlook, in our opinion," Anderson added.

Reed ruled that the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) arguments against COPA, "true, reliable and credible and I accept those facts" and determined COPA violated the First Amendment's right to free speech.

Reed said that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales failed to "meet his burden of showing that COPA is the "least restrictive, most effective" alternative in achieving the "compelling [public] interest."

The ACLU filed a suit for permanent injunction relief against enforcing the law a week after Congress passed the measure in 1998. The organization argued that COPA overreached lawmakers' good intentions to protect children from "sexually explicit" material available online. Under COPA, children are defined as anyone under 17-years of age.

As written by Congress and signed by then President Bill Clinton, any commercial Web site operator that made "sexually explicit" material available to minors was, under COPA, subject to criminal and civil sanctions even if the online material was otherwise acknowledged as free speech for adults but deemed "harmful to minors."

COPA provided a safe harbor for Web site owners if they required the use of a credit card or other identification method used to verify age or, significantly, "any other reasonable measures that are feasible under available technology."

The ACLU immediately contended that Internet filtering technology was more feasible than any age verification methods, mitigating, the ACLU claimed, the impact on otherwise protected free speech. By the time the Bush administration inherited the political hot potato, it steadfastly maintained that filtering technology does not work and the threat of jail time and steep fines were the most effective defenses against making sexually explicit material available to minors.

Reed wrote that the ACLU's clients "post content on their Web sites including…resources on sexual health, safer sex, and sexual education; visual art and poetry; resources for gays and lesbians; online magazines and articles; music; and books and information about books that are being offered for sale." No matter Congress' valid interests to protect children, Reed ruled, such free speech restrictions on content stifled legal online free speech.

"I may not turn a blind eye to the law in order to attempt to satisfy my urge to protect this nation's youth by upholding a flawed statute, especially when a more effective and less restrictive alternative is readily available." Reed wrote.

As the case bounced all the way up from the district court to the Supreme Court and back down again, the Bush administration insisted filtering technology is not an effective tool for parents to censor adult content for their children. The ACLU argued otherwise. As the case dragged on for almost a decade, the Department of Justice (DoJ) eventually subpoenaed Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL for proof child protection filters were ineffective tools against sites with sexually explicit material.

While Google successfully fought the subpoenas, the other search engines turned over evidence that convinced Roberts that "filtering products block both Web pages originating from within the United States and Web pages originating from outside the United States."

That determination, Roberts ruled, sank the DoJ's defense of COPA.

Roberts said that, in addition to their content-filtering features, filters can provide parents with a report indicating which Web sites a child visited, which sites were blocked, the number of e-mails and instant messages a child sent and to whom a child sent e-mail or instant messages.

Roberts further ruled that Internet-filtering technologies offer "money-back guarantees or free trial periods, so that parents can simply download a filtering product for free over the Internet and then use it for a set time period to see if it is something that they want to continue using."

"Based upon the testimony of [ACLU witnesses], which I accept, I find that filters generally block about 95 percent of sexually explicit material," Roberts ruled. He also determined that two separate reports commissioned by Congress, "have confirmed that content filters can be effective at preventing minors from accessing harmful materials online."

The Bush administration has the right to appeal the decision, but the DoJ had not responded to Roberts' decision by press time.