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Lawyers: Dispute over Van Gogh art in Detroit is settled
Headline Legal News |
2023/03/21 16:58
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A deal has been reached over control of an 1888 painting by Vincent van Gogh, lawyers said, weeks after the custody fight created public buzz and much tension near the end of a rare U.S. exhibition in Detroit.
Brokerarte Capital Partners LLC, which claims to own “The Novel Reader,” told a federal appeals court that it reached a confidential settlement with the unnamed entity who loaned the painting to the Detroit Institute of Arts for an exhibition of Van Gogh’s works that ended Jan. 22.
Because of the dispute, the museum has been under orders to hold the painting while the court determined who would next get the art.
Brokerarte Capital, an art brokerage, said it acquired the painting in 2017 for $3.7 million and gave temporary possession of it to a third party who absconded with it. The company filed a lawsuit on Jan. 10 seeking to seize the painting, and the museum subsequently posted a security guard next to it.
The museum was caught in the middle but wasn’t accused of wrongdoing. It has not publicly explained how it got the painting on loan, saying only that it came from a collection in Brazil.
Lawyers for Brokerarte Capital and its sole proprietor, Gustavo Soter of Brazil, said a deal had been reached with the other party.
“Consistent with the confidential settlement, Brokerarte no longer seeks injunctive relief, and therefore, this appeal is moot,” lawyers said in a March 13 filing with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The museum said it spent more than $100,000 defending itself in the litigation, which began in federal court in Detroit. It argued that a federal law governing the international sharing of art prevents courts from intervening. The U.S. Justice Department took a similar position.
The museum still is concerned about the significance of the appeals court issuing an injunction in February. It wants the court to consider declaring the injunction “null and void” so it can’t be cited as a precedent in any future international art disputes. |
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Supreme Court remembering Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Headline Legal News |
2023/03/17 16:34
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion for women’s rights whose death ahead of the 2020 election allowed the Supreme Court to become more conservative, will be remembered during ceremonies Friday at the high court.
Ginsburg, who served as a justice for 27 years and was the Supreme Court’s second female member, will be remembered by some of the people who worked for her as law clerks, young lawyers who spend a year at the court working for a justice. The group includes Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, its top Supreme Court lawyer, as well as several judges and professors.
The ceremonies, technically a meeting of the Supreme Court Bar followed by a special session of the court, are a tradition at the high court following the death of a justice, a tradition dating back to 1822. The court will livestream the meeting on its website beginning at 1:45 p.m. EDT.
Ginsburg’s death just over six weeks before the 2020 election was immensely consequential. It allowed then-President Donald Trump to fill the liberal justice’s seat on the court with a conservative, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and gave conservatives a 6-3 majority on the bench. Barrett was among the justices who voted last year to overturn Roe v. Wade and do away with constitutional protections for abortion, protections Ginsburg had backed as a justice.
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Court: Ukraine can try to avoid repaying $3B loan to Russia
Legal Topics |
2023/03/16 02:22
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The U.K. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Ukraine can go to trial to try to avoid repaying $3 billion in loans it said it took under pressure from Russia in 2013 to prevent it from trying to join the European Union.
The court rejected an attempt to avoid a trial by a British company acting on Russia’s behalf to collect the loans. Ukraine said it borrowed the money while facing the threat of military force and massive illegal economic and political pressure nearly a decade before Russia invaded its neighbor.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted that the ruling was “another decisive victory against the aggressor.”
“The Court has ruled that Ukraine’s defense based on Russia’s threats of aggression will have a full public trial,” he tweeted. “Justice will be ours.”
The case was argued in November 2021, and the court was not asked to consider Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three months later.
Ukrainian authorities allege that the corrupt government of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych borrowed the money from Moscow under pressure before he was ousted in protests in February 2014, shortly before Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.
After the 2014 Ukraine revolution, the country’s new government refused to repay the debt in December 2015, saying Moscow wouldn’t agree to terms already accepted by other international creditors.
The case came to British courts because London-based Law Debenture Trust Corp. had been appointed by Ukraine to represent the interests of bondholders. The company initially won a judgment to avoid trial but Ukraine appealed.
The Supreme Court rejected several of Ukraine’s legal arguments, including that its finance minister didn’t have authority to enter into the loan agreement and that Ukraine could decline payment as a countermeasure to Russia’s aggressions.
The ruling, however, said a court could consider whether the deal was void because of threats or pressure that are illegitimate under English law.
While the court noted that trade sanctions, embargoes and other economic pressures are “normal aspects of statecraft,” economic pressures could provide context to prove that Russia’s threats to destroy Ukraine caused it to issue the bonds. |
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Georgia grand jury heard another Trump call recording
Legal Topics |
2023/03/15 22:32
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A special grand jury that investigated whether Donald Trump and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 election in Georgia heard a recording of the former president pushing a top state lawmaker to call a special session to overturn his loss in the state, according to a newspaper report.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Wednesday that it spoke to five members of the special grand jury who said they heard a recording of a phone call between Trump and Georgia House Speaker David Ralston that had not previously been reported and has not been made public. Ralston, who died in November, did not call a special session in the weeks after the November 2020 election.
The five grand jurors — three men and two women — spoke to the newspaper but declined to be named because they were concerned about their safety and privacy.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis opened the Georgia investigation in early 2021, shortly after another recording of a phone call between Trump and a top state official was made public. During that Jan. 2, 2021, phone call, Trump suggested that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger could “find” the votes needed to reverse his narrow loss in the state. |
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Oregon courthouse security video shows escaping defendant
Court Watch |
2023/03/13 22:33
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Newly released video in Oregon shows a defendant escaping from courthouse seconds after sheriff’s deputies remove his shackles.
The defendant Edi Villalobos Jr. was appearing in court in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro on Feb. 27 for jury selection after he allegedly stabbed two men, and killed one, two years ago, KGW-TV reported.
Security camera footage released by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday shows the 28-year-old entering the courtroom guarded by two officers. Villalobos is wearing a blue dress shirt and dark slacks.
One officer removes removes Villalobos’ hand and leg cuffs, in line with legal requirements for the court session. Then Villalobos scoots behind two desk chairs and runs out the courtroom door. No one is blocking the path to the door.
The footage then shows Villalobos racing down multiple hallways and through two doors as the two officers chase him and passersby get out of their way. Officers found Villalobos hours later hiding in a closet in a vacant apartment.
His trial has been rescheduled for September. He faces additional charges of first-degree burglary and second-degree escape. His court-appointed attorney didn’t immediately return a voicemail message Friday seeking comment.
Sgt. Danny DiPietro, a spokesman for the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, said his agency is reviewing the incident and will use training to address the lessons learned. The two deputies who were guarding Villalobos remain on regular duty. |
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Ohio State asks court to hear Title IX issues in abuse suits
Court News |
2023/03/12 10:23
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Ohio State University is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider questions about the law known as Title IX in a case that affects whether more than 230 men can proceed with lawsuits against the school over decades-old sexual abuse by a team doctor, the late Richard Strauss.
The petition filed Tuesday urges the high court to hear the case and review two aspects: When does the clock start ticking on the legal time limit for filing Title IX claims, which in this case are about the university’s alleged “deliberate indifference” toward sexual harassment? And does the right to bring such claims apply to people who aren’t students or employees there, such as fans attending football games or visitors touring campus?
The school argues the divided appeals court that revived the unsettled lawsuits against OSU reached the wrong conclusions on both elements.
“Together, these rulings arm virtually anyone who has visited Ohio State over the past 40 years with a potential Title IX claim today,” and that result wasn’t what Congress intended in establishing the law in 1972, the university’s legal team wrote in the petition to the high court.
The university has repeatedly offered apologies to those Strauss harmed and has reached over $60 million in settlements with at least 296 survivors, but eventually sought to have the remaining unsettled cases dismissed. It argued that the time limit for the claims — the applicable two-year statute of limitations in Ohio — began way back during the doctor’s tenure and had long passed.
But those remaining plaintiffs have argued that the clock didn’t start until allegations became public in 2018, because they didn’t have reason before then to believe the university had enabled or covered up the doctor’s behavior.
The appeals court’s agreement with that, combined with its finding that several plaintiffs could bring such Title IX claims even though they weren’t OSU students or employees when the alleged abuse occurred, wrongly expanded the scope of Title IX in ways that are problematic and potentially very costly for all sorts of schools under that law, Ohio State contends. Its petition also says a threat of Title IX lawsuits based on decades-old allegations might deter schools from investigating such claims.
It noted that the decision from the Cincinnati-based Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals about when the clock started conflicts with conclusions from federal appeals courts elsewhere, and said that points to the need for the nation’s high court to weigh in. |
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German woman risks tougher sentence over Yazidi girl’s death
Legal Business |
2023/03/10 10:24
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A German appeals court on Thursday ordered a new sentencing hearing for a German convert to Islam who was given 10 years in prison on charges that, as a member of the Islamic State group in Iraq, she allowed a 5-year-old Yazidi girl she and her husband kept as a slave to die of thirst in the sun.
The 31-year-old defendant now risks a higher sentence.
The Federal Court of Justice threw out an appeal by the woman, who has been identified only as Jennifer W. in line with German privacy rules, but partly approved an appeal by prosecutors. It overturned the sentence, though not the rest of the verdict, and sent the case back to the Munich state court for a new decision.
The woman was convicted in October 2021 of, among other things, two counts of crimes against humanity through enslavement, in one case resulting in death, being an accessory to attempted murder and membership in a terrorist organization abroad.
The federal court found that Munich judges erred in sentencing the woman for a “less severe case” of crimes against humanity and overlooked aggravating circumstances. German law allows for a life sentence in cases where a defendant’s actions result in a person’s death. |
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