UN court: Australia cannot use seized documents

The United Nations' highest court on Monday banned Australia from making any use of documents it seized from a lawyer working for East Timor in an arbitration case over a multibillion-dollar oil and gas deal between the two nations.

The International Court of Justice also ordered Canberra not to "interfere in any way in communications" between East Timor and its legal advisers in the arbitration or future negotiations on a maritime boundary between resources-rich Australia and its tiny, impoverished northern neighbor.

Australian agents in December raided the Canberra office of a legal adviser to East Timor and seized documents and data. That followed claims by a former Australian spy that his country bugged the East Timorese government ahead of negotiations on the Timor Sea Treaty that carves up revenue from oil and gas under the sea between the two countries.

East Timor wants to renegotiate the treaty, arguing that it is invalid because of the alleged bugging.

It went to the world court arguing the seizure was illegal. Monday's orders did not address that claim, which will be litigated later.

Court: Broad protection for whistleblowers

The Supreme Court says whistleblower protections in a federal law passed in response to the Enron financial scandal apply broadly to employees of publicly traded companies and contractors hired by the companies.

The justices ruled 6-3 Tuesday in favor of two former employees of companies that administer the Fidelity family of mutual funds. The workers claimed they faced retaliation after they reported allegations of fraud affecting Fidelity funds.

The case involved the reach of a provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in 2002 in response to the Enron scandal, that protects whistleblower activity. The measure was intended to protect people who expose the kind of corporate misdeeds that arose at Enron.

No mistrial for LA man who threw chair in court

A Los Angeles County judge has refused to declare a mistrial for a man who threw a chair and injured a police detective during his murder trial.

Superior Court Judge Ronald H. Rose also rejected a defense attorney's request Thursday for mental competency tests for Jesus Mendez.

But City News Service reports Mendez must be secured to a chair with handcuffs and restraining belt for the remainder of his trial.

Rose says the restraints must not be visible to the jury. Mendez had been appearing in court in civilian clothes without handcuffs to avoid prejudicing the jury.

Mendez threw the chair just after entering court Wednesday, hitting the detective in the head. She was hospitalized and in good condition.

Mendez is charged with fatally shooting a man during a robbery.

Court sides with S. Ind. city in man's injury suit

The Indiana Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court's ruling that the Ohio River city of Madison is not liable for injuries a man suffered when he tripped on a sewer grate.

Brad Haskin suffered a ruptured Achilles tendon in July 2008 when he tripped on the grate while walking from Madison's riverfront. He sued Madison in 2009, alleging it was negligent in maintaining the sewer drain and did not properly illuminate it.

The Madison Courier reports a Jefferson County judge had ruled that under Indiana law a city cannot be held liable for injuries caused by infrastructure like the grate that had been unchanged for 20 or more years.

The appellate agreed with that ruling, finding that the city was immune from liability in the case.

Hearing: Which court should hear coastal lawsuit?

A legal tug-of-war continues in a state levee board's lawsuit against 97 oil, gas and pipeline companies over the erosion of wetlands.

The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East wants U.S. District Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown to send the case back to Orleans Parish Civil District Court, where the board filed it in July.

Attorneys for Chevron USA Inc. got the lawsuit moved to federal court in August, arguing that federal laws govern many of its claims.

Since then, lawyers have filed hundreds of pages of arguments and exhibits just on the question of which court should hear the case.

Brown scheduled arguments Wednesday.

The lawsuit says oil and gas canal and pipeline work has contributed to the erosion of wetlands that protect New Orleans when hurricanes move ashore. Corrosive saltwater from a network of oil and gas access and pipeline canals has killed plants that anchored the wetlands, letting waves sweep away hundreds of thousands of coastal land, it says.

Gov. Bobby Jindal has blasted the lawsuit as a windfall for trial lawyers and his coastal protection chief, Garret Graves, said the suit would undermine Louisiana's work with the industry to rebuild wetlands. An association of state levee districts voted to oppose the suit.

Since then, however, two coastal parishes heavily dependent on the industry have filed lawsuits of their own raising similar issues.

Earlier this month, the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association sued the state's attorney general, accusing him of illegally approving the Southeast Louisiana board's contract with lawyers who filed its lawsuit.

The association contends that Buddy Caldwell had no authority to approve the contract and that the suit will have "a chilling effect on the exploration, production, development and transportation" of Louisiana's oil and gas.

Planned Parenthood Asks Supreme Court's Help In Texas

Planned Parenthood is asking the Supreme Court to place Texas' new abortion restrictions on hold.

The group says in a filing with the high court Monday that more than a third of the clinics in Texas have been forced to stop providing abortions since a court order allowed the new restrictions to take effect Friday.

Planned Parenthood says that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals went too far in overruling a trial judge who blocked the law's provision that requires doctors who perform abortions in clinics to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

The filing was addressed to Justice Antonin Scalia, who oversees emergency matters from Texas.

Appeals court moves BP forward in settlement dispute

The April 2010 blowout of BP's Macondo well off the Louisiana coast triggered an explosion that killed 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and led to millions of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf. Shortly after the disaster, BP agreed to create a $20 billion compensation fund that was administered at first by the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, led by attorney Kenneth Feinberg.

BP argued that Barbier and court-appointed claims administrator Patrick Juneau misinterpreted terms of the settlement. Plaintiffs' lawyers countered that BP undervalued the settlement and underestimated how many claimants would qualify for payments.

In the panel's majority opinion, Judge Edith Brown Clement said BP has consistently argued that the settlement's complex formula for compensating businesses was intended to cover "real economic losses, not artificial losses that appear only from the timing of cash flows."

"The interests of individuals who may be reaping windfall recoveries because of an inappropriate interpretation of the Settlement Agreement and those who could never have recovered in individual suits for failure to show causation are not outweighed by the potential loss to a company and its public shareholders of hundreds of millions of dollars of unrecoverable awards," Clement wrote.

Judge Leslie Southwick wrote a concurring opinion. Judge James Dennis wrote a partial dissent, largely disagreeing with the other two.

"Because BP has not satisfied its heavy burden of showing that a change in circumstances or law warranted the modifications it sought, the district court correctly affirmed the Administrator's decision rejecting BP's argument and actions to modify the agreement," Dennis wrote.