Note: The related CLE, "The Price of Oil," is Wed., Aug. 18. The legal repercussions from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are spreading quickly. But like so many other aspects of the catastrophe, it is hard to predict where the legal battles will lead—and impossible to say when, or how, they will end. By the end of June, with the closure of vast stretches of federal fishing waters, and with tourism plummeting along the U.S. Gulf Coast, emergency claim centers established by BP already had been flooded with some 87,000 requests for compensation to keep mortgages…

Putting an end to speculation about why a chief federal district judge was suddenly removed from an ongoing criminal trial in Chicago, the federal appeals court that axed him earlier this week explained today in a written opinion that it acted because of the jurist's "unreasonable fury" against prosecutors. Responding to a petition for a writ of mandamus by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, a three-judge appeals panel not only agreed with the government that excluded fingerprint evidence should have been admitted in the drug prosecution but took Chief U.S. District Judge James Holderman off the case in a Tuesday order…

A racketeering lawsuit seeking class action status and, potentially, up to billions of dollars in damages has been filed against a Florida lawyer and his foreclosure-mill law firm. Also named as a defendant is a bank-created company that, the complaint alleges, owned a criminal enterprise which operated to violate homeowners' legal rights by intentionally obscuring the true holders of mortgages under the guise of running a "registration" company that purportedly kept track of mortgage ownership. Filed Monday in federal court in South Florida, the suit (PDF) contends that David Stern and his Plantation law firm violated the Racketeer Influenced and…

Some large law firms are planning to step up their hiring of summer associates for 2011 after a year of cutbacks. The Am Law Daily talked to sources, some of them anonymous, at a handful of firms and learned they are planning to increase their summer associate classes. Although the numbers won’t reach the high levels of 2009, "even modest jumps are what pass for good news these days," the story says. The Am Law Daily identifies these firms as planning increases: • Cravath Swaine & Moore, planning to hire about 75 summer associates for 2011, compared to 23 this…

The Pierce Atwood law firm has reached a tentative deal with a seafood auction house in Portland, Maine, that will protect its view of the Fore River. The law firm’s new office is on a fish pier owned by the city. Its deal with the Portland Fish Exchange, also owned by the city, restricts development on two lots next to the firm’s headquarters, the Portland Press Herald reports. The deal still must be approved by the boards overseeing the pier and fish exchange, the story says. Details have not yet been disclosed. Critics say the deal interferes with the city’s…

The co-author of a new book on higher education says undergrads should skip the vocational classes and consider going on to law school. The book maintains that it’s a waste of money to spend $250,000 on a bachelor’s degree from top universities such as Harvard and Yale, Reuters reports. Co-authors Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus say the cost of an undergraduate degree has doubled in real dollars in the span of one generation, but the education is not twice as good. "All undergraduate education should be a liberal arts education where you think about the enduring ideas and issues of…

A former assistant county attorney in Minnesota has been charged with running a high-priced “nice guy” prostitution ring, receiving payment in free or reduced-price sex for his efforts. John Paul St. Marie was charged with six felony counts of promoting prostitution, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. St. Marie, a quadriplegic since the age of 8 when he contracted polio, left the Hennepin County Attorney’s office four years ago because of health reasons, his lawyer, James Dahlquist, told the Pioneer Press. He worked on civil matters. Police began investigating St. Marie more than two…

A new study of North Carolina death sentences shows that defendants accused of killing whites are almost three times more likely to be sentenced to death than those accused of killing blacks in similar homicides. The study is the first examining North Carolina data since the state passed a law last year allowing convicted and suspected murders to present statistical evidence of racial bias, according to a press release by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The study was conducted by University of Colorado sociology professor Michael Radelet and Northeastern University criminology researcher Glenn Pierce. It examined more than 15,000…

A lawyer for billionaire brothers Samuel and Charles Wyly has been named, along with the two Wylys and a stockbroker, in an alleged $550 million insider-trading fraud. The defendants are accused in a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint of using offshore trusts and subsidiaries to conceal illicit trading profits from transactions concerning four companies at a time when the brothers were on their boards, according to the Associated Press and Reuters. One of the companies is Michaels Stores Inc. All of the defendants, including attorney Michael C. French, 67, live in Dallas. The case is being pursued in federal court…

A graduate of the University of Chicago Law School who was being paid over $200,000 a year as an associate at DLA Piper in 2009 is facing a legal ethics complaint that alleges he failed to pay his guaranteed student loan debt. Olufemi Nicol, 42, is accused of bad-faith avoidance of repayment and "conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation" concerning the loan in a March 2010 complaint filed with the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission. Additionally, he is accused of engaging in "conduct which tends to defeat the administration of justice or to bring the courts or the…