Allowing a class action to go forward over moldy washing machines, Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner made a statement that's shocking in its simplicity and good sense, and which may be heresy to the Supreme Court.

On Thursday the Miller Canfield partner won a $300 million jury verdict for Valassis, a company specializing in stand-alone newspaper coupon inserts. Valassis claimed that its competitor News America unfairly pressured customers--some of whom testified by video at trial--to drop Valassis. The jury agreed. Now Curtner gets to try the same case in two other courts.

Which allegations are worse--that a YouTube founder "is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it," or that Viacom secretly uploaded its own copyrighted videos to YouTube? Both sides have a lot of explaining to do.

The last time we checked, The Sun-Times Media Group (formerly known as Hollinger International) had spent more than $77 million on lawyers defending Conrad Black and three former Hollinger executives charges with looting it. Thanks to generous indemnification agreements, the company has to pay the legal bills of its ousted executives. Those bills will continue to mount now that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal of three former Hollinger execs whose convictions were upheld last year by the Seventh Circuit.

The proposed settlement comes two-and-a-half months after class counsel reached a $125 million proposed settlement with Satyam for alleged accounting fraud that earned the company the nickname, "India's Enron."

According to Gibson Dunn's Theodore Boutrous Jr., whose arguments won the day in Standard Fire Insurance v. Knowles, Monday's Supreme Court ruling will stop plaintiffs lawyers from "slicing and dicing" their class action claims to avoid federal jurisdiction.