Government lawyers sought Tuesday to put hundreds—if not thousands—of civil cases on hold, while regulatory agencies went dark and more than 1,000 Department of Justice lawyers across the country stayed home without pay.

Was Judge Jed Rakoff right to rule on a crucial bankruptcy law provision in Irving Picard's clawback case against the owners of the New York Mets? Or was the Manhattan federal district court judge just unable to resist sinking his teeth into a juicy case?

A dozen Am Law firms failed to convince a federal judge in San Francisco to throw out claims that many of the world's leading consumer electronics companies conspired to fix prices for CD, DVD and Blu Ray recordable and rewritable drives.

For close to two years, counsel for Bank of America at Cleary Gottlieb and Wachtell Lipton have been struggling--and largely failing--to tame consolidated securities, ERISA, and derivative litigation over BofA's 2008 merger with Merrill Lynch. Will Brad Karp, Ted Wells, and their partners at Paul Weiss fare any better?

The group filed what appears to be its first amicus brief, urging the Second Circuit to uphold U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff's controversial rejection of the SEC's $285 million settlement with Citigroup. If you expected the brief to be stuffed with inflammatory rhetoric, you'd be wrong.

Victims of convicted Ponzi schemer R. Allen Stanford finally got some good news Monday when their class claims against law firms and other advisors accused of aiding in the multibillion dollar fraud were restored. And that's bad news for the primary targets of the litigation, which include Proskauer Rose, Chadbourne & Parke, and Adams & Reese.