For the lawyers at Cravath fighting Dexia SA's mortgage-backed securities lawsuit against JPMorgan, Jed Rakoff giveth, and Rakoff taketh away.

American International Group's United Guaranty unit didn't fare any better in its second attempt to press tort and statutory claims against Countrywide for allegedly misrepresenting underwriting standards for failed real estate loans. On Monday, a federal judge in California dismissed AIG's claims, but there's still plenty unresolved in the battle between two poster children of the current economic crisis.

How did Bank of America show that this case brought by AIG over soured mortgage-backed securities should be governed by the federal Edge Act, which applies to foreign banking transactions? By showing that two of the 1.7 million mortgages underlying the 350 mortgage-backed securities at issue were issued on properties in Guam.

Judges in New York just keep doling out bad news for banks caught up in litigation over mortgage-backed securities. The latest defendants to feel the sting are Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley, which learned Friday that they can't escape fraud claims in state court in Manhattan over a combined $457 million in MBS gone sour.

Sometimes a court ruling is almost as noteworthy for its dicta as for its holding. That's the case for a ruling this week in Assured Guaranty's $1 billion RMBS suit against UBS, in which a federal judge took a jab at the "immorality" of our "win at any price society."

There's no question that the smartphone patent wars are a bruising business. And in the headline battle — Apple Inc.'s fight with Samsung Electronics Co. — Samsung is looking especially black and blue this month.

In 2008 the University of Kansas sued the National Institutes of Health over the inventorship credit on patents for the blood cancer drug Velcade. The dispute came to an end on Friday when Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, which represented Kansas, announced that an arbitration panel had determined that a professor and a research assistant at the university were indeed co-inventors of the patents.

A judge has capped Vringo's potential recovery in its ongoing patent infringement trial against Google. Vringo sought to calculate damages from 2005, but U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson in Norfolk ruled on Wednesday that the company can't ask for damages prior to 2011. The ruling means that even if jurors side with Vringo, it won't be walking away with the $696 million it originally asked for.