Union Pacific Railroad and BNSF Railway chipped away at their significant antitrust exposure on Tuesday, fending off a lawsuit brought by the mining company Oxbow Carbon & Minerals.

Delaware bankruptcy judge Mary Walrath was far from convinced by Sullivan & Cromwell's argument that JPMorgan Chase's notice of appeal of an earlier decision divested her of jurisdiction.

Slowly but surely the firm is beating back suits that accuse it of complicity in the fraud that brought down the brokerage in 2005. Last month Mayer Brown was dismissed from a shareholder class action; Tuesday it escaped the Refco bankruptcy trustee's suit.

"While this may not be the last word on the subject," wrote Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, "perhaps Mattel and MGA can take a lesson from their target demographic: Play nice."

The cert grant comes less than a month after the U.S. asked the high court to resolve the parameters of the Bayh-Dole Act, which governs ownership of research backed by federal funds. Roche, which has twice defeated Stanford's claims in lower courts, says the patent at issue wasn't developed with government money.

A company director who pledged all his stock to a merger can sue over allegedly false statements in the merger registration statement — even if he made the pledge long before the registration statement was drafted.

"They definitely are not going to support the plan," said Boies, Schiller & Flexner's Nicholas Gravante Jr., about the position of his clients, who hold $6 billion of the debt of Washington Mutual Bank. "We are prepared to oppose it in bankruptcy court and any other forum necessary."

In its first ruling under a pilot arbitration program for large cases, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority issued a divided decision ordering Morgan Stanley to pay a former energy trader $8 million.