On July 6, North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley announced a settlement of an administrative complaint, accusing Western Distributing Company and affiliate companies Plains Gaming Distributing Inc. and Midwest Gaming Distributing Inc. of violating the state’s gambling laws and regulations by facilitating excessive rent payments and attempting to influence bars’ charitable gambling activities through the Wall of Honor veterans nonprofit.
On June 5, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) in Texas v. Google, LLC ruled that the State Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2021 applies to pending state antitrust enforcement actions, including to actions the JPML previously centralized. Specifically, the JPML ordered that a 16-state multistate attorneys’ general antitrust litigation against Google should be remanded to federal court in Texas.
On June 6, Alabama, California, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, South Carolina, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin each filed enforcement actions against leading cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and its parent, alleging that Coinbase’s staking rewards program constituted unregistered securities sales in violation their states’ securities laws. These actions followed an investigation by a multistate task force with assistance from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Ashley Taylor, Ryan Strasser and Amy Pritchard Williams of Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders LLP discuss the involvement of outside counsel in representing state Attorney Generals and how that involvement can affect the dynamics of the litigation.
On June 27, Illinois AG Kwame Raoul led a coalition of 13 Democratic attorneys general nationwide in submitting a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), supporting more stringent regulation of ethylene oxide (EtO) emissions. In their letter, the coalition urged the EPA to adopt proposed amendments to EtO standards under the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants program (NESHPA), and also offered several recommendations for more regulatory requirements “based on several states’ experiences regulating commercial sterilizers.”
The New York and Pennsylvania state attorneys general recently led a bipartisan coalition of 26 state AGs in a letter, supporting the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s proposed rule amending the Negative Option Rule.
On June 13, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Rohit Chopra provided the CFPB’s semiannual report to Congress, which included concerns about predatory house-flipping practices by companies like HomeVestors. Afterwards, Senate Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation, and Community Development Chair Tina Smith (D-MN) and Senate Ranking Member Lummis (R-WY) sent a letter to the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG), requesting a coordinated effort to prevent cash homebuyers from entrapping sellers into unfair contracts.
The federal government, the District of Columbia, and each of the 50 states have Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws that allow individuals to file requests for specific public documents with government agencies and quickly receive them unless the documents are subject to statutory exemptions. As most federal and state FOIA statutes were originally passed in the late 1960s, they impose some duties upon government agencies that many believe no longer make sense in the digital era.
On June 12, a bipartisan group of 23 attorneys general wrote a letter to the chief counsel for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), recommending a risk-based approach to a regulatory framework for using and deploying AI technology. Driven by their “extensive experience enforcing data privacy and consumer protection laws,” the AGs noted that states, such as Colorado, California, Connecticut, Tennessee, and Virginia, already regulated AI through their respective state data protection and privacy laws.
A bipartisan coalition of 23 state attorney generals led by Virginia AG Jason Miyares recently went up in arms about a products liability ruling they believe will threaten state consumer protection laws. On May 30, the coalition filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs’ claims in In Re: Fosamax (Alendronate Sodium) Products Liability Litigation, a consolidated case where hundreds of plaintiffs claimed to suffer femur fractures as a result of taking Merck drug Fosamax.