Millions of people across the country are waiting to get the COVID-19 vaccine. For businesses, immunity is sought not against the virus but against liability, and, in some cases, businesses have been successful in invoking COVID-19 as a means to do so. Recently, the Southern District of New York held that the pandemic immunized a defendant, Phillips Auctioneers LLC, from liability under its contract with the plaintiff, JN Contemporary. Under the terms of the contract, Phillips agreed to present a painting at an auction scheduled for May 2020 and guaranteed JN that it would receive a minimum of $5 million from the sale. Phillips’ contractual obligations, however, were subject to the contract’s force majeure provision which read as follows:
Southern District of Florida
Courts Split on Standing Issues in FCRA Suits After Spokeo
By Tiffany Woo on
On October 5, 2016, two district courts came to opposite conclusions on whether putative class action plaintiffs had standing to bring claims based on prospective employers’ failure to comply with Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) disclosure requirements.
Standing under Article III of the Constitution requires (1) an injury in fact (2) fairly traceable to the challenged conduct of the defendant and (3) likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins clarified that to confer standing, an injury in fact must be both particularized – affecting the plaintiff in a “personal and individual” way – and concrete – “real, not abstract.”