Court upholds $185 million award against Argentina

The Supreme Court has upheld a British natural gas company's multimillion dollar award against the government of Argentina.

BG Group won $185 million through arbitration of a dispute with Argentina over investment in natural gas development. An arbitration tribunal said the company did not have to first submit the dispute to Argentine courts before arbitration could begin.

Argentina asked a U.S. court to throw out the award. The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., sided with Argentina because it found that judges, not arbitrators, should decide where attempts to resolve the dispute should begin.

But the Supreme Court said Wednesday the arbitrators get to make that call and that they were correct to rule in favor of BG Group in this case.

SC Supreme Court to rule on public autopsy reports

South Carolina's Supreme Court will begin grappling with that question Wednesday, when it hears a lawsuit by a Sumter County newspaper against the county's coroner.

The Item newspaper wants the high court to toss out a lower court's ruling that said autopsies do not have to be made public because they do not fall under the state's Freedom of Information Act.

The coroner says autopsies should be considered medical records that are exempt from public view. The newspaper says autopsy reports are investigative tools, not medical records.

Open records advocates say the Sumter County case is an example of government officials making it harder to get public documents.

It's a debate that is far from settled nationally. About 15 states across the U.S. allow the public release of an autopsy report. About a half-dozen other states allow the release of reports not being used as part of a criminal investigation. The rest severely restrict what's released or don't give any information from the reports, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Keeping autopsy records secret closes off an important tool to make sure police agencies do the right thing when they investigate deaths, especially people shot and killed by officials or who die in custody, said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center.

"There is any number of cases over the years where journalist watchdogs have been able to shed light on suspicious circumstances only by having access on those records," LoMonte said. "And those records don't just show culpability, they can clear someone, too."

California appeals court upholds plastic bag ban

A California appeals court has upheld San Francisco's ban on single-use plastic bags that can serve as a precedent for other cases.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports the 1st District Court of Appeal issued its ruling last month and published it Friday as precedent binding on lower courts. The ordinance was passed in February 2012 and prohibits plastic bags that can be used only once and requires stores to charge 10 cents for recyclable plastic or paper bags.

A lawsuit by Save the Plastic Bag Coalition said plastic bags took more energy to produce than plastic and take up more space in landfills.

Similar measures have been adopted in about 50 cities and counties in California and have survived legal challenges. The state Supreme Court upheld a plastic-bag ban in 2011.

Affirmative action foe wins California court fight

In a bitter fight over the effects of affirmative action, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that law school data on race, attendance and grades should be available to the public.

The unanimous decision represents a legal victory for a law professor seeking to test his notion that minority students are actually harmed by preferential admissions policies.

University of California, Los Angeles law professor Richard Sander created a firestorm when he published his "mismatch theory" in the Stanford Law Review in 2004.

Critics swiftly attacked his conclusions, saying Sander understated the positive effects of affirmative action and based his thinking on inadequate statistics.

To further his research, Sander sought data on ethnicity and scholastic performance compiled by the State Bar of California with a public records request in 2008. The state bar denied the request, prompting the lawsuit.

Information compiled by the bar, a branch of the state judiciary responsible with licensing and disciplining lawyers, is "unparalleled," Sander said after the ruling Thursday.

German Court Begins Hearing Afghan Airstrike Case

A court in Germany has begun hearing a civil case brought by relatives of some of the 91 Afghans killed in a NATO airstrike four years ago.

Bonn regional court spokesman Philipp Prietze said Wednesday that the court reviewed video recorded by two U.S. fighter jets involved in the airstrike in the Afghan province of Kunduz on Sept. 4, 2009.

The strike was ordered by a German colonel fearful that insurgents would use two stolen fuel tankers to attack his troops.

Germany paid $5,000 each to victims' families, but some are seeking additional compensation. Most of the dead were civilians.

Separately, Germany said it would offer refuge to 182 Afghan translators and drivers who could face persecution after Western troops leave Afghanistan because they worked for the German military.

Appeals court moves BP forward in settlement dispute

The April 2010 blowout of BP's Macondo well off the Louisiana coast triggered an explosion that killed 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and led to millions of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf. Shortly after the disaster, BP agreed to create a $20 billion compensation fund that was administered at first by the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, led by attorney Kenneth Feinberg.

BP argued that Barbier and court-appointed claims administrator Patrick Juneau misinterpreted terms of the settlement. Plaintiffs' lawyers countered that BP undervalued the settlement and underestimated how many claimants would qualify for payments.

In the panel's majority opinion, Judge Edith Brown Clement said BP has consistently argued that the settlement's complex formula for compensating businesses was intended to cover "real economic losses, not artificial losses that appear only from the timing of cash flows."

"The interests of individuals who may be reaping windfall recoveries because of an inappropriate interpretation of the Settlement Agreement and those who could never have recovered in individual suits for failure to show causation are not outweighed by the potential loss to a company and its public shareholders of hundreds of millions of dollars of unrecoverable awards," Clement wrote.

Judge Leslie Southwick wrote a concurring opinion. Judge James Dennis wrote a partial dissent, largely disagreeing with the other two.

"Because BP has not satisfied its heavy burden of showing that a change in circumstances or law warranted the modifications it sought, the district court correctly affirmed the Administrator's decision rejecting BP's argument and actions to modify the agreement," Dennis wrote.

Judge says Episcopal issues belong in state court

U.S. District Judge C. Weston Houck has ruled for the second time in recent months that legal issues arising from the Episcopal schism in eastern South Carolina belong in state court, not federal court.

Houck dismissed a federal lawsuit late Friday brought by Bishop Charles vonRosenberg, the bishop of parishes remaining with the national Episcopal Church.

The bishop had asked Houck to block Bishop Mark Lawrence, the spiritual head of churches that left the national church, from using the name and symbols of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina.

But Houck ruled the issues "are more appropriately before, and will more comprehensively be resolved, in South Carolina state court."

Lawrence and churches in the conservative diocese separated from the more liberal national church last year. Those parishes later sued in state court to protect their use of the diocesan name and symbols and title to a half billion dollars in church property.

In a consent order agreed to by both sides and signed by a state judge earlier this year, Lawrence and those parishes were given the right to use the name and symbols.

Parishes remaining with the national church later tried to move that case to federal court, but Houck ruled in June that doing so would disrupt the balance between state and federal courts.