Panera Bread Company is, quite obviously, in the bread business. But when Mark Boswell and others filed a class action against the company for breach of contract and fraud, the case was about a different kind of dough.
Boswell and the other named plaintiffs had served as Joint Venture General Managers for Panera, managing the daily operations of company-owned cafés. Boswell v. Panera Bread Company, No. 4:14-CV-01833 AGF, 2015 WL 6445396, at *1 (E.D. Mo. Oct. 23, 2015). Panera entered into a standard Employment Agreement with Boswell and other Joint Venture GMs. Id. Under the ...
This year, France was treated to a quintessentially French scandal: a yogurt cartel. On March 12, 2015, the Autorité de la Concurrence, France’s antitrust authority, announced that it was fining eleven companies more than €192 million ($214 million). Together, these eleven companies represented close to 90% of French yogurt production.
From 2006 to 2012, representatives from companies like Yoplait, Novandie, Senagral (Senoble Group), and Lactalis Nestlé, met in private to coordinate price increases on the private-label yogurt, cheese, cream, and dairy-based dessert ...
In his commencement address for Washington University in St. Louis’ graduating Class of 1998, political commentator George Will shared a cautionary tale of youth. “I grew up in Champaign, Illinois, midway between Chicago and Saint Louis,” Will began. “And at an age too tender for life-shaping decisions, I made one. While all my friends were becoming Cardinals fans. I became a Cubs fan,” he said. “My friends, happily rooting for Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst, and other great Redbirds, grew up cheerfully convinced that the world is a benign place. So, of course, they ...
Is your bracket busted yet? Unless you predicted No. 14 UAB knocking out No. 3 Iowa State 60-59 in the first round of the NCAA’s Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, it probably is. That upset has added to what was already a difficult year for corn. (Iowa State is located in, well, Iowa, where 90% of the land is dedicated to agriculture — i.e. the “Corn State”). Earlier this year, college basketball fans at the University of Wisconsin attempted to intimidate their Big Ten rival the Nebraska Cornhuskers by donning T-shirts that decried corn as the “WORST VEGETABLE ...
After leaving almost 10,000 empty seats in its Champions League game against Roma last September, the professional football team in Manchester City chose to offer a buy-one-get-one-free deal on tickets at its October match against CSKA Moscow. ("Football" here is meant in the European sense, a game most Americans call "soccer", which in the fall of 2016 may be the only professional football played in St. Louis. Go Ambush!) The promotion was a success in that City went on to sell out its match against CSKA. The buy-one-get-one-free deal, however, drew the derision of fans of City's rival ...
Antonia Neshev is a Bulgarian artist who moved to Colorado in the mid-1990s to become a wildlife instructor and T-shirt decorator. In the late 2000s she designed a T-shirt that depicted three wolves howling at the moon. The manufacturer sold the shirts through Amazon, which of course allows customers to post product reviews. Brian Govern, then a 32-year-old law student in New Jersey (it’s always a law student) was so moved by the shirt that he decided to post a review on the site.
“This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it ...
Have you ever seen a corporation walk down the street? Or maybe you’ve shaken hands with a corporation lately? Perhaps you’ve witnessed a corporation do The Wiggle? Over two hundred years ago, Chief Justice Marshall wrote that a corporation is “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” More recently, Justice Stevens wrote in dissent that “corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires”. Others disagree.
For example, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney famously told a crowd of ...
The backbone of insurance is risk. It is assessing risk, allocating risk, pricing risk, and insuring risk. The insurance industry is – in a word – one of risk.
To help calculate risk, the industry has built sophisticated models and algorithms, designed to measure the likelihood of certain events and scenarios. These predictive models quantify the odds of your car getting wrecked, your home being damaged, or – as Nationwide so morbidly reminded us – the odds that your child might die from a preventable accident.
The insurance industry, of course, insures risks beyond the home ...
Illinois’ former eavesdropping law was unconstitutional because it was too broad to protect the fundamental interest in conversational privacy. When the former law was held unconstitutional, many wondered how the General Assembly would respond. By enacting this new law on December 30, 2014, Illinois made clear that it was going to stay the course and protect its citizens’ private conversation.
The cornerstone of Illinois’ eavesdropping law is the policy that the people of Illinois should not fear that what they believe to be private conversations are being recorded. That ...
The Missouri Court of Appeals recently rendered unenforceable employment contracts seeking to bind “at-will” employees unless there is consideration from the employer beyond an offer of employment. In Kathryn Jimenez v. Cintas Corporation, et al., No. ED101015 & ED1011241 (Mo. App. E.D. Jan. 13 2015), the Eastern District held that an offer for at-will employment, regardless of whether the offer from the employer was for new employment or continued employment, does not constitute sufficient consideration to form a binding employment contract.
Kathryn Jimenez began ...