A referee has ordered the ex-wife of Rolling Stones icon Mick Jagger to pay more than $700,000 in back rent and attorney fees to her former landlords after she lost a bitter five-year battle to keep her $4,600-a-month, rent-stabilized Park Avenue apartment. The ruling followed a 2008 decision by the New York Court of Appeals holding that Bianca Jagger and other foreign nationals in the country on tourist visas were not eligible for rent-stabilized units.

The prevailing plaintiff in a contract dispute cannot invoke an indemnification clause to recover more than $700,000 in attorney fees under an “exacting” test set by the New York Court of Appeals in 1989, a state appellate panel has ruled. Even though a lower court’s interpretation of the indemnification clause was not “irrational,” the court reversed the fee award, characterizing New York law as “distinctly inhospitable” to the use of indemnification claims as a mechanism for claiming fees in a contract dispute.

A New York appeals court has handed a major victory to freelance journalist Jim Edwards in a nearly four-year battle to gain access to court documents that he claims contain information about a multimillion-dollar kickback scheme involving international advertising agency Grey Global Group.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has reversed a federal district court’s grant of a habeas petition to a Guantanamo detainee in a ruling that relaxed the evidence standards for the government to hold men at the U.S

A New York appeals court has reinstated aiding and abetting charges against a New Jersey law firm in a suit by investors over its alleged role in a $22 million Ponzi scheme. A lower court in 2008 granted Lum, Drasco & Positan’s motion to dismiss the charges by investors who claimed the lawyers knew about the undisclosed criminal histories of the scheme’s perpetrators prior to its unraveling. But the appeals court judge reversed, saying the investors had adequately alleged the lawyers had actual knowledge of the fraud.