The Georgia Supreme Court has affirmed a lower court’s finding that online travel companies that book hotel rooms via the Internet must pay hotel taxes on the room rates they charge their customers, not the lower rates they pay to the hotels.

Goodwin Liu’s bid for a federal judgeship may be headed for a crucial Senate vote this week, in what would be the biggest fight yet over any of President Barack Obama’s nominees for the lower federal courts.

The Federal Circuit has dealt Rambus a major setback, ruling in two cases that the technology licensing company improperly destroyed millions of pages of documents in advance of litigation, and sending the cases back to the lower courts.

In a FOIA case brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union, a judge has ruled the Department of Homeland Security does not have to reveal the locations of surveillance cameras installed for the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative.

A federal appeals court has vacated a $24 million settlement of a consumer class action filed in the wake of a massive recall of tainted pet foods after finding one evidentiary flaw in the lower court’s analysis of whether it was “fair and reasonable.”