At a hearing Wednesday, the judge seemed impatient--even angry--with lawyers who asked him to stay his ruling ordering filmmaker Joseph Berlinger to turn over 600 hours of raw footage from his movie about the Lago Agrio litigation to Chevron defense lawyers. The case, he said, would be decided on the law, not influenced by a celebrity letter-writing campaign against his previous ruling.

Private antitrust litigation related to LIBOR isn't over--not by a long shot. But on Friday 16 banks accused of manipulating the benchmark global interest rate dispelled any notion that they'd be easy targets for the plaintiffs bar.

Last year, Manhattan federal judge Shira Scheindlin rejected the rating agencies' First Amendment defense and permitted the claims of three lead institutional investor plaintiffs to proceed. But now she's decided that they can't move forward as a class.

One of the most engrossing cases of alleged corporate intrigue in years will move forward, with novel claims of illicit computer file access intact.

Has the credit rating agencies' overconfidence in investor litigation come back to bite them?

The First Amendment doesn't always protect credit rating agencies that make bad calls on securities, a Manhattan federal district court judge ruled Wednesday. The decision leaves Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service on the hook for allegedly misleading two institutional investors about the value of mortgage-backed securities.