We've long known that securities class actions have gone global. But a new report by the RiskMetrics Group, which can be accessed here (subscription required), attempts to quantify just how much. For example, from 1996 through 2007, it counts 234 times that an international institutional investor has sought to be named lead plaintiff. The study also notes that in every year since 2002, international investors have filed motions to become lead plaintiff in more then 5 percent of all new federal securities class actions.

Once again, a federal judge in Philadelphia has clipped the wings of some of the country's largest egg producers hoping to hatch their way out of multidistrict class action litigation over alleged price-fixing for eggs and egg products. And this time the judge got just a few dozen words into her decision before cracking her first chicken joke.

On Wednesday a Manhattan federal judge approved a purported $180 million antitrust class action settlement with Sirius XM Radio Inc., rejecting objections by Frank's Center for Class Action Fairness that the settlement was a sweetheart deal benefitting only the plaintiffs lawyers and the company.

We weren't the only ones struck by Vivendi's Paris gambit aimed at preventing French class members from participating in the company's securities fraud trial in New York. On Tuesday, class counsel for the plaintiffs in New York demanded that Vivendi withdraw the suit.

PUBLISHEDArgued: March 20, 2012Before WILKINSON, KING, and AGEE, Circuit Judges.Affirmed and remanded by published opinion. Wilkin- son wrote the opinion, in which King and