A selection of the need-to-know civil justice news for the week of January 7-13.

 

From Addiction To Pensions: 10 Things To Know About Christie’s 2017 State Of The State

Brent Johnson and Susan K. Livio | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday delivered his seventh annual State of the State address — and even he noted it was markedly different than his previous ones.

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What They Said About Christie’s State Of The State Speech

Susan K. Livio | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

With Gov. Chris Christie devoting most of his final State of the State address laying out a blueprint to tackle heroin and opioid addiction, New Jersey lawmakers, lobbyists, and mental health experts offered mostly praise for his “passionate” remarks. Some took issue, however, with the governor’s singular focus on addiction. They said they hoped he would make room in his last year in office for other issues like school funding, preserving the Medicaid program expansion under Obamacare and the underfunded state pension system.

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Christie Signs Bill Adding Judges In Bail Reform

Dustin Racioppi | The Record

A little more than week after new bail reforms took effect in New Jersey, Governor Christie signed into law a bill that adds 20 new judges to the state Superior Court system and boosts spending by $9.3 million to pay for that expansion.

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Raisinets Boxes ‘Recklessly’ Underfilled, Lawsuit Alleges

Saabira Chaudhuri | Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog

A lawsuit filed Tuesday in a California federal court claims Nestlé packages some of its Raisinets in opaque movie-theater-style containers that lead customers to believe they are buying a full box, when in fact only 60% of the box contains chocolate-coated raisins.

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College Senior Holding Out Hope That Internship Will Lead To Class-Action Lawsuit

The Onion

Aiming to transition seamlessly from her current position, college senior Molly Black is holding out hope that her current internship with BrownLink Media will lead to a class-action lawsuit, sources confirmed Monday. “I spend 12-hour days here, six days a week, so I think I have a decent shot of leveraging this experience directly into a legal battle against the company,” said Black, 21, adding that working through her legally mandated lunch hour would likely further increase her chances of staying on long-term as a plaintiff in a multiyear trial.

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Florida Convict Blames Verizon For Letting Him Steal Man’s Identity

ABC 9 WFTV

A Florida man sentenced to 10 years in prison for using a stolen identity to obtain more than $300 in products and services from Verizon Wireless is suing the company for not stopping him.

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Debt Collectors Take On Lawyers In What May Be N.J.’s Least Empathetic Lawsuit

Jessica Mazzola | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

It’s shaping up to be a battle royale between members of some of the least popular professions in New Jersey. A Bergen County collections agency has filed a class action lawsuit against five lawyers who it claims are running a racketeering scheme targeting collections agencies. The lawsuit, filed in December in the U.S. District Court in Trenton, claims that the attorneys file bogus class action suits against the collections companies, knowing that the companies will be forced to settle the claims quickly for less than it would cost them to go through the judiciary process.

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