Law Court

It isn’t every day that the Law Court addresses claims of civil conspiracy or aiding and abetting breaches of fiduciary duty, but that is exactly what the court did in Meridian Medical Systems, LLC v. Epix Therapeutics, Inc. – with a bit of literary allusion thrown in.

In Meridian, the Court clearly stated for the first time that

civil liability can attach for aiding and abetting another’s tortious conduct.

Meridian involved a business relationship gone bad.  Ken Carr, in his capacity as assignee of the claims of Meridian, sued corporate defendants which had a relationship with Meridian as a result of a licensing agreement.  The complaint asserted that the value of Meridian’s technology was not maximized due to the conduct of Ken Carr’s co-managers at Meridian, which allegedly was encouraged by the defendants.  The complaint included counts for “conspiracy” and “aiding and abetting breaches of fiduciary duty.”

Reviewing the

In a recent blog post, I explored the application of the final judgment rule to appeals from preliminary injunction orders in state court.  As I noted, the Law Court has recently applied the “death knell” exception to that rule to hear an interlocutory appeal regarding a preliminary injunction.  In two other recent cases, the Law Court has taken up and considered the “judicial economy” exception to the final judgment rule.  These cases help delineate the scope of that exception.

The first case is Cutting v. Down East Orthopedic Associates, P.A.  In that case, a plaintiff brought separate cases in federal court asserting a discrimination claim and a medical malpractice claim against a physician.  The district court granted summary judgment against the plaintiff in the discrimination case, and dismissed the second case for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.  The plaintiff then filed a malpractice claim in state court, which the defendant moved to dismiss on claim preclusion grounds.  The Superior

As recently noted on this blog, parties can appeal a preliminary injunction order in federal court under 28 U.S.C. § 1292 – but, typically, the same right of appeal is not available under Maine law.   As stated in Sanborn v. Sanborn, “an order granting or denying a motion for a preliminary injunction is not a final judgment and generally is not an action from which we will entertain an appeal.”

As the Law Court reaffirmed just a few weeks ago, in Cutting v. Down East Orthopedic Associates, P.A.,

[t]he final judgment rule is a judicially-created doctrine that promotes judicial economy and curtails interruption, delay, duplication and harassment.

Because it is a judicially-created rule, the final judgment rule has various exceptions which might permit the Law Court to address an appeal from a preliminary injunction order.  Indeed, the Law Court has, on occasion, reached the merits of

The Law Court yesterday issued an interesting decision in the ongoing ranked choice voting litigation that will have a broad application to appeals of final agency actions under M.R. Civ. P. 80C.  The decision clarifies when an automatic stay of a Superior Court judgment enters in a Rule 80C action.  The answer, somewhat counterintuitively, is that a judgment reversing an agency action is automatically stayed even though a judgment affirming an agency action is not.

In Jones v. Secretary of State, petitioners appealed the determination of the Secretary of State that there were insufficient signatures to place a people’s veto of a law implementing ranked choice voting for presidential primaries and elections onto the November ballot.  Petitioners won in the Superior Court, with the court issuing an order reversing the Secretary of State’s determination.  Given pressing deadlines for preparing the ballot, the question then became whether the decision was automatically stayed under Rule 62(e) – leaving the