The Supreme Court announced today that it has granted review in five more cases. In four of those matters, the Court granted certification. The fifth case will be before the Court as a result of a motion for leave to appeal. Wild v. Carriage Funeral Holdings, Inc. was the subject of a published Appellate Division decision, reported at 458 N.J. Super. 416 (App. Div. 2019), and discussed here. There, the Appellate Division reversed a dismissal of plaintiff’s Law Against Discrimination case for failure to state a claim. The question presented to the Supreme Court, as phrased by its...

L.R. v. Camden City Public School Dist., ___ N.J. ___ (2019). A relative rarity for our Supreme Court occurred in this case today: the decision of the Appellate Division was affirmed by an equally divided Court. Only six Justices sat because Justice Fernandez-Vina did not participate. As discussed here, the question presented in this appeal was “Are plaintiffs—the mother of a student with a disability and a nonprofit advocacy organization—entitled to obtain from several school districts redacted copies of settlement agreements and records reflecting the provision of special services to...

On July 3, 1997, the Supreme Court decided Lemelledo v. Beneficial Management Corp. of America, 150 N.J. 255 (1997). Justice Handler’s opinion in that case, for a 6-0 Court, is a key Consumer Fraud Act (“CFA”) case. It is also the leading authority as to when a CFA claim is, or is not, pre-empted by the fact that the conduct complained of is regulated by multiple state agencies. The case, a class action, involved “loan packing,” which Justice Handler defined as “a practice on the part of commercial lenders that involves increasing the principal amount of a...