Michael Bloomberg is the greatest manager ever which is why pundits always want him to run for president. He's sooo great that he left an abusive tyrant in charge of his financial news company, and also that company gets sued every so often for being a hostile work environment for women. Last September, four women were suing Bloomberg LP for wrongful discrimination. Now, it's 58! It seems that whenever a lady employee became pregnant at Bloomberg, they were denied promotions and then received pay cuts. Mayor Mike always claims to have nothing to do at all with his company anymore, but the women filing the suit say he still calls the shots and "contributes to a culture of sexual discrimination." As there have been almost 500 women who've taken maternity leave from Bloomberg since 2002, the number of plaintiffs is expected to grow. And Mike himself is now writing a book about how to be as great a manager as he is. Like his last book, it will probably be ghost-written by his asshole-in-chief Winkler. [NYP]

New York state legislators passed a law that will require Amazon.com to collect sales tax on items New Yorkers purchase on the site. Amazon lawyers call the idea "unconstitutional" and have filed a lawsuit in New York's Supreme Court. These lawyers say New York can't ask Amazon to collect sales tax because Amazon isn't based in New York. Legislators there disagree, arguing that if any Amazon affiliates — independent websites which market Amazon.com's catalog of goods, and receive a cut of sales — are based in New York, and several thousand are, Amazon very much has a presence in the state. Amazon's complaint, via Epicenter, is embedded below.

Jim Buckmaster has just set himself up for a messy court fight. Responding to eBay's lawsuit against Craigslist and its board — the board being Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark — he has claimed that he and Newmark issued additional shares in the company to themselves "for the sake of protecting the long term well-being of the Craigslist community." Let's leave aside the question of how the community benefits from Buckmaster and Newmark increasing their ownership. Craigslist is registered as a for-profit company; as such, its only legal responsibility is to its shareholders, not its users.

eBay's lawsuit against Craigslist, alleging that founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster conspired to squeeze eBay out of the company, is fascinating for many reasons. It reveals Buckmaster and Newmark's naked greed: They issued shares of the company to themselves to increase their stakes and decrease eBay's.But it also shows how tight the two have been with Craigslist's workers. eBay owns, or owned 28.4 percent of the company, a stake acquired from early Craigslist employee Philip Knowlton. Knowlton sold his shares in part because Buckmaster and Newmark were trying to squeeze him out, too. (Are you beginning to see a pattern?) The two, acting as Craigslist's board of directors, issued themselves one new share for every five they already owned, a move which pushed eBay's ownership stake down to 24.85 percent — a level which, among other things, eliminated eBay's ability to elect a director for the company. Do the math, and it becomes clear that Craigslist's other shareholders — presumably its employees — own about 3.3 percent of the company. That's a miserably small portion of equity to give employees of a tech startup; normally, about 20 percent of a company's equity is reserved for employees.

Dartmouth Dean of First-Year students Gail M. Zimmerman, in an email to students threatened with a lawsuit by Priya Venkatesan:

In case you hadn't heard, Dartmouth lecturer Priya Venkatesan has dropped the discrimination lawsuit she inexplicably filed against her former students. Hopefully it'll still all end up in the book! (Complete with thinly-veiled Gawker, if we're lucky.) Venkatesan is now a research assistant at Northwestern, btw. [Dartlog]

During proceedings in a shareholder lawsuit against Yahoo's board, Microsoft lawyers said that the company has set aside $1.5 billion to retain Yahoo employees. This cash is separate from a Yahoo board-approved severance package that guarantees two years' pay to anybody laid off after a change in control. Already, two-thirds of our readers said they would prefer to see Yahoo merge with Microsoft instead of AOL. Sources confirm the sentiment is similar inside of Yahoo. (Photo, "Free Man's Prison," by code_martial)

Click to viewA Dartmouth lecturer is suing her class for discrimination, as she revealed in a series of regrettable and bizarre emails that promptly ended up all over Dartmouth blogs. Priya Venkatesan (Dartmouth '90, MS in Genetics, PhD in literature) emailed members of her Winter '08 Writing 5 class Saturday night to announce her intention to seek damages from them for their being mean to her. The email, and so, so much more, below:

The stock-options backdating scandal, which bored Silicon Valley the day the SEC first announced its investigations, continues. The latest to disclose a brush with the law: Google. Google has not been accused of misleading investors by moving up the grant date of stock options, making them more profitable for the executives who received them. But Google board member Ann Mather, the former CFO of animation studio Pixar, has, and the SEC is now initiating legal proceedings against her.

When Google advertisers sign up for AdWords they encounter two adjacent boxes. The first asks how much the advertiser is willing to pay per click for ads in Google search results. The second, labeled optional, asks how much the advertiser is willing to pay per click for ads on third party networks. If you leave the second box blank, Google assumes you'd pay the same price that you entered into the first box. Lawyer Brian Kabateck calls that a false assumption and he's filed a federal class action lawsuit in San Jose seeking damages.

Expect a rash of headlines accusing auction giant eBay of bullying saintly Craig Newmark. eBay has sued Newmark, his business partner Jim Buckmaster, and Craigslist. The charge? Craigslist has allegedly diluted eBay's 28.4 percent stake in the company, which the auction giant acquired from a former Craigslist employee. The part of the story Newmark and Buckmaster don't want anyone to hear: The pair made about $16 million in the process of letting eBay buy the stake in their company. The deal included a shareholder-rights agreement which ought to prevent Craigslist from diluting eBay's stake in the company, people familiar with the deal have told Valleywag. By squeezing out eBay, Newmark and Buckmaster appear to be having their cake and eating it too. Relations between the companies had already deteriorated: eBay had a seat on the Craigslist board, at one point occupied by founder Pierre Omidyar, until last year.

Chest support theft report! Victoria's Secret is known as a BRA store, but is it also a ROB store? Long Island mom of four Katerina Plew says VS gave her the screw after they refused to meet with her about her idea for a new convertible bra, then ripped her off after the tipoff! The company's Very Sexy 100-way strapless convertible bra is really her own patented design, sez Plew—who sued! Now there's a legal meetup over the regal C-cup, cause the inventive mother is offended, brother. The two sides are taking their strapless tort back to court. It's a nuclear showdown on this brassiere throwdown! After the jump, compare Plew's patent plans with Victoria's Secret's own product: great minds think alike, or a thief in the night?

Sam Zell, the crazy old man who bought some newspapers recently, is a champion of free speech, which is why he swears so much. So it's odd that he is suing some lady for defamation, right? Especially because the lady is not associated with us, and we have called him all sorts of things! Oh, the lady is Dianne Jacob, who represents the Second District on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. Sam Zell also owns a trailer park company that has four parks in her district. Recently, they started raising rents. Dianne Jacob said some very mildly defamatory things about them!

Facebook lawyers won't let Think Computers founder Aaron Greenspan use the company's name to market his new self-pubished book, Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era . These lawyers say it would violate Facebook's trademark. So Greenspan has petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel Facebook's claim to the name. The suit rehashes Greenspan's old arguments that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole his idea.

A UK-based anti-abortion organization just wants you to keep your baby — and their own high search ranking. So when the Christian Institute's ad for "news and views on abortion" was denied by Google on the grounds that it mingled religion too closely with anti-choice politics, they sued. It's not that Google doesn't ever take pro-lifers ads. Secularian anti-abortion site Stand Up, Girl turns up on searches for abortion, "abortion good," and "abortion wrong." All that Google's saying to the Christian Institute is that so long as Jesus stays on the sidelines, they're happy taking ads for fetusporn sites.

Four of the seven counts in the suit brought by Dan Rather against his former employers at CBS have been dismissed. Unfortunately for CBS, among the three remaining counts is the "the $70 million in compensatory and punitive damages Rather is seeking from CBS for breaching his contract." So the vast government conspiracy bit of the lawsuit is apparently without merit, but he'll still get his money (maybe). After the jump, we've embedded the text of the judge's decision. And because that is not very interesting, we've also embedded a rockin music video.

A judge last summer called the ConnectU founders' claims that Mark Zuckerberg had used code written while employed by them to create Facebook "tissue thin." Yesterday, in the final ruling before Facebook's lawyers decided to settle, a higher court disagreed and rejected Facebook's call for a dismissal. According to the appeals court ruling, Facebook's defense arguments were "either unavailing, or inadequately developed, or both. We reject them out of hand and, for the reasons elucidated above, we reverse the order of dismissal." Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, unwilling to go on with the case, chose to settle.

Jonathan and Jenny Selbin—two people who deserve one another—are both attorneys and the worst neighbors you could possibly imagine. In February, they filed a lawsuit against their neighbor for smoking in her own apartment, taking her to court even after she bought air purifiers because her smoking was "endangering" their sensitive child. The note they slipped under her door at the time read "As you may not be aware, we are both lawyers and both litigators, for whom the usual barriers to litigation are minimal." That bit made them the runaway winners of our February ""Which snippet from the Times Real Estate section makes you most want to assault the person in the story?" contest. Now, the suit has been settled [NYT]—and the Selbins are concerned about their own reputation.

Facebook is preparing to settle with ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra. The three allegedthat in 2003, Facebook founder and then-fellow Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg turned code he wrote for ConnectU into Facebook. All motions in the case have been terminated, the New York Times reports — a usual prelude to a settlement. In July 2007, a judge characterized the ConnectU founder's case as tissue-thin, remarking that dormroom chatter does not equate to a contract. Still, the case didn't seem to be going away. Already, inadvertently released court filings proved embarrassing to Zuckerberg, and a trial would likely have revealed worse. What the Times didn't get: the terms of the settlement.

This is the view that Aaron and Christine Boring don't want you to see. The couple — who live at 1567 Oakridge Lane, Allegheny County, Pittsburgh, PA 15237, USA, according to their court filing — are suing Google over the company's "Street View" feature, which takes road-level pictures of neighborhoods for their mapping service. Among the complaints, the Borings — their actual name — accuse Google of an "intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion" of their privacy. More pics after the jump.