Lawyer Monthly - March 2023

Monthly Round-Up MARCH 2023 Supreme Court Rules Northern Ireland Protocol is Lawful The UK Supreme Court has rejected a challenge to UK-EU trade arrangements by unionist leaders. British users. Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, a legal academic bringing the case, said that these users were not properly compensated for the value of personal data that the platform required them to provide. Gormsen’s lawyers last month asked the Competition Appeal Tribunal to certify the case under the UK's collective proceedings regime, leading to the February rejection as the tribunal ruled that Gormsen’s methodology of establishing users’ losses needed “rootand-branch evaluation” in order to continue. A spokesperson for Meta said the company welcomed the decision and referred to its previous statement that the lawsuit is "entirely without merit". (DUP) leader Jeffrey Donaldson said a solution to the protocol was “never going to be found in the courts”, adding that the Brexit trading arrangements remained “an existential threat to the future of Northern Ireland’s place within the union”. Speaking with the BBC, a UK government source added that there was “lots still to work through” in negotiations concerning the protocol. Instated as part of the Brexit deal, the Northern Ireland Protocol creates a trade border between Northern Ireland and Britain. It has been appealed by uninionist politicians who have claimed that this conflicts with the 1800 Act of Union, which states that all UK nations should be treated equally in matters of trade, and the Northern Ireland Act 1998, which prohibits the alteration of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status without a referendum. That appeal has now been unanimously rejected by the court, which agreed that the protocol did conflict with the Act of Union but added that it was Parliament’s will that any part of the Act that conflicted with the protocol be suspended. In response to the ruling, Democratic Unionist Party On 20 February, a London tribunal rejected a class action lawsuit against Facebook parent company Meta valued at up to $3.7 billion. The lawsuit alleged that the social media giant abused its dominant market position to monetise users’ personal data. However, the tribunal gave the proposed claimants’ legal counsel six months to “have another go” at establishing any alleged losses suffered by users. The class action lawsuit was brought against Meta on behalf of Facebook’s 45 million $3.7 Billion UK Class Action Against Meta Temporarily Rejected 6 LAWYERMONTHLYMARCH 2023

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