Congress has passed the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, paving the way for health care and compensation for New Yorkers who have been sickened by the dust from World Trade Center attacks.

The bill has been in the works for years, pushed by New York politicians, fire fighters and police officers, but had stalled in the Senate earlier this month. After its sponsors agreed to scale down the cost of the bill considerably, from the $7.4 billion price tag approved by the House of Representatives in September, to $4.2 billion, it passed quickly.

The bill will continue to provide health care and monitoring for tens of thousands of first-responders, construction workers and Lower Manhattan residents who were exposed to World Trade Center dust in the weeks following the attacks.

But instead of continuing that monitoring effort for 10 years, the scaled-back bill provides only enough funding to last for five years. That’s still an advantage over the present system, which mandates federal funding for the effort be renewed on a year-by-year basis.

The bill also sets up a Victims Compensation Fund that will give monetary awards for to emergency workers and others who fall ill and lose wages as a result of exposure to the dust and to their families in case of death. The fund will be similar to one set up for people who were killed by the actual attacks.  

Information regarding your legal rights under the Zadroga Act will become available within 180 days from its enactment (on or about July 2011) once the new Special Master is appointed and develops regulations. 

The City of New York has asked a judge to toss out 9/11 lawsuits by 4,600 cops, firefighters, and paramedics, for personal injuries they suffered resulting from, among other claims, the City of New York’s failure to provide proper safety equipment.

The argument that the “uniformed” personnel are not entitled to workplace protection under state labor laws has infuriated Ground Zero responders, who called the City of New York’s move “a slap in the face.”

New York’s Bravest and Finest fought smoldering fires at Ground Zero, dug for human remains and guarded the toxic disaster site for months, but still the City of New York feels they don’t deserve the same protections as manual laborers, mechanics and other “working men”.

Uniformed workers make up half of about 9,000 city employees, construction workers and others who have filed personal injury lawsuits against the city in the World Trade Center cleanup.

If the city gets its way, NYPD and Port Authority cops, firefighters and EMTs would also be dismissed from lawsuits against the City of New York’s WTC contractors.

A Bronx jury has awarded a police officer $3.16 million in a personal injury suit against the City of New York after he fell 40 feet while chasing a carjacker.

The carjacker had smashed a patrol car with a stolen livery cab, ran off and ended up unconscious on Metro-North tracks at East 187th Street and Park Avenue in June 2003.

The police officer, a seven-year veteran, hopped a fence on an overpass to reach the man and plummeted when the fence gave way from the posts. He suffered broken bones, loss of feeling in his left hand and a lacerated liver.

According to a recent report, $321.2 million in legal settlements where paid over the past five years for slip and fall accidents caused by defective sidewalks.

An annual claims report also shows sidewalk settlements cost the city $54 million last year.

Properly inspect 20% of the sidewalk complaints and, on average, violations remained unfixed for four years. These broken, cracked and uneven sidewalks are costing taxpayers plenty, according to a review of settlements.

A jury awarded $16 million in 2007 to a plaintiff in a personal injury lawsuit who suffered a brain injury when she tripped over the stump of a sheared traffic pole.  

In January 2008, another female plaintiff in a personal injury lawsuit received $1.65 million after she slipped in an unrepaired catch basin, causing a severe injury her knee.

In 2006, another female plaintiff in a personal injury lawsuit was awarded $1.25 million after she tripped on a broken sidewalk in lower Manhattan causing her to sustain a bad back and leg despite several surgeries.

Property owners have submitted 22,229 requests to inspect and repair tree-damaged sidewalks, but so far, only 4,491 have been fixed under a pilot program.

And even though slip and fall lawsuits against New York City have plummeted since 2003, when a law moved the responsibility for faulty sidewalks to commercial property owners — absolving the city of most claims, New York City is still liable for accidents on sidewalks in front of one, two and three-family homes.

In what appears to be an act of obstruction of justice, Bank of America threatened to sue a former employee if he cooperated in a probe by the Attorney General Andrew Cuomo of $3.6 billion in Merrill Lynch bonuses issued immediately before Bank of America took over Merrill.   

These threats appeared to have been an attempt to coerce the former Merrill employee from responding to a subpoena by the Attorney General’s office which sought information of Bank of America and Merrill’s flurry of bonuses before the takeover.

The Attorney General’s office has reported these threats to the judge overseeing the investigation.

The bank claims this information is proprietary and would be useful to its competitors, a claim Cuomo says is without merit.

Many buyers who are unable to get financing or just don’t want to purchase a unit they contracted to buy more than a year ago are trying to get out of their contracts or obtain price concession in exchange for closing.

In addition, the number of New Yorkers filing claims with the attorney general’s office to claw back their down payments has more than tripled in the last two years.  

As a result, they are hiring lawyers to find legal maneuvers which will allow them to back out of their contracts and receive the return of their down payments or receive a significant concession on the price between 5-40% of the original contracted price as well as have the project’s developer pay closing costs, cover taxes and relocation expenses.

For many buyers, given the significant depression in the values of their units, it would make financial sense to simply walk away from their deals and deposits.

And although the developer’s have the legal strength of a signed contract and the financial leverage of a buyer’s deposit on their side, working against them ironically is the recession as well.

For many developers, their profitability, lending status and sales have also been severely affected by the current recession. As a result, developers cannot afford to lose sales, even if they get to retain the buyer’s deposits.

Unless a contract includes a mortgage contingency, nothing in the law allows for a change in financial circumstances or the lending market to constitute a “right of rescission.”

But one traditional method for a buyer to break a contract is arguing breach of contract on the part of the developer by proving that some element of the completed unit differs from the developer’s offering plan.

The Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act, a 41-year-old consumer protection law rarely applied in the city is a law created to protect against speculators selling uninhabitable plots.

The act requires developers of condominiums or conversions with more than 100 units to provide buyers with a particular type of property report containing information like proof of ownership and the availability of public utilities.

The law has its limits as a negotiation device: a developer is exempt from the act if he or she has pledged to complete the unit within two years. But for distressed buyers in certain buildings, the Land Sales Act may offer a way out.

Under New York real estate state law, buyers in a new development have the right to get out of their contracts if the developer does not close at least one unit within a year of the originally projected start date. Developers almost always find a way to meet this requirement, but lawyers say that buyers are now putting those initial deals under a microscope.

An immigrant from Jamaica, whose husband of less than a year died in a Staten Island ferry crash in 2003 is taking her fight to get her green card to the U.S. Supreme Court after Immigration officials’ denied her green card application because the couple had been married only about eight months.

Under Federal laws, which aim at cracking down on sham marriages involving immigrants, if a citizen spouse dies before two years have elapsed, the immigrant spouse’s green card eligibility ends.

A federal judge in Newark ruled in 2007 that immigration officials were wrong to deny the petitioner’s application for a green card, but that decision was overturned by an appeals court in February.

Two wrongful death civil lawsuits filed on behalf of the estates of two young men shot to death by two New York City police officer claim the New York City police used excessive force during the shooting.  

The civil trial over the men’s deaths started Friday with claims that the two victims pleaded for their lives as the officers fired 28 times.

The New York City’s claims the officers acted within department guidelines after one of the men pointed a “big, silver, semiautomatic weapon” at an officer. A previous New York Police Department investigation also found the police officers acted within department guidelines, and a Bronx grand jury brought no criminal charges.

The shooting which took place occurred after the New York City police officers responded to a robbery.

According to reports, the victims were face-down on the ground when they were killed, one shot eight times in the back and the second hit with 14 bullets, mostly in the back.

The victims’ parents are suing the City of New York and former New York City police officers for $20 million.

A state appeals court ruled in favor of tenants by determining that they should not have to pay pricey luxury rents if their landlords benefit from a common tax break.

In a unanimous decision, the four-judge panel sided with tenants who said they were wrongly forced to pay higher market-rate rents even though their landlord was getting tax breaks meant for rent-stabilized buildings.

Thousands of building owners across the city have operated for years under the impression that the tax breaks did not prevent them from converting rent-stabilized apartments into expensive luxury units if rents grew incrementally above $2,000 a month or if tenants earned more than $175,000 for two years in a row.

If the ruling stands, landlords in New York City could be forced to reimburse millions of dollars to tenants living in formerly rent-stabilized apartments.

It’s not clear how many buildings could be affected, but the New York City Finance Department says 14,647 buildings are using the tax break at issue in the case.

The defendant landlord has tried to convert as many of the 11,000 apartments into market rate units but this ruling could end that effort and require the landlord to reimburse 3,000 tenants now paying luxury rents for as many as four years of excess payments.

This lawsuit was originally filed by tenants from Stuyvesant Town.