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This Day in Legal History: The Little Rock Nine

On September 4, 1957, nine Black teenagers tried to walk into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas—and were turned away at the doors by soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard, deployed by Governor Orval Faubus specifically to keep them out. The image of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine, walking alone through a jeering white mob, became one of the defining photographs of the civil rights era. And the confrontation it began became one of the most important tests of whether the rule of law actually means anything.

The legal backdrop was Brown v. Board of Education, decided three years earlier, in which the Supreme Court held that segregated public schools are unconstitutional. Little Rock had a desegregation plan; the Little Rock Nine were supposed to be its first students. Governor Faubus decided to defy the federal courts, using state troops to block integration. The standoff escalated until President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent in the 101st Airborne Division to escort the nine students into the school—federal soldiers enforcing a federal court order against a state government determined to resist it.

The significance of September 4, 1957 crystallized the following year in the Supreme Court’s decision in Cooper v. Aaron, which arose directly from the Little Rock crisis. There, in an opinion signed personally by all nine justices—a rare show of unanimity—the Court declared that state officials cannot nullify a federal court’s interpretation of the Constitution, and that “the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution.” It’s a principle that echoes through so much of what we cover: that a court order is not a suggestion, and that no official, however powerful, gets to decide for himself which parts of the Constitution to obey. It’s also a fitting anniversary for today, because our second story is, at bottom, another chapter in the long, unfinished American argument about race and education.

The Trump administration has taken its mail-in voting fight back to the Supreme Court, filing to have the justices clear away the last judicial obstacle to its executive order. Longtime listeners know this saga well. The order would create a federal list of eligible voters and restrict how the Postal Service delivers ballots. Back in late August, the Supreme Court, on its emergency docket, lifted one of two injunctions—but left the Postal Service piece blocked nationwide. The administration then went to the appeals court to try to clear that remaining block, and now it’s gone straight back to the Supreme Court to finish the job. So the whole thing is back in front of the justices, again on an emergency basis. Here’s what makes this significant and, frankly, uncomfortable. We are now two months out from the November midterms, and the fundamental legal question—whether the president actually has the authority to reshape how Americans vote by mail—still has not been decided on the merits. Everything so far has happened through emergency orders and stays, the “shadow docket,” with no full briefing, no argument, and no written opinion explaining the Court’s reasoning. Election administrators need settled rules to run an election; voters need to know how to cast a ballot. Instead, the rules are being rewritten in real time, in emergency filings, weeks before people vote. The significance is that the Supreme Court is now positioned to shape the mechanics of a national election through its emergency process—and whichever way it rules, doing it this way, this close to the election, on this thin a record, is itself a serious concern for the stability and predictability that election law is supposed to provide. Trump administration takes mail-in ballot fight to US Supreme Court | ReutersNPR · The Hill

Now the biggest legal story of the day: the Treasury Department and the IRS have proposed regulations to strip federal tax-exempt status from private schools and colleges that consider race in admissions, scholarships, or policies. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed it bluntly, saying that schools rebranding race-based preferences as “equitable” or “diversity-enhancing” doesn’t change what he called their discriminatory nature. To understand how significant—and how legally aggressive—this is, you need to know a case called Bob Jones University v. United States. In 1983, the Supreme Court upheld the IRS’s power to deny tax-exempt status to a school that racially discriminated—there, a university that banned interracial dating—on the theory that tax exemption is reserved for organizations that serve a public purpose, and that racial discrimination in education violates fundamental public policy. That doctrine was forged to punish schools that discriminated against Black students. What the administration is doing now is taking that exact doctrine and inverting it: arguing that after the Supreme Court’s 2023 SFFA decision ended race-conscious admissions, it’s race-conscious programs—the ones designed to help underrepresented minorities—that constitute the illegal discrimination violating public policy. So the anti-discrimination tax weapon built to dismantle segregation is being turned against diversity programs. A few crucial caveats: this is a proposed regulation, not a final rule—it goes through notice-and-comment and will absolutely be litigated—and it pointedly exempts schools that select based on religion. The significance is enormous. Tax-exempt status is existential for schools; losing it means donations stop being deductible and the institution owes taxes. We’ve tracked this administration’s campaign against DEI—Harvard, Columbia, William & Mary, the Deloitte settlement—and this is the most powerful lever yet: using the tax code, and a civil-rights-era precedent, to force schools to abandon any consideration of race. Trump moves to strip tax-exempt status from schools that consider race | ReutersWashington Post · CNBC

And finally, a story that should make every lawyer check their firm’s cybersecurity: data from two elite law firms, Quinn Emanuel and McDermott Will & Emery, has been exposed in a wave of cyber breaches hitting the legal industry. Law firms are, in a sense, the perfect target. Think about what they hold: their clients’ most sensitive secrets—merger plans, litigation strategy, trade secrets, personal financial and health information, government investigations. A single big firm is a one-stop shop for confidential data across dozens of major companies and individuals. That makes firms enormously attractive to criminal hackers and nation-state actors alike, and this latest wave—part of a broader surge of attacks on the legal sector—shows the threat is intensifying. Here’s the professional-responsibility dimension, because this isn’t just an IT problem. Lawyers have an ethical duty to protect client confidences—the ABA’s Model Rules require attorneys to make reasonable efforts to prevent unauthorized disclosure of client information, which in the modern world squarely includes cybersecurity. When a firm gets breached, it can face not only regulatory and contractual liability and breach-notification obligations, but also questions about whether it met its ethical duty of competence in safeguarding the data in the first place. The significance is a wake-up call for a profession that runs on confidentiality. As firms rush to adopt powerful new tools—we covered Google bringing Gemini AI into Big Law just last week—they’re accumulating and centralizing ever more sensitive client data, which raises the stakes on protecting it. The duty of confidentiality is as old as the profession; the threat surface is brand new, and growing. Data of law firms Quinn Emanuel, McDermott exposed in cyber breaches | ReutersBloomberg Law · The Record

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This Day in Legal History: The Treaty of Paris

On September 3, 1783, American and British negotiators signed the Treaty of Paris, formally ending the Revolutionary War and, with it, securing the thing the whole war had been fought over: British recognition of the independence of the United States. For the young nation, this was the moment it became, in the eyes of international law, a sovereign country among sovereign countries.

The American delegation—Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay—negotiated remarkably favorable terms. In its very first substantive article, Britain acknowledged the United States to be “free, sovereign and independent.” The treaty set generous boundaries, extending the new nation west to the Mississippi River, granted Americans valuable fishing rights off Newfoundland, and addressed the thorny questions of pre-war debts and the treatment of Loyalists. Franklin, ever the shrewd diplomat, had played the European powers against one another to extract terms far better than a defeated-looking rebellion might have expected.

The significance of September 3, 1783 is foundational in the most literal sense. A declaration of independence is a claim; a treaty of peace in which your former ruler concedes that claim is its legal realization. The Treaty of Paris is the document in which the United States stopped being a rebellion and started being a nation with recognized borders, treaty-making power, and standing in the world. Everything that followed—the Constitution four years later, the entire edifice of American law—was built on the sovereignty this treaty secured. And it’s worth remembering Franklin’s hard-won wisdom, captured in today’s opening quote, from a man who had seen the war up close: there was never a good war, or a bad peace. On a day of stories about the ordinary business of a functioning legal system, it’s worth pausing on the treaty that made that system possible.

Google has won a major victory: a federal judge has declined to force the company to sell off its advertising-technology business, opting for behavioral remedies instead of a breakup. Some background: last year, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia found that Google had illegally monopolized key parts of the ad-tech market—the plumbing that places digital ads across much of the web. This week’s ruling was about the remedy, and remedy is where antitrust cases are won or lost in practice. The Justice Department and a coalition of states wanted a structural remedy: forcing Google to divest its ad exchange, breaking the company up to restore competition. Judge Brinkema declined to go that far. Instead, she imposed behavioral remedies—requiring Google to change how it operates, to open up aspects of its ad auctions and share data with rivals, under ongoing oversight. Here’s the legal significance. Courts are historically very reluctant to order structural breakups; they’re drastic, hard to administer, and risk unintended consequences, so judges tend to prefer conduct remedies that police behavior rather than dismantle a company. We just saw the same pattern in the separate Google search-monopoly case, where a different judge also declined to force a divestiture. So a picture is emerging: Google keeps being found to have violated antitrust law, and keeps avoiding a breakup, landing instead with behavioral restrictions. Critics argue conduct remedies are weak—that a monopolist told to behave will find new ways to dominate. Google and its defenders say a breakup would be overkill. The significance is that this is the central debate in modern antitrust: when you’ve found illegal monopoly power, do you regulate the monopolist’s conduct, or do you break it up? For now, in the ad-tech case, the answer is conduct—and that’s a big win for Google. Google defeats US bid to force ad-tech sale | ReutersCNBC · Bloomberg

Boeing has paid a $3.1 million fine to the Federal Aviation Administration over a raft of safety and quality-control violations—and the number itself is the story. The penalty covers a series of failures, including the January 2024 incident in which a door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 in mid-flight, along with other lapses like unqualified work and improper pressure on an FAA-designated representative. Here’s the thing to understand: $3.1 million is, essentially, the maximum civil penalty the FAA is statutorily allowed to impose for this set of violations. And for a company the size of Boeing—which books tens of billions of dollars in revenue—critics, including families of crash victims and aviation-safety advocates, call a figure like that a rounding error, a cost of doing business rather than a genuine deterrent. That’s the real legal and policy issue here: the gap between the penalties regulators are authorized to levy and the scale of the companies they regulate. When the maximum lawful fine is trivial relative to a company’s balance sheet, the deterrent value of the penalty largely evaporates, and enforcement becomes symbolic. This is separate from the criminal exposure Boeing has faced over the earlier 737 MAX crashes; this is the civil, regulatory side. The significance is a recurring question in regulatory law: statutory penalty caps, often set decades ago and never updated for inflation or corporate scale, can leave regulators without the tools to meaningfully punish or deter misconduct by the largest players. Boeing writes a $3.1 million check, and the deeper questions about its safety culture—and about whether our regulatory penalties have any teeth against a corporate giant—remain very much open.Boeing paid $3.1 million fine to FAA over widespread safety violations | ReutersUS News · CBS News

And finally, a federal judge has blocked the EPA from sending California’s landmark vehicle-emissions rules to Congress for a possible fast-track repeal—a ruling that turns on a genuinely clever piece of administrative-law maneuvering. Here’s the setup. Under the Clean Air Act, California has a unique, long-standing power to set its own, stricter vehicle-emissions standards through “waivers” granted by the EPA, and other states can choose to follow California’s lead. The EPA, this June, took the position that those waivers should have been submitted to Congress under the Congressional Review Act—the CRA—which is significant because the CRA lets the Senate repeal a federal “rule” by a simple majority vote, bypassing the 60-vote threshold that would otherwise be needed. In other words, by reclassifying California’s waivers as “rules,” the EPA could hand the Senate a path to wipe them out with 51 votes. California sued, arguing the waivers aren’t rules and don’t belong in the CRA process at all. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell agreed, and she did not mince words—she said the EPA was asking the court to “engage in Orwellian doublethink,” writing that “the EPA cannot say one thing to Congress while ignoring any consequence from reclassifying these waivers as rules.” The significance operates on two levels. Substantively, it protects California’s authority to regulate tailpipe emissions, which shapes the auto market nationwide because so many states follow California’s standards. Procedurally, it’s a check on a creative attempt to use a reclassification to unlock a simple-majority repeal—a reminder that agencies can’t relabel their actions to reach a preferred political outcome without legal consequences. The fight over how America regulates car emissions just ran into the fine print of administrative law, and for now, California’s rules stand. US judge bars EPA effort to send California vehicle emissions rules to Congress | ReutersPolitico · Courthouse News

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This Day in Legal History: The Treasury Department Is Created

On September 2, 1789, Congress passed the act establishing the Department of the Treasury—the third executive department created under the new Constitution, after Foreign Affairs and War, both of which we’ve marked on this show. A week or so later, President Washington would name Alexander Hamilton its first Secretary, and with that appointment, one of the most consequential careers in American governance began.

The Treasury Department was, in a real sense, where the abstract new government became a functioning state. Hamilton inherited a country drowning in Revolutionary War debt, with no reliable revenue, no national bank, and shaky credit at home and abroad. Over the next few years, from that department, he engineered the financial architecture of the United States: the federal assumption of state debts, a system of customs duties and excise taxes to actually bring in revenue, the First Bank of the United States, and the establishment of public credit as a national asset. His conviction—captured in today’s opening quote—was that a manageable national debt, properly serviced, would knit the country’s creditors to its success and give the young republic financial standing in the world.

The significance of September 2, 1789 is that the Treasury became, and remains, one of the most powerful institutions in American life. It runs the IRS, manages the public debt, enforces sanctions, and shapes economic policy in ways that touch every person in the country. The debates Hamilton started—about debt, about taxation, about how much the federal government should do with its fiscal power—are debates we are still having, quite literally, in every episode where we cover a tax question. And it’s a fitting anniversary for today, because our final segment is a tax story—a reminder that the unglamorous machinery of how governments raise revenue, which Hamilton built, is where an enormous amount of real policy actually happens.

A Utah judge has ruled that there is enough evidence to send Tyler Robinson to trial for the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk—and, critically, that prosecutors may seek the death penalty. We covered the prosecution’s theory of this case back in July; now it has cleared its first major legal hurdle. At a preliminary hearing, Judge Tony Graf found the state had met the probable-cause standard on all seven counts, including aggravated murder, concluding that the evidence was “sufficient at this stage to support a reasonable belief that the defendant is the individual who shot and killed Charlie Kirk.” A word on that standard, because it matters: a preliminary hearing is a low bar. The state doesn’t have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt—that’s for the trial. It only has to show probable cause, a reasonable belief that a crime occurred and this defendant committed it. So this ruling isn’t a verdict; it’s a green light to proceed. The most consequential fight at the hearing was over whether this qualifies as aggravated murder, the charge that makes the death penalty available. Under Utah law, that generally requires an aggravating circumstance—and here prosecutors argued that Robinson, by allegedly firing a rifle from a rooftop toward Kirk near a crowd at Utah Valley University, knowingly created a great risk of death to people other than his target. The prosecutor called it “common sense” that shooting into a crowd endangers others; the defense contested it. The judge sided with the state, keeping capital punishment in play. The significance is that this now becomes a death-penalty trial in a case already saturated with political meaning, and everything—the evidence, the alleged motive, the aggravating circumstances—will now be tested under the far more demanding standard of a jury trial. Utah judge rules accused killer of Charlie Kirk will stand trial, face death penalty | ReutersNPR · CNN

Now for something lighter, though still a real lesson in criminal procedure: Tiger Woods has reached a plea deal in his Florida impaired-driving case, and will lose his driver’s license for five years. Woods was arrested in March after a rollover crash on Jupiter Island; no one was hurt. Under the plea agreement, prosecutors amended the charges—the first count down to reckless driving as a second offense, and the second to a careless-driving citation—and Woods agreed to the five-year license suspension plus a $1,500 fine, avoiding jail time. This is a textbook illustration of how plea bargaining actually works: the vast majority of criminal cases never go to trial, and instead resolve through negotiated pleas in which the defendant accepts responsibility for a reduced charge in exchange for a lighter, more certain outcome, and the state secures a conviction without the cost and risk of trial. Two details are worth flagging. First, “second offense”—Woods had a prior reckless-driving plea back in 2017, and repeat offenses generally carry stiffer consequences, which is part of why the license suspension is so long. Second, the judge was pointed about that suspension, saying it’s “for the safety of the public” and that there are “no exceptions”—drive for any reason at all, the judge warned, and Woods goes straight to jail. The significance, beyond the celebrity, is a clean look at how the system handles impaired driving for someone who isn’t a first-timer: not incarceration, but a charge reduction paired with a long, strictly-enforced license suspension aimed squarely at keeping him off the road. It’s the everyday machinery of criminal justice, applied to an extraordinarily famous defendant. Woods gets 5-year license suspension in plea deal | ReutersABC News · CNN

And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on a delightfully wonky problem with a real-world bite: the way Massachusetts taxes interstate trucks. My argument is that the state’s rolling-stock tax is backward—it functions, weirdly, as a reverse carbon tax and a hidden tax on consumers—and that the fix isn’t simply to exempt trucks, but to redesign the tax around where the trucks are actually used.

Here’s the problem. Massachusetts applies its sales and use tax to the full purchase price of an interstate truck, even if only a sliver of that truck’s miles are logged in Massachusetts. Under state guidelines, a truck basically escapes the tax only if it spends six or fewer days in the state over a year—spend a week, and you can owe tax on the vehicle’s entire price. Now layer on a perverse consequence: newer, cleaner trucks cost more money, so a tax based on purchase price falls hardest on the newest, most efficient, lowest-emission equipment. That gives carriers an obvious incentive to keep their clean new trucks out of Massachusetts and send in their older, dirtier ones. A state that says it cares about emissions has built a tax that literally rewards operating older, more polluting trucks within its borders. And because this is a tax on a business input, it doesn’t stay with the trucking companies—it gets baked into freight costs and shows up in the price of groceries, medicine, and building materials, a phenomenon economists call tax pyramiding and the rest of us call higher prices.

So what should Massachusetts do? There’s a House bill to exempt qualifying interstate rolling stock, and I say that moves in the right direction—but the state shouldn’t stop at a blanket exemption. The cleaner solution is apportionment: tax the Massachusetts share of the truck’s use, based on in-state mileage, the same way states already apportion other business activity. Massachusetts taxes the Massachusetts piece, New York the New York piece, and so on. That six-day threshold is a lousy proxy—the seventh day a truck rolls through the state doesn’t magically make the other 358 days of interstate driving Massachusetts activity. I also argue the state should make sure that upgrading to a cleaner fleet never increases a carrier’s tax bill—give newer, higher-emissions-standard vehicles a credit or adjustment. And because no carrier should face a different tax regime every time it crosses a state line, I think the right long-term answer is a uniform, mileage-based model rule developed through something like the Multistate Tax Commission. The bumper-sticker version of my argument: removing this distortion is environmental policy, even though it looks like a tax break—because sometimes the cheapest, smartest thing a government can do is just stop taxing the very behavior it claims to want. Massachusetts Truck Taxes Need Revamp Beyond Adding an Exemption | Bloomberg Tax

On September 1, 1807, a jury in Richmond, Virginia acquitted Aaron Burr—the former Vice President of the United States—of treason, in what remains the only time such a high-ranking American official has ever been tried for that crime. The verdict was delivered in memorably grudging terms: the jury said Burr was “not proved to be guilty under this indictment by any evidence submitted to us.” Burr had allegedly conspired to carve an independent republic out of western territory, but he walked free.

The reason he walked free is one of the most important principles in American criminal law. The framers of the Constitution, remembering how English kings had used vague, elastic treason charges to destroy their political enemies, deliberately wrote the narrowest possible definition into Article III: treason against the United States consists only of levying war against them, or adhering to their enemies, and—crucially—no one can be convicted except on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. Presiding over the trial was Chief Justice John Marshall, and Marshall enforced that definition strictly. He held that mere conspiracy, mere intention, mere assemblage of men was not enough—the government had to prove an actual overt act of levying war, with two witnesses. It couldn’t, and Burr was acquitted.

The significance of September 1, 1807 is layered. It was a dramatic clash between the branches: President Thomas Jefferson desperately wanted Burr convicted and worked behind the scenes to make it happen, while Marshall’s court insisted on rigorous proof and refused to bend to political pressure—even subpoenaing the president himself for documents. It cemented the idea that “treason” cannot be a catch-all for disloyalty, and that an independent judiciary must hold the line on proof even when a president demands a scalp. On a day featuring both a murder verdict and several tests of executive power, Burr’s acquittal is a fitting reminder that the highest function of a court is sometimes to say no.

A jury in Las Vegas has found Duane “Keffe D” Davis guilty of first-degree murder for orchestrating the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur—closing, at last, one of the most notorious cold cases in American music history nearly thirty years after the fact. We’ve tracked this trial from jury selection through the defense’s remarkable “don’t believe my client” strategy, and now it’s over: after a weeks-long trial, the jury deliberated for under three hours before convicting. Prosecutors never claimed Davis pulled the trigger. Their theory, as the deputy district attorney put it in closing, was that “this was a case about gang retaliation and revenge”—that Davis provided the gun and ordered the attack, making him criminally responsible for the murder even though someone else fired the shots. And the evidence that convicted him was, essentially, Davis himself: the interviews, the podcasts, and the 2019 memoir in which he described his role in the killing. His own lawyer’s defense was to beg the jury not to credit those statements—to treat them as the lies of a braggart embellishing for money and street credibility. The jury didn’t buy it. The significance is a striking answer to the evidentiary question I flagged when this trial opened: yes, a man’s public boasts about a crime can be enough to convict him of it. Davis talked his way from “long-suspected” to “convicted murderer.” It’s a cautionary tale as old as the law itself—that the words you say to burnish your legend can become the words that put you in prison—and it brought a measure of accountability to a killing that went unpunished for three decades. Jury convicts Duane “Keffe D” Davis in Tupac killing trial | ReutersNBC Los Angeles · CNN

The legal war over mail-in voting grinds on: the Trump administration has asked the First Circuit Court of Appeals to lift the order still blocking parts of the president’s executive order overhauling how ballots are delivered. Recall the state of play. Last week, the Supreme Court, on its emergency docket, lifted one of two injunctions—letting some pieces of the order take effect—but pointedly did not rule on whether any of it is actually lawful, and the Postal Service’s role remained blocked nationwide. Now the administration is going back to the appeals court to try to clear that remaining block. Its arguments are largely practical: it says the lower court’s injunction was premature, issued before the Postal Service and other agencies had even finalized their plans, and that the injunction created an impossible situation—a “bifurcated” system where the order is blocked in the 23 states that sued but allowed everywhere else, which the government says is logistically unworkable. Meanwhile, there’s a new wrinkle: a whistleblower has reportedly claimed the Postal Service’s plan to implement the order could actually “derail” the midterms. The significance is that this is heading, almost inevitably, back to the Supreme Court—which still has not addressed the fundamental question of whether the president can restructure how Americans vote by mail. We are now roughly two months from the election, and the machinery of how ballots get delivered is being litigated in real time, court by court, on emergency timelines. The uncertainty itself is a problem: election administrators and voters need to know the rules, and right now the rules are moving. Trump administration asks US appeals court to lift order blocking mail-in voting | ReutersThe Hill · NPR

And finally, a divided Supreme Court has cleared the way—for now—for construction of President Trump’s new White House ballroom to continue. In a 5-4 emergency ruling, the Court granted the administration’s request and blocked lower-court orders that would have paused the aboveground portion of the project. Some background: in 2025, the administration had the White House’s East Wing demolished—without notifying Congress—to make room for a planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom projected to cost $400 million or more, including an extensive underground component the administration says houses secure facilities. The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued, arguing the president had no authority to demolish part of the White House and build this on his own. The legal hook the Court used is a familiar one: standing. The majority said the Trust likely doesn’t have standing—the legal right to bring the suit in the first place—which is often how courts dispose of cases without confronting the underlying merits. And that’s the key caveat: the unsigned order does not decide whether Trump actually has the authority to build a massive ballroom without congressional approval. That question stays open as the litigation continues. The significance is twofold. Substantively, a president reshaping the White House itself, demolishing a historic wing without telling Congress, raises real questions about the limits of executive authority over federal property. Procedurally, this is once again the emergency docket letting the executive proceed on a threshold technicality—standing—while leaving the hard constitutional question for another day, if it’s ever answered at all. By the time the merits are sorted out, the ballroom may simply be built. Supreme Court lets Trump’s White House ballroom construction continue for now | ReutersCNBC · NBC News

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This Day in Legal History: The Neutrality Act of 1935

On August 31, 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the first of what would become a series of Neutrality Acts—laws designed to keep the United States out of the wars gathering in Europe and Asia. This first act imposed a mandatory embargo on shipping arms and ammunition to any nation the president declared to be at war, and it put America’s armaments industry under a measure of federal control. It was a legal expression of the deep isolationism that gripped the country between the world wars.

Here’s the constitutional wrinkle that makes it interesting, and that Roosevelt himself chafed against. FDR wanted flexibility—he asked Congress for a law that would let him embargo arms to an aggressor nation while still selling weapons to its victim. Congress refused. Instead, it wrote a rigid, evenhanded rule: once the president declared that a state of war existed, he had to embargo arms to all sides, aggressor and victim alike. That was a deliberate congressional choice to tie the executive’s hands in foreign affairs, to prevent a president from drawing the country toward one belligerent or another. Roosevelt signed it reluctantly, believing he could get it revised—and over the next several years, as the threat from fascism grew undeniable, the Neutrality Acts were indeed loosened, culminating in Lend-Lease and, ultimately, American entry into the war.

The significance of August 31, 1935 is as a case study in the perennial struggle between Congress and the president over foreign affairs, and in the moral limits of legal neutrality. The mandatory embargo’s great flaw was exactly its neutrality: by treating aggressor and victim the same, it arguably aided aggressors, who were already armed, against victims who were not. That’s the tension in today’s opening quote from Desmond Tutu—the idea that neutrality in the face of injustice is not really neutral at all. It’s a fitting backdrop for a day that includes a story about the government’s power over foreign companies, and one about whether the state can suppress speech it dislikes.

A federal judge has dealt a significant blow to the administration’s campaign to deport noncitizen students over pro-Palestinian activism, ruling that the effort is unconstitutional. In a lengthy 90-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise in San Jose found that the administration’s use of existing immigration law to cancel foreign students’ visas and put them into deportation proceedings—based on their campus advocacy and criticism of Israel—violates the First Amendment right to free speech. The ruling traces the policy back to March 2025, when the government began revoking visas and detaining noncitizens for pro-Palestinian advocacy, starting with the high-profile arrest of Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. The lawsuit was brought, notably, by the Stanford Daily, Stanford’s student newspaper. Here’s the core legal principle, and it’s an important one that surprises people: noncitizens physically present in the United States have First Amendment rights. The government has broad power over immigration, but the judge found it can’t use that power as a pretext to punish people for protected speech—that would be viewpoint discrimination, targeting people precisely because of the ideas they express. Judge Wise sharply criticized the State Department and Homeland Security for deploying immigration law to suppress views they didn’t like. The significance connects to threads we’ve followed all summer—the pressure on universities, the Comey prosecution, the fights over dissent. This is a court drawing a hard line: the immigration system is not a loophole around the First Amendment, and the government cannot deport people for saying things it wishes they hadn’t. Expect an appeal, but as a statement of principle, it’s a forceful one. Judge deals blow to Trump moves to deport pro-Palestinian activists | ReutersAl Jazeera · The Hill

Now a story about the business of law: U.S. law firm office leasing surged 17% in the first half of 2026, with firms signing leases for nearly 12.2 million square feet, according to Cushman & Wakefield—and the second quarter was up a striking 27% over the same period last year. This is a boom, concentrated in the big legal markets of New York, Chicago, and Washington, and it includes some eye-popping deals, like Simpson Thacher’s roughly 916,000-square-foot Manhattan lease—the same firm we discussed back in July over its rare malpractice trial. What’s driving it is worth unpacking, because it contains a real paradox. Firms say their caseloads are exploding under a combination of forces: rising regulatory uncertainty, a more litigious business climate, and—here’s the twist—the surge in artificial intelligence. AI adoption in law has rocketed, with something like 62% of firms now using it, up from just 17% a few years ago. And here’s the paradox worth sitting with: we covered, a few weeks ago, how AI is thinning out entry-level hiring by automating the document review and first drafts that junior associates used to do. So how are firms leasing more space while hiring fewer juniors? The answer seems to be that the high end of legal work is booming—more complex, higher-stakes matters that generate demand for experienced lawyers and premium space—even as the bottom of the pyramid gets automated. The significance is a snapshot of a profession in transition: Big Law is physically expanding and financially thriving at the top, while the traditional on-ramp for young lawyers narrows. The office towers are filling up; it’s just less clear who will be sitting in the entry-level offices a decade from now. US law firm leasing jumped 17% in first half, report says | ReutersCushman & Wakefield · Law360

And finally, China’s largest memory chipmaker, ChangXin Memory Technologies—CXMT—has sued the Pentagon to get itself off a U.S. government blacklist of companies it says are tied to China’s military. The list in question is the Defense Department’s roster of “Chinese military companies,” maintained under a provision of federal defense law, and landing on it carries real consequences: restrictions on government contracting and significant reputational damage that can spook customers and partners worldwide. CXMT’s argument is straightforward—it says it’s not affiliated with the Chinese military at all, and that it designs and sells its DRAM memory chips purely for civilian and commercial use. The most interesting piece of the lawsuit, legally, is a procedural one. CXMT alleges that the Pentagon actually published a notice in February saying the company would be removed from the list—then withdrew that notice the very same day, and later relisted the company in June without adequately explaining why it reversed course. That’s the heart of an administrative-law claim: under the standards that govern federal agency action, the government generally can’t act arbitrarily or capriciously, and a sudden, unexplained reversal is exactly the kind of thing courts scrutinize. And CXMT isn’t alone—Alibaba filed a similar suit in June, and Xiaomi actually won removal from the list through U.S. litigation back in 2021. The significance is a reminder that even in the highly deferential arena of national security, designations like this are reviewable in American courts—foreign companies can, and increasingly do, use U.S. administrative law to challenge being branded a security threat, and sometimes they win. CXMT sues Pentagon over inclusion on list of companies tied to China’s military | ReutersUS News · Benzinga

On August 28, 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was abducted, tortured, and murdered in the Mississippi Delta by two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, after Till—a Black teenager visiting from Chicago—was accused of offending a white woman in a grocery store. His killers beat him, shot him, weighted his body, and threw it in the Tallahatchie River. He was a child, and his murder, and what came after, helped ignite the modern civil rights movement.

The legal story is one of justice utterly failing, and then, slowly, refusing to disappear. Bryant and Milam were tried the next month in a segregated Mississippi courtroom. The trial lasted five days; the all-white, all-male jury deliberated for barely an hour before acquitting both men, with one juror later saying it wouldn’t have taken that long if they hadn’t stopped for a soda. Protected by double jeopardy, the two men then sold their confession to a magazine for a few thousand dollars, describing in detail how they’d killed the boy they had just been acquitted of murdering. It was one of the starkest demonstrations imaginable that the machinery of Southern justice was not built to deliver justice to Black victims.

The significance of August 28, 1955 reaches across the decades. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made the searing decision to hold an open-casket funeral and let the world photograph her son. That act of witness galvanized a generation. And there is a haunting piece of calendar symmetry worth honoring: exactly eight years later, on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial and delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech to the March on Washington. The law eventually, partially, caught up—the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and, only in 2022, a federal anti-lynching law that bears Emmett Till’s name. It’s a reminder that some of the most important developments in American law began not in a courtroom win, but in a courtroom failure so profound that the country could not look away.

The brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate were back in a Miami federal courtroom this week, shackled, asking a judge to release them on bond while they fight extradition to the United Kingdom. The two, who have built a massive and controversial online following, have been held in a federal detention center since their July arrest on U.K. rape and sex-trafficking charges. Their lawyers made a pointed argument: if Romania, where the brothers face a separate sex-crimes case, is willing to let them remain free pending those proceedings, then a U.S. court should free them too—especially since, they argue, two of the most recognizable men on the internet can’t exactly disappear. Prosecutors pushed back hard, and here the law is decidedly against the Tates. In ordinary criminal cases, release pending trial is the norm. But international extradition is different: there is a strong, long-standing presumption against bail, rooted in the idea that the United States has a treaty obligation to actually produce the person for the requesting country, and that letting an extradition target go free risks a diplomatic and legal failure if they flee. Courts generally require “special circumstances” to grant bail in an extradition case—a demanding standard—and prosecutors noted the brothers have money and have bragged about holding multiple passports. Legal experts quoted in the coverage thought it unlikely they’d win release. The significance is a useful window into a corner of the law most people never see: that fighting extradition is not like fighting ordinary charges, and the presumption of liberty that normally protects defendants is largely flipped when a foreign government is waiting to prosecute.

Tate brothers press for release from US jail during extradition fight | ReutersPBS NewsHour · NPR

A federal appeals court has cleared a significant hurdle for Bayer’s $7.25 billion settlement of tens of thousands of Roundup cancer claims. The Eighth Circuit dismissed a challenge by a group of objecting plaintiffs who were trying to derail the deal—and the fight was about forum, which sounds dry but matters enormously in mass litigation. Bayer structured this as a class-action settlement in Missouri state court, an unusual move: it’s using a single state-court proceeding to try to resolve claims nationwide. The objectors argued that a state court has no business fast-tracking a nationwide resolution, and that the whole thing belongs in front of the federal judge already overseeing the consolidated federal Roundup litigation. A federal judge ruled in June that the case could stay in Missouri state court, and now the Eighth Circuit has agreed, dismissing the appeal. Why does the forum matter so much? Because a settlement that binds a nationwide class of people—including people who haven’t actively participated—raises real due-process questions about whether a single state court can bind absent claimants across the country, and because plaintiffs and defendants often have strong strategic preferences about which court, and which rules, govern a mega-settlement. This connects to the Bayer story we covered earlier this summer, when the Supreme Court handed the company a big win on failure-to-warn claims; this settlement is the other half of Bayer’s campaign to finally contain a decade of Roundup litigation. A hearing to approve the deal is set for September 14, with roughly 65,000 claims hanging in the balance. The significance is that Bayer is close to buying its way out of a liability that has dogged it for years—and the courts just removed one of the last procedural obstacles.

US court dismisses appeal over objections to $7.25 billion Roundup deal | ReutersRTÉ · Maryland Daily Record

And finally—though this is anything but a footnote—the biggest story of the week, and arguably the summer: Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and fundamentally change how its apps work for teenagers, settling the landmark case accusing it of designing Facebook and Instagram to addict children. This is the resolution of the very trial we watched begin just ten days ago—the 29-state case in Oakland, with the whistleblower testimony from Arturo Bejar. Rather than let it run to a verdict, Meta settled, and the numbers are staggering: more than $17.6 billion to 48 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the territories, plus another $459 million to resolve privacy claims tied to the old Cambridge Analytica scandal. But the money may be the less important part. For the next decade, Meta has agreed to concrete design changes: teens will be capped at two hours a day on the apps, and blocked from using them between midnight and 6 a.m. without a parent’s consent. And in a clever pressure mechanism, part of the payout is contingent on whether YouTube and TikTok adopt similar protections—effectively using this settlement to try to move the whole industry. Everything we’ve tracked all summer led here: the New Mexico verdict, the Tennessee trial, the bellwether cases, the Ninth Circuit clearing these suits past Section 230. This is the reckoning arriving. It still needs approval from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who presided over the trial, but if it holds, it’s one of the largest consumer-protection settlements in American history—and, more consequentially, the first time a court-supervised deal will reach inside these platforms and re-engineer them for the safety of kids. The era of treating social media’s effect on children as an unregulated externality may have just ended, not with a verdict, but with $18 billion and a clock that shuts the app off at midnight.

Meta reaches $18 billion of settlements over children’s social media addiction | ReutersCNN · Al Jazeera

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This Day in Legal History: The Kellogg-Briand Pact

On August 27, 1928, representatives of fifteen nations gathered in Paris and signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact—an international agreement in which the signatories solemnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy. Named for U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, it was born of the still-fresh horror of World War I and the earnest hope that the great powers could simply agree to stop settling disputes by force. Eventually 64 nations signed on.

It is, on its face, one of the most idealistic documents in the history of international law—and one of the most famous cautionary tales about law’s limits. The pact had a fatal flaw: it contained no enforcement mechanism, no sanctions, no army, nothing but the promise itself and the hope that world opinion would keep nations honest. Within a few years, that hope was in tatters—Japan invaded Manchuria, Italy invaded Ethiopia, Germany rearmed, and the whole edifice collapsed into the Second World War. As a device for preventing war, Kellogg-Briand failed almost completely.

And yet the significance of August 27, 1928 is more complicated than “noble failure.” The pact planted a legal idea that outlived its own impotence: that aggressive war is not just tragic but unlawful. After World War II, that principle became the backbone of the Nuremberg trials, where Nazi leaders were prosecuted for “crimes against peace”—waging aggressive war—a charge that traced its lineage directly to Kellogg-Briand. So the pact is a genuinely instructive anniversary for lawyers: it’s a reminder that a law without an enforcement mechanism is mostly an aspiration, but also that even an unenforced principle can lodge itself in the legal conscience and reappear, with teeth, decades later. It’s worth keeping that dual lesson in mind on a day when we’ve got stories about whether court orders and legal protections will actually be honored.

A federal judge in Washington holds a hearing this afternoon on a question that sounds trivial but isn’t: whether adding President Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center’s signage defies a court order. We set this up yesterday. Back in May, Judge Christopher Cooper ordered the Kennedy Center to remove Trump’s name from the building, siding with Democratic Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, who sued over the renaming of the memorial to President John F. Kennedy. Then, on August 13, the center’s board—now stacked with Trump appointees—voted to alter the signage to read “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” and to christen the grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” The administration says this complies with the injunction because the building is still, technically, named for Kennedy—the Trump language is just a donor acknowledgment. Beatty says it’s open defiance. Today Judge Cooper hears them out. And this is genuinely the crux of the rule of law: an injunction isn’t a word game. Courts have long held that you can’t evade a court order by finding a technical workaround that accomplishes the very thing the order forbade. If Cooper concludes the board’s maneuver is a bad-faith attempt to do indirectly what he directly prohibited, the consequences can escalate toward contempt. The significance, as I noted yesterday, is that this small fight over a plaque is really a test of whether the executive branch treats a court order as a binding command or a puzzle to be solved. And on today’s Kellogg-Briand anniversary, it’s a pointed reminder that a legal order matters only if it’s actually enforced. US judge weighs challenge to restore Trump’s name to Kennedy Center | ReutersThe Hill · PBS NewsHour

Now to a fight with far bigger stakes for the economy: the effort to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Cook’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, has sent a letter to the White House declaring there is “no legally cognizable cause” to fire her, arguing she “has never committed mortgage fraud or any intentional wrongdoing.” The White House has been trying to oust Cook for over a year, most recently by building a formal process to remove her over allegations that she listed two different properties as her primary residence in mortgage documents—and this comes after the Supreme Court already ruled against an earlier, more summary attempt to fire her. Here’s why this is one of the most important legal stories of the year. Federal Reserve governors are not ordinary executive officials who serve at the president’s pleasure; under the Federal Reserve Act, they can only be removed “for cause.” That phrase is doing enormous work. It traces back to the 1935 Supreme Court decision in Humphrey’s Executor, which upheld Congress’s power to insulate the heads of independent agencies from at-will presidential removal—the legal foundation of the Fed’s independence. The current Supreme Court has been chipping away at Humphrey’s Executor for other agencies, but it has pointedly signaled that the Fed is special and its independence protected. So the battle is being fought on the meaning of “cause”: Cook’s team says a disputed mortgage-paperwork allegation, with no finding of intentional wrongdoing and no crime, doesn’t come close to the kind of malfeasance that “cause” requires. The significance could hardly be larger. If a president can remove a Fed governor he disagrees with by gathering allegations and declaring “cause,” then the Fed’s independence—the firewall that’s supposed to keep monetary policy insulated from short-term political pressure—becomes a fiction. Markets, and the rule of law, are watching this one closely. Lawyer for Fed’s Cook, targeted by Trump, says there is no grounds for dismissal | ReutersCNBC · Axios

And finally, Elon Musk’s X has lost its First Amendment challenge to a New York law requiring social-media companies to disclose how they handle hate speech. U.S. District Judge John Cronan in Manhattan dismissed the suit—and did so “with prejudice,” meaning X can’t refile. The law at issue is New York’s “Stop Hiding Hate Act,” signed by Governor Hochul in late 2024, which requires large social-media platforms to disclose their policies for handling hate speech, extremism, harassment, foreign interference, and disinformation, and to report on their efforts. X argued this compelled it to speak—forcing it to make statements about “highly sensitive and controversial” content under threat of lawsuits and fines, in violation of the First Amendment. The judge disagreed, and the legal reasoning is worth understanding. There’s a well-established doctrine that governments can require businesses to disclose “purely factual and uncontroversial information” about their own practices, as long as the requirement is reasonably related to a legitimate government interest—the standard from a case called Zauderer. Judge Cronan found that making X describe its own content-moderation policies is exactly that kind of factual disclosure, tied to New York’s interest in helping users make informed choices about the platforms they use. The significance is that this lands on one side of a genuinely unsettled national fight. Courts have split over social-media transparency laws—a similar California law was partly struck down on First Amendment grounds—so this New York ruling, upholding a disclosure mandate, deepens a divide that may ultimately need the Supreme Court to resolve. And there’s an irony worth noting: X, the platform that markets itself as the champion of free speech, just lost a free-speech case—by arguing that being made to describe its own rules violated its rights. Judge dismisses lawsuit by Elon Musk’s X challenging New York hate speech law | ReutersUS News · Daily Maverick

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This Day in Legal History: The Declaration of the Rights of Man

On August 26, 1789, France’s National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the foundational documents of modern constitutional government. The Marquis de Lafayette played a major role in drafting it, with input from his friend Thomas Jefferson, who was then serving as the American minister in Paris. In just seventeen articles, the Declaration tried to turn Enlightenment ideas about natural rights and legitimate government into law.

A lot of it will sound familiar to American ears, in part because the American and French revolutions were very much in conversation with each other. Article I declares that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights”—today’s opening quote. The Declaration identifies liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression as natural rights. It says the law must apply equally, punishment must be authorized by law, defendants are presumed innocent, and the free communication of ideas is “one of the most precious of the rights of man.” It also makes separation of powers part of the definition of constitutional government: a society where rights are not secured and powers are not separated “has no constitution at all.”

The Declaration mattered well beyond France. Its ideas influenced constitutions throughout Europe and Latin America and eventually found echoes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. There was also an enormous gap between the Declaration’s promises and what followed. Within a few years, the French Revolution had descended into the Terror, and the supposedly universal rights announced in 1789 were plainly not being extended to everyone.

That makes August 26 an especially fitting date for another reason. In the United States, it is Women’s Equality Day, commemorating the 1920 certification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The coincidence is a useful reminder that declaring people “equal in rights” is considerably easier than actually making them so—and that many of the people supposedly covered by universal declarations of equality had to spend generations fighting to make those words apply to them.

A federal judge previously issued an injunction barring the administration from renaming the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after President Trump. Then, earlier this month, the Kennedy Center’s board—now dominated by Trump appointees—voted 20 to 3 to change the building’s signage to read “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” and to name the surrounding grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” The administration’s argument, in a new filing, is essentially semantic: it says this doesn’t violate the injunction because the building is still named the John F. Kennedy Center, and the added inscription is merely a donor acknowledgment—the kind, it says, that’s “ubiquitous in similar facilities.” Democratic Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, who’s part of the suit, says the board “openly defied” the court’s ruling and has asked the judge to block the signage. Here’s the legal question, and it’s a real one: when does creative compliance with a court order become defiance of it? Courts don’t just police the literal words of an injunction—they police attempts to accomplish the forbidden thing through a technical workaround. If the injunction’s purpose was to stop the center from being turned into a monument to the sitting president, a judge may well look past the “we didn’t technically rename it” framing to the practical reality. The judge, Christopher Cooper, has set a fast briefing schedule with deadlines today. The significance is that this small, almost absurd dispute over building signage is really a test of something fundamental: whether the executive branch will comply with a court order in substance, or look for the narrowest possible reading to get what it wanted anyway. Trump administration says new Kennedy Center renaming does not violate court order | ReutersBloomberg Law · Time

Deloitte has agreed to pay $21.5 million to settle Justice Department allegations that its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs amounted to illegal discrimination—a landmark in the administration’s campaign against corporate DEI. And note the legal vehicle, because it’s clever and aggressive: the DOJ brought this under the False Claims Act, the federal government’s primary anti-fraud statute. The theory is that Deloitte, as a federal contractor, certified compliance with anti-discrimination requirements while allegedly running DEI programs that themselves discriminated—making its certifications false. The specific allegations: Deloitte’s business units received monthly summaries tracking progress against “demographic goals”; roughly 150 senior partners and managing directors had part of their compensation tied to hitting those targets, some risking tens of thousands of dollars; and race and sex were allegedly factored into promotion decisions and access to certain training and mentoring programs. Of the $21.5 million, about $10 million is designated as restitution. Crucially, Deloitte denies the allegations and the settlement includes no admission of liability. The significance is that this reframes DEI from a corporate HR initiative into potential fraud against the United States. We’ve tracked the administration’s use of Title VI against universities—Harvard, Columbia, William & Mary—and this is the corporate front of the same campaign, deploying the False Claims Act against a major government contractor. That’s a powerful deterrent, because the False Claims Act carries treble damages and invites whistleblower suits. Whatever you think of DEI programs on the merits, the legal move here is significant: it puts every federal contractor on notice that diversity targets tied to pay and promotion could be recast as discriminatory, and therefore as a false certification the government can prosecute. Deloitte to pay $21.5 million to settle US government probe over DEI | ReutersJustice Department · Fox Business

And finally, a federal appeals court has ruled that the administration cannot attach ideological conditions to federal grants for homelessness and transportation—another entry in the running saga over the limits of the executive’s power over the money. The Ninth Circuit, in a decision backing Santa Clara County and other local governments, affirmed a lower court and found that the administration abused its authority by imposing new strings on grants like the Continuum of Care program, which has funded homelessness services since 1987. Those grants have long been built around a “housing-first” philosophy—the approach of getting people into permanent housing without preconditions like sobriety or employment—and the administration sought to attach conditions cutting against that model and advancing its own policy priorities. The court found the cities would suffer irreparable harm if the funds were withheld. Here’s the legal principle, and longtime listeners will recognize it: back in July, we covered the anniversary of South Dakota v. Dole, the case that lets the federal government attach strings to the money it gives states—but only within limits. The conditions have to be clearly stated, related to the purpose of the funding, and not coercive. When an administration tries to bolt novel, ideological conditions onto grants Congress created for a specific purpose, courts have repeatedly said that exceeds those limits. This fits a pattern we’ve followed all summer—from the OMB grant clawbacks to the EPA’s frozen climate funds—of courts telling the executive that money Congress appropriated for a purpose can’t be turned into a lever for unrelated policy goals. The significance is that the spending power, real as it is, keeps running into the same wall: you can fund homelessness programs, or not, but you can’t quietly rewrite what they’re for. Trump cannot impose conditions on transportation, homelessness grants, US appeals court rules | ReutersPalo Alto Online · Mountain View Voice

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This Day in Legal History: The National Park Service Is Created

On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act, creating a new federal bureau inside the Department of the Interior to manage the country’s national parks and monuments. Before this, the roughly 35 parks and monuments the government had accumulated were administered in a haphazard, piecemeal way—some by the Army, some by scattered Interior officials—with no unified mission and no consistent protection.

The genius of the Organic Act is compressed into a single, oft-quoted sentence that has generated a century of law and litigation. It directed the new Park Service to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein” and to “leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” That phrasing contains a built-in tension that lawyers and the courts have wrestled with ever since: the Park Service is told both to provide for the public’s enjoyment of the parks and to leave them unimpaired—two goals that can pull hard against each other when you’re deciding whether to build a road, permit a concession, or limit the number of visitors. That “dual mandate” is the central puzzle of public-lands law.

The significance of August 25, 1916 is that it enshrined in law a genuinely radical idea: that some places belong to the whole public, in perpetuity, held in trust by the government for people who haven’t been born yet. Today the Park Service manages more than 400 sites across all fifty states and welcomes hundreds of millions of visitors a year. The writer Wallace Stegner, who gave us today’s opening line, called the national parks “the best idea we ever had”—absolutely American, absolutely democratic. On a day whose news is heavy with contested executive power, it’s a nice reminder that the law is also the instrument through which a society decides to preserve something for the common good.

The Supreme Court has handed the Trump administration an interim victory on mail-in voting—but it’s important to be precise about what the Court did and didn’t do. In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the justices lifted an injunction that a Massachusetts federal judge imposed in June, which had blocked key parts of Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting in California and 22 other states that sued. That order aims to create a federal list of eligible voters and, controversially, to have the Postal Service deliver ballots only to people on that list. Here’s the crucial nuance. This is a stay, not a ruling on the merits—the Court did not decide whether the president actually has the authority to reshape how states run their elections. It merely paused the lower court’s block while the litigation continues. And it’s partial: the Postal Service’s role in the scheme remains blocked nationwide. Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, made the point sharply—she wrote that the decision doesn’t suggest the executive branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to do this, it just postpones the day of reckoning. This is the shadow docket in action, a theme we keep returning to: the Court altering the rules for a national election months before that election, through an emergency order, without a full merits decision or a written explanation of its reasoning. The significance is that, for now, parts of Trump’s order can take effect for the November midterms—a real-world consequence—even as the fundamental question of whether any of it is lawful remains formally undecided. The status quo the courts had maintained all summer just shifted, at least temporarily, and it shifted on the emergency docket.

US Supreme Court lifts judicial hurdle to Trump’s mail-in ballot curbs | Reuters Washington Post · NPR

The administration is preparing what would be the largest mass visa revocation in U.S. history: according to the Associated Press, the State Department plans to revoke the tourist and business visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are seeking asylum. The targets are holders of so-called B1 and B2 visas—the standard business and tourism visas—issued between 2016 and 2026, whose holders later sought asylum, with the action coordinated between the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. The legal logic is worth understanding. A visitor visa rests on a premise: that you intend to come temporarily and then go home. When someone on a tourist visa applies for asylum, the government’s position is that they’ve revealed an intent inconsistent with that temporary-visitor status—so it’s moving to strip the visitor visa. Importantly, officials say this wouldn’t necessarily mean immediate deportation; most people with pending asylum cases would be recategorized, losing their visitor status but not instantly removed. Still, the scale is staggering and unprecedented, and it raises hard questions. Seeking asylum is a legal right, protected by statute and international obligation, and there’s a real tension in penalizing people’s immigration status precisely because they used the lawful asylum process. There are also due-process concerns lurking in any mass action that recategorizes 200,000 people, and a potential chilling effect on those weighing whether to come forward and claim protection. The significance is that this fits the aggressive immigration-enforcement pattern we’ve tracked all summer—but at a scale that’s genuinely new, using visa revocation as a lever against the asylum system itself.

US plans to revoke up to 200,000 tourism, business visas, AP reports | ReutersWTOP · Houston Public Media / NPR

And a story close to home for everyone in this profession: Google has launched a version of its Gemini AI built specifically for lawyers. Google Cloud unveiled “Gemini Enterprise for Legal,” an agentic AI platform purpose-built for legal workflows—with specialized skills, connectors to legal research and document systems, and an ecosystem of partner tools. And its launch customers are not fringe experimenters; they’re elite firms: Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, Weil, and Williams & Connolly. When firms of that caliber sign on as launch partners, it’s a signal that AI in legal practice has moved from novelty to infrastructure. Here’s the significance, and the tension. On one hand, this is the mainstreaming of AI in law—the same shift that, as we discussed a few weeks ago, is thinning out entry-level hiring at big firms as software absorbs the document review and first-draft work once done by junior associates. Google is now competing directly with the specialized legal-AI companies for that market, and its entry accelerates everything. On the other hand, this collides with a problem we’ve covered again and again: the fake, hallucinated citations, the AI-generated errors, even the litigant hiding prompt injections in his filings. A more powerful, more deeply integrated AI tool doesn’t dissolve a lawyer’s duties of competence, confidentiality, and candor—it raises the stakes on them. The significance is that the profession is being reshaped in real time. The tools are getting better and more embedded, the biggest firms are adopting them, and the hard questions—about verification, about who’s accountable when the machine is wrong, about what happens to the training pipeline for young lawyers—are all arriving at once.

Google expands Gemini AI platform for law firms, lawyers | ReutersArtificial Lawyer · Google Cloud

And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a big loss for Maryland—and a valuable lesson for every other state eyeing the digital economy for revenue. Maryland’s first-in-the-nation digital advertising tax just took a potentially fatal blow, with the state tax court siding with Google, Apple, and Peacock in their challenges. My argument is that this doesn’t prove you can’t tax digital advertising—it proves Maryland went about it the wrong way, by designing a tax around the companies it wanted to pay rather than the activity it wanted to tax.

Two design choices doomed it. First, Maryland taxed digital advertising while leaving comparable non-digital advertising—billboards, print, radio, television—completely alone. Second, the tax only kicks in for companies above a huge global revenue threshold, and the rate actually climbs, from 2.5% up to 10%, based on a company’s worldwide revenue, not its Maryland activity. The court saw that for what it was: a structure that, in practice, hits big out-of-state tech companies while sparing basically every in-state business, which runs into both the dormant Commerce Clause and the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act. As I put it, using worldwide corporate revenue to set the rate on identical in-state transactions is just a backward way of making big companies pay more—two companies doing the exact same amount of business in Maryland can end up with wildly different bills.

There’s also a cautionary detail I love, because it says everything: Maryland passed this tax in 2021, but by 2025 the state comptroller had to hire an outside expert just to figure out what “digital advertising services” even means—introducing terms like “programmatic” and “visual” that weren’t in the statute at all. If you need to hire an expert four years after enactment to ascertain what your own tax taxes, maybe the problem isn’t that taxpayers are being difficult. And the fiscal stakes are real: the tax pulled in about $535 million earmarked for education, but now the challengers may be owed refunds with interest, right as Maryland stares down a multibillion-dollar budget gap. A tax that collects hundreds of millions for a few years and then has to hand it all back, with interest, is quantifiably worse than no tax at all. So my takeaway for states is that the durable path is the boring one—broad tax bases, treat economically similar transactions the same, scale liability to in-state activity. A neutral tax on all advertising would have reached less convenient targets too, including local businesses, and that’s exactly the point: a tax principle that only applies when it lands on the politically preferred target isn’t much of a principle.

Maryland’s Digital Ad Tax Defeat Is Teachable Moment for States | Bloomberg Tax

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This Day in Legal History: Communist Control Act

On August 24, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Communist Control Act, a law that did something extraordinary in a country built around the First Amendment: it effectively outlawed a political party. The Act declared the Communist Party of the United States an instrument of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. It stripped it of “all rights, privileges, and immunities” available to legal organizations, and made knowing membership in the party potentially criminal.

Perhaps more remarkable is how little resistance any of this encountered. This was the height of the McCarthy era, when the political cost of appearing insufficiently hostile to communism was enormous. The bill passed the Senate 79-0 and the House 265-2. Those margins tell you something important about the moment: liberals and conservatives alike had strong incentives to demonstrate their anti-communist bona fides, and almost no one had much incentive to be the person standing up for the constitutional rights of communists. Eisenhower signed the bill, and, at least on paper, an American political party ceased to have any legal existence.

The significance of August 24, 1954 is mostly as a lesson in what happens to civil liberties when they are placed under enough political pressure—and in the messier ways our constitutional system often corrects itself. The Communist Control Act was constitutionally dubious from the start; punishing someone for just belonging to a political organization runs directly into the freedoms of speech and association. But the law was rarely enforced, courts largely avoided confronting its most sweeping provisions head-on, and it gradually withered into a stricture approaching a dead letter, though it technically remains on the books. Later Supreme Court decisions made considerably clearer that the government can’t punish mere association or abstract advocacy, as opposed to incitement to imminent lawless action.

That makes this a fitting anniversary for a day when we also have a story about protesters sentenced for their political activity. The point captured in today’s opening quote from Justice Brandeis is easy to endorse when the speaker and the cause are popular. The real test of the freedom to think and speak as you will comes when neither is.

A federal judge has struck down one of the administration’s broader immigration policies, vacating a State Department decision that suspended immigrant visa processing for applicants from 75 countries.

The policy, announced in January, halted immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries—including Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, and Somalia—on the theory that applicants from those countries were likely to require public assistance. U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan called the policy “patently unlawful,” but the interesting part of the decision is less the rhetoric than the relatively straightforward statutory problem she identified: Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not have the power Congress gave someone else.

Federal immigration law expressly limits the Secretary of State’s authority over how consular officers process immigrant visas. The administration therefore could not use the Secretary’s general authority to accomplish something Congress had specifically placed beyond his reach. It is a theme we have seen repeatedly this summer: not some enormous constitutional confrontation over presidential power, but the considerably more mundane question of whether the executive branch can point to a statute that actually authorizes what it is doing.

Vargas’s order also does more than stop the policy going forward. She vacated visa denials based solely on the suspended-processing policy, meaning applicants who were turned away under it can have their applications reconsidered. The lawsuit was brought by immigrant-rights organizations, visa applicants, and U.S. citizens seeking visas for family members.

The broader point is that immigration and foreign affairs may be areas in which the executive branch enjoys substantial discretion, but discretion is not the same thing as unlimited authority. The government still needs to identify where Congress gave it the power it claims to possess. Here, the court concluded Congress had done essentially the opposite.

US judge strikes down policy suspending immigrant visa processing for 75 nations | ReutersWashington Post · Al Jazeera

Seven pro-Palestinian protesters who shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in 2024 have now been sentenced, and the result is a useful little illustration of how the law handles civil disobedience.

The seven were among 26 protesters who drove onto the bridge in April 2024, stopped their vehicles, and chained themselves together to protest the war in Gaza, blocking traffic for hours. They were convicted in July of misdemeanor false imprisonment, obstruction of a thoroughfare, and unlawful assembly. On Friday, they were sentenced to 30 days in jail—with an option that could cut that time in half—along with six months of probation and roughly $1,000 in fines and restitution.

The First Amendment line here is not especially mysterious. Protest is protected; physically preventing other people from leaving is not. That is the significance of the false-imprisonment charge: motorists were stuck on a bridge with nowhere else to go. You can stand alongside the road holding a sign. You do not acquire a First Amendment right to chain the road shut merely because your reason for doing it is political.

But the sentence is interesting in the other direction. The defendants potentially faced years in prison and received 30 days, while prosecutors dropped the most serious felony conspiracy charge after the jury deadlocked on it. That gap illustrates just how much calibration occurs after we decide that conduct is criminal. Prosecutors and judges can recognize both that the protesters deliberately interfered with the rights of hundreds of other people and that they did so as part of nonviolent political expression rather than for personal gain or predatory purposes.

That is more or less how a legal system metabolizes civil disobedience: the political motivation does not erase the underlying offense, but neither must the law pretend that motivation is irrelevant when deciding how severely to punish it. On the anniversary of the Communist Control Act, it is an especially useful reminder that the legal treatment of dissent rarely comes down to a simple choice between “protected” and “illegal.” Much of the real work happens in between.

Pro-Palestinian protesters sentenced over blocking Golden Gate Bridge traffic | ReutersKQED · Mission Local

And finally, TikTok and parent company ByteDance have agreed to pay $400 million to settle the Justice Department’s lawsuit accusing the platform of violating federal children’s privacy law—an enormous number for a case built around a statute passed before TikTok, or really modern social media, existed.

The Justice Department filed the lawsuit in 2024 on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that TikTok allowed millions of children under 13 to create accounts without their parents’ knowledge or consent and then made it unnecessarily difficult for parents to have those accounts deleted. The statute at issue is COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, which generally requires online services covered by the law to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13.

There is an especially interesting wrinkle in how the $400 million settlement is structured. TikTok will pay $300 million now and another $100 million once a court vacates an earlier consent decree entered against Musical.ly, TikTok’s predecessor. That matters because this is not the first time the platform has encountered the government over children’s privacy. Musical.ly had already been penalized over COPPA violations, and the government’s latest case alleged that the problems continued afterward.

TikTok is settling without admitting wrongdoing and says it has made substantial changes to its age controls and parental-oversight systems. But whatever one thinks of the underlying allegations, $400 million is a fairly substantial reminder that COPPA is not merely a disclosure statute sitting around from the early Internet.

And this case fits into the larger fight over children and social media from a somewhat different direction than the addiction and product-design litigation we have been following. Those cases ask what platforms may design for children and what harms those designs may cause. COPPA asks the considerably less glamorous but foundational question that comes before all of that: who gets to collect information about children in the first place, and on what terms? Four hundred million dollars suggests the government still thinks the answer matters quite a bit.

US Justice Department, TikTok settle $400 million children’s privacy suit | ReutersAxios · Justice Department

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This Day in Legal History: The American Bar Association Is Founded

On August 21, 1878, seventy-five lawyers from twenty-one states gathered in Saratoga Springs, New York, and founded the American Bar Association. The stated mission had all the ambition—and word count—you would expect from a nineteenth-century professional organization: “the advancement of the science of jurisprudence, the promotion of the administration of justice, and a uniformity of legislation throughout the country.”

James Overton Broadhead, a Missouri lawyer, became the ABA’s first president. And the idea apparently had some appeal. Within a year, the organization had grown from its original 75 members to nearly 300.

It is worth remembering just how different the legal profession looked at the time. There were few meaningful licensing standards, legal education varied enormously from one place to another, and there was nothing resembling a national voice for lawyers. “The bar,” such as it was, was largely a collection of state and local institutions operating under their own rules and traditions.

The ABA helped change that.

Over the next century, it became one of the principal forces behind the professionalization of American law. It developed model ethics standards, eventually producing what became the Model Rules of Professional Conduct that form the basis for lawyer regulation in most states. It became enormously influential in law-school accreditation. And for decades, its assessments of federal judicial nominees carried substantial weight in Washington.

In other words, the ABA became something close to an institutional center of gravity for a profession that, by design, does not really have one. Whether that has always been a good thing is a separate question—and there is certainly no shortage of lawyers willing to debate it.

But the date is particularly interesting this year because the ABA is once again squarely in the headlines.

Just this week, we covered the organization’s lawsuit challenging the administration’s executive orders targeting major law firms. The ABA’s argument, at bottom, is that the government is attempting to use its power to punish lawyers and firms for representing clients or causes the administration dislikes—and, in doing so, pressure the broader legal profession into falling in line.

There is a rather striking symmetry to it.

An organization founded nearly 150 years ago in part to promote “the administration of justice” now finds itself in court arguing that the independence of the lawyers responsible for administering that system is itself under threat.

One can agree or disagree with the ABA’s politics—and plenty of people do. But the principle underlying its founding is harder to dismiss. A legal profession capable of governing itself, enforcing its own standards, and, when necessary, telling political power “no” is not merely a professional convenience. It is part of the architecture of the rule of law.

Of course, independence is only valuable if lawyers actually use it. Which brings us neatly back to today’s opening quote from Charles Hamilton Houston: what lawyers choose to do with the power and independence their profession gives them matters enormously.

Nearly 150 years after those 75 lawyers met in Saratoga Springs, that question has hardly become less relevant.

Another key test case in the massive social-media litigation has evaporated: a New Jersey teenager has voluntarily dropped her lawsuit against Meta, Google, and Snap, just weeks before it was set for trial in October. The 15-year-old, identified in court records only by her initials, had alleged that the companies’ platforms fueled addiction, depression, and self-harm. Notably, her lawyer said she received no payment to walk away—she simply wanted, in the attorney’s words, to “resume her life.” TikTok had earlier settled her claims separately. If you’ve been following along, this should sound familiar: back in July, we covered a different teen plaintiff, in a bellwether case against Meta, dropping his claims days before trial. Now it’s happened again. Here’s why it matters strategically. These are “bellwether” cases—representative individual lawsuits, plucked from a pool of thousands, tried first so both sides can gauge how juries will react and calibrate settlement value. When a marquee bellwether disappears right before trial, it removes a data point everyone was watching. And the reason this one vanished is worth sitting with: not a secret settlement, but a teenager deciding she didn’t want to spend her life as the face of a landmark lawsuit, subjected to discovery into her mental health and cross-examination about her worst moments. The significance is a quiet illustration of a real tension in mass litigation—the individual plaintiffs who anchor these cases are often young and vulnerable, and the litigation itself exacts a toll that can lead them to walk away. Meanwhile, the states’ cases, like the 29-state trial underway in California, march on without that problem, because a state attorney general doesn’t have a childhood to protect. US teen drops lawsuit against Meta, Google, Snap ahead of trial | ReutersBenzinga · WJLA

The Justice Department is seeking to question the FBI officials who carried out the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago—a striking move that turns the machinery of investigation around to point at the investigators. According to sources, the requests are coming from a team working under Joe diGenova, a Trump ally now overseeing a Florida-based probe, and the investigation is reportedly built on the theory that Trump was the victim of a criminal conspiracy against his rights. Let’s recall the facts, because they matter. The 2022 search was authorized by a federal judge and turned up more than 100 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, including highly sensitive national-security records. That led to charges against Trump and two associates for retaining classified material and obstruction. The case never reached a jury on the merits—it was dismissed after a judge concluded the special counsel, Jack Smith, had been unlawfully appointed, and the DOJ dropped its appeal after Trump won the 2024 election. So here’s the inversion: agents who executed a lawful, court-approved search warrant, and found exactly the classified documents the warrant anticipated, are now themselves the subjects of scrutiny, under a theory that pursuing Trump was itself a crime against him. The significance is about the independence of law enforcement and the chilling effect of retribution. When agents who followed a valid warrant can be investigated years later for having done so—by a team led by a political ally of the person they investigated—it sends a message to every FBI agent and prosecutor about the personal risk of investigating the powerful. It’s the same thread we pulled on yesterday with the Comey prosecution: the concern that federal law-enforcement power is being turned to punish the president’s perceived enemies rather than to pursue crime. DOJ seeks to question FBI officials tied to search of Trump Mar-a-Lago estate, sources say | ReutersWashington Post · Yahoo News

And finally, a fight is heating up that will help define who owns the raw material of the AI era: your voice. In federal court in Illinois, a group of journalists, podcasters, voice actors, and audiobook narrators are suing a who’s-who of tech—Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, Alphabet, Adobe, and the AI voice company ElevenLabs—alleging the companies harvested their “voiceprints” from publicly available audio recordings and used them to train commercial AI voice models without consent. This week, the two sides squared off over the companies’ motions to dismiss. The legal engine here is a powerful Illinois statute called BIPA, the Biometric Information Privacy Act—the same law that produced a $650 million settlement from Facebook over face-tagging. BIPA treats biometric identifiers, including voiceprints, as something a company can’t collect or use without informed consent, and it comes with statutory damages and a private right of action, which makes it a serious threat. The core dispute is about harm. The tech companies argue the plaintiffs can’t point to any concrete injury—no cloned voice showed up in a product they can identify—so there’s nothing to sue over. The plaintiffs counter that the harvesting itself is the harm: BIPA was designed to stop the nonconsensual capture of your biometric identity in the first place, whether or not it later surfaces in a product. The significance is that this is a preview of the defining legal question of AI training: the models are built on enormous quantities of human-created data—our voices, our writing, our faces—often scraped without asking, and the law is scrambling to decide whether that scraping is a harm in itself. Old privacy statutes like BIPA are becoming the sharpest tools plaintiffs have, and how these motions come out will shape whether the people whose voices train the machines have any say at all. Lawyers square off in fight over voice data used to train AI | ReutersMacDailyNews · Crypto Briefing

On August 20, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act, the legislative centerpiece of the “War on Poverty” he had declared in his State of the Union address seven months earlier. It was among the most ambitious pieces of social legislation in American history. More fundamentally, it committed the federal government to the idea that poverty was not merely an individual misfortune, but a national problem the country could organize itself to confront.

The Act was broad by design. It authorized roughly $1 billion and created a collection of programs whose names remain familiar: the Job Corps, which trained young people; VISTA, conceived as a domestic version of the Peace Corps; the Neighborhood Youth Corps; and the Community Action Program. The last of those sent federal money directly to local organizations and required the “maximum feasible participation” of poor people in designing the programs intended to help them. The Act also created the Office of Economic Opportunity to oversee the broader effort. Head Start, which continues operating today, grew out of the same framework.

The legacy of August 20, 1964, is genuinely mixed, which is precisely why it is worth remembering honestly. The War on Poverty created durable institutions, including Head Start, Job Corps, and legal-services programs for poor Americans, while embedding the principle that the federal government has some responsibility for expanding opportunity. But the “maximum feasible participation” requirement also produced fierce battles between local activists and city governments that were accustomed to controlling federal money. The initiative was then starved of funding as the war in Vietnam consumed both the federal budget and the country’s political attention. The Economic Opportunity Act remains a reference point in nearly every argument about what the government owes its most vulnerable citizens. It also pairs pointedly with a day of legal news dominated by criminal prosecutions and judicial power—a reminder that law is not only a mechanism for punishment, but, at its most aspirational, a tool for creating opportunity.

In the trial of the man accused of orchestrating Tupac Shakur’s 1996 murder, the defense has settled on a genuinely remarkable strategy: asking the jury not to believe its own client. When we covered the opening of the trial, I noted that the case largely rests on Duane “Keffe D” Davis’s own words. Over the years, Davis said in media interviews and in a 2019 memoir that he was inside the Cadillac on the night Tupac was shot and that he handed the gun to the men in the back seat. Police had long suspected Davis, but they did not have enough evidence to charge him until he began publicly talking about the crime. His lawyer, Michael Sanft, is now attacking the reliability of those same admissions, at one point displaying a slide for jurors bearing a single word: “b******t.” The defense theory is that Davis is a braggart who exaggerated or invented his involvement to sell books and improve his street reputation—and that self-aggrandizing talk is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Legally, this is a fascinating position because Davis’s statements are doing much of the work a live confession ordinarily would, except that he made them for money and status rather than during a police interrogation. His effort to claim immunity based on a 2008 proffer has already failed before the Nevada Supreme Court, clearing the way for the statements to be used at trial. The case therefore turns on a basic but difficult evidentiary question: when someone publicly brags about participating in a notorious crime for personal gain, is that a confession the government can use to convict him, or is it just talk? The jury must decide whether Keffe D was telling the world the truth—or, as his own lawyer now argues, lying for profit.

Defense strategy in Tupac murder case: don’t believe my client | ReutersCNN · KELO

President Trump has announced nine new judicial nominees for federal courts in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Alaska as the November midterms approach. The group notably includes an Oklahoma state attorney who supported allowing taxpayer-funded religious charter schools, offering a preview of the church-state disputes these judges could eventually be asked to decide. The larger legal point is that lifetime federal judgeships may be the most durable form of power a president exercises.

These nominees, if confirmed, will continue interpreting federal law and the Constitution for decades after the president who selected them has left office. There is an unusual wrinkle this time, however: Trump’s pace of judicial appointments has slowed because there are not many vacancies left. His first term substantially reshaped the federal judiciary, and an aggressive beginning to his second term further reduced the number of available seats. That is why a nine-person slate spanning six states is meaningful in a year when there simply is not much left to fill. The “as midterms loom” framing matters as well, because control of the Senate determines whether a president’s nominees receive confirmation votes at all. The administration therefore has every reason to move nominees while the current Senate math remains favorable. Even a comparatively modest batch of nominations illustrates the quiet, cumulative way presidents shape American law—not through the executive orders that dominate a news cycle, but through lifetime appointments that survive countless news cycles. Each of these nine nominees, if confirmed, would represent a decades-long imprint on the federal judiciary.

Trump names nine new judicial nominees as November midterms loom | ReutersLaw360 · Bloomberg Law

And finally, we have a genuinely novel legal argument—literally. The Justice Department is prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly threatening President Trump, and prosecutors are now pointing to Comey’s own novel as evidence against him. The charge arises from a May 2025 Instagram post in which Comey shared a photograph of seashells arranged on a beach to spell “86 47.” In that formulation, “86” is slang for getting rid of something, while “47” refers to Trump as the 47th president. Comey said he encountered the shells while walking on a North Carolina beach and posted the image as a clever piece of political commentary. Prosecutors have adopted a much darker interpretation. In a new filing urging the judge not to dismiss the case, the Justice Department cites Comey’s legal thriller FDR Drive, published that same month, in which a right-wing podcaster uses coded language to incite followers against political opponents.

The government’s theory is that the novel demonstrates Comey understood how coded language can function as a threat and therefore knew what “86 47” would communicate. Prosecutors also suggested that he exploited the resulting controversy to sell books, quoting a message to his agent in which Comey wrote that the attention was “not my intention, but I’ll be OK if it sells books.” The First Amendment does not protect “true threats,” but it strongly protects political criticism and hyperbole, and the Supreme Court has held that the government generally must prove a speaker was at least reckless about how a statement would be understood. The central question is therefore whether “86 47” amounted to a genuine threat of violence or protected political speech. Using a defendant’s fictional writing to establish his state of mind is an aggressive and unusual prosecutorial move. Comey’s lawyers describe the case as retaliation for his criticism of Trump. The prosecution sits directly on the fault line between criminalizing a threat and criminalizing dissent—and the government is effectively asking the court to treat a novelist’s imagination as evidence of criminal intent.DOJ argues Comey novel shows he knew ‘86 47’ post was a threat against Trump | ReutersCNBC · The Hill

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This Day in Legal History: The Salem Witch Trials

On August 19, 1692, five people—George Burroughs, John Proctor, John Willard, Martha Carrier, and George Jacobs Sr.—were hanged at Salem, Massachusetts, convicted of witchcraft. It was one of the darkest days in a period that has become the enduring American shorthand for a legal system gone catastrophically wrong.

What makes the Salem trials so instructive for lawyers is that they weren’t lawless in form—they had judges, juries, indictments, and testimony. They failed on substance, and specifically on evidence. The courts admitted so-called “spectral evidence”: testimony from accusers that the defendant’s ghostly apparition had tormented them, something no one else could see or disprove. It was, by its nature, impossible to rebut—the perfect engine for convicting the innocent. The case of George Burroughs, a Harvard-educated former minister, captures the horror of it. At the gallows, Burroughs recited the Lord’s Prayer flawlessly—something a witch, according to popular belief, should have been incapable of doing. The crowd was shaken; it looked like proof of innocence. He was hanged anyway. When the evidence and the conclusion pointed in opposite directions, the conclusion won.

The significance of August 19, 1692 is that it became a permanent cautionary tale baked into American law. Within months, prominent voices—including the minister Increase Mather, who gave us today’s opening quote about the danger of condemning the innocent—turned against the use of spectral evidence, and the trials collapsed. In the centuries since, the reforms we associate with due process—rules of evidence, the presumption of innocence, the requirement of proof that can actually be tested and challenged—are in many ways a long answer to Salem. It’s a fitting backdrop for a day when two of our stories turn on evidence: what an insider witness reveals under oath, and what a litigant is allowed to keep hidden. Salem is the reminder of what happens when a legal system stops caring whether its evidence is real.

In the landmark trial where 29 states accuse Meta of designing its platforms to addict and harm children, jurors heard from a powerful first witness: Arturo Bejar, a former Facebook engineering director turned whistleblower. Bejar worked at the company for years, and he told the Oakland jury that internal culture put growth ahead of kids’ safety—that “move fast and break things” was the mantra, that Meta took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to whether children under 13 were on the platform, and that the company used the softer euphemism “problematic use” instead of “addiction” in a way that, he testified, undercounted the real harm. His central accusation is that Meta’s leadership knew, from its own internal research, what its products were doing to young users—and chose not to act. There’s a revealing legal sub-story here, too. Meta tried hard to keep Bejar off the stand, arguing he’d failed to preserve evidence because he deleted some Signal messages with former colleagues. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected that as a long-shot bid to eliminate a key witness. Meta, for its part, flatly denies the claims, insisting it never set out to hook children and has worked to make its platforms safer. The significance is that this is the evidentiary heart of the case: not abstract allegations about algorithms, but an insider describing, under oath, what he says the company knew and how it talked about it internally. It’s the same pattern that broke open the tobacco cases—a witness from inside translating the company’s own euphemisms back into plain English for a jury. Whether jurors believe him will shape one of the most consequential product cases in years. Former Meta engineer resumes testimony in landmark trial over social media’s harm to young users | ReutersThe Globe and Mail · LPM / NPR

A federal judge in Texas has declared the Biden-era “ghost gun” rule unconstitutional—a striking move, because the Supreme Court upheld that very rule just last year. Some background: ghost guns are firearms assembled from parts or kits that lack serial numbers, making them largely untraceable, and in 2022 the ATF issued a rule bringing those parts and kits under federal firearms regulation. Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth had originally struck the rule down as exceeding the agency’s statutory authority—but in March 2025, the Supreme Court reversed him, holding the rule was a permissible reading of the Gun Control Act. Here’s the maneuver worth understanding: the Supreme Court decided a statutory question—whether the agency had the power to issue the rule. It did not decide the constitutional questions. So O’Connor has now ruled again, this time on entirely different grounds, holding that the rule violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and is unconstitutionally vague under the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. In effect, when the statutory door closed, the challengers walked through the constitutional one, and the same judge let them in—blocking the rule as to certain products for Defense Distributed and members of the Second Amendment Foundation. Gun-control advocates called the decision “egregiously wrong” and predicted an appeal. But there’s a genuine wrinkle: the Justice Department that would normally defend a Biden-era rule is now the Trump administration’s DOJ, which is far more sympathetic to gun-rights arguments—so whether the government vigorously appeals its own rule’s defeat is an open question. The significance is a vivid lesson in how litigation adapts: a Supreme Court win on statutory grounds does not necessarily end a fight if constitutional theories remain, and a determined judge can find a new path to the same result. Biden-era ‘ghost guns’ restrictions are unconstitutional, US judge rules | ReutersUS News · Maryland Daily Record

The Trump administration has invoked presidential privilege to keep secret the identities of the people who crafted its executive orders targeting major law firms. The context: last year the American Bar Association sued the White House and Justice Department over what it calls a “law firm intimidation policy”—a series of executive orders aimed at punishing firms for representing clients, causes, or positions the president dislikes, and, the ABA argues, coercing lawyers into dropping those clients. In discovery, the ABA wants to know who was behind the orders and whether officials specifically intended to discourage firms from taking on cases against the government. The administration’s response is what’s notable. It has formally invoked the presidential communications privilege—the same doctrine at the heart of the Nixon tapes case—but stretched it in an aggressive direction: the DOJ argues the privilege shields not just the substance of confidential advice, but the very identities of the people who gave it, whether or not they’re executive-branch employees, and whether or not they’re even lawyers. In other words, the government is claiming it can keep secret who wrote the orders. Here’s the tension. The presidential communications privilege is real and important—presidents need candid advice—but it’s qualified, not absolute; the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon made clear it can yield to a sufficient showing of need. Extending it to conceal the mere identity of outside advisers, people who may not work for the government at all, is a notably broad claim. The significance is a double irony worth sitting with: these are executive orders designed to punish lawyers for their advocacy, and now the government is using one of the law’s most powerful secrecy doctrines to hide who dreamed them up. Whether a court accepts that will say a lot about how far executive privilege can be stretched to shield the process behind a controversial policy. Trump invokes presidential privilege in lawsuit over law firm orders | ReutersAbove the Law · Law & Crime

And finally, in a piece I wrote for Forbes this week, I take up a question the president has apparently been chewing on: can the federal government stop New York’s new pied-à-terre tax—the surcharge on second homes I’ve written about before? My short answer is that there’s a federal solution, but it almost certainly isn’t the one Trump wants, because he has almost nothing he can do on his own.

Start with the executive branch. The president cannot simply nullify a state tax by executive order—that’s not a power he has. The Justice Department could jump into the existing litigation or file its own federal challenge, but neither goes anywhere useful. The big obstacle is the Tax Injunction Act, a federal statute that keeps federal district courts out of the business of blocking state tax collection whenever taxpayers have an adequate remedy in their own state courts—which, here, they do. And when the DOJ once tried to get around that law by suing on behalf of homeowners over an allegedly discriminatory New York property-tax system, a federal court said no, you can’t evade the Tax Injunction Act that way. So the executive route is basically a dead end; the administration can litigate, apply pressure, and post on Truth Social, but it can’t make the tax disappear.

Congress, though, has a real—if difficult—path, and this is where it gets genuinely interesting as a matter of federalism. Congress has more power over state taxation than the president does. It has limited state taxes before: a federal railroad law, for instance, bars certain discriminatory property taxes on railroads and even gives federal courts jurisdiction to enforce it despite the Tax Injunction Act. And in a case called Arizona Public Service v. Snead, the Supreme Court upheld a federal statute enacted specifically to preempt a New Mexico tax that Congress found discriminated against interstate commerce. So using its affirmative Commerce Clause power, Congress can prohibit state taxes it decides burden interstate commerce. But there are two catches I walk through. First, anti-commandeering: Congress can’t order New York to repeal anything—it would have to regulate all states directly, invalidating a defined category of tax. Second, and harder, New York drafted this tax cleverly to dodge the obvious constitutional attack: it taxes based on use—whether a home is your primary residence—not based on whether you’re an in-stater or an out-of-stater. A New Jerseyan’s Manhattan apartment can be exempt if it’s their primary home; a New Yorker’s second home gets taxed. That use-not-residency design makes the usual discrimination claim much harder, and it means Congress would have to build a long, strained logical chain connecting a residence-neutral property tax to interstate commerce, then tailor a preemption statute to it and defend the whole contraption in court. So, yes, a federal fix is theoretically possible—but it runs entirely through Congress, and it’s a heavy lift. Which is a lawyer’s way of saying there’s probably not much the administration can actually do. My bet is that Trump just stops posting about it.

Trump Can’t Stop New York’s Pied-À-Terre Tax

On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment—the final state needed to reach the three-quarters threshold—and with that vote, the constitutional guarantee that the right to vote could not be denied on account of sex became part of American law. It enfranchised, at a stroke, roughly half the adult population of the United States.

The story of how it happened is almost unbelievably close. Tennessee’s state senate had ratified comfortably, but the house was deadlocked, tied 48 to 48. The decisive vote belonged to a 24-year-old representative named Harry Burn, who had a red rose on his lapel signaling opposition to the amendment—and a letter in his pocket from his mother, Phoebe, urging him to “be a good boy” and vote for suffrage. He did. His single vote broke the tie, Tennessee ratified, and the amendment was certified into the Constitution days later. A generational struggle turned, in the end, on a young man listening to his mother.

The significance of August 18, 1920 is best understood as the payoff to a story we told on this show back in July. When we covered the Seneca Falls Convention and its 1848 Declaration of Sentiments—the founding document of the American women’s rights movement, which dared to demand the vote—I noted that it would take seventy-two years to win the ballot. This is that day. The distance from Seneca Falls to Nashville is the distance from a bold, ridiculed demand to a line in the Constitution. And like the Fifteenth Amendment before it, the Nineteenth didn’t instantly deliver on its promise—many women of color, in particular, remained effectively disenfranchised for decades until the Voting Rights Act. But it permanently changed who “the people” are in a democracy. It’s a reminder, on a day full of stories about the law’s unfinished business, that some of the most fundamental rights we now take for granted were won slowly, against fierce resistance, and sometimes by a single vote.

A landmark trial has begun in California federal court that could reshape the most popular apps on the planet: a bipartisan coalition of 29 states has put Meta on trial, alleging it deliberately designed Instagram and Facebook to addict and harm children. This is the big one we’ve been building toward all summer—the federal counterpart to the state cases in New Mexico and Tennessee. The states, led by Colorado, California, New Jersey, and Kentucky, told the court that Meta engineered features like infinite scrolling, notifications, “likes,” visual filters, and algorithmic recommendations to drive compulsive use, and misled the public about the platforms’ safety for young people. Here’s an important procedural wrinkle: while there’s an eight-person jury in Oakland, it’s serving only in an advisory capacity—the case will ultimately be decided by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. That’s because this is largely an equitable case, and what the states are really after isn’t just money but sweeping changes to how the platforms work: stronger age verification, restrictions on algorithms trained on children’s data, limits on notifications, and the removal of features like infinite scroll. On damages, Meta itself has floated the staggering figure of $1.4 trillion as its potential exposure, though the states haven’t named a number and legal experts consider an award anywhere near that scale unlikely. The significance is that this trial could force concrete, structural redesign of Instagram and Facebook for young users—not a settlement negotiated in private, but a judge’s findings after a public trial. Everything we’ve tracked, from the multistate penalties to the New Mexico verdict to the Ninth Circuit clearing these suits, has been leading here. This is where the social-media reckoning gets its fullest public airing yet. Meta faces 29-state trial that could reshape Instagram and Facebook | ReutersYahoo Finance · anews

The Justice Department has opened a civil-rights investigation into the College of William & Mary, alleging the Virginia public university runs scholarship and mentorship programs that unlawfully discriminate in favor of minority students. The Department’s Civil Rights Division announced a “compliance review” under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—which bars race discrimination by institutions that receive federal funding—targeting several specific programs: a fellowship in the education school that gives preference to Hispanic or Latina women with financial need, a doctoral mentorship program for “future education leaders of color,” and a law-school scholarship program. Here’s the legal backdrop that makes this a national trend and not a one-off. After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ended race-conscious admissions, the fight didn’t end—it moved. The administration is now using Title VI to argue that race-conscious scholarships, fellowships, and pipeline programs are themselves a form of unlawful discrimination, framing programs designed to expand opportunity for underrepresented groups as illegal “discrimination in favor of minorities.” Supporters of these programs say they’re lawful efforts to remedy historic exclusion and build diverse professions; critics say any use of race, even to help, runs afoul of the post-SFFA legal landscape. It’s worth being precise: this is a compliance review, an investigation, not yet a lawsuit or a finding of wrongdoing. The significance is that this is part of a systematic campaign we’ve tracked against universities—from Harvard to Columbia—and it signals that the enforcement frontier after affirmative action has shifted from the admissions office to the financial-aid office. Every race-conscious scholarship in the country is now, potentially, a legal target. DOJ probes College of William & Mary alleging discrimination in favor of minorities | ReutersBloomberg · Fox News

A federal judge has ordered the release of a woman charged with vandalizing the World War II Memorial in Washington—and the top federal prosecutor there, Jeanine Pirro, is not happy about it. The defendant, 41-year-old Melissa Farris of Kentucky, was arrested last week and charged with two felony counts after the memorial’s fountain was filled with soap suds and the words “Clean hands Dirty $” were spray-painted across a surface in red and green. A judge ordered her released on conditions—surrendering her passport and not leaving the continental U.S. without approval—and Pirro publicly criticized that decision. Let’s unpack the legal pieces, because there are two distinct ones. First, pretrial release: in the American system, the default is that a defendant awaiting trial should be released unless the government shows they’re a flight risk or a danger, with conditions used to manage any risk. A judge ordering release with conditions is the system working as designed—the presumption of innocence is not an empty phrase—even when a prosecutor would prefer detention. Second, the underlying conduct: Farris reportedly said on social media that she acted to protest tax dollars not being spent on ordinary Americans and alleged corporate wrongdoing. But political motivation doesn’t convert property destruction into protected speech—you can hold the message and still prosecute the spray paint. The significance ties into a thread we’ve followed: this is the same U.S. Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, at the center of the Reflecting Pool saga, again clashing over how a memorial-vandalism case should be handled—this time frustrated that a judge released a defendant rather than that a case was dropped. A preliminary hearing is set for September 3, and it’s a reminder that the everyday machinery of bail and pretrial release keeps operating regardless of how politically charged the underlying act may be. US judge orders release of woman accused of vandalism at World War Two Memorial | ReutersWashington Post · CBS News

And finally, in my column this week, I take on a well-intentioned proposal to tax artificial intelligence in order to help the workers it displaces—and argue that, while the instinct is right, the mechanism is wrong. The proposal in question is Representative Greg Casar’s AI Tax and Work Protection Act. Its premise is sound: if firms are capturing the gains from replacing human workers with AI while pushing the costs—unemployment, lost tax revenue—onto workers and society, those costs look like an externality, the same way pollution does. And we tax externalities all the time: cigarettes, gasoline, carbon. So taxing AI to fund worker protections is a reasonable idea in principle.

My problem is with the particulars. Casar’s bill doesn’t actually tax worker displacement—it taxes AI “tokens,” the technical units of AI computation, with the rate keyed to the unemployment rate. That creates an appealing feedback loop on paper: as AI drives up unemployment, the tax rises and generates more money to put people back to work. But it asks the Treasury to do two things it’s genuinely bad at. First, it has to figure out, in real time and on a political calendar, how much of any given rise in unemployment is actually caused by AI, as opposed to a recession, a pandemic, or a war. That’s a causal judgment the tax code has no machinery for. Second, and worse, it has to put a stable dollar value on a “token”—an unstable, non-standardized unit that spans text, code, images, audio, and video, and isn’t sold in any clean arm’s-length market. You’re trying to tax the meter, and the meter doesn’t have a reliable price.

So here’s the alternative I argue for: instead of taxing AI use, give the public an equity stake in the companies that capture AI’s gains—let the government own a piece of the franchise rather than tax the meter. This isn’t as exotic as it sounds; scholars like Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz have proposed having AI firms pay tax in kind, transferring equity rather than cash, and Senator Sanders has floated a far more aggressive version—a 50% stake funding a sovereign wealth fund. My point is that you don’t have to go to 50% to adopt the underlying architecture. Equity is a better proxy than token usage: it scales with the actual size of the economic reallocation AI produces, and it only asks the government to value a company once, rather than to price billions of individual computations or adjudicate whether a particular prompt cost a particular job. If AI merely augments workers and produces modest gains, the public’s share stays modest; if it produces extraordinary gains, the public shares in the upside. A smaller equity assessment on the largest firms, held through an independently managed vehicle, would let the public participate in AI’s wealth without handing a shrunken Treasury an impossible measurement problem. The instinct to make sure the public benefits from AI is exactly right—we should just own a piece of the thing, not tax the ticker. Taxing AI to Help Workers Sounds Good, But Public Deserves More | Bloomberg Tax

On August 17, 1998, President Bill Clinton became the first sitting president to testify before a grand jury as the subject of its investigation. He gave his testimony via closed-circuit television from the White House to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s grand jury, concerning his relationship with a White House intern—and that same evening, he addressed the nation to admit he had misled the public about it.

The legal machinery that brought a president to that moment is worth understanding. It began, improbably, with a civil lawsuit: Paula Jones’s sexual-harassment suit, which produced the 1997 Supreme Court decision in Clinton v. Jones holding that a sitting president is not immune from civil litigation over unofficial conduct and can be deposed while in office. That deposition, and the questions in it, are what put Clinton’s statements under oath—and when those statements collided with what Starr’s investigation uncovered, the independent counsel built a case around perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton, carefully, insisted his earlier answers had been “legally accurate,” a phrase that became emblematic of the entire episode.

The significance of August 17, 1998 is layered. It led directly to Clinton’s impeachment by the House on charges of perjury and obstruction—only the second presidential impeachment in American history—and his acquittal by the Senate. But its deeper legal legacies are the ones that still echo: Clinton v. Jones established that the presidency is not a shield against civil accountability for private conduct, a principle you can hear resonating in today’s fights over presidential immunity, and the whole saga became a national seminar on perjury, executive privilege, and the limits of the independent-counsel model, which Congress let expire the following year. It’s a fitting anniversary for a day when the relationship between political power and prosecutorial judgment is, once again, at the center of the news.

Opening statements begin today in Las Vegas in the murder trial of Duane “Keffe D” Davis, nearly thirty years after the 1996 killing of rapper Tupac Shakur. Davis, 63, is charged with murder with a deadly weapon with intent to promote a criminal gang. He has pleaded not guilty and faces life in prison if convicted.

A sixteen-person jury has been selected, and prosecutors are expected to call roughly forty witnesses. The witness list includes Suge Knight, who was driving the car in which Shakur was shot, and Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, who responded to the shooting as a Las Vegas police sergeant in 1996.

Prosecutors say Davis was the “shot caller” behind a quickly assembled plan to retaliate after Shakur and members of his entourage beat Davis’s nephew at the MGM Grand earlier that evening. The government’s theory places the killing within a larger conflict involving rival street gangs.

The obvious problem for prosecutors is time. Trying a murder case three decades after the crime means dealing with faded memories, unavailable witnesses, and physical evidence that may have been lost or degraded. What eventually revived the case, however, was Davis himself.

Over the years, Davis publicly discussed his involvement in Shakur’s killing in interviews and in a memoir. Those statements now form an important part of the prosecution’s case. They also give the defense an obvious line of attack: statements made years later for publicity, money, or street credibility are not necessarily reliable accounts of what actually happened.

That makes Davis’s own words one of the most important legal issues to watch. Prosecutors do not merely have to show that he repeatedly claimed involvement; they have to persuade jurors that those claims, considered alongside the remaining evidence, prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The trial is therefore as much about the reliability of decades-old admissions as it is about solving one of the most famous unsolved murders in American popular culture.

Tupac shooting trial begins with opening statements | ReutersWashington Post · PBS NewsHour

Attorney General Todd Blanche is publicly backing U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro after President Trump criticized her office for dropping a vandalism prosecution involving the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, Blanche said he “absolutely” supports Pirro, the top federal prosecutor in Washington. The comments came after Trump criticized her decision to abandon the prosecution of former Olympian David Hearn and others accused of damaging the Reflecting Pool.

The case grew out of a roughly $15 million renovation project that the administration pushed to complete before July 4. After an algae bloom appeared and portions of the pool’s lining began peeling, Pirro’s office brought vandalism charges. Prosecutors later dropped the case after concluding that the damage resulted from problems with the renovation rather than deliberate sabotage.

Trump was not happy with that conclusion. He publicly called on Pirro to revisit what he described as her “hastily made decision,” and the White House reportedly asked the Justice Department to consider whether additional charges were available.

Blanche is now defending the prosecutor’s decision. He said it was unfair to judge Pirro based on a single case when her office had made its decision based on the evidence available to prosecutors.

The legal principle here is prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutors have substantial authority to decide whether the available evidence justifies bringing or continuing criminal charges, and those decisions are supposed to turn on the law and evidence rather than the political preferences of the president. That principle takes on additional importance because Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer, faced questions during his confirmation about whether he could operate the Justice Department independently.

There is an important qualification. Blanche also said Trump supports Pirro, despite the president’s public criticism of her handling of this case. Still, an attorney general publicly defending a prosecutor’s evidence-based decision against presidential criticism is a meaningful test of how much independence federal prosecutors will have when their charging decisions conflict with the White House.

US Attorney General Blanche publicly backs Pirro after Trump criticism over Reflecting Pool | Reuters · US NewsAOL

A federal judge has cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 1,100 Somalis living in the United States.

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston lifted a pause she had imposed in March on the Department of Homeland Security’s termination of Somalia’s TPS designation. The change largely reflects what has happened at the Supreme Court since Burroughs entered that earlier order.

Temporary Protected Status allows people from designated countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary conditions to remain and work legally in the United States for a limited period. The protection does not itself provide permanent immigration status, and the executive branch periodically decides whether conditions in a particular country continue to justify the designation.

The administration maintains that conditions in Somalia have improved enough to end TPS. Opponents point to continuing violence in the country, including fighting involving al-Shabaab militants, as evidence that returning people to Somalia remains dangerous.

Four Somali plaintiffs and advocacy organizations also argued that the administration’s decision was motivated by racial discrimination, citing President Trump’s previous comments about Somalis. Burroughs rejected that discrimination claim at this stage, although the broader litigation continues.

The most important legal development, though, happened above the district court. In June, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to terminate similar protections involving people from Haiti and Syria. Burroughs concluded that the Supreme Court’s intervention changed the legal landscape and limited her ability to continue blocking the Somali termination.

That illustrates how a Supreme Court ruling can affect considerably more than the people immediately involved in a particular case. Once the Court signaled that the executive branch has broad authority to terminate TPS designations, lower courts confronting similar challenges had less room to intervene. For the roughly 1,100 Somalis affected here, that means a temporary immigration protection that allowed them to remain legally in the United States can now be withdrawn while the underlying legal fight continues.

US judge clears way for Trump to end Somalis’ deportation protections | ReutersUS News · Fox News

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, creating the foundation of the American social safety net and permanently changing the relationship between citizens and their government. Flanked by members of Congress and photographers, FDR put his signature to a law that guaranteed, for the first time in American history, a measure of economic security against the hazards of old age, unemployment, and poverty.

The Act was born of the Great Depression, when the suffering of millions—elderly people with no savings, workers with no jobs, families with no support—overwhelmed the old assumption that hardship was a purely private matter. Social Security established old-age benefits funded by taxes on workers and employers, created a federal-state system of unemployment insurance, and provided aid for dependent children, the blind, and people with disabilities. Roosevelt himself was clear-eyed about its limits, saying at the signing that no law could insure everyone against every vicissitude of life, but that this one gave “some measure of protection” against poverty-ridden old age and unemployment.

The legal significance runs deep, and it connects to a story we’ve told before on this show. When the Social Security Act was challenged as an unconstitutional federal overreach and an improper use of the taxing power, it reached a Supreme Court that had been striking down New Deal programs left and right. But in 1937—in the same term as the failed court-packing fight and the Court’s famous doctrinal shift—the justices upheld Social Security, in Steward Machine Company v. Davis and Helvering v. Davis, broadly reading Congress’s power to tax and spend for the general welfare. Those decisions helped cement the constitutional foundation of the modern administrative and welfare state. Ninety-one years later, Social Security remains the single largest program in the federal budget, and the principle it established—that the national government has a role in securing the economic dignity of its people—remains, as our opening quote from FDR suggests, a live measure of the country’s progress.

A federal trade court has upheld President Trump’s authority to close the “de minimis” tariff exemption—handing the administration a rare courtroom win on tariffs. The U.S. Court of International Trade, a three-judge panel in New York, ruled that Trump lawfully used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to end the duty-free treatment that low-value imports—parcels worth $800 or less—had long enjoyed. Some quick background: the de minimis exemption is what let a flood of cheap packages, especially from Chinese e-commerce sellers, enter the U.S. tariff-free, and closing it has already generated over a billion dollars in new duty payments. What makes this ruling notable is that it cuts against the trend. Trump’s tariff agenda has fared badly in court—the Supreme Court ruled in February that IEEPA does not authorize him to unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs, which led to that roughly $100 billion in refunds we covered, and the trade court later struck down a replacement tariff. So how does the administration win this one? The court drew a fine but important distinction: ending a duty-free privilege is not the same as affirmatively imposing a tariff. The challenger, an auto-parts importer, argued IEEPA gave the president no independent power to close the exemption, but the panel found that rescinding a trade-related “privilege” falls within the emergency-powers statute even if imposing new tariffs does not. The significance is that it carves out a narrow lane where the administration’s emergency-powers theory actually holds up—a reminder that in the tariff wars, the difference between taking away a benefit and imposing a new burden can be the difference between winning and losing in court. US court backs Trump’s power to close ‘de minimis’ tariff exemption | ReutersCNBC · Bloomberg

The Supreme Court has taken up a case that sounds technical but goes to the heart of whether wrongly detained immigrants can find a lawyer at all. The question is whether attorneys who successfully challenge an immigrant’s detention through a habeas corpus petition can recover their fees from the federal government. It turns on the Equal Access to Justice Act—a statute that lets people who beat the government in court recover their attorney’s fees, unless the government’s position was “substantially justified.” Here’s why this matters enormously right now. As immigration detention has surged, so have habeas petitions challenging it: one court in California went from a handful of these cases in 2021 to hundreds in a single month this year, and courts have repeatedly ordered the government to pay fees after finding people were detained unlawfully. But two federal appeals courts, the Fourth and Fifth Circuits, have held that habeas challenges to immigration detention aren’t the kind of “civil case” the fee statute covers—which would mean the lawyers who win these cases can’t recover a dime. Think about the practical stakes. Detained immigrants are frequently poor, often can’t work, and have no right to a free lawyer in immigration proceedings. Fee-shifting is a big part of what makes it economically possible for attorneys to take these cases at all. If the Supreme Court rules that EAJA doesn’t apply, it doesn’t change the substance of anyone’s detention—but it quietly removes much of the financial incentive for lawyers to challenge unlawful detention, weakening one of the few real checks on the system. The significance is that this is access to justice in its most concrete form: whether the courthouse door stays open depends, as it so often does, on who can afford to walk through it. US Supreme Court case tests fees for immigration detainees | ReutersSCOTUSblog · Bloomberg Law

And finally, a story from the frontier of AI misuse that is equal parts alarming and absurd. A Connecticut judge has sanctioned a plaintiff who hid secret instructions inside his own court filings—instructions aimed not at the judge, but at any artificial intelligence that might read the documents. The plaintiff, representing himself, buried text in white font on a white background, invisible to a human eye, telling any AI model reviewing the filing to side with him. This is what’s known as a “prompt injection” attack, and it’s reportedly the first documented instance of one aimed at a U.S. court. The court caught it—apparently tipped off by strange white spaces in the text—and issued an order warning him to stop. He didn’t. At the next hearing, he’d hidden a message reading “hi, I hope you can’t see me,” and, in another filing, a concealed link to a SpongeBob SquarePants video. The judge was not amused, issuing a decision bluntly titled “Court Sanction for Plaintiff’s Use of Prompt-Injection.” The remedy is almost poetically low-tech: the plaintiff is now barred from filing electronically and must submit everything on paper. Now, it’s easy to laugh—and the SpongeBob link earns a chuckle—but the serious point is real. This is a new species of the AI-integrity problem we’ve tracked all summer, alongside the fake hallucinated citations. It’s an attempt to corrupt the decision-making process itself, and it quietly reveals something bigger: that courts and their staff may increasingly be using AI tools to help review filings, which creates a brand-new attack surface for litigants willing to game it. The significance is that the age-old duty of candor to the tribunal now has to contend with adversaries trying to whisper to the machines—and courts are going to need new rules, and sharp eyes, to catch them. Connecticut judge says plaintiff hid messages for AI in court filings | Reuters404 Media · Tom’s Hardware

On August 13, 1964, two men—Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans—were hanged simultaneously in two different English prisons for the murder of a man during a robbery. They were the last people ever executed in the United Kingdom. Evans died at Strangeways Prison in Manchester and Allen at Walton Prison in Liverpool, both at eight in the morning, and with them, centuries of capital punishment in Britain came quietly to an end.

Neither man knew he was making history; the abolition of the death penalty wasn’t yet law. But the machinery of change was already turning. The very next year, in 1965, Parliament passed the Murder Act, which suspended the death penalty for murder for a trial period of five years. In 1969, Parliament made that suspension permanent for England, Scotland, and Wales. The death penalty lingered on the books for a handful of exotic offenses—treason, piracy with violence, certain military crimes—until it was finally abolished completely in 1998, bringing British law into line with the European Convention on Human Rights.

The significance of August 13, 1964 is sharpened by contrast. Britain reached the end of capital punishment through ordinary legislation, and much of Europe followed a similar path, treating abolition as a basic human-rights commitment. The United States took the opposite fork: the Supreme Court briefly halted the death penalty in 1972 in Furman v. Georgia, only to allow it back four years later in Gregg v. Georgia, and capital punishment remains part of American law today, administered by the federal government and a number of states. So this anniversary is a useful mirror—a reminder that two closely related legal systems, working from a shared common-law inheritance, reached opposite conclusions on one of the deepest questions a legal system can face: whether the state should ever have the power to take a life. That’s the question our opening quote, from Bryan Stevenson, puts squarely on the table.

The law firm Motley Rice is in line for a payday of more than $67 million—its fee for winning New Mexico’s sprawling case against Meta. We covered the underlying result: a judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a teen mental-health fund, on top of $375 million in civil penalties a jury imposed in March, bringing New Mexico’s potential recovery to more than $942 million. Motley Rice represented the state on contingency, and under its contract it can seek a sliding-scale cut—20% of the first $50 million recovered, scaling down to 5% on amounts over $250 million—which works out to roughly 7% of the total, or about $67 million. Here’s the practice-of-law angle worth understanding. States increasingly hire private plaintiffs’ firms to bring these massive cases because they don’t have the in-house firepower to go toe-to-toe with a company like Meta and its armies of lawyers. The firm fronts the enormous cost and risk of years of litigation in exchange for a percentage if it wins—the same model that produced the giant tobacco settlements of the 1990s, in which Motley Rice was a central player. Supporters say it lets under-resourced states take on deep-pocketed defendants they otherwise couldn’t touch; critics say it hands public law-enforcement power to private firms with a profit motive. The significance is that this is the economic engine behind the whole wave of state social-media litigation we’ve been tracking. The fee comes out of New Mexico’s recovery, and it only gets paid after appeals conclude—and Meta has said it will appeal—so the number, like the verdict, isn’t final. But it’s a rare, concrete look at the money that makes this kind of public-interest litigation actually happen. Law firm Motley Rice’s fee for Meta case in New Mexico could top $67 million | ReuterAlbuquerque Journal · JD Journal

Two press-freedom organizations—The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation—have sued in Manhattan federal court to shut down a Trump Media service that sells wealthy subscribers early access to President Trump’s social media posts. The service, called Truth API, launched August 1 and charges up to $100,000 a month for a faster feed of ten high-profile Truth Social accounts, including the president’s own. The legal concern at the heart of the suit is a specific and serious one: Trump’s posts routinely move financial markets—an announcement about tariffs or a company can send stocks lurching—and a paid feed that delivers those posts to deep-pocketed subscribers before the general public gives those subscribers a head start to trade on market-moving information. In other words, it potentially creates a two-tiered market in the president’s words, where those who can pay six figures a month get to act on presidential statements seconds or minutes before everyone else. That’s the kind of information asymmetry securities law generally frowns on. The service drew scrutiny fast—Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff had already called for a government investigation days before this suit. It’s also legally novel: the plaintiffs are press-freedom groups, framing public access to a president’s official-ish communications as a matter of public interest, which raises interesting questions about their theory and standing. The significance is that this sits at a genuinely new intersection—of a president who governs partly through market-moving social media posts, the business incentive to monetize that, and a securities and public-information framework that never contemplated selling early access to the president’s feed. However the case comes out, it’s a preview of the strange legal questions created when official speech becomes a paid product. Trump sued over service that offers paid early access to Truth Social posts | ReutersWashington Post · NPR

A group of current and former Palestinian students and staff have sued Columbia University, alleging that the school discriminated against its Palestinian community over the past two years. According to the complaint filed in New York, the plaintiffs say Columbia failed to protect Palestinian members from harassment, subjected them to what they call “unfair and biased disciplinary hearings,” and “actively participated in and amplified” what they describe as racially, ethnically, and politically motivated targeting of Palestinians on campus. The legal vehicle here is worth understanding, because it’s the same one being wielded on multiple sides of the campus fights. Civil-rights law—principally Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—bars institutions that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. We’ve seen Title VI invoked against universities over allegations of antisemitism, and we’ve seen the Justice Department use it to pressure schools like Harvard. Here, Palestinian and Arab plaintiffs are invoking that same framework to allege discrimination against them. The context matters: Columbia suspended more than 65 students last year over a pro-Palestinian protest that shut down its main library, and it agreed to pay the federal government over $200 million to resolve federal probes and restore funding. Columbia has denied discriminating and says it condemns hate, and it declined to comment on the pending litigation. To be clear, these are allegations in a complaint, not proven facts, and I’m not weighing in on the underlying political conflict. The significance is legal and institutional: universities are now being sued from opposite directions under the very same civil-rights statute, and Columbia in particular finds itself squeezed between federal enforcers, one set of students, and another—each claiming the protection of Title VI. It’s a vivid illustration of how anti-discrimination law becomes the battleground when a campus fractures. Palestinian students and staff sue Columbia University alleging discrimination | ReutersUS News · Middle East Eye

On August 12, 1867, President Andrew Johnson suspended Edwin Stanton, his Secretary of War, and installed General Ulysses S. Grant to run the department temporarily. It was a quiet-sounding personnel move that lit the fuse on one of the great constitutional confrontations in American history—and it turned on a question we still argue about: how much control a president has over the officials who serve beneath him.

The context was Reconstruction. Stanton was a close ally of the Radical Republicans in Congress, and as Secretary of War he controlled the Army’s presence across the defeated South, including the Freedmen’s Bureau—making him essential to Congress’s plans to remake the region and protect the newly freed. Johnson, who bitterly opposed that agenda, wanted Stanton gone. But Congress had anticipated exactly this: it had passed the Tenure of Office Act, which barred the president from removing a Senate-confirmed cabinet officer without the Senate’s consent. Johnson, trying to thread the needle while Congress was in recess, suspended Stanton rather than firing him outright. When the Senate later refused to concur and Johnson removed Stanton anyway in early 1868, the House impeached him—and he survived removal in the Senate by a single vote.

The significance of August 12, 1867 reaches all the way to the present. The Tenure of Office Act was eventually repealed and, decades later, the Supreme Court in Myers v. United States suggested it had been unconstitutional all along, endorsing a robust presidential removal power—the same removal-power debate that traces back to the very first Congress and runs through today’s fights over the independence of agencies and prosecutors. Johnson’s clash with Stanton is the original American showdown over whether a president can be checked in the control of his own executive branch. And on a day when we’ve got a story about the White House leaning on the Justice Department, that 159-year-old question feels remarkably current.

A federal appeals court has thrown out the government formula at the heart of the law meant to protect patients from surprise medical bills—handing a significant win to doctors and hospitals over insurers. Sitting en banc, all seventeen judges of the Fifth Circuit issued an unsigned opinion mostly siding with physicians and air-ambulance companies, and invalidating a federal rule as going beyond what Congress actually authorized in the No Surprises Act. Here’s how this works, because it’s less about patients than it sounds. The No Surprises Act protects you, the patient—if you get care from an out-of-network provider in an emergency, you only owe your normal in-network cost-sharing. The fight is over who pays the rest: the insurer or the provider. That gets decided in arbitration, and the key benchmark is something called the “qualifying payment amount,” or QPA. Whoever controls how the QPA is calculated basically controls who wins. The court found that federal agencies had let insurers game that number—by baking in so-called “ghost rates,” contracted amounts for services that providers never actually deliver, which dragged the benchmark down in insurers’ favor—and by improperly excluding bonus and incentive payments. The significance is twofold. Substantively, it rebalances a high-stakes payment fight away from insurers and toward providers. But the deeper theme is administrative law: this is a court holding that agencies rewrote a statute to favor one side beyond what Congress wrote—exactly the kind of post-Chevron scrutiny of agency rulemaking we’ve been tracking all summer. The patient protections stay; the multibillion-dollar question of who pays just got sent back to the drawing board. US appeals court voids formula used to avert surprise medical bills | ReutersAmerican Medical Association · Bloomberg Law

A federal judge has blocked the U.S. Postal Service nationwide from enforcing the mail-in voting restrictions in President Trump’s executive order—and if this story sounds familiar to longtime listeners, it should. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston expanded an order she first issued in June, which had covered 23 states, into a nationwide injunction. Under the executive order, the Postal Service was supposed to gather state lists of eligible voters and deliver absentee ballots only to people on those lists; Talwani’s ruling bars USPS from refusing to deliver mail ballots based on those new federal verification requirements. Her reasoning is the same principle we keep coming back to: the executive branch, she wrote, has no authority to regulate elections—that power belongs to the states under the Constitution. And she stressed the timing, noting it’s now less than 90 days before the November 3 midterms, which makes it especially important not to let the federal government change election rules on the eve of the vote. This connects to the entire voting-rights arc we’ve followed—the administration’s 0-and-21 losing streak on voter rolls, the Supreme Court emergency application, the Voting Rights Act anniversary. The significance is that the courts continue to hold a firm, near-unbroken line: however much the administration wants federal control over how Americans cast and count ballots, judges keep ruling that elections are run by the states, and the closer we get to November, the more urgently they’re saying it. Judge blocks US Postal Service from restricting mail-in voting | ReutersNPR · US News

The White House has reportedly asked the Justice Department to explore bringing new charges against David Hearn—the former Olympian in the Reflecting Pool case—just over a week after the department dropped the case because its own evidence showed he didn’t do it. Recall the sequence: Hearn was indicted on a felony for allegedly damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but prosecutors then moved to dismiss, telling the court that newly disclosed documents showed the damage came from a botched renovation, not vandalism. According to sources, President Trump was furious at U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for dismissing the case, and the White House has since asked the department to examine whether there’s a basis for a new charge—possibly a misdemeanor. The talks are described as preliminary, with no decision made, and Congressman Jamie Raskin has already launched a probe into the whole affair. Here’s why this is legally striking. The decision to drop the case wasn’t a technicality—it was the government concluding, on the evidence, that the underlying premise was false. To now go looking for new charges against the same person, at the White House’s urging and reportedly out of the president’s personal anger, raises the specter of vindictive prosecution—using the charging power not to pursue justice but to punish. The significance goes to the core of prosecutorial independence, the theme running through the Blanche confirmation fight and beyond: charging decisions are supposed to be driven by evidence and law, not by a president’s displeasure that a case was dropped. It’s a live test of whether that line still holds. Trump White House asked DOJ to explore new Reflecting Pool charges, sources say | ReutersUS News · MS NOW

And finally, the law graduates who suffered through California’s disastrous 2025 bar exam have reached a settlement in their class action against the company that administered it. You may remember the debacle: the February 2025 California bar exam, run by the vendor Meazure Learning, collapsed into login failures, software crashes, frozen screens, and lost answers, throwing thousands of aspiring lawyers into chaos on the single most important test of their careers. That fiasco spawned multiple lawsuits—the test-takers’ claims were consolidated into a class action in federal court—as well as a state audit and a legislative inquiry. This settlement resolves the graduates’ own case, and it’s distinct from the separate deal the State Bar itself reached with Meazure last month, in which the vendor agreed to pay the Bar $5.25 million and forgive $1.36 million in unpaid invoices. The significance connects directly to a story we covered a couple of weeks ago—the meltdown of the new NextGen exam in Washington State. Two different states, two different vendors and formats, the same underlying failure: the high-stakes gateway to the legal profession buckling under basic technology problems, and leaving the people trying to enter the profession to pick up the pieces. These settlements put a price on that failure—but they also intensify a growing question about whether the bar exam, as currently built and administered, is a reliable way to license lawyers at all. Law grads reach settlement in class action over botched California bar exam | ReutersBloomberg Law · ICLG

On August 11, 1919, President Friedrich Ebert signed the Weimar Constitution into force, creating the first parliamentary democracy in German history. It came into effect a few days later, ending the provisional government that had followed Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the fall of the monarchy. On paper, it was a strikingly modern and liberal document—and its story is one of the most important cautionary tales in all of constitutional law.

The Weimar Constitution rested on genuinely progressive foundations: popular sovereignty, a separation of powers, and an extensive bill of fundamental rights, including—remarkably for 1919—formal equality between men and women and the right to vote for both. It established a directly elected president, a parliament, the Reichstag, and a framework that looked, in many respects, like a model twentieth-century democracy. For a document drafted in the chaos of postwar Germany, it was an ambitious attempt to build a rights-respecting republic from the ground up.

But the Weimar Constitution is remembered today largely for the flaw that helped destroy it: Article 48, which gave the president sweeping power to rule by emergency decree, suspending civil liberties when he deemed public order to be threatened. That emergency clause was invoked more and more frequently as the republic’s politics fractured—and in 1933 it became the legal mechanism through which the Nazi regime dismantled democracy from the inside, using the constitution’s own emergency powers to suspend rights and seize dictatorial control. Which brings us back to today’s opening quote: the Weimar experience is the definitive real-world example of Justice Jackson’s warning that an emergency power, once available, “lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” The significance of August 11, 1919 is that it stands as an enduring lesson that a constitution’s protections are only as durable as the limits it places on emergency power—that a democracy can be subverted not in spite of its own laws, but through them.

Luigi Mangione is due back in court for a pretrial hearing ahead of his murder trial, set to begin September 8, in the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel. Mangione, who is 28, has pleaded not guilty to murder, weapons, and forgery charges brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, and he has separately pleaded not guilty to federal stalking charges. At today’s hearing before Justice Gregory Carro, the parties are expected to take up jury selection and the thorny question of public access to what is shaping up to be one of the most closely watched trials in years. Let’s talk about the real legal challenges here, because this case is unusual on several fronts. First, Mangione faces parallel state and federal prosecutions arising from the same killing—something the Constitution permits under the “dual sovereignty” doctrine, even though it can feel like being tried twice. Second, the defense has signaled it may argue that Mangione lost control of his actions due to an extreme mental-health breakdown, and notably has not conceded that he was even the shooter, despite prosecutors citing surveillance video, DNA, ballistics, and a notebook. And third—the elephant in the courtroom—is that this case became a cultural flashpoint, with a wave of public anger at the health-insurance industry curdling, in some corners, into sympathy for the accused. That makes jury selection genuinely difficult: finding impartial jurors amid saturation coverage and strong public feeling is exactly the kind of problem that tests the machinery of a fair trial. The significance is that beyond the headlines, this is a serious test of whether the system can give a fair, dispassionate trial to a defendant the public has turned into a symbol—which is precisely when the guarantees of criminal procedure matter most. Luigi Mangione due in court ahead of insurance CEO murder trial | ReutersUPI · 6abc

President Trump has said that whether to revive the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” is now up to his newly confirmed attorney general, Todd Blanche—a statement that lands like the punchline to a story we’ve been telling for weeks. Recall the sequence: Blanche rescinded the fund on the eve of his confirmation to win over Republican holdouts, but Trump then acknowledged that he himself never signed the rescission order, which left the door open. Now, with Blanche confirmed as attorney general by that razor-thin 50-49 vote, Trump is saying the future of the fund rests with Blanche. And that is exactly the scenario that critics warned about. Think back to what senators extracted as the price of confirmation: a promise to kill a fund that would have used taxpayer money to pay people, including January 6 defendants, who claimed to be victims of the prior Justice Department. But a promise made by the executive branch can be unmade by the executive branch, and here the president is openly signaling that his former personal lawyer, now running the Justice Department, could bring it back. The significance goes to the very heart of the concern that dogged Blanche’s nomination: the independence of the attorney general. When the president publicly frames the revival of a controversial payout fund as a decision for “his” attorney general to make, it underscores the worry that the Justice Department’s most consequential choices may run through the lens of the president’s personal and political interests. The confirmation fight is over, but the question it raised is very much alive. Trump says future weaponization fund is up to Blanche | ReutersForbes · Axios

A federal appeals court has cleared thousands of lawsuits to proceed against the major social-media companies over claims they deliberately designed their platforms to addict young users. The San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit rejected the bid by Meta, Google’s YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat to escape roughly 2,400 lawsuits consolidated in federal court, brought by states, municipalities, school districts, and individuals. The legal fight here is all about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—the 1996 law that shields online platforms from liability for content their users post. The companies argued that Section 230 also immunizes them from claims that they failed to warn about, or engineered, the addictive nature of their platforms. The court said no, and the distinction it drew is the crucial one: Section 230 protects a platform from being sued over what its users say, but it does not necessarily protect the platform’s own product-design choices—the infinite scroll, the algorithmic feeds, the notification schedules engineered to maximize engagement. Claims aimed at that design, the court reasoned, are different from claims aimed at user content. If you’ve been listening, you know this is the federal counterpart to everything we’ve tracked at the state level—the New Mexico judgment, the Tennessee trial, the multistate penalty fight. The significance is that the industry’s most powerful legal shield, Section 230, is being narrowed: plaintiffs are increasingly framing their cases around addictive design rather than harmful content, and courts are increasingly letting those cases through. That reframing may prove to be the key that unlocks the courthouse door for the whole wave of social-media harm litigation. US appeals court allows thousands of lawsuits against social media companies to proceed | ReutersNBC News · Al Jazeera

And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a question hiding underneath the AI gold rush: who’s actually paying for it? My starting point is a striking data point—Microsoft’s current federal tax expense fell year over year from about $14.1 billion to just $2.5 billion, even as its revenue surged. And a big part of that drop comes from accelerated deductions in last year’s massive 2025 tax law, which restored 100% bonus depreciation—letting companies write off the full cost of huge investments, like AI data centers, in the very first year.

My core argument is that the tax law is financing the AI infrastructure boom, but it isn’t creating it—and that distinction matters enormously before anyone declares the policy a success. The political narrative writes itself: capital spending soared after the tax cut, therefore the tax cut worked. But I think correlation is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there. Microsoft and its rivals aren’t pouring tens of billions into AI infrastructure because Congress rediscovered depreciation. They’re doing it because falling behind in AI could threaten their core businesses—it’s become about as close to a strategic necessity as it gets. And here’s the tell: Microsoft announced its roughly $80 billion AI data-center plan in a blog post in January 2025, a full six months before the tax law was even signed. The trajectory was public, budgeted, and well underway before the depreciation rules changed.

So my point to Congress is: prove it. Before congratulating yourselves, you owe the public evidence that these tax benefits actually changed corporate behavior rather than just rewarding investments companies were already racing to make. And I want to push back on the idea that this is “just” a timing benefit and therefore basically free. Timing isn’t free—letting a company keep its cash now in exchange for tax revenue later is like giving it an interest-free loan, and every dollar of accelerated depreciation is a dollar the Treasury can’t use for something else this year. That’s a real opportunity cost, felt in deficits or forgone public investment. My recommendation is concrete: Congress should require the Treasury and the Joint Committee on Taxation to regularly estimate how much of this investment is genuinely induced by the tax break, how much was simply pulled forward, and how much would have happened anyway. Because the public is quietly helping finance the AI revolution—and if Congress intends to make taxpayers silent investors in it, it should at least have the honesty to say so, and to show the math. Tax Law Is Funding the AI Infrastructure Boom, Not Creating It | Bloomberg Tax

On August 10, 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, becoming the second woman—and the first Jewish woman—ever to serve on it. She had been confirmed by the Senate just a week earlier by a lopsided 96 to 3, a margin that is almost unimaginable for a Supreme Court nominee today, and she took the seat vacated by the retiring Justice Byron White.

Ginsburg reached the Court after one of the most consequential legal careers of the twentieth century—much of it spent, as a litigator, dismantling sex discrimination brick by brick. In the 1970s, as head of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, she argued a series of cases before the very Court she would later join, persuading an all-male bench to recognize that treating men and women differently under the law often rested on nothing but stereotype. She was strategic and incremental, sometimes choosing male plaintiffs to show that gender lines cut both ways. On the Court, she became known for landmark majority opinions like United States v. Virginia, striking down the male-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute, and, later, for pointed dissents that made her an unlikely cultural icon.

The significance of August 10, 1993 is a fitting frame for today’s news, because it raises a question the Court is wrestling with right now: when justices come and when they go. Ginsburg famously declined to retire during President Obama’s second term, confident she could outlast the political moment; when she died in September 2020, President Trump filled her seat, shifting the Court’s balance for a generation. That episode turned “strategic retirement” from an academic debate into a live and painful one—and it’s the exact debate hanging over our second story today. Ginsburg’s life is a reminder both of how much a single justice can shape the law, and of how fraught the timing of a lifetime appointment has become.

The Senate has confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general, ending one of the most bruising cabinet fights of Trump’s second term with a razor-thin 50-49 vote taken overnight on Saturday. We’ve followed this saga from the beginning—the tense confirmation hearing, the stalled committee vote, the eleventh-hour deal to rescind the anti-weaponization fund—and this is where it lands. Two Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, broke ranks and voted no, citing concerns ranging from the Epstein files to that $1.8 billion fund; Senator Bill Cassidy provided the decisive vote, saying Blanche was the best option the president was likely to offer. Blanche, you’ll recall, was Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer before joining the Justice Department, and that’s the heart of why this was so contested: the concern that the nation’s top law-enforcement officer would serve the president personally rather than the law. The significance is twofold. First, the margin itself—a single vote, with defections from the president’s own party—signals just how uneasy even some Republicans were about Blanche’s independence. Second, remember what it took to get here: Blanche had to formally dismantle a controversial initiative to win confirmation. But as Democrats pointed out, that was an executive-branch promise, not a law, and the same executive branch can revisit it. So Blanche takes office as attorney general having made a concession whose durability is genuinely uncertain—confirmed, but on the narrowest possible terms and with the questions about his independence very much unresolved. Senate Republicans narrowly confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general | ReutersNPR · Washington Post

Justice Samuel Alito has put an end to a summer of retirement speculation, confirming that he intends to stay on the Supreme Court. “Obviously, I’m here for another term,” the 76-year-old justice said in an interview published in the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. The speculation had reached a fever pitch back in June, when a veteran Supreme Court reporter’s pre-written retirement story was published by mistake and then quickly retracted—but the talk never fully died down. What makes Alito’s statement legally and politically interesting is what he pushed back on. He explicitly rejected the suggestion that he should time his retirement strategically—stepping down now, while President Trump is in office and Republicans control the Senate, so that a younger conservative could be confirmed to replace him and hold the seat for decades. And that is exactly where today’s Ginsburg anniversary comes crashing in. Justice Ginsburg made the opposite bet: she declined calls to retire while President Obama could name her successor, and when she died in 2020, a president of the opposite party filled her seat and reshaped the Court. That history is precisely why so many now urge aging justices to retire strategically. Alito is declining to play that game—at least publicly. The significance is that this keeps a reliably conservative vote on the Court for now, but it also spotlights an uncomfortable feature of our system: lifetime tenure means the timing of a single retirement can shape constitutional law for a generation, and we increasingly expect justices to make that intensely personal decision with one eye on the electoral calendar. Justice Alito says he is staying on Supreme Court for another term | ReutersABC News · Fortune

And finally, a federal judge has approved more than $2.5 billion in settlements that New Jersey reached with DuPont, Chemours, Corteva, and 3M to resolve claims over contamination from PFAS—the “forever chemicals” that have become one of the biggest environmental-liability stories of the decade. Chief U.S. District Judge Renée Marie Bumb signed off on Friday, ending a legal battle that began back in 2019. A quick primer: PFAS are a family of synthetic chemicals used in everything from nonstick coatings to firefighting foam, and they’re called “forever chemicals” because they essentially don’t break down in the environment or the human body, and they’ve been linked to serious health harms. New Jersey sued under a natural-resource-damages theory—the idea that these companies polluted the state’s shared resources, its water and land, and must pay to restore them. The numbers are substantial: DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva will pay $875 million over 25 years, clean up four former industrial sites, and fund a $1.2 billion remediation account; 3M will pay up to $450 million. The judge called the deal “fair, reasonable and adequate” and even an “impressive windfall” given the risks of taking such a case to trial. The significance is that this is one of the largest state PFAS recoveries yet, and it fits the mass-tort pattern we’ve watched all summer—from talc to Roundup—where companies, facing enormous litigation exposure, choose certainty over trial. But this one has an environmental twist: beyond the money, it forces the actual cleanup of contaminated sites, and it gives every other state attorney general eyeing PFAS litigation a $2.5 billion data point to bring to their own negotiating table. New Jersey’s $2.5 billion ‘forever chemicals’ settlements with DuPont, 3M, others win court approval | ReutersPhiladelphia Inquirer · New Jersey Attorney General

On August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, one of the most consequential—and most cautionary—delegations of power in American history. The vote was overwhelming: unanimous in the House, and 88 to 2 in the Senate. The resolution authorized President Lyndon Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” in Southeast Asia—and it became the legal foundation for the escalation of the Vietnam War, all without a formal declaration of war.

The resolution passed after Johnson told the public that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had made unprovoked attacks on two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. In the years that followed, serious doubts emerged about what had actually happened—particularly regarding the second reported attack, which may never have occurred at all. Congress, acting on the president’s account and in a moment of Cold War urgency, handed the executive branch what amounted to a blank check for war. At the time there were only about 25,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam; that number would eventually exceed half a million.

The significance of August 7, 1964 is that it became the defining lesson in the dangers of Congress ceding its war powers to the president. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war precisely because the founders feared executive war-making, and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution showed what happens when the legislature abdicates that role. The backlash shaped a generation of law: Congress rescinded the resolution in 1970, and in 1973 passed the War Powers Resolution over President Nixon’s veto, trying to claw back some control over the commitment of American forces. It’s a permanent reminder—resonant on a day full of stories about the reach of executive power—that authority handed over in a crisis is very hard to take back.

The Trump administration’s campaign to force states to hand over their voter registration data has now lost twenty-one court cases in a row—an unbroken streak of defeats as the November midterms approach. According to a Reuters analysis, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking their voter rolls, and it has gone zero for twenty-one, with federal courts from Pennsylvania to California to Michigan, plus the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, all rejecting the effort. Here’s the detail that really tells the story: seven of the fifteen district judges who ruled against the administration were appointed by Trump himself, and some Republican state officials—in Idaho, Kentucky, Utah, and West Virginia—have resisted the requests too. This isn’t a partisan split; it’s a near-consensus rejection. The legal problem is structural. Under the Constitution, the administration of elections is primarily the job of the states, and courts have repeatedly found the federal government lacks the authority to simply demand statewide voter data. We’ve tracked the pieces of this all summer—the SAVE database fights, the threats to prosecute election officials, the mail-in voting order—and this is the throughline: a coordinated push for federal control over election machinery running headlong into a judiciary, staffed partly by the president’s own appointees, that keeps saying no. The significance is that the courts are holding a hard line on the decentralized structure of American elections, and doing it unanimously enough that it’s hard to dismiss as politics. It’s a fitting counterpoint to yesterday’s Voting Rights Act anniversary: sixty years apart, the fights over who controls the ballot continue. Analysis: Trump loses 21 straight court battles for state voter rolls as midterms near | ReutersCBS News · Brennan Center

President Trump has signed two new executive orders attempting to narrow birthright citizenship—despite the fact that the Supreme Court rejected his last attempt just over a month ago. Recall that on June 30, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil, striking down his earlier order. These new orders are narrower. The White House is taking aim at “birth tourism”—foreigners traveling to the U.S. specifically to give birth—and at denying birthright citizenship to children of some foreign diplomatic staff, with the possibility of extending limits to U.S. territories later. It’s worth being precise here, because the two pieces are legally very different. The diplomatic-staff piece actually sits on firmer ground: the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to those “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and children of accredited foreign diplomats have long been recognized as a genuine exception. But the birth-tourism piece runs straight into the June ruling, which held that a child’s citizenship doesn’t depend on the immigration status or purpose of the parents. And crucially, these are executive orders—they set executive-branch policy, but they don’t carry the force of a statute or override a constitutional holding. After his June loss, Trump had called on Congress to act; instead he’s gone back to the executive-order well. The significance is a real test of what a president can do after the Supreme Court has ruled against him on constitutional grounds. Legal experts say it’s unclear what practical effect these orders can even have, and fresh legal challenges are all but certain. It’s an attempt to chip at the edges of a ruling the administration couldn’t overturn head-on. Trump to sign orders on birthright citizenship, Axios reports | ReutersCBS News · Al Jazeera

And finally, a New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a teen mental-health fund and to substantially overhaul how its platforms work for young users—one of the most significant rulings yet in the wave of litigation over social media and children. Judge Bryan Biedscheid in Santa Fe found that Meta created a “public nuisance” in New Mexico, siding with Attorney General Raúl Torrez—the same AG who, as we noted yesterday, is suing the Justice Department over the Epstein files. Torrez had accused Meta of designing its products to addict young users and failing to protect children from sexual exploitation on its platforms. The “public nuisance” theory is worth flagging, because it’s the same legal tool that drove the big opioid settlements: the idea that a company’s conduct created a widespread harm to the public that it can be forced to help abate. And the money is only part of it. The judge imposed a five-year decree requiring concrete design changes—monthly limits on teens’ time on Facebook and Instagram, restrictions on notifications, tighter controls on adult contact with minors, safeguards around AI chatbots, and enhanced review of child sexual abuse reports. This lands amid everything we’ve tracked: the Tennessee trial that just opened, the multistate penalty fight, the bellwether cases. Meta says it will appeal and that it’s been working to remove harmful content. The significance is that a court hasn’t just put a price on Meta’s conduct—it has ordered the company to redesign its products for kids, backed by the public-nuisance theory. If that approach holds up on appeal, it’s a template other states will follow, and it moves the social-media reckoning from damages into the far more consequential territory of forced design change. New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567 mln teen mental health fund | ReutersWashington Post · Yahoo Finance

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, arguably the most effective civil-rights statute in American history. Johnson signed it at the Capitol, and after a ceremony in the Rotunda, he moved to the President’s Room near the Senate Chamber—the same room where Abraham Lincoln had signed a bill freeing enslaved people pressed into Confederate service—flanked by congressional leaders, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and others who had fought and bled for this moment.

The Act was a direct response to the machinery of disenfranchisement that Southern states had built after Reconstruction. For nearly a century, literacy tests, poll taxes, and outright intimidation had kept Black Americans from the ballot box despite the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee. The Voting Rights Act attacked that machinery head-on: it banned literacy tests, and—crucially—in Section 5, it required jurisdictions with the worst histories of discrimination to “preclear” any change to their voting rules with the federal government before those changes could take effect. It also authorized federal examiners to register voters directly. The impact was immediate and staggering: over a quarter-million new Black voters registered by the end of 1965 alone.

The significance of August 6, 1965 is that it transformed American democracy by finally making the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment real. But it’s also a living, contested statute, which is why it belongs in the news and not just the history books. In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court effectively disabled the Section 5 preclearance requirement, holding that the formula for deciding which jurisdictions were covered was outdated. In the years since, fights over voting rules, voter rolls, and ballot access—many of which we’ve covered on this show—have unfolded on the terrain the Voting Rights Act created and that Shelby County reshaped. Sixty years on, the argument the Act tried to settle is still very much open.

A court filing has revealed the striking scale of the aftermath of one of the biggest separation-of-powers rulings in years: the U.S. government has already refunded about $100 billion in tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down. According to the filing in the U.S. Court of International Trade, roughly $100 billion in refunds—duties plus interest—had been completed as of the end of July, representing more than half of the $166 billion the government had collected under the invalidated tariffs. Here’s the backstory. After returning to office, President Trump used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—a law meant for genuine national emergencies—to impose sweeping tariffs on trading partners. This February, the Supreme Court ruled he had exceeded his authority, holding that IEEPA doesn’t hand the president that kind of open-ended tariff power. Now the bill is coming due, and the refunds go to the importers who paid the duties in the first place. There’s a direct line from this to a story we covered last week: after losing the IEEPA tariffs at the Supreme Court, the administration reached for Section 338, a dormant 1930s trade statute, to hit Canada—a workaround that itself invites fresh legal challenge. The significance is a vivid, hundred-billion-dollar lesson in the cost of executive overreach. When a president stretches a statute past its limits and the courts say no, the consequences aren’t abstract—they’re measured in massive refunds and a scramble for new legal authority. It’s the separation of powers with a price tag attached. US refunds $100 billion in tariffs struck down by Supreme Court, filing shows | ReutersNBC News · US News

New data shows that entry-level hiring at the country’s largest law firms has fallen—and the reasons say a lot about where the profession is heading. According to the National Association for Law Placement, firms with more than 500 lawyers pulled back on hiring associates straight out of law school, and for the first time in memory, those firms brought in more lateral associates—attorneys with prior experience—than fresh graduates. Laterals made up about 49% of associate hires, while entry-level grads fell to roughly 38%, a sharp drop from the 46% share they’d held. Three forces are driving this, and the middle one should get your attention. First, clients increasingly want sophisticated, autonomous counsel who can hit the ground running. Second—and this is the newsy part—artificial intelligence is absorbing exactly the kind of tasks that used to be assigned to first-year associates: document review, initial research, first drafts. Third, there’s a deep pool of experienced lateral talent available to poach. The significance is both immediate and long-term. In the short run, it’s a harder market for new graduates entering six-figure debt into a profession that’s hiring fewer of them. But there’s a real structural risk the report flags: the junior-associate years are how firms train the next generation of partners. If AI hollows out entry-level work and firms stop hiring and mentoring juniors, they may find themselves, a decade from now, with no mid-level talent to promote—having automated away the bottom of the pipeline that feeds the top. It’s a preview of a question every knowledge profession is about to face. Entry-level hiring at large US law firms declined for first time in a decade, data shows | ReutersLaw.com (American Lawyer) · NALP

New Mexico has sued the U.S. Justice Department for access to the unredacted files on Jeffrey Epstein, accusing the federal government of stonewalling the state’s own investigation. New Mexico’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez, reopened the state’s Epstein investigation earlier this year and requested the unredacted federal files to identify people—visitors and staff at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch property in New Mexico—who allegedly participated in or witnessed crimes. The state says the DOJ reneged on a 2019 arrangement under which New Mexico paused its own probe and turned evidence over to federal authorities in exchange for continued information-sharing. The Justice Department counters that under the Epstein Files Transparency Act and protective court orders, it is neither required nor permitted to disclose victim-identifying information, and that New Mexico has offered “no lawful basis” for such sweeping disclosures. Torrez put the stakes plainly: the state says it needs to see those files before it can decide whether to charge anyone. The significance is a genuine legal collision between two legitimate interests. On one side is a state prosecutor who says he can’t do justice—can’t bring charges—without evidence the federal government is holding. On the other are real statutory and court-ordered protections for the privacy of victims, which exist for good reason in a case defined by the sexual abuse of young women and girls. It’s also another chapter in the long-running, politically charged fight over transparency in the Epstein files, an issue that has repeatedly surfaced around this administration. A court will now have to weigh a state’s investigative need against federal victim-protection rules. New Mexico sues US government for access to Epstein files | ReutersAl Jazeera· UPI

And finally, OpenAI has asked a federal judge to throw out Apple’s lawsuit accusing it of stealing trade secrets—a case we covered when Apple filed it back in July. To recap, Apple alleged that OpenAI misappropriated its confidential information to jump-start its own push into consumer hardware, using former Apple employees, aggressive recruiting, and supply-chain connections. In its motion to dismiss, OpenAI calls the allegations “baseless” and makes a pointed argument: “OpenAI has no use, need, or desire for Apple’s trade secrets,” its lawyers wrote, insisting it’s “building something entirely new and different from anything at Apple.” OpenAI’s core defense is to reframe the story—not as theft of secrets, but as ordinary competition for talent. It says its real interest is in recruiting top engineers, many of whom simply chose to leave Apple for more exciting work. And that reframing goes right to the heart of trade-secret law. Hiring a competitor’s employees is completely legal—people are free to change jobs and use the general skills and knowledge they’ve built. What’s illegal is taking or using the former employer’s specific, protected confidential information. So the whole case turns on which side of that line the conduct falls: lawful talent raid, or unlawful secret-grab. The judge is set to hear arguments on October 1, and OpenAI faces an August 17 deadline to respond to Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction. The significance is that this is shaping up to be a marquee test of where the law draws the line between competing for people and stealing their knowledge—a question that will define a lot of fights in the AI talent wars.OpenAI asks US judge to dismiss Apple’s trade secrets case | ReutersBloomberg · Axios

On August 5, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Revenue Act of 1861, and with it created the first federal income tax in the history of the United States. The country was three months into the Civil War, the Union’s costs were exploding, and the government needed money on a scale the old system of tariffs and land sales simply couldn’t provide. So Congress reached for something new: a tax of three percent on annual incomes over $800.

The 1861 income tax was, in practice, a bit of a false start. The $800 threshold meant only a small slice of the population owed anything, the administrative machinery to collect it barely existed, and in fact no income tax was ever actually collected under the 1861 Act—it was superseded the next year by the Revenue Act of 1862, which built the real apparatus, including the office of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the direct ancestor of the modern IRS. But the significance of August 5, 1861 is conceptual and enduring: it was the moment the federal government first asserted the power to tax the incomes of individual Americans directly.

That assertion would be contested for decades—the Supreme Court struck down a later income tax in 1895, and it took the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 to settle the question for good. But the line runs straight from Lincoln’s wartime measure to the entire modern federal tax system. It’s a fitting anniversary for a day when one of our stories is about the fees and sanctions flowing from a lawsuit against the IRS—the very institution whose origins trace back to this Civil War revenue scramble. The income tax was born of necessity, in the middle of the gravest crisis the country ever faced, and it’s been at the center of American political and legal argument ever since.

After Trump’s roughly $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS was thrown out as brought in “bad faith,” a federal judge ordered him to pay the legal fees of those who fought it—and now the Justice Department is fighting the size of that bill. In this particular case, the challengers are seeking a fairly modest sum, around $43,500. But it’s part of a much bigger pattern: according to a Bloomberg analysis, attorneys have sought fees topping $100,000 in at least ten cases over the past year, totaling more than $2.5 million, and the DOJ is pushing courts to throw out or shrink many of those requests. Here’s the legal mechanism at work. Ordinarily in American litigation, each side pays its own lawyers—that’s the “American rule.” But courts can shift fees onto a party as a sanction when a lawsuit is frivolous or brought in bad faith, which is exactly what happened with the IRS suit, a case that also named Trump’s sons and alleged harm from the leak of the family’s tax records. Fee-shifting like this is meant to deter abusive litigation and to make whole the people forced to defend against it. The significance—and the irony—is that after a court found the underlying suit was an abuse of the judicial process, the government is now spending its lawyers’ time contesting comparatively small fee awards owed to the people who were dragged into it. And because the DOJ is doing the contesting, it’s taxpayers funding both sides of that fight. It’s a small-dollar story that illustrates a large-dollar problem: what happens, and who pays, when the government itself is found to have litigated in bad faith. Trump fights fees for challengers in lawsuit against IRS | ReutersYahoo Finance (Bloomberg) · AOL

A federal appeals court has overturned a ban on Perplexity’s AI-powered shopping agents accessing Amazon—and it’s a genuinely landmark ruling for the future of “agentic” artificial intelligence. Back in March, a court had temporarily barred Perplexity’s shopping tool, built into its Comet browser, from operating on Amazon’s platform. Amazon’s legal theory rested on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act—the federal anti-hacking statute that makes it illegal to access a computer “without authorization.” Amazon argued that when Perplexity’s AI agent logs into Amazon and shops on a user’s behalf, that’s unauthorized access. The appeals court disagreed, and the reasoning is what makes this important: the court found Amazon unlikely to succeed, concluding that it was Perplexity’s users—real people, with real Amazon accounts—who were accessing the platform, not Perplexity itself. The AI agent was simply acting as the user’s tool. This is the first time a federal appeals court has addressed whether AI agents acting on behalf of users can lawfully access online platforms, and that question is about to be everywhere. We’re heading into a world where your AI assistant books your travel, does your shopping, and manages your accounts—and the legal system has to decide whether that’s you using a tool, or a company trespassing on someone else’s system. The significance is that this ruling plants an early flag on the side of the user: if you’re authorized to be somewhere online, your AI agent acting for you is authorized too. Expect this to be cited constantly as the agentic-AI economy collides with decades-old computer-access law. Amazon loses US court ban on Perplexity’s AI shopping tools | ReutersBloomberg Law · Engadget

A federal judge has dismissed the last of the January 6 Oath Keepers prosecutions—but he did so under vocal protest, in a rebuke that is itself the story. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta granted the Justice Department’s motion to drop the cases against nine remaining Oath Keepers members tied to the Capitol attack, closing out the final chapter of the January 6 prosecutions. The dismissal flows from the administration’s decision, on the first day of Trump’s second term, to drop all pending January 6 cases. Here’s the legal framework and the tension inside it. Under the rules of criminal procedure, prosecutors have broad power to dismiss charges, and courts generally must defer to that call—the executive branch, not the judge, decides whom to prosecute. Mehta acknowledged the government had the authority. But he made unmistakably clear he thought it was wrong, writing that “today’s epilog diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy—the peaceful transfer of presidential power—to buckle.” That’s extraordinary language from a sitting federal judge. The significance is a stark illustration of the limits of judicial power against prosecutorial discretion. A judge who presided over these seditious-conspiracy trials, who saw the evidence and entered the convictions, had to sign the order erasing them because the decision to prosecute—or not—belongs to the executive. He could register his profound disagreement for the historical record, but he could not stop it. It’s a study in where one branch’s power ends and another’s begins. US judge grants Justice Department bid to dismiss Oath Keepers prosecutions | ReutersWashington Post · CNN

And finally, a divided federal appeals court has ruled that the EPA cannot claw back roughly $20 billion in clean-energy grants—another decision drawing a hard line around executive power over money that Congress has already committed. The D.C. Circuit restored an injunction against EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s move to terminate grants that had been awarded to nonprofit groups from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program Congress created in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to finance renewable-energy projects, including in communities historically shut out of green financing. Zeldin had frozen the money in early 2025, saying it didn’t align with the agency’s priorities and might be tainted by fraud, waste, and abuse. The court wasn’t persuaded: six judges concluded that terminating the grants and clawing back the funds “based solely on a policy disagreement” likely violated the Inflation Reduction Act, and pointedly noted the EPA gave no assurance it would leave the money alone if the injunction were lifted. This should sound familiar—it’s the same principle we saw when a judge blocked the administration from canceling grants it deemed inconsistent with its priorities. The significance is the recurring constitutional boundary of this era: when Congress appropriates money for a purpose and an agency awards it, a new administration generally can’t just unwind those commitments because it dislikes the policy. The EPA says it’s reviewing the decision and may take it to the Supreme Court—which would tee up a definitive answer on just how much power a president has to stop spending money Congress told him to spend. EPA cannot block billions in climate grants, US appeals court rules | ReutersUS News

On August 4, 1735, a New York jury acquitted printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel—a verdict that planted one of the earliest seeds of freedom of the press in America. Zenger published the New York Weekly Journal, which had spent a year printing scathing criticism of the colonial governor, William Cosby. For that, Zenger was jailed for nearly ten months and put on trial for libeling the governor.

Here’s what made the case so important. Under the English common law of the time, truth was no defense to a charge of seditious libel—in fact, the more true the criticism, the more “dangerous” it was thought to be, because it was more likely to undermine the government’s authority. The judge instructed the jury accordingly: they were only to decide whether Zenger had published the words, and the court would decide whether they were libelous. But Zenger’s brilliant lawyer, Andrew Hamilton of Philadelphia, went over the judge’s head and appealed directly to the jury, arguing that they had the power to weigh the truth of what Zenger printed—and that truthful criticism of government could not be a crime. The jury agreed, and acquitted.

The Zenger verdict didn’t immediately change the formal law—truth wouldn’t be firmly established as a defense to libel for decades—but its influence was enormous. It established, in the American mind, two ideas that would prove foundational: that truth ought to be a defense to a charge of defaming the government, and that a jury of ordinary citizens could stand between the state and a critic it wanted to silence. Those principles run straight through the First Amendment and into modern press-freedom law, including New York Times v. Sullivan two centuries later. The significance of August 4, 1735 is that it’s a origin point for the American conviction that the freedom to criticize those in power is not a privilege the government grants, but a liberty the people hold—an idea that, as today’s stories show, is still very much contested.

Todd Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general has cleared its biggest obstacle: the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to advance him after he cut a deal with the Republican holdouts who had threatened to sink it. We’ve tracked this saga closely—the stalled vote, Senator Cornyn’s refusal, and then Blanche’s move over the weekend to formally rescind the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund.” The final piece came in a deal struck late Sunday with Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who had demanded written assurances about the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns. With those assurances in hand, the committee’s Republicans are now expected to line up behind him. It’s worth noting the Democrats’ objection, because it’s a substantive legal point: they argue Blanche’s rescission order doesn’t actually prevent the administration from reviving the fund after he’s confirmed, and they’re calling for legislation to bar it permanently. In other words, an executive-branch promise can be undone by the same executive branch, which is exactly why they want a statute. The significance is that advice-and-consent worked as a real check—Blanche had to publicly dismantle a controversial initiative to win the votes—but it also exposed the limits of that check. A confirmation deal extracts a promise; it doesn’t write a law. The nation’s next top law-enforcement officer advances, having conceded the point, but with the durability of that concession still an open question.

Blanche set to clear nomination hurdle after deal wins senators’ vote | ReutersUS News (AP) · CNN

A coalition of two dozen Democratic-led states has sued to block a new federal policy that would let immigration authorities get their hands on personal data about low-income families enrolled in a cash-assistance program. The policy would allow the Administration for Children and Families—which runs welfare programs—to share detailed personal information about benefit recipients with other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, and it’s set to take effect August 11. The states’ legal theory is twofold. First, they argue the policy violates the Administrative Procedure Act—the law that requires federal agencies to follow proper procedures and not act arbitrarily—by ignoring existing data-sharing restrictions and slapping new conditions on federal funding. Second, they invoke the Constitution. And a separate suit filed in Brooklyn by civil-rights and privacy groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, adds a Privacy Act claim—the federal statute that limits how the government can use and share the personal data it collects. Here’s why this matters beyond the courtroom. Programs like this cash-assistance program serve some of the most vulnerable families in the country, and the fear that applying for help could funnel your information to immigration enforcement produces a powerful chilling effect—people forgo food and cash aid they’re legally entitled to. It’s the same dynamic behind the “public charge” fights, and fittingly, today marks the anniversary of the 1882 immigration law that first tied benefits to immigration status. The significance is a collision between the machinery of the welfare state and the machinery of immigration enforcement, with data privacy law as the battleground—and courts once again asked whether the administration followed the rules before repurposing sensitive government data.

States sue over Trump policy of sharing benefits data with immigration authorities | ReutersDetroit News (AP) · UPI

And a striking piece of accountability journalism: a Reuters investigation has found that judges in 75 separate cases have ruled that the Trump administration violated First Amendment rights—this despite the president campaigning as a free-speech champion who vowed to end what he called years of “government censorship.” The 75 rulings span the full range of First Amendment protections: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press. According to the reporting, judges have repeatedly found that the administration chilled or suppressed the speech of citizens and groups who oppose its agenda—an unusually broad pattern of judicial pushback on constitutional grounds. A few caveats worth stating plainly, in fairness: many of these are trial-level rulings, some are preliminary, and the administration disputes them and is appealing in various cases, so not every one is a final word. But the sheer volume is the story. When dozens of federal judges, appointed by presidents of both parties, independently conclude that the same administration is infringing the First Amendment, that’s a signal that’s hard to wave away. The significance ties directly to today’s Zenger anniversary. The whole American tradition of free expression rests on the idea that the government cannot punish or silence its critics—and this reporting suggests that principle is being tested, and defended by the courts, on an extraordinary scale. It’s a reminder that the First Amendment is not self-enforcing; it lives or dies in the accumulation of individual rulings by judges willing to say no.

Trump vowed to ‘bring free speech back.’ Judges in 75 cases ruled that he has stifled it | ReutersCNN · Yahoo News

And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on New York City’s brand-new pied-à-terre tax—the city’s first surcharge on high-value second homes—and my basic take is that it’s good policy being undermined by a messy rollout. The trigger for the piece is a striking number: the city’s initial roll flagged about 31,000 potentially liable properties, versus the roughly 10,000 officials had projected. That gap set off a backlash, and I wanted to separate the policy from the implementation.

On the policy, I come down in favor. High-value second homes are actually a really sensible tax base, because they represent concentrated, largely immobile wealth. That’s the key word—immobile. A wealthy person’s labor income or investments can pick up and leave, but a condo can’t reincorporate in Delaware or establish residency in West Palm Beach. It just sits there, and its value depends overwhelmingly on the city around it—the transit, the sanitation, the parks, the public safety, the cultural institutions. So a well-calibrated surcharge is really just asking people who hold significant, location-keyed wealth to return a share of the value the city itself creates and preserves. Across the OECD, the top wealth quintile holds roughly three-quarters of secondary-real-estate wealth, so this is a genuinely progressive base, and economists generally find recurring taxes on immovable property are among the least damaging to growth.

Where I get critical is the data and the process. That 31,000-property list isn’t a final bill—it’s a preliminary screening pool, and many of those owners will be winnowed out. But the size of it exposes how hard it is for City Hall to tell a true second home from a rental, a family residence, or a property held in trust, using fragmented government records. Property records can identify an expensive apartment; they’re much worse at revealing who’s actually sleeping in it, and when. My core recommendation is transparency: every formal notice should include a plain-language reason code explaining exactly why a property was flagged and what records produced that conclusion, and the city should publish aggregate data on how many determinations are screened out, appealed, reversed, and upheld. The burden of the government’s record gaps shouldn’t fall on homeowners forced to rebut an unexplained conclusion. So my bottom line is that a second-home surcharge can be progressive, economically sound, and administratively workable—but only if the government is willing to show, clearly, whom it means to tax and how it got there. Make the first two years a genuinely transparent implementation period, and the policy earns its legitimacy before the real revenue arrives.

New York City’s Second-Home Tax Is Good Policy With a Data Issue | Bloomberg Tax

On August 3, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Immigration Act of 1882, the first comprehensive federal law regulating immigration into the United States. Before this, immigration had largely been left to the individual states; this Act marked the moment the federal government claimed the subject as its own, and it built the first federal machinery for controlling who could enter the country.

The Act did two enduring things. First, it imposed a “head tax”—fifty cents on every immigrant arriving by ship—to fund the administration of immigration, and it placed enforcement under the Secretary of the Treasury, creating the country’s first federal immigration bureaucracy. Second, and more consequentially for the law that followed, it created categories of people who would be excluded: convicts, the “insane,” and—in language that would echo for the next century and a half—”any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” That public-charge concept, born here in 1882, is the same doctrine we discussed just a couple of weeks ago when the current administration revived an expansive version of the public-charge rule.

The significance of August 3, 1882 is that it is the taproot of the entire federal immigration system. Coming just months after the Chinese Exclusion Act, it established the foundational premise that the national government decides the terms of admission to the United States, and it introduced the framework—head taxes, excludable categories, federal enforcement—on which everything since has been built. It’s worth sitting with the tension in the date: 1882 is also, almost exactly, the moment Emma Lazarus was composing “The New Colossus,” with its welcome to the tired and the poor. The law and the poem were born together, and the distance between them—between the statute’s exclusions and the sonnet’s embrace—is a distance the country has been arguing about ever since.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has formally rescinded the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” clearing what had been the biggest obstacle to his confirmation. If you were with us last week, this is the resolution of that story. The fund—created by a Justice Department order back in May—would have used taxpayer money to compensate people who claimed to be victims of the prior administration’s Justice Department, a group that notably included those convicted in connection with the January 6 Capitol attack. Republican Senator John Cornyn had refused to support Blanche’s nomination until the fund was killed, and this week Blanche did exactly that, signing an order declaring the May directive “rescinded” with “no force or effect,” and, as part of the deal, agreeing to limit the related immunity arrangement so it applies only to the IRS and not to other agencies. The significance ties together several threads we’ve followed all summer. This fund grew out of the same collusive IRS settlement that a federal judge voided as a sham, and it sat at the center of concerns about the Justice Department being used to reward the president’s allies. That a senator from the president’s own party forced its formal repeal as the price of confirmation is advice-and-consent working as a genuine check—and it means the incoming attorney general takes office having had to publicly dismantle one of the administration’s most criticized initiatives before the Senate would trust him with the job.

Acting US Attorney General Blanche rescinds ‘anti-weaponization’ fund before confirmation vote | ReutersNPR · NBC News

In a court filing, Capital One has disclosed for the first time that it closed more than 300 Trump Organization bank accounts back in 2021 after an anti-money-laundering review—the first time a bank has formally tied such concerns to its decision to cut off the president’s family business. The context is a lawsuit: the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and Eric Trump sued Capital One in Florida last year, alleging the bank “debanked” them for political reasons, having notified the Trump Organization of the closures in March 2021, just weeks after January 6. Capital One’s filing reframes that story entirely. The bank says its compliance team did precisely what federal regulators expect—flagging accounts that raised anti-money-laundering red flags and acting on them. Here’s the legal machinery underneath. Under the Bank Secrecy Act and related anti-money-laundering rules, banks are legally obligated to monitor their customers, file suspicious-activity reports, and, when warranted, close accounts; failing to do so can expose a bank to serious regulatory penalties. Importantly, Capital One did not accuse the Trump Organization of actual money laundering—flagging a risk and proving a crime are very different things. The significance is that this is a clean collision between two hot legal debates: the “debanking” complaint that financial institutions are dropping customers for political or ideological reasons, and the reality that banks operate under mandatory AML obligations that require them to shed risky accounts. A court will now have to decide which of those framings fits what Capital One actually did.

Capital One says it closed Trump Organization’s accounts after anti-money-laundering review | ReutersCNBC · NPR

Tom Goldstein, the prominent Supreme Court advocate and SCOTUSblog founder we’ve been following, has launched his appeal—asking the Fourth Circuit to overturn his twelve convictions for tax and mortgage fraud and to undo his six-year prison sentence. Recall the case: a jury found that Goldstein concealed millions from a secret high-stakes poker life, diverted his law firm’s fees to cover gambling debts, and lied to mortgage lenders; he was sentenced to 72 months and ordered to pay more than $3 million in restitution. The appeal is a reminder that even a resource-intensive, headline conviction gets a second look, and Goldstein is raising some genuinely lawyerly arguments. The most interesting is venue—the constitutional requirement that a defendant be tried in the right place. His team argues that while prosecutors proved he filled out loan applications in Maryland, they never proved from where he actually transmitted the documents, leaning on a recent Fourth Circuit decision that took venue seriously. He’s also challenging the admission of statements he made in media interviews and the wording of the jury instructions. Commentators describe his path as daunting, and it is—appellate courts rarely overturn convictions, and factual findings get real deference. But the significance is that these are exactly the kinds of technical, procedural issues on which serious appeals are built. Goldstein spent his career winning cases at the top of the appellate system; now he’s testing whether that same system will scrutinize the government’s work in convicting him.

US Supreme Court lawyer Tom Goldstein appeals tax conviction | ReutersLaw360 · Bloomberg Law

And finally, the Justice Department has moved to drop its criminal case against David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist charged with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool—and the reason is striking. We covered Hearn’s not-guilty plea back in July, when his lawyers called the prosecution an abuse of power built on a “concocted narrative.” It turns out that characterization may have been closer to the truth than the charge. In a 20-page filing, prosecutors acknowledged that evidence received after Hearn was indicted shows the damage to the pool “was the result of flawed installation by the contractor,” compounded by “the rush to complete the project” before the America 250 celebrations around July 4. In other words: not vandalism—shoddy construction. The U.S. Attorney’s office said it only learned of the flawed-installation evidence after a grand jury had already indicted him. The significance goes right to prosecutorial power and its risks. A 67-year-old man was detained for hours and charged with a felony over damage that, by the government’s own admission, he didn’t cause. The case collapsing is the system correcting itself—but only after Hearn spent weeks as a felony defendant. It’s a real-world illustration of a point we keep returning to: the decision to charge is one of the most consequential and least reviewable powers in the legal system, and when it’s exercised on a flawed factual premise, the damage to the person charged is done long before the dismissal.

US Justice Department drops case against former US Olympian over Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool | ReutersPBS NewsHour · CNN

On July 31, 1790, the United States issued its first patent under the newly enacted Patent Act of 1790. The patent was granted to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for an improved method of producing potash and pearl ash, chemicals widely used in fertilizer, soapmaking, and glass production. President George Washington, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph personally signed the patent—a reminder that, in the nation’s earliest years, the federal government itself directly evaluated patent applications.

The Patent Act of 1790 was one of Congress’s first major efforts to implement the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 authorizes Congress to “promote the progress of science and useful arts” by granting inventors exclusive rights to their discoveries for limited periods. Rather than viewing patents as natural rights, the Framers saw them as legal incentives designed to encourage innovation while ultimately benefiting the public.

The original patent system was remarkably small. A board consisting of Jefferson, Randolph, and Secretary of War Henry Knox decided whether an invention was “sufficiently useful and important” to merit protection. As the country industrialized, that system quickly became overwhelmed, leading Congress to create a more formal Patent Office in 1836 with professional examiners and standardized procedures.

The first patent issued on this day marked the beginning of what has become one of the world’s most influential intellectual property systems. Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants hundreds of thousands of patents each year, and patent law continues to shape industries ranging from pharmaceuticals and biotechnology to software and artificial intelligence.

President Donald Trump is pressing Senate Republicans to confirm acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose nomination has stalled because of a dispute over a proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis have withheld their support while demanding written assurances that the Justice Department will not establish the program. The fund emerged from a proposed settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit accusing the Internal Revenue Service of improperly handling his tax records. Critics contend that the program could use taxpayer money to compensate Trump supporters who claim they were unfairly targeted by federal authorities, including people investigated or prosecuted in connection with the January 6 Capitol attack. Trump defended the proposal by arguing that victims of government misconduct deserve compensation and maintained that he would not personally benefit from it. Cornyn and Tillis have also objected to a separate provision that could shield Trump and certain associates from future IRS audits. Blanche reportedly met with the senators as the Justice Department attempted to resolve the disagreement. Even without confirmation, Blanche may be able to remain acting attorney general while his nomination is pending, provided that Trump does not formally withdraw it and the Senate does not reject it.

Trump defends ‘anti-weaponization’ fund as Blanche nomination stalls | Reuters

New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued prediction-market operator Kalshi, alleging that the company is offering illegal gambling without a state license. Kalshi allows customers to trade contracts tied to the outcomes of sporting events, elections, television programs, and other future events. New York argues that these transactions function as wagers because customers risk money on outcomes they cannot control. State officials also object to Kalshi allowing customers between the ages of 18 and 20 to participate, while New York generally requires mobile sports bettors to be at least 21. The lawsuit seeks to stop the allegedly unlawful activity, recover Kalshi’s gains, impose civil penalties worth three times those gains, and obtain restitution for customers. James previously brought similar cases against prediction-market platforms operated by Coinbase and Gemini. Kalshi argues that its contracts are federally regulated derivatives under the exclusive authority of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than gambling products governed by individual states. The CFTC has supported that position and filed an emergency request seeking to prevent New York from enforcing its gambling laws against the company. Courts in several other states have already restricted Kalshi’s operations, while a federal judge in New York recently declined to protect the company from state enforcement. The litigation could determine whether prediction markets must comply with state gambling laws, federal commodities regulation, or both.

New York Says Kalshi’s Prediction Markets Are Illegal Gambling

Former federal health official Anthony Fauci could face a contempt-of-Congress referral after refusing to answer more than 100 questions during a Senate investigation into the government’s response to COVID-19. Senator Rand Paul, the Republican chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the panel would consider referring Fauci for prosecution. Federal law makes it a crime for a person summoned by Congress to deliberately refuse to provide relevant testimony or requested documents. Congress cannot prosecute the offense itself, however, so a committee must approve a referral, followed by the full Senate or House, before the Justice Department decides whether to pursue charges. Reuters reported that a Senate referral would likely require 60 votes, meaning some Democratic support would be necessary. Prosecutors would then need to persuade a grand jury that Fauci intentionally refused to answer questions that fell within the committee’s legitimate investigation. Fauci would likely argue that the Fifth Amendment allowed him to remain silent because his testimony could expose him to criminal liability. President Joe Biden previously pardoned Fauci for possible federal offenses committed between 2014 and January 2025, but that pardon does not cover conduct occurring after Biden left office. The pardon creates an unsettled legal issue because courts have not clearly decided whether a witness may invoke the Fifth Amendment regarding conduct already covered by a presidential pardon. Even if Congress approves a referral, the Justice Department and a Washington grand jury would still have separate opportunities to decline the case.

Could Fauci face criminal charges for refusing Senate COVID questions? | Reuters

On July 30, 1619, in a wooden church at Jamestown, twenty-two elected representatives took their seats alongside the governor and his council, and the first representative legislative assembly in what would become the United States came to order. This was the Virginia General Assembly—soon known through its elected chamber as the House of Burgesses—and it marks the beginning of self-government by elected representatives in America.

The mechanics were modest and the setting brutal: two burgesses were elected from each of the colony’s eleven settlements, and they met in sweltering heat so severe that one burgess died during the six-day session. But the principle was revolutionary. Under instructions from the Virginia Company, Governor George Yeardley had called forth a body in which colonists—not just a distant crown or company—would have a hand in making the laws that governed them. It became the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World, and it planted an idea that would grow over the next century and a half into a full-blown theory of government by consent.

The significance of July 30, 1619 is that so much of American constitutional order traces back to this cramped, miserable first session. The House of Burgesses trained generations of colonial leaders in the practice of legislative self-government; it was the venue where figures like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson cut their political teeth; and its example fed directly into the revolutionary conviction that legitimate power flows from the consent of the governed and is exercised through elected representatives. It’s a fitting anniversary for a day when one of our stories turns on that very principle—the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise and consent on who leads the Justice Department.

President Trump and the Justice Department have asked the Supreme Court to throw out the $83 million defamation verdict that writer E. Jean Carroll won against him, arguing that he can’t be sued for statements he made while he was president. Some quick context: a Manhattan jury awarded Carroll roughly $83 million in early 2024 over defamatory comments Trump made in 2019 denying her sexual-assault allegation. This is now Trump’s second trip to the Supreme Court in the Carroll saga—recall that back in June the justices declined to hear his appeal of a separate $5 million verdict, which we covered here. The new appeal leans heavily on the Court’s 2024 presidential-immunity decision, which gave presidents broad immunity for official acts. Trump’s lawyers argue that because he made the disputed statements in 2019 while in office, that immunity should shield him, and they accuse the appeals court of “procedural contortions” to avoid the question. The significance is about how far the 2024 immunity ruling stretches. That decision arose in the context of criminal prosecution for official acts; here it’s being deployed to wipe out a civil defamation judgment for things a sitting president said to reporters. Whether “official act” immunity reaches a president’s public denials about a private, decades-old personal matter is a genuinely consequential question—and the fact that the Justice Department has joined Trump’s personal civil appeal is itself a notable signal about how the government is deploying its weight. Trump asks Supreme Court to throw out E. Jean Carroll’s $83 million verdict | Reuters

Washington Post · CNN

Todd Blanche’s bid to become attorney general has hit a serious snag: the Senate Judiciary Committee scrapped a planned vote after Republican Senator John Cornyn said he is “not prepared to vote yes.” We’ve tracked Blanche’s nomination through his confirmation hearing, and the math has always been tight—with the recent death of Senator Lindsey Graham, committee Republicans have just one vote to spare, so Cornyn alone could sink it. What’s notable is the substance of his objection, because it ties together several threads we’ve followed all month. Cornyn’s concerns center on the administration’s roughly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” and the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS—the very deal a federal judge voided weeks ago as a collusive arrangement, and which would have handed Trump and his associates protections from tax audits unavailable to ordinary taxpayers. In other words, the sticking point isn’t Blanche’s résumé; it’s the integrity of the tax system and whether the Justice Department has been used to engineer special treatment. The committee said the vote is postponed while it works “to secure sufficient support.” The significance is a real-time illustration of advice and consent functioning as a check—not a rubber stamp. A president’s nominee for the nation’s top law-enforcement job is stalled because a member of his own party wants answers about a tax settlement that courts have already called unlawful. It’s the Senate’s constitutional role doing exactly what it’s designed to do: forcing accountability before handing over power.

Trump’s attorney general nominee hits snag as senator withholds support | Reuters

NPR · Washington Post

And finally, a story close to home for anyone in this profession: the debut of the new national bar exam has gone badly wrong. This week marked the first-ever administration of the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination—a major overhaul of how aspiring lawyers are licensed—across ten jurisdictions. And in Washington State, it collapsed. Officials canceled the entire first day of testing after network bandwidth and Wi-Fi problems left hundreds of examinees unable to even access the exam; somewhere between 645 and 700 standard-time test-takers were affected. Missouri saw delayed start times, and a Maryland site had a shorter delay. The National Conference of Bar Examiners, which runs the exam, insists the NextGen platform itself performed as intended and pinned the failures on local network and site infrastructure rather than the software. That’s cold comfort to the test-takers. Think about what’s actually at stake for them: months of full-time study, bar-prep costs, and in many cases a job offer contingent on passing—all thrown into limbo. Washington is offering a make-up exam on September 1, or the option to transfer to the February 2027 sitting or get a refund, and there are already calls for a class action and even for “diploma privilege”—admitting these graduates without an exam. The significance is both practical and symbolic. Practically, hundreds of careers are on hold through no fault of the examinees. Symbolically, the gateway to the legal profession—the gatekeeping ritual that’s supposed to certify competence—failed a basic test of its own on its most important day, and it’s going to intensify the already-heated debate over whether the bar exam, in any form, is the right way to license lawyers.

Tech problems, cancellation mar new US bar exam for some test-takers | Reuters

Bloomberg Law · Above the Law

On July 29, 1899, delegates from twenty-six nations signed the first Hague Convention, the product of an international peace conference convened at the initiative of Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II. It was one of the founding moments of modern international law—an attempt, at the close of a violent century, to subject the conduct of war and the resolution of disputes between nations to legal rules rather than raw power.

The 1899 Convention did two enduring things. First, it began the codification of the laws and customs of war—rules on the treatment of prisoners, the protection of civilians, and limits on certain weapons—laying groundwork that would grow into the modern law of armed conflict and, eventually, the Geneva Conventions. Second, and just as important, it created the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the first standing international institution designed to let states resolve their disputes through neutral arbitration instead of on the battlefield. The idea was radical for its time: that sovereign nations would voluntarily submit their quarrels to a legal process.

The Hague system was, of course, imperfect—the twentieth century that followed was the bloodiest in human history, and the conventions did not prevent two world wars. But the significance of July 29, 1899 is that it planted the institutional and conceptual seeds of everything that came after: the League of Nations, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the international criminal tribunals, and the entire architecture of treaties and adjudication that structures relations between states today. It reflects an enduring aspiration—one that runs through so much of what we cover—that disputes are better settled by law than by force. It’s a fitting backdrop for a day whose stories, in their own ways, are all about turning conflict over to the legal system rather than settling it by other means.

A federal appeals court has revived a proposed class action accusing Chobani of deceiving consumers by marketing some of its Greek yogurt as “zero sugar.” The Seventh Circuit in Chicago ruled that consumers can proceed with claims under state consumer-protection laws, because Chobani Zero Sugar yogurt contains about four grams per serving of allulose, a naturally occurring sweetener. Here’s the wrinkle that makes this interesting. Allulose is chemically a sugar, but the body barely metabolizes it, so the FDA lets manufacturers leave it out of the “sugars” lines on the Nutrition Facts panel. Chobani leaned on exactly that, saying its panel accurately shows zero grams of total and added sugar. But the court focused on the big front-of-package promise—”Zero Sugar”—and found persuasive an FDA brief explaining that “total sugars” actually includes all monosaccharides, allulose among them. Under FDA rules, a product generally can’t be labeled “zero sugar” or “sugar free” unless it has less than half a gram of sugar per serving. Writing for the court, Judge Thomas Kirsch said it was not implausible that consumers—here, a couple who bought the yogurt at a Costco near Chicago—were “fooled” by that absolute promise. The significance is a reminder that the technically-accurate fine print on the back doesn’t necessarily save a bold marketing claim on the front. This is how consumer-protection law polices the gap between what a label shouts and what a product actually contains, and the ruling lets the plaintiffs try to prove that gap misled shoppers.

Chobani must face lawsuit over zero-sugar yogurt claim, US appeals court rules | Reuters

Yahoo Finance · Insurance Journal

eBay and three of its former executives have agreed to pay roughly $56 million to settle a civil suit brought by a Massachusetts couple who were the targets of one of the more disturbing corporate harassment campaigns in recent memory. The couple, Ina and David Steiner, publish an e-commerce trade newsletter, and back in 2019 several eBay employees—furious over the Steiners’ coverage of the company—orchestrated a campaign to terrorize them: shipping cockroaches, live spiders and fly larvae, and a bloody pig Halloween mask to their home, sending threatening messages, and conducting covert surveillance. It grew out of internal communications in which senior executives discussed taking the couple “down.” The criminal side of this played out years ago, with multiple former employees prosecuted and sentenced. This week’s news is the civil resolution: eBay will pay about $46 million to the couple plus millions more in charitable contributions, and the former executives are personally on the hook—two million dollars from former CEO Devin Wenig, and smaller sums from two others. The significance here is corporate accountability, and specifically accountability for retaliation against the press. A powerful company weaponized its resources to punish two journalists for critical coverage—the kind of retaliation that strikes at the heart of a free press—and while the criminal cases addressed the individual foot soldiers, this settlement attaches a very large price tag to the company and the executives at the top. It’s a stark example of the civil justice system doing what the criminal system often can’t: reaching the institution and its leadership, and making them pay.

eBay, former executives to pay $56 million to settle couple’s harassment case | Reuters

CNN · CNBC

And finally, prosecutors have offered their most detailed account yet of why they believe activist Charlie Kirk was killed, arguing in a new court filing that the man accused of shooting him targeted Kirk for his political and religious views. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist and ally of President Trump, was shot and killed in September 2025 at a university in Utah; Tyler Robinson, who is 23, is charged in his death. In the filing, prosecutors pointed to Kirk’s opposition to gay marriage and transgender rights, and cited a letter from a board member of Kirk’s organization describing him as the face of a political and religious movement. They allege Robinson’s own lifestyle ran contrary to Kirk’s views and that he targeted Kirk because of his “political expression.” Robinson’s defense attorney pushed back, arguing that the materials the state is relying on show nothing about whether Robinson actually disagreed with Kirk or what was in his mind. And that disagreement is the legal heart of this. Motive is not, strictly speaking, an element the prosecution must prove to establish murder—but it is powerful evidence, it helps a jury make sense of a killing, and in a serious case it can bear heavily on how the crime is characterized and punished. What we’re watching is the perennial challenge of proving why someone did something: the state assembling external evidence to reconstruct a defendant’s internal state of mind, and the defense insisting that inference isn’t proof. The significance is that a case already saturated with political meaning will now turn, in part, on a genuinely hard legal question—how, and whether, prosecutors can establish motive—and the coming proceedings will test whether their theory holds up under the rules of evidence.

Prosecutors say Charlie Kirk was attacked for his politics, cite anti-LGBT views | Reuters

On July 28, 2009, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, sending her to the full Senate, which confirmed her the following week. With that confirmation she became the first Hispanic justice—and only the third woman—ever to serve on the Court.

Her path to the bench was the stuff of American mythology, and it was central to her nomination. Born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, raised in a housing project, diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at seven and losing her father at nine, she went on to Princeton and Yale Law School, then worked as a Manhattan prosecutor before becoming a federal trial judge and later a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. As a district judge, she famously issued the injunction that ended the 1994–95 Major League Baseball strike. Her confirmation fight, though, turned heavily on a single phrase from an earlier speech—her remark that a “wise Latina” might, with the richness of her experiences, sometimes reach a better conclusion than someone without them. Critics called it bias; supporters called it an honest acknowledgment that lived experience shapes judgment.

In the years since, Sotomayor has become one of the Court’s most forceful liberal voices, known for pointed dissents on race, criminal justice, and—fittingly for today—the very “shadow docket” at the center of our lead story. She has been among the sharpest critics of the Court deciding major questions through emergency orders with little briefing and no argument. The significance of July 28, 2009 is both symbolic and substantive: symbolic, in that a woman from a Bronx housing project reached the pinnacle of the American legal system and expanded who Americans see reflected on their highest court; and substantive, in that she has spent her tenure insisting the Court explain itself and show its work—an insistence that lands with particular weight in a week when the justices are again being asked to make consequential law on the emergency docket.

The Trump administration has escalated its fight over mail-in voting all the way to the Supreme Court, asking the justices on an emergency basis to let its executive order take effect nationwide. This is the direct sequel to yesterday’s story: after the First Circuit refused on Saturday to lift the injunction blocking key parts of the March order, the Justice Department went straight to the high Court, asking it to put that injunction on hold while the litigation continues. The order directs federal agencies to build voter-eligibility lists and to restrict Postal Service delivery of ballots not tied to those lists; a coalition of 23 states and D.C. argues the President simply lacks authority to impose federal rules on elections that the Constitution assigns to states and to Congress. What’s notable here is the vehicle. This is an emergency application—part of what critics call the “shadow docket,” where the Court decides consequential questions quickly, often with little briefing and no full argument. Regular listeners will remember the shadow docket as a recurring concern precisely because it lets the Court make major law in the shadows. The justices have told the states to respond by August 3, so a decision could come fast. The significance is that one of the most consequential election-administration questions in years—decided against the administration twice below—is now in the hands of a Supreme Court being asked to act on an emergency timeline, months before the midterms.

Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow mail-in ballot restrictions | Reuters

Washington Post · CNBC

Johnson & Johnson has announced a $5.5 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming its talc products caused ovarian cancer—a deal that could finally close out more than a decade of litigation. The settlement would cover roughly 69,000 cases consolidated in New Jersey federal court plus related state cases, amounting to about 99.75% of the remaining talc claims. If you were with us last week, the timing is impossible to miss: just days ago, the federal magistrate judge overseeing those 69,000 cases cast serious doubt on whether the plaintiffs could even prove specific causation, ordering them to explain why their claims shouldn’t be dismissed. Days later, J&J puts $5.5 billion on the table. That sequence is a lesson in how litigation leverage works—a favorable evidentiary signal can push a defendant toward a global resolution on its own terms, or embolden it, depending on the read. The mechanics matter: the deal needs acceptance by 95% of the ovarian-cancer claimants and approval from the judge overseeing the federal litigation. And notably, J&J isn’t conceding anything—its litigation chief called the claims “meritless,” and the company still denies its talc caused cancer, though it pulled talc-based baby powder from U.S. and Canadian shelves back in 2020. The significance is that after years of trials, appeals, and two failed attempts to offload the liability through bankruptcy, J&J is choosing certainty and closure over continued combat—paying billions to make a decade of litigation risk go away, without ever admitting its product was dangerous.

Johnson & Johnson announces $5.5 billion settlement of talc lawsuits | Reuters

CBS News · Bloomberg Law

A major trial has opened in Nashville, where the state of Tennessee is telling a jury that Meta knew its Instagram platform was harming teenagers and buried the evidence to protect its profits. In opening statements for what’s expected to be a seven-week trial in state court, Tennessee’s lawyers said Meta’s own researchers repeatedly flagged that some teens were using the platform compulsively—linked to eating disorders, depression, and self-harm—yet the company declined to disable engagement features like autoplay, notifications, and infinite scroll, which the state says were designed to keep teens hooked and maximize the ads they saw. Meta’s lawyer countered that the company has been transparent about the risks teens face and about the dangerous content it works to find and remove. The legal theory here should sound familiar—it echoes the playbook used against Big Tobacco: the argument that a company’s own internal research proves it knew about the harm and chose profit anyway. That’s powerful evidence if the jury believes it, which is likely why, according to reporting, there’s already been a fight over whether Meta’s lawyers tried to keep some of that internal research out. This connects to threads we’ve followed all month, from the multistate suit seeking enormous penalties to the individual bellwether cases. The significance is that these harm-to-teens claims are now being tested in front of an actual jury, and the outcome will shape how Meta and its peers value the risk—and how aggressively other states and plaintiffs press similar cases.

Meta disregarded its own research on teen harm, Tennessee tells jury | Reuters

And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I use a striking data point—the Miami metro area’s cost of living has reportedly now surpassed greater New York City’s—to make a case about how we misunderstand what it means to call a state “low tax.” My core argument is that focusing on a single, highly visible tax like the income tax gives you a badly incomplete picture of whether a place is actually affordable, and for whom.

Here’s the logic. Florida markets itself relentlessly on having no personal income tax, and rankings like the Tax Foundation’s competitiveness index put Florida near the top and New York dead last largely on that basis. But I argue that conflates three very different claims: that Florida collects less through income taxes, that households there bear lower total costs, and that residents end up better off. Only the first is clearly true. The costs a state doesn’t cover through an income tax don’t vanish—they get shifted, recovered through other levies, or pushed into the private market. It’s the same principle as a restaurant that offers “free” parking: the cost of that parking is just baked into the price of the food. When Florida forgoes an income tax, residents still pay—through sales and property taxes, fees, sky-high insurance premiums, and services they have to buy privately that other states provide publicly. And because the income tax is the most progressive major revenue source a state has, replacing it with all of that tends to shift the burden down the income ladder.

The comparison I keep coming back to is the everyday cost that a public system absorbs in New York but a family pays out of pocket in Florida. New York guarantees every four-year-old a free, full-day pre-K seat; Florida’s program funds about 540 instructional hours—roughly three hours a day—leaving working parents to cover the rest. New York’s subsidized transit lets many households skip a car entirely. None of these private substitutes—an insurer, a toll road, a childcare provider—charges you less because you earn less, the way an income tax does. So here’s the distributional punchline of my piece: Florida’s model is a genuinely great deal if you make ten million dollars a year, because avoiding the income tax dwarfs everything else. But for the merely affluent professional making a few hundred thousand—and certainly for middle- and lower-income households—those insurance bills, tuition payments, and housing costs can quietly eat the whole “tax savings.” My bottom line is that any honest discussion of tax competitiveness has to start with comprehensive household-burden metrics across income levels, not a single headline rate—because “low tax” and “affordable” are not the same thing, and treating them as if they were lets officials sell breaks for the wealthy as broad affordability wins.

Miami’s Cost of Living Shows Income Tax’s Limits as a Metric | Bloomberg Tax

On July 27, 1789, President George Washington signed the act establishing the Department of Foreign Affairs—the first executive department created under the brand-new Constitution, and the direct ancestor of today’s State Department, which was renamed a few weeks later. It’s easy to overlook, but this was a foundational moment: the First Congress was building the executive branch essentially from scratch, deciding what federal administration would actually look like in practice.

The most consequential part of the debate wasn’t the department’s diplomatic functions—it was a question that still echoes through constitutional law today: who controls the officials who run these departments? The Constitution says the President appoints principal officers with the Senate’s consent, but it is conspicuously silent on who can remove them. As Congress drafted the statute, it confronted this head-on in what historians call the “Decision of 1789.” After intense debate, Congress structured the law to reflect the view that the President alone—without needing the Senate’s permission—holds the power to remove the department head. That choice embedded a powerful assumption about presidential control of the executive branch into the very first agency Congress built.

The significance of July 27, 1789 reaches all the way to the present. The Decision of 1789 has been cited by the Supreme Court for a century as evidence that the Constitution vests the President with broad removal power—in cases like Myers v. United States, and more recently in the modern fights over the independence of agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the removal of officials at supposedly independent commissions. Every time we argue about whether a president can fire the head of an agency at will, we are arguing about a question the First Congress thought it had answered when it created this very first department. It’s a reminder that the architecture of executive power was contested from the founding’s opening days—and that those early choices still bind us.

A federal appeals court has refused to let the administration implement President Trump’s executive order overhauling mail-in voting, keeping the order frozen ahead of November’s midterm elections. In a 2-1 decision, the Boston-based First Circuit declined to lift an injunction that Democratic-led states won on June 25, when a lower-court judge found key parts of the order unconstitutional. Here’s what the March order actually did. It directed federal officials to build a national “state citizenship list” of eligible voters, and told the Justice Department to investigate officials who mail ballots to people the administration deems ineligible. The constitutional problem is structural: under the Constitution, the authority to set the “times, places and manner” of elections rests with the states and with Congress—not with the President acting alone by executive order. The states argued, and the courts have so far agreed, that the President can’t unilaterally rewrite the machinery of federal elections. This fits a pattern we’ve tracked all month—the SAVE citizenship database fight, the Justice Department’s warnings to election officials, the gutting of the Election Assistance Commission. The significance is that the judiciary is repeatedly drawing the same line: however much a president wants to reshape how Americans vote, elections in this country are decentralized by constitutional design, and that design is holding, at least for now, right when it matters most.

US appeals court rules Trump cannot implement mail-in voting order | Reuters

Tom Goldstein—one of the most celebrated Supreme Court advocates of his generation, who argued 44 cases before the Court and co-founded SCOTUSblog—has been sentenced to six years in prison for tax evasion and mortgage fraud. We previewed the sentencing on Friday; now the number is in: 72 months, and the judge revoked his bond and took him into custody on the spot. Recall the conduct the jury found: Goldstein concealed millions in winnings and losses from his secret life as an ultra-high-stakes poker player, diverted his law firm’s legal fees into personal accounts to cover gambling debts, and steered money to his creditors so it never surfaced as reportable income. The Justice Department had asked for eight years; the judge landed at six. The significance is the same point I made in my Forbes piece last week, now delivered with a prison term attached: the tax laws reach even the most sophisticated players, but only when the government invests the resources to untangle complex, deliberately obscured finances. Goldstein’s case is the rare, resource-intensive prosecution that actually happens—and its severity sends a message to the sliver of high-end taxpayers who assume complexity is a shield. That a lawyer who reached the absolute summit of the profession is now headed to federal prison over how he handled his taxes is a stark bookend to a remarkable career.

Star US Supreme Court lawyer Goldstein sentenced for tax crimes | Reuters

And finally, the same Boston appeals court has rejected the administration’s bid to revive its $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers. The First Circuit declined to pause a lower-court ruling from June 8 that struck down the fee, and the reasoning goes to the heart of who gets to impose costs like this. The trial court held that the fee was, in substance, an unlawful tax that Congress never authorized—and taxing is a power the Constitution gives to Congress, not the executive. To put the number in perspective: employers seeking an H-1B visa typically paid somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000 in fees before this; the administration wanted to charge a hundred thousand dollars, as part of a broader effort to discourage companies from hiring foreign workers over Americans. The three-judge panel found the administration hadn’t shown it was likely to prove it stayed within its authority. The significance connects directly to the theme running through today’s episode: the limits of executive power. Just as the President can’t unilaterally rewrite election rules, he can’t unilaterally impose what amounts to a six-figure tax on visa applications without Congress. When the executive reaches for a power the Constitution assigns elsewhere—here, the power to tax—the courts have been willing to say no. It’s a reminder that even sweeping policy goals have to run through the constitutional plumbing of who is actually allowed to do what.

Appeals court rejects Trump bid to halt $100,000 H-1B visa fee ruling | Reuters

On July 24, 1937, the state of Alabama dropped all charges against four of the nine young Black men known to history as the Scottsboro Boys—a small, belated measure of relief in one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American legal history, and a case that helped reshape constitutional criminal procedure. The nine, ranging in age from approximately 13 to 20, had been arrested after riding a freight train through Alabama in 1931 and falsely accused of raping two white women. Within two weeks, in a series of rushed trials before all-white juries, eight of them had been convicted and sentenced to death; the trial of the youngest, Roy Wright, ended in a mistrial when the jury could not agree on whether to impose death or life imprisonment.

The extraordinary speed and unfairness of those proceedings produced two landmark Supreme Court decisions that still shape the rights of criminal defendants. In Powell v. Alabama in 1932, the Court held that the defendants had been denied due process because they had not received the timely and meaningful assistance of counsel needed to prepare their defense. The Court’s holding was formally limited to capital cases involving indigent defendants incapable of adequately defending themselves, but it became a foundational step toward the broader right to appointed counsel later recognized in Gideon v. Wainwright. Then, in Norris v. Alabama in 1935, the Court overturned Clarence Norris’s conviction because Alabama had systematically excluded qualified Black citizens from its jury rolls. Building on earlier equal-protection precedents, the Court made clear that a state could not accomplish through discriminatory administration what the Constitution prohibited it from doing expressly.

The Scottsboro cases dragged on for years through retrials, reconvictions despite one accuser’s recantation, appeals, and slow, partial releases. On July 24, 1937, Alabama dropped all charges against Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright. Prosecutors expressly concluded that Roberson and Montgomery were not guilty; Williams and Wright were released principally because of their youth and the six years they had already spent imprisoned. The state continued prosecuting or imprisoning the remaining defendants.

The significance of the Scottsboro saga is twofold: it exposed nationally how the Jim Crow justice system operated against Black defendants, and it forced the Supreme Court to give practical constitutional force to protections—meaningful representation by counsel and freedom from racially discriminatory jury selection—that we now consider basic. It is a reminder that some of the most important rights in American law were secured through the suffering of people who were themselves never fully given justice.

Thomas Goldstein, one of the most prominent Supreme Court advocates of his generation and a co-founder of the widely read SCOTUSblog, is being sentenced today after a jury convicted him of tax evasion and mortgage fraud. Goldstein argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court and built a celebrated appellate practice—but prosecutors showed the jury a hidden second life as an ultra-high-stakes poker player, in games running into the tens of millions of dollars. The jury found him guilty on 12 of 16 counts, including tax evasion, assisting in the preparation of false returns, willfully failing to pay taxes on time, and lying to mortgage lenders. The conduct is a case study in exactly the kind of sophisticated evasion I wrote about in Forbes this week: prosecutors said Goldstein concealed millions in poker winnings and losses, diverted his law firm’s legal fees into personal accounts to cover gambling debts, and directed people to pay his creditors so the money never showed up as his income. That’s not a wage earner whose taxes are withheld automatically—it’s precisely the complex, hard-to-trace arrangement that takes real investigative resources to unwind. The Justice Department has asked for eight years in prison. The significance is a pointed reminder that the tax laws reach even the elite of the legal profession—and that when the government does devote the resources to untangle a sophisticated scheme, the accountability can be severe. A man who spent his career at the pinnacle of the legal system now faces the system’s full weight.

Star US Supreme Court lawyer Goldstein to be sentenced for tax crimes | Reuters

The Justice Department has dropped its subpoenas of New York Times journalists over their reporting on the Qatari-donated Air Force One—a striking retreat that came after a federal judge tore into nearly every aspect of the government’s approach. We’ve been following this one: the subpoenas were issued July 10, days after the Times published its stories, seeking grand jury testimony and phone records to unmask the reporters’ sources. At Thursday’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian pressed the government hard. He criticized prosecutors for hastily issuing subpoenas that the DOJ’s own lawyers admitted were riddled with “inadvertent errors,” and he chided them for asking another judge to gag phone companies from telling the journalists their records had been subpoenaed—days after the department had already publicly confirmed the subpoenas existed. Faced with that skepticism, the government agreed to withdraw them. A Times lawyer called it “a great day for the First Amendment and a great day for the rule of law.” The significance is worth stating precisely. This wasn’t a sweeping constitutional ruling establishing a reporter’s privilege—the DOJ retreated before the judge had to decide the hard First Amendment question. But it’s a concrete example of judicial scrutiny working as a check: when a court forced the government to justify subpoenas aimed at the press, the case collapsed under its own sloppiness and overreach. After a month of friction between the administration and the media, the press got a clear win.

US judge to weigh New York Times subpoenas over Trump plane reporting | Reuters

And finally, the pause on Paramount Skydance’s roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery has been extended—a federal judge has now frozen the deal through August 17. When we covered this earlier in the week, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín had issued a short 14-day restraining order at the request of a dozen state attorneys general; now that freeze runs deeper into August, buying the court time to weigh the states’ request to block the merger outright. The states’ antitrust theory has sharpened. They argue the combination would lessen competition in three specific markets: wide-release theatrical film distribution, top-grossing theatrical distribution, and basic cable licensing—harming movie theaters, cable distributors, and ultimately audiences. Remember the framework: antitrust law lets courts halt mergers that would concentrate too much market power, and a pause like this preserves the status quo so the deal can’t close before a judge decides whether it’s lawful. The significance is that time is itself a weapon in merger fights. Every week a deal sits frozen adds cost, uncertainty, and risk for the companies, and it gives regulators and challengers leverage. Here it’s state attorneys general—not federal antitrust enforcers—driving the challenge, and they’ve now kept one of the largest media mergers in history on ice for the better part of a month, with the decisive rulings still to come.

Paramount-Warner Bros. deal paused through August 17, judge rules | Reuters

On July 23, 1866, Congress passed the Judicial Circuits Act, and in doing so did something that sounds almost unimaginable today: it shrank the Supreme Court. The Act provided that the Court would gradually contract from ten justices down to seven, as sitting justices died or retired and their seats simply went unfilled. Yesterday we talked about Franklin Roosevelt’s failed attempt to enlarge the Court to overpower it; today’s anniversary is the mirror image—Congress reducing the Court’s size for pointedly political reasons.

The politics were about President Andrew Johnson. Johnson, who had ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, was locked in a bitter struggle with the Radical Republicans in Congress over Reconstruction. Congress did not trust him, and one thing it was determined to deny him was the power to shape the Supreme Court. By legislating that upcoming vacancies would go unfilled until the Court shrank to seven, Congress effectively stripped Johnson of any Supreme Court appointments. It was court-unpacking as a weapon of inter-branch warfare—using Congress’s control over the Court’s size not to change its rulings directly, but to lock a distrusted president out of influencing it.

The size of the Supreme Court has never been fixed by the Constitution—it’s set by statute, and it has ranged from six at the founding up to ten and back down over the country’s first century. After Johnson left office, Congress promptly passed the Judiciary Act of 1869 and settled the number at nine, where it has remained ever since. The significance of July 23, 1866 is that it’s the clearest historical example of Congress manipulating the Court’s very size for immediate political advantage—and, paired with the 1937 court-packing fight, it bookends the story of how the number nine came to feel sacrosanct even though it never actually was. The Court’s independence, it turns out, has always rested partly on a political truce about not touching its structure.

A Manhattan federal judge is set to weigh today whether to throw out the Justice Department’s subpoenas to New York Times journalists who reported on security concerns about President Trump flying on a Qatari-donated Air Force One. This is the next chapter of a story we covered when the subpoenas first landed: they were issued July 10 by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney, and U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian has paused their enforcement pending this afternoon’s hearing. The two sides want very different things. Prosecutors have asked the judge merely to put the subpoenas on hold for a couple of weeks, saying the investigation’s next steps could shape his decision; the Times wants them quashed outright, arguing they’re designed to harass and intimidate journalists in violation of the First Amendment. The legal backdrop is genuinely unsettled. There is no absolute reporter’s privilege under federal law—prosecutors correctly note the First Amendment doesn’t categorically excuse reporters from testifying in criminal investigations—but courts have long been wary of subpoenas that function as fishing expeditions to unmask sources. The significance is that this hearing is a concrete test of where that line falls, and it lands amid a broader pattern we’ve tracked all month of friction between the administration and the press. However Judge Subramanian rules, it will be an early data point on how much protection newsgathering gets when the government wants to know who talked.

US judge to weigh New York Times subpoenas over Trump plane reporting | Reuters

The teenager at the center of a closely watched lawsuit blaming social media for his depression and anxiety has dropped his claims against Meta just days before trial. The plaintiff, a 15-year-old known in court papers as R.K.C., had originally sued four companies—Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram, Snap’s Snapchat, and ByteDance’s TikTok—alleging their platforms were engineered to be addictive and harmed his mental health. YouTube, TikTok, and Snap all reached confidential settlements earlier, which would have left Meta as the lone defendant when the case went before a Los Angeles jury on July 27. Instead, R.K.C. withdrew, ending the case. Here’s why this matters beyond one teenager. His was a “bellwether” case—one of a small set of representative lawsuits chosen from a huge pool of similar claims and tried first, so both sides can see how juries react and use those signals to gauge settlement values across the whole litigation. When a marquee bellwether evaporates right before trial, it sends a message, though an ambiguous one: it could reflect a quiet settlement, a weakness in this particular plaintiff’s proof, or simply strategic repositioning. The significance is that the sprawling social-media-harm litigation against these platforms rolls on, but this particular test balloon won’t be inflated—depriving both the companies and the thousands of other plaintiffs of a data point they were watching closely.

Teen plaintiff suing Meta over mental health harms drops his claims against company days before trial | Reuters

A federal judge has cast serious doubt on roughly 69,000 lawsuits claiming that Johnson & Johnson’s talc products caused ovarian cancer, warning the plaintiffs they must come forward with better evidence or risk having their cases dismissed. U.S. Magistrate Judge Rukhsanah Singh in Trenton, New Jersey, zeroed in on a problem at the heart of the litigation: causation. In a mass tort like this, plaintiffs generally have to show not just that a product can cause harm in the abstract—”general causation”—but that it caused this particular plaintiff’s disease—”specific causation.” Judge Singh noted that two of the plaintiffs’ own expert witnesses, testifying in preparation for a set of bellwether trials, conceded they could not rule out other possible causes of the women’s cancers. That’s a serious admission, because it goes to whether the experts can offer an opinion that’s admissible at all under the rules that make judges the “gatekeepers” of scientific testimony. If you’ve been listening, this should ring a bell—it’s the same expert-gatekeeping battleground we saw in the Tylenol-autism case, just cutting the other direction. Here the judge ordered plaintiffs to explain, by November 19, why their cases shouldn’t be tossed for lack of an admissible expert opinion tying J&J’s talc to their specific cancers. The significance is that after years of litigation, settlements, and failed bankruptcy maneuvers, the whole edifice of these 69,000 claims may hinge on a question of scientific proof—and the judge just signaled the plaintiffs have a real problem.

US judge casts doubt on 69,000 cases alleging J&J talc caused cancer | Reuters

And finally, in a piece I wrote for Forbes this week, I make an argument that runs underneath a lot of the tax stories we’ve covered lately: the tax code is only as real as its enforcement. My core claim is that defunding the IRS doesn’t actually shrink the tax code—it quietly splits it into two.

Here’s the framing I start with. Washington has a strange way of talking about tax enforcement. Money to help the IRS collect taxes that are already legally owed gets described as spending, waste, or bureaucratic excess—but when Congress cuts that funding and less revenue comes in, the shortfall gets treated like weather, as if it just happened. I think that’s exactly backwards. Congress can write whatever rates, deductions, partnership rules, and anti-abuse provisions it likes, but without skilled auditors and functioning technology, a big chunk of those rules becomes purely aspirational.

And crucially, that aspiration isn’t evenly distributed. For most wage earners, there’s almost no room to maneuver: your income is reported by your employer, your taxes are withheld before you ever see the paycheck, and a computer can flag a mismatch without a human ever looking at your return. But wealthier filers and large businesses often operate through partnerships, closely held entities, cross-border transactions, and complex securities arrangements that take specialized expertise and real time to unwind. So my point is that defunding the IRS doesn’t create a smaller tax code—it creates two codes: a statutory, basically inescapable one for people whose income is visible, and a negotiated one for people whose finances are complicated enough to delay, obscure, or contest what they owe. Strip out the enforcement capacity, and the nominal rule stays on the books while its practical effect on the highest earners quietly weakens. That’s regressive—a backdoor tax cut for the taxpayers best positioned to resist enforcement.

There’s a new bill, the Stop CHEATERS Act, that would restore enforcement funding, and I think its sponsors are right about the underlying problem. But I argue they should retire the “fair share” language they’ve wrapped around it. “Fair share” is subjective—reasonable people can argue forever about whether capital gains should get preferential treatment or whether the top rate is too high or too low, and those are legitimate legislative questions. But that’s not the issue here. Congress already wrote the laws; taxpayers are already obligated to follow them. The case for funding the IRS isn’t about inventing a new standard of fairness after the fact—it’s about consistently administering the standards we already have. By leaning on “fair share,” Democrats risk making basic enforcement sound like a partisan redistribution project when the stronger, harder-to-dismiss argument is simply this: if Congress imposes a tax, the government should be funded well enough to collect it. Anything less isn’t restraint or a considered policy choice—it’s a quiet exemption for those who can afford to fight.

The Tax Code Is Only As Real As Its Enforcement | Forbes

On July 22, 1937, the United States Senate rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to reorganize—critics said “pack”—the Supreme Court, voting 70 to 20 to send the bill to a quiet death. It was a stinging defeat for a president at the height of his popularity, delivered by his own party, and it settled a constitutional question that still shapes how we think about the independence of the judiciary.

The background was a collision between the New Deal and the Court. Through the mid-1930s, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court had struck down key pieces of Roosevelt’s economic program as unconstitutional. Frustrated after his landslide 1936 reelection, FDR proposed legislation that would have let him appoint a new justice for every sitting justice over the age of seventy—which, not coincidentally, would have allowed him to add up to six new justices and swamp the opposition. He framed it as a matter of efficiency and helping overworked elderly judges, but nobody was fooled; it was a naked attempt to change the Court’s decisions by changing its membership.

The plan backfired, and the reasons are the lesson. Even senators who supported the New Deal recoiled at the precedent—if this president could enlarge the Court to get the rulings he wanted, so could the next one, and the Court’s independence would become a fiction. Meanwhile, the Court itself defused the crisis: in the spring of 1937, Justice Owen Roberts began voting to uphold New Deal legislation, the famous “switch in time that saved nine,” which took some of the urgency out of FDR’s demand. The significance of July 22, 1937 is that it established a durable, if unwritten, constitutional norm—that the size of the Supreme Court is essentially off-limits as a tool for a president to overpower rulings he dislikes. The number nine isn’t in the Constitution, but the bipartisan rebuke of court-packing helped make it feel almost as if it were.

An analysis of the closely watched lawsuit by Meta employees over AI-driven layoffs highlights a hard truth: even when workers suspect an algorithm decided their fate, proving it is enormously difficult. To recap, 26 current and former Meta employees sued, alleging the company’s internal AI tools flagged them for termination because they have disabilities or took protected medical, parental, or family leave. Their theory is mechanically specific: because tools like the “Metamate” system scored employees partly on data such as keystroke activity, workers who were lawfully out on leave generated fewer data points and were disproportionately ranked as low-value. Meta cut roughly 8,000 people—about ten percent of its workforce—and says humans, not machines, made the decisions. Here’s why these cases are so hard to win. Anti-discrimination law generally requires the worker to show the employer’s decision was tainted by a protected characteristic, but the employee usually has almost no visibility into how the AI actually worked—the models, the training data, and the weighting are the company’s closely held secrets. On top of that, many employees have signed arbitration agreements, funneling their claims out of open court and into a private process that’s harder to see into and to appeal. The significance is that this appears to be the first case of its kind against a major U.S. company, and it exposes a growing gap: as employers hand more consequential decisions to opaque algorithms, the legal tools workers have to challenge those decisions—built for an era of human managers—may not be up to the job of proving what the machine did.

Analysis: Meta employees’ lawsuit shows that if AI fires you, proving it is the hard part | Reuters

A split panel of the D.C. Circuit has struck down a long-standing National Labor Relations Board doctrine that protected unions after a business changes hands, ruling that it conflicts with federal labor law. The doctrine at issue is the “successor bar,” and it works like this: when a company is acquired and a new employer takes over, that employer generally cannot challenge or withdraw recognition from the existing union for a reasonable period—about six months—giving the union and workers a window of stability to bargain with their new boss. The court held that this Board-created rule isn’t consistent with the National Labor Relations Act. What makes this ruling bigger than one labor doctrine is the tool the court used to get there. The decision applies the Supreme Court’s 2024 Loper Bright ruling, which overturned the decades-old Chevron doctrine and ended the requirement that courts defer to a federal agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. Without that deference, the D.C. Circuit felt free to substitute its own reading of the labor law for the NLRB’s. This is exactly the dynamic I wrote about in my Bloomberg column last week in the tax context—the death of Chevron doesn’t erase statutory ambiguity, it just moves the power to resolve it from agencies to courts. The significance is that we’re now watching that shift play out across the administrative state: settled agency doctrines, some decades old, are suddenly vulnerable to being reinterpreted by judges, and here the immediate losers are unions and the workers who counted on a bargaining foothold after a merger.

US court says longstanding NLRB rule on post-merger union bargaining is invalid | Reuters

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the administration from stripping work authorization from tens of thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants with Temporary Protected Status. U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton in Boston sided with a coalition of immigrant-rights groups and labor unions, halting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from moving ahead with a set of policies while he weighs a longer-term pause; he said he’ll rule by August 5. Here’s the stakes and the legal frame. A work permit—formally, an employment authorization document—is what lets many immigrants lawfully hold a job while their asylum case or protected status is pending. Yanking it doesn’t just threaten deportation down the line; it immediately jeopardizes people’s livelihoods and their employers’ workforces. The contested policies were designed to implement immigration restrictions Congress enacted last year as part of the administration’s signature tax-and-spending law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The plaintiffs argue USCIS is implementing those provisions in ways that exceed what the law allows and skip required procedures. A temporary block like this one preserves the status quo—keeping people employed—while the court decides whether the government followed the rules. The significance connects to a theme we keep returning to: courts serving as a check on how fast and how far the executive can move in reshaping immigration, insisting that even policies rooted in a real act of Congress still have to be implemented lawfully and with proper process.

US judge blocks Trump administration from stripping immigrants of work permits | Reuters

And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a self-inflicted mess in California: lawmakers scrambling to rework a business tax-credit cap that they apparently didn’t realize would kneecap Hollywood film studios. My core argument is that California is directionally right to resist subsidy bidding wars, but wrong to rewrite the economics of credits it has already issued after companies have started relying on them.

Here’s what happened. Since 2024, California has capped the total tax reduction a business can take from all its credits at $5 million a year. That cap was set to expire after 2026—right as productions were going to start claiming credits under a newly expanded film incentive the state had just touted as a centerpiece of keeping film jobs in California. Instead, a bill called SB 122 extended the $5 million limit through 2029 and then converts it to the greater of $5 million or 70% of taxes owed. The part that really gets me is the admission underneath it: lawmakers passed a $351.7 billion budget without apparently understanding how this cap would interact with the film credit they’d just enlarged. As one assemblymember candidly put it, “I’m not sure who knew what about what.” It looks like the cap was really aimed at large research-and-development credit stockpiles, and film credits just got caught in the crossfire.

My argument is that the distinction between prospective and retroactive matters enormously here. It’s one thing for California to decide, going forward, that future subsidies will be smaller or conditioned—that’s legitimate fiscal discipline, and I don’t think Hollywood should get to dictate tax policy just by threatening to decamp to Georgia. But it’s another thing entirely to change the timing and practical value of credits after studios have already committed workers, facilities, and financing in reliance on the old rules. When a state does that, it makes itself a less credible counterparty, and it quietly reduces the value of every future incentive it offers, because businesses will start discounting California’s promises for legislative risk. So my prescription is targeted: protect the film credits already awarded under the prior rules, keep a real limit on the big accumulated R&D credits that were the actual target, and replace the blunt across-the-board cap with rules tailored to how these very different credits actually work. California doesn’t have to choose between fiscal discipline and keeping its word—its tax policy can be skeptical, but its promises should still mean something.

California’s Business Tax Credit Cap Needs More Targeted Changes | Bloomberg Tax

On July 21, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the most sweeping overhaul of American financial regulation since the New Deal. It was a direct response to the 2008 financial crisis—the collapse that wiped out trillions in household wealth, toppled storied institutions like Lehman Brothers, and required massive taxpayer bailouts to keep the banking system from failing entirely.

Dodd-Frank tried to attack the crisis’s root causes on several fronts at once. It created the Financial Stability Oversight Council to watch for systemic risks—the danger that one firm’s failure could cascade through the whole economy—and gave regulators new “resolution authority” to wind down failing giants in an orderly way, an attempt to end the problem of banks being “too big to fail.” It imposed the Volcker Rule, restricting banks from making certain speculative bets with depositors’ money. It brought the shadowy derivatives market under federal oversight. And, in its most visible legacy, it created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—a new agency dedicated to policing mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products, born largely from an idea championed by then-professor Elizabeth Warren.

Dodd-Frank has been contested ever since—fought over in rulemaking, trimmed by later legislation, and litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, including a major case over the constitutionality of the CFPB’s structure. But its core significance endures: it represents the country’s considered legal judgment that concentrated financial power, left unchecked, poses a systemic danger, and that the answer is robust administrative regulation. It’s a fitting anniversary to sit alongside today’s news, because so much of what we cover comes back to the same enduring question—how the law should restrain private economic power without strangling the enterprise that power creates.

A federal judge has temporarily paused Paramount Skydance’s roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, siding for now with a coalition of twelve state attorneys general who sued to stop it. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a fourteen-day temporary restraining order, finding the deal “likely” violates antitrust law. Here’s the framework. Antitrust law exists to preserve competition, and one of its central tools is blocking mergers that would concentrate too much market power in a single company. The states, led by California, sued on July 13 arguing that combining these two entertainment giants would create a media behemoth with the power to raise prices across film and television and to squeeze rivals. A temporary restraining order is exactly what it sounds like—a short-term freeze to preserve the status quo while the court takes a harder look; the “likely violates” language signals the states cleared the initial bar of showing they’re reasonably likely to succeed. It is not a final ruling that the merger is illegal. The significance is twofold. First, it’s a reminder that even after companies strike a deal, they still have to clear the antitrust gauntlet, and state attorneys general—not just federal enforcers—can be the ones holding the gate. Second, the sheer scale here, a hundred-and-ten-billion-dollar combination of major studios and networks, makes this a marquee test of how aggressively courts will scrutinize consolidation in an industry that shapes what Americans watch.

Judge orders Paramount to temporarily pause Warner Bros. acquisition | Reuters

A federal judge has granted final approval of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with a class of authors who accused the AI company of misusing their books to train its chatbot Claude—the largest known copyright settlement in U.S. history. The deal works out to roughly $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 books, split among the authors and publishers who hold the rights. The legal backstory is important, because it’s more precise than “AI company pays authors.” The now-retired Judge William Alsup, who first handled the case, drew a careful line: he suggested that training AI on lawfully acquired books could qualify as fair use, but found that Anthropic had violated authors’ rights by downloading and storing more than seven million pirated books in a “central library”—copies it obtained illegitimately, regardless of whether they were ultimately used for training. In other words, the core wrong the settlement addresses is the piracy—the acquisition and hoarding of stolen copyrighted works—not simply the act of training itself. The settlement drew objections from some authors who argue it’s too small, overpays the plaintiffs’ attorneys, or wrongly leaves out certain rights holders, and the judge had to weigh those before signing off. The significance is that this sets a real-world price on one flavor of AI’s copyright problem. It doesn’t resolve the biggest open question—whether training on copyrighted material is itself lawful—but it establishes that how you got the training data matters enormously, and that building your library out of pirated books can cost you well over a billion dollars.

US judge approves Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement of copyright lawsuit | Reuters

And finally, the Justice Department has announced a civil-rights probe into Harvard University, this time over its financial aid programs. The Department’s Civil Rights Division says it has opened a “compliance review” to determine whether Harvard’s China-based financial aid arrangements discriminate on the basis of national origin by steering aid to foreign—presumably Chinese—students in a way that excludes American citizens. The theory rests on an unusual inversion of civil-rights law. Statutes like Title VI of the Civil Rights Act bar recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on national origin, and they’ve historically been used to protect racial and ethnic minorities. Here the DOJ is deploying that framework to allege discrimination against American-citizen students. The trigger, according to the Department, was an audit of Harvard’s foreign-funding disclosures showing the university has received more than $630 million from sources based in China, some of it allegedly earmarked, through donor restrictions, for aid to particular students. Harvard says it’s reviewing the letter and will engage with the government. The significance is that this is the latest salvo in a sustained campaign against Harvard and other elite universities, which have faced probes and funding threats over everything from admissions to campus protests. Whatever the merits of this specific allegation, the pattern is what’s notable: the machinery of federal civil-rights enforcement being aimed, repeatedly and pointedly, at a handful of institutions the administration has publicly targeted.

US DOJ says it is probing Harvard over financial aid programs | Reuters

On July 20, 1848, at the close of the two-day Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York, roughly a hundred people signed the Declaration of Sentiments—the founding document of the organized women’s rights movement in the United States. Drafted principally by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, it was a deliberate and pointed act of legal argument: Stanton modeled it on the Declaration of Independence, echoing Jefferson’s cadences but adding two words that changed everything—”that all men and women are created equal.”

The genius of the document was to take the nation’s own founding logic and turn it on the exclusion of half the population. It then catalogued, in the form of a bill of particulars against “man” rather than King George, the specific legal disabilities women lived under. Married women had no right to their own property or wages—under the common-law doctrine of coverture, a wife’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s. Women could not vote, were barred from most professions and higher education, had almost no rights to their own children in the event of separation, and were governed by laws they had no voice in making. The Declaration listed these as concrete legal grievances, not vague complaints, framing the denial of women’s rights as a violation of the country’s stated principles.

The most controversial demand was the resolution calling for women’s suffrage, which passed only narrowly and with the public support of Frederick Douglass, who attended the convention. The significance of July 20, 1848 is that it launched a legal and political campaign that would take seventy-two years to win the vote, with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and far longer to dismantle coverture and the web of laws built on women’s legal subordination. It’s a reminder that constitutional principles are not self-executing—that “all men are created equal” had to be argued, expanded, and fought for by the people the original text left out.

A federal appeals court has struck down New Jersey’s ban on assault firearms and high-capacity magazines, the first time any federal appeals court has invalidated a state assault-weapons ban. Sitting en banc, the Philadelphia-based Third Circuit ruled 10-5 that the state’s prohibition on semi-automatic rifles—not just AR-15s, but the whole category—violates the Second Amendment, as does its ban on magazines holding more than ten rounds. The reasoning flows from the Supreme Court’s recent framework, which asks whether a gun regulation is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation; the majority concluded these bans are not. What makes this a genuinely big deal is the split it creates. Just last week, a different federal appeals court upheld Illinois’s ban on semi-automatic weapons—so we now have appeals courts squarely disagreeing on whether these bans are constitutional. That kind of circuit split is precisely the condition that draws the Supreme Court in, and the Court is already poised to take up whether bans on semi-automatic rifles violate the Second Amendment. The significance is that a question affecting roughly a dozen states with similar laws is now barreling toward a definitive answer. For the moment, New Jersey’s ban is unenforceable as to these weapons, but the durability of that outcome—and of assault-weapons bans nationwide—now depends on what the Supreme Court does next.

US appeals court declares New Jersey’s ban on assault rifles unconstitutional | Reuters

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration cannot rely on a White House budget-office regulation to cancel billions of dollars in grants simply because those grants no longer match its priorities. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston sided with a coalition of Democratic-led states, rejecting the administration’s claim that a clause in Office of Management and Budget regulations gave it authority to revoke funding whenever an agency’s focus shifts. Here’s the underlying principle. When Congress appropriates money for a program and an agency awards grants under it, the government generally can’t just take that money back on a whim—grant recipients have relied on it, and the terms for termination are limited. The administration’s theory was that an OMB regulation let it terminate grants it deemed “inconsistent with agency priorities,” effectively a roving power to defund causes it disfavors. Judge Talwani found the regulation didn’t authorize anything of the kind. The significance connects to a theme we keep returning to: the limits of executive power over money that Congress has already directed. The administration has repeatedly tried to redirect or withhold funds to reshape policy without going through Congress, and courts have repeatedly pushed back. This ruling reinforces that a president’s control over federal spending, though real, is bounded—an agency can’t retroactively pull grants just because political priorities changed.

Trump administration cannot cancel grants for disfavored causes, US judge rules | Reuters

A federal judge has declined to block Meta from laying off 26 employees who claim the company’s AI tools singled them out for termination because they have disabilities or took medical leave. U.S. District Judge William Orrick in Oakland ruled that the workers hadn’t shown the “irreparable harm” needed for an emergency order halting the layoffs, which are set to begin July 22, and that the merits of their novel claims will be decided in private arbitration. The allegations are striking. The plaintiffs—engineers, managers, researchers, and designers suing anonymously—say Meta used a suite of internal AI systems to score and rank employees onto a termination list, including an assistant called “Metamate,” an employee-trained “second brain” that tracked workers’ communications, and a productivity score drawn from scanning keystrokes, screen content, emails, and browser history. Meta denies wrongdoing and insists humans, not algorithms, made the layoff decisions. This is a frontier legal question: when an employer uses AI to help decide who gets cut, and those tools allegedly disadvantage people with disabilities or on leave, is that illegal discrimination? The judge’s refusal to block the layoffs was procedural—losing a job usually isn’t “irreparable” because money damages can fix it—but he pointedly noted the case raises “serious questions” and said he might reconsider based on more evidence about how AI was actually used. The significance is that algorithmic management is colliding with anti-discrimination law, and courts are just beginning to work out who’s accountable when the machine does the ranking.

US judge won’t block Meta from laying off workers who filed AI discrimination lawsuit | Reuters

And finally, the IRS’s top lawyer has been forced out after refusing White House demands that would have drawn him into tax audits of particular taxpayers. Ken Kies, who served as the agency’s acting chief counsel and as Treasury’s assistant secretary for tax policy, told administration officials their requests would violate a federal law that bars the president, the vice president, and other White House officials from ordering the IRS to conduct or terminate an audit of any specific taxpayer. That statute is a direct legacy of Watergate-era abuses, when presidents tried to sic the tax agency on their enemies, and tax professionals regard it as the single most important safeguard against weaponizing the tax code. Kies apparently stood on that law—and lost his job for it. The story connects directly to one we covered recently: the administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” settlement that would have given the president and his family immunity from IRS audits, which a federal judge struck down as a collusive arrangement with no basis in law. The significance is about the fragile independence of tax administration. The protections that keep audits free from political direction only work if the officials inside the agency are willing to enforce them—and when the person who says “no” to an unlawful demand is pushed out, it sends a chilling message to everyone who remains.

Top US tax lawyer forced out after White House clash over tax audits | Reuters

On July 17, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, the law that effectively set the drinking age at 21 across the entire country. What makes the Act a fixture of law-school classrooms isn’t the policy itself—it’s the clever, and constitutionally fraught, mechanism Congress used to achieve it.

Here’s the problem Congress faced. Setting a drinking age is a classic exercise of state police power; the federal government has no general authority to tell states how old someone must be to buy a beer. So Congress didn’t order the states to do anything. Instead, it reached for its spending power. The Act directed that any state which failed to raise its drinking age to 21 would lose a percentage of its federal highway funds. States remained technically “free” to keep a lower drinking age—they’d just forfeit a slice of the highway money they depended on. Within a few years, every state had fallen into line.

South Dakota challenged the law, and in the 1987 case South Dakota v. Dole, the Supreme Court upheld it. The Court laid out the framework that still governs conditional federal spending: conditions must be unambiguous, related to a federal interest, not otherwise unconstitutional, and—critically—must not be so coercive that they amount to “compulsion” rather than mere “encouragement.” The Court decided that losing about five percent of highway funds was just mild pressure, not coercion. That last piece became enormously important decades later. In the 2012 healthcare decision, NFIB v. Sebelius, the Court for the first time found that a spending condition had crossed the line into unconstitutional coercion, when Congress threatened states with the loss of all their Medicaid funding. The significance of July 17, 1984 is that a law about drinking age quietly established the constitutional playbook for how the federal government leverages its money to steer state policy—and where the limits of that leverage finally lie.

A federal appeals court has reinstated the Pentagon’s policy requiring journalists to be accompanied by a government escort inside the building, handing the Trump administration a win in its press-access fight with The New York Times. A lower-court judge had blocked the escort requirement in June, but a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit put it back in place. The legal reasoning is worth parsing. The Times argued the escort rule was retaliation against the press in violation of the First Amendment. The panel disagreed—at least for now—finding the Pentagon likely to succeed on its argument that a “generally applicable escort requirement” isn’t a “sufficiently adverse action” to support a First Amendment retaliation claim. In other words, because the rule applies to all reporters rather than singling out particular outlets or viewpoints, the court was skeptical it amounts to unconstitutional retaliation. This is an interim ruling on a preliminary question, not a final decision; the Times says it looks forward to litigating the merits on an expedited basis. The significance is part of a broader pattern we’ve tracked this week—friction between the administration and the press over access and newsgathering. Here the court signaled that neutral, across-the-board restrictions on where reporters can roam are harder to attack than targeted ones, even as the deeper question of press access to the government remains very much alive.

US appeals court keeps in place Pentagon’s escort policy for journalists | Reuters

A federal judge has warned the Justice Department after government lawyers cited a court decision that does not exist—an apparent AI “hallucination”—in an immigration detention case. In the Michigan matter, DOJ lawyers argued that the Sixth Circuit had barred courts from second-guessing an immigration judge’s bond decision, and cited a case, Taylor v. Hott, that simply isn’t real. Notably, the judge who caught it was appointed by President Trump, and he observed that fabricated AI citations have fueled “a rash of cases” clogging the courts with fake authorities. If this sounds familiar, it should—we covered a nearly identical episode on Monday, when the Eleventh Circuit sanctioned a private lawyer for the same mistake. The rule is the same regardless of who commits it: when you sign a brief, you certify that its legal contentions are grounded in real, existing law, and generative AI tools routinely invent confident, well-formatted citations to cases that were never decided. What makes this one notable is that it’s the government’s own lawyers doing it, in a case about detaining a human being. The judge declined to impose sanctions but issued a pointed warning that future filings must not contain nonexistent authorities. The significance is that the AI-hallucination problem has reached the Justice Department itself, and the courts’ patience—already thin—is not going to extend just because it’s the government at the podium.

US judge warns Justice Department about AI use in immigration case | Reuters

The Trump administration is reviving the “public charge” rule, a policy that can deny green cards to immigrants deemed likely to rely on public benefits. The rule appeared in the Federal Register on Thursday, will be formally published July 20, and takes effect September 18. Here’s the concept. “Public charge” is a very old idea in immigration law—the government has long been able to refuse admission or permanent residency to someone likely to become primarily dependent on government support. The fight is over how broadly to define it. The version being revived, first adopted in 2019, dramatically expanded the definition to sweep in anyone who received a government benefit—things like food stamps, Medicaid, or housing vouchers—for more than twelve months in any three-year period. The Biden administration abandoned that broad approach in 2022 and narrowed the grounds for denial; now the expansive version is back. Immigrant advocates warn of a powerful “chilling effect” beyond the green-card applicants themselves: the fear that using benefits could jeopardize their status leads people—including in mixed-status families with citizen children—to avoid the doctor, skip food assistance, or hesitate to file taxes. The significance is that a technical change to the definition of a single term can reshape the behavior of millions, deterring lawful use of public programs out of fear it will be held against someone later.

US to revive rule that could deny green cards to immigrants using public benefits | Reuters

And finally, DraftKings has sued the city of Philadelphia after receiving a subpoena, arguing that the city’s consumer-protection ordinance is preempted by Pennsylvania state law. The dispute is a clean illustration of a recurring structural question: who gets to regulate what. Gambling in Pennsylvania is heavily regulated at the state level, through a comprehensive statutory scheme and a state gaming authority. Philadelphia enacted its own ordinance and issued DraftKings a subpoena as part of an investigation into potential violations. DraftKings’ core argument is preemption—the principle that when a higher level of government has occupied a field, a lower one can’t layer on conflicting or duplicative rules of its own. The company contends the city ordinance essentially copies Pennsylvania law, and that gambling regulation belongs to the state, not the city, so Philadelphia lacks the authority to investigate and enforce in this space. This is the same preemption logic we’ve seen play out between the federal government and states—here it’s just one rung down, between a state and one of its cities, governed by state law and the limits of municipal power. The significance is both immediate and broad: immediately, it’s a bid to quash a subpoena and fend off a city investigation; more broadly, it tests how much room local governments have to police national sports-betting companies when the state has already claimed the field.

DraftKings sues Philadelphia after receiving subpoena | Reuters

On July 16, 1973, before the Senate Watergate Committee and a live national television audience, a former White House aide named Alexander Butterfield answered a question that changed American history. Asked whether there was any kind of recording system in the White House, Butterfield confirmed that President Nixon had installed a secret, voice-activated taping system that recorded his conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office and elsewhere. In a single answer, the entire Watergate investigation pivoted.

Until that moment, the inquiry into the Watergate break-in and cover-up had largely been a contest of competing testimony—Nixon’s word against that of his former counsel John Dean. The existence of the tapes meant there was now an objective record of what the President had actually said and known. Prosecutors and Congress immediately sought them; Nixon refused to hand them over, asserting executive privilege—the claim that a president’s confidential communications are shielded from disclosure. That standoff produced one of the most important separation-of-powers decisions in American law.

In United States v. Nixon, decided a year later in July 1974, a unanimous Supreme Court rejected the President’s claim of absolute privilege. The Court recognized that executive privilege exists and has real constitutional footing, but held that it is not unqualified—that it must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a criminal proceeding. No person, the decision made clear, not even the president, is above the ordinary processes of the law. Nixon turned over the tapes, one of which captured him plotting to obstruct the investigation, and he resigned days later. The significance of July 16, 1973 is that a single truthful answer under oath set in motion the enforcement of a foundational principle: that presidential power operates within the law, and that the courts, not the president, decide the limits of privilege.

Todd Blanche’s bid to become attorney general is hanging in the balance after a tense confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Blanche, who has been acting attorney general since President Trump fired Pam Bondi in April and who previously served as Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer, spent hours fielding pointed questions—including a telling moment when he said he “is” the president’s lawyer before catching himself and correcting it to “was.” The awkwardness captures the central concern: whether a former personal attorney to the president can run the Justice Department as a neutral servant of the law rather than of the man who appointed him. Senators pressed him on the now-defunct anti-weaponization fund, the handling of the Epstein files, and Trump’s pardons for January 6 defendants. The math is what makes this precarious. The recent death of Senator Lindsey Graham left committee Republicans with just one vote to spare, and Senator John Cornyn—a lame duck—has said he isn’t sold, meaning Blanche’s advancement may rest largely in Cornyn’s hands. The significance is about the independence of federal law enforcement: confirming a president’s former defense lawyer as attorney general tests whether the Justice Department’s prosecutorial power will be insulated from the president’s personal interests, and the narrow margin means a single Republican could decide the outcome.

Blanche to face Senate grilling in bid to be Trump’s attorney general | Reuters

The Senate has confirmed a second Florida state appeals judge who ruled in President Trump’s favor in his defamation suit against the Pulitzer Prize Board, giving him a lifetime seat on the federal bench. The vote was 51-46 along party lines to place Chief Judge Jeffrey Kuntz on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Here’s the connection that drew scrutiny. Kuntz sat on the Florida appeals court panel that ruled for Trump on a personal-jurisdiction question, allowing his defamation case against the Pulitzer Board to move forward—and Kuntz wrote that panel ruling. He is now the second judge from that same panel to be nominated by Trump and confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship. At his hearing, Kuntz defended his decision not to recuse from the Trump matter. The significance is about judicial independence and the appearance of a quid pro quo. There is nothing unusual about elevating state appellate judges to the federal bench, and a favorable ruling doesn’t by itself prove anything improper. But when a president rewards judges who ruled for him personally with lifetime appointments, it raises an uncomfortable question about incentives—whether judges hoping for advancement might feel subtle pressure to favor the person doing the appointing—and that perception, critics argue, can corrode public confidence in an impartial judiciary even where each individual ruling was defensible on the merits.

2nd Florida judge who ruled for Trump in Pulitzer case confirmed to federal bench | Reuters

And finally, the Federal Trade Commission and the Ohio State Bar Association have thrown their support behind an Ohio Supreme Court proposal to loosen the American Bar Association’s long-standing grip on who gets to become a lawyer. The proposal would let graduates of non-ABA-accredited law schools sit for the Ohio bar exam and would move toward a state-run accreditation process. Here’s the structure worth understanding. In most states, you generally can’t take the bar exam unless you graduated from a law school the ABA has accredited—which effectively makes the ABA the national gatekeeper of legal education. The FTC’s objection is framed in competition terms: it argues the ABA’s accreditation standards “go beyond what is reasonably necessary” to ensure lawyers are prepared, and that restricting the supply of lawyers this way may boost incumbent lawyers’ pay while raising costs and reducing access for ordinary people who need legal help. Ohio isn’t alone—Florida and Texas have already amended their rules so the ABA no longer has the final say, and Tennessee is weighing a similar move. The significance is a real shift in how the profession polices its own entry. Supporters see it as breaking up a monopoly to expand access to legal careers and legal services; critics worry that weakening a uniform national standard could erode the quality and consistency of legal training. Either way, the ABA’s decades-long role as the sole gatekeeper is eroding, state by state.

State bar, FTC back Ohio proposal to limit ABA role in lawyer admissions | Reuters

On July 15, 1949, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act of 1949, a centerpiece of his “Fair Deal” and one of the most ambitious housing laws in American history. Its stated goal was breathtaking in scope: “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” To get there, the Act poured federal money into public housing construction, expanded federal mortgage insurance, and created the urban renewal program to clear and redevelop so-called “slum” neighborhoods.

The Act’s legacy is genuinely double-edged, and it’s worth telling honestly. On one hand, it expanded homeownership for millions and built hundreds of thousands of units of public housing. On the other, its implementation became one of the great engines of racial segregation in the twentieth century. Urban renewal too often meant bulldozing established Black neighborhoods—critics bitterly renamed it “Negro removal”—and the public housing built in their place was frequently segregated by design and concentrated in already-poor areas. Meanwhile the federal mortgage machinery it fed continued the practice of redlining, steering the benefits of homeownership toward white families and away from Black ones.

That mixed legacy is why the Housing Act belongs in a legal-history conversation about civil rights. The same federal government that would, within a few years, order schools desegregated in Brown v. Board of Education was, through its housing policy, actively entrenching residential segregation—and residential segregation is what makes school segregation so durable, because in America where you live largely determines where you go to school. The story of July 15, 1949 is a reminder that the law’s effects depend enormously on how it’s carried out: a statute promising a decent home for every family became, in practice, a tool that shaped the segregated geography we’re still litigating over today.

Todd Blanche faced a high-stakes Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today in his bid to become attorney general on a permanent basis. Blanche has been acting attorney general since President Trump fired Pam Bondi in April, and before joining the Justice Department he served as Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer—a background that sits at the center of the concerns about him. The confirmation process exists because the Constitution’s Appointments Clause requires the Senate to advise and consent on the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, and the attorney general is supposed to serve the United States, not the president personally. That tension drove the questioning: senators pressed Blanche on the Department’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and its prosecutions of figures perceived as Trump’s political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The significance is about the independence of the Justice Department. An attorney general who was recently the president’s private defense attorney raises the question of whether federal prosecutorial power will be wielded neutrally or as an instrument of the president’s interests. With a pair of undecided Republicans—Senators Cornyn and Tillis—holding real leverage, the hearing was Blanche’s chance to reassure a narrowly divided Senate, and most observers still expect him to be confirmed by a slim margin.

Blanche to face Senate grilling in bid to be Trump’s attorney general | Reuters

Two U.S.-based advocacy groups have sued the Trump administration, arguing that its sanctions targeting the International Criminal Court violate the First Amendment. The groups—Democracy for the Arab World Now and the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide—are challenging the February 2025 executive order under which the administration has sanctioned ICC judges, prosecutors, and Palestinian human rights organizations, and which officials pledged this week to expand. The free-speech theory is the key. The plaintiffs say the sanctions regime is so broad that they have stopped doing constitutionally protected things—filing submissions with the ICC and coordinating advocacy with sanctioned people, like the U.N. special rapporteur for Palestine—out of fear that doing so could expose them to fines or even prison. In First Amendment law, that’s a classic “chilling effect”: when a law is vague or sweeping enough that people self-censor protected speech to avoid the risk of penalty, the law itself can be unconstitutional even before anyone is actually punished. There’s notable precedent here: a similar Trump order in 2020 was blocked by a judge who found it likely violated the First Amendment, before the Biden administration rescinded it in 2021. The significance is a direct clash between the executive’s broad power over foreign affairs and sanctions on one side, and Americans’ right to speak, associate, and petition on the other. Three ICC judges have separately sued over the same sanctions, so this order is now being attacked on multiple fronts.

Trump’s ICC order violates free speech, advocacy groups say in lawsuit | Reuters

A federal appeals court has ended more than sixty years of federal oversight of the Concordia Parish School Board in Louisiana, lifting one of the desegregation orders that dates back to the Civil Rights era. The Fifth Circuit’s decision hands a win to the Trump administration, which has pushed to wind down these long-running cases—a striking reversal for a Justice Department that spent decades on the other side, fighting to enforce them. Here’s the legal framework. After Brown v. Board of Education, hundreds of Southern school districts were placed under federal court supervision and ordered to dismantle segregation. A district can be released from that oversight when a court finds it has achieved “unitary status”—meaning it has eliminated the vestiges of segregation, to the extent practicable, in areas like student assignment, faculty hiring, facilities, and discipline. The dispute in cases like this one is whether that’s really been accomplished. Louisiana officials argue the orders are relics of a bygone era and no longer needed. Civil rights advocates and some parents counter that the vestiges persist—in racial disparities in student discipline, access to advanced academic programs, and teacher hiring—and that lifting oversight removes a crucial tool for addressing them. The significance is part of a broader push to close out Civil Rights-era decrees, and it raises a hard question: whether these districts have genuinely outgrown the need for supervision, or whether ending it prematurely risks letting old patterns quietly reassert themselves.

Appeals court ends US oversight of Louisiana school system related to desegregation mandate | Reuters

On July 14, 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act, the most notorious of the four laws known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to write, print, utter, or publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government of the United States, the Congress, or the President—with the intent to defame them or bring them into disrepute. In plain terms, it criminalized criticism of the government.

The context was a Federalist administration, under President John Adams, gripped by fear of France and of domestic dissent, and eager to silence the opposition press aligned with Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans. And that’s exactly how it was used. Federal prosecutors went after Republican newspaper editors and even a sitting congressman, securing convictions for the crime of harsh political speech. Notably, the Act was written to expire in 1801—conveniently, the moment Adams’s term would end—so that it could be wielded against his critics but would not outlive his own hold on power.

The reaction was fierce and consequential. Jefferson and James Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions arguing the Act was unconstitutional, and the ensuing backlash helped sweep Jefferson into the presidency in 1800; once in office, he pardoned those convicted under it. The Sedition Act was never tested at the Supreme Court, but history rendered its verdict. More than a century and a half later, in New York Times v. Sullivan, the Court looked back and declared that the Act’s assault on free expression had been repudiated “in the court of history,” using it as a touchstone for modern First Amendment law. The lesson of July 14, 1798 endures: laws that punish criticism of the government are almost always tools of the powerful against their critics—and a free press is most necessary precisely when the state would prefer it silent.

Federal prosecutors have issued subpoenas seeking to compel four New York Times journalists to testify before a Manhattan grand jury, part of a leak investigation into the paper’s reporting on security concerns surrounding President Trump’s flight on the new Qatari-donated Air Force One. Federal agents delivered some of the subpoenas to the reporters’ homes. Here’s the legal terrain. There is no absolute federal reporter’s privilege—the Supreme Court held decades ago that the First Amendment doesn’t categorically shield journalists from grand jury subpoenas—but the Justice Department has long operated under internal guidelines that made going after reporters a last resort. Those guardrails matter here, because in 2025 Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded the Biden-era policy that had sharply limited subpoenas against journalists, restoring broader authority to pursue them. The Times says it will fight, and can ask a court to quash the subpoenas as overbroad, issued in bad faith, or violating the First Amendment. The significance is the pressure this puts on newsgathering: when the government can subpoena reporters to unmask their sources, sources stop talking, and the kind of national-security reporting at issue here gets harder to do. Press-freedom groups warn this administration has reached for subpoenas and search warrants against journalists—at the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal—more freely than its predecessors.

Explainer: Can prosecutors compel New York Times journalists to testify in leak probe? | Reuters

A federal judge has voided President Trump’s roughly $1.78 billion settlement with the IRS, delivering a scathing rebuke and referring his lawyers for possible discipline. The backstory is unusual. Trump sued his own administration in January over the leak of his tax returns, and by late May had reached a deal with the IRS to create an “anti-weaponization” fund and to “forever bar” the government from any action related to his past tax returns—protection extending to his family and businesses. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams found the whole thing was a setup. The core legal defect is the absence of what courts call adverseness. Federal courts can only decide genuine “cases or controversies”—real disputes between opposing parties. Here, Judge Williams wrote, “there was never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail,” because Trump was effectively suing himself, with his own Justice Department on the other side agreeing to lose. She found the case was brought for an improper purpose: to get a court’s stamp of legitimacy on a settlement with no basis in law or fact. She sanctioned Trump’s attorneys and referred one, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar, and suggested Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche should face discipline too. The significance is a court refusing to be used as a rubber stamp—insisting that its legitimacy can’t be borrowed to bless a collusive deal dressed up as litigation.

US judge voids Trump’s settlement with IRS | Reuters

A federal appeals court has revived more than 500 private lawsuits against Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, alleging that acetaminophen use during pregnancy caused autism and ADHD in children—and here it’s worth being clear about the science before the law. There is no firm scientific evidence that Tylenol causes autism or ADHD. The most rigorous recent research, including a large Swedish sibling-comparison study of millions of children, found no causal link once you control for genetic and environmental factors shared within families; mainstream medical bodies continue to regard acetaminophen as one of the safer pain and fever options in pregnancy, and untreated high fevers carry their own real risks. So this ruling is not a finding that Tylenol is dangerous. What the Second Circuit actually decided was narrower and procedural: that the trial judge had wrongly excluded the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses. Under the rules governing expert testimony, judges act as “gatekeepers,” admitting expert opinion only if it rests on reliable methodology. The district court had tossed the plaintiffs’ experts as unreliable; the appeals court, per Judge Guido Calabresi, said their methods reflected approaches other scientists use and amounted to “acceptable interpretations of scientific evidence where scientists may, and in fact do, disagree.” Crucially, the court stressed it was not deciding whether Tylenol actually causes these conditions. The significance is about who weighs contested science—the ruling lets juries, not just judges, hear the dispute, which is a real win for the plaintiffs procedurally even though the underlying causation case remains, on the current evidence, weak.

US appeals court revives private lawsuits linking Tylenol to autism, ADHD | Reuters

And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on a counterintuitive idea: that big corporate taxpayers may come to miss the boring, predictable world of administrative tax law now that the Supreme Court has overruled Chevron deference. My argument, in short, is that a weaker IRS and Treasury is not the unalloyed win a lot of multinationals assume it is.

Here’s the setup. For forty years, under Chevron, courts deferred to a federal agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. With Chevron gone, courts no longer have to defer to Treasury’s reading of the tax code just because the statute is vague and the agency has expertise. A lot of corporate taxpayers cheered that—less agency power sounds like more freedom. But my point is that killing Chevron did nothing to remove the underlying ambiguity in the tax code; it just moved the job of resolving that ambiguity to a different desk. And there are only two other desks it can land on, and I don’t love either one for a company that wants predictability.

The first desk belongs to the courts. If Treasury can’t issue as many binding, prospective rules, then more of these questions get resolved through litigation—case by case, on particular records, often years after the transactions are done. Courts are built to handle controversies, not to administer a global corporate tax system. The Coca-Cola transfer-pricing fight is the stress test I point to: a company may win a great refund that way, but you can’t organize a multinational’s affairs around the hope that every ambiguous question turns into a bespoke judicial adventure. The second desk belongs to Congress, which is the more democratically satisfying answer—Congress writes the code and is politically accountable. But in practice Congress moves slowly and episodically, usually only when tax changes ride along on some bigger budget deal. By the time Congress fixes an international tax problem, the business model that created it has been reorganized twice and pivoted to something involving AI.

So the core of my argument is that corporate taxpayers need to distinguish between a useful litigation win and a stable legal environment—those two things don’t always travel together. A bad but clear rule can be modeled and planned around; an ambiguous rule, as I put it, isn’t really a rule, it’s a threat in the shape of a Treasury notice. My prescription is that Congress should make clearer, more deliberate delegations where technical administration is unavoidable—transfer pricing, international tax, anti-abuse rules—and that Treasury should do a post-Chevron audit of its own regulations to flag where the code is asking too much of administration and too little of legislation. Because the real choice here isn’t between IRS power and taxpayer freedom. It’s between prospective administration and retroactive improvisation—and multinationals may get their wish, see the IRS diminished, and then find themselves stuck with rules everyone knows are broken but no one can fix.

Big Corporate Taxpayers Need More Clarity in a Post-Chevron World | Bloomberg Tax

On July 13, 1787, the Confederation Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance, one of the most important laws in American history—and one passed under the Articles of Confederation, before the Constitution even existed. Its formal subject was dry: how to govern the vast territory north and west of the Ohio River. But in answering that question, it set precedents that shaped the entire future of the nation.

The Ordinance did several remarkable things at once. It created an orderly process by which frontier territories would move through stages of self-government and eventually be admitted to the Union as new states—fully equal to the original thirteen, not as colonies or dependencies. That single principle, that new territory would become co-equal states rather than subordinate possessions, distinguished the American project from every empire that had come before. The Ordinance also guaranteed a set of rights to settlers in the territory: freedom of religion, the right to trial by jury, habeas corpus, and proportionate representation—a bill of rights in miniature, adopted before the Bill of Rights.

And in its most consequential provision, Article 6, the Ordinance banned slavery throughout the Northwest Territory—the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. It was the first time the national government prohibited slavery in a defined territory, drawing a line that would harden over the decades into the divide between free states and slave states, and setting up the bitter fights over the expansion of slavery that culminated in the Civil War. The significance of July 13, 1787 is that a Congress often dismissed as weak and ineffectual produced a statute of enduring genius—a template for national growth, an early charter of liberties, and a foundational stand, however partial, against slavery.

Apple has sued OpenAI in federal court in Northern California, accusing the AI company of a systematic scheme to steal its trade secrets in order to break into consumer hardware. It’s a striking reversal for two companies that struck a high-profile partnership back in 2024. Apple’s complaint alleges misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of contract, claiming OpenAI leaned on former Apple employees—more than 400 now work there—along with aggressive recruiting and supplier relationships to vacuum up confidential information. Apple points a finger at OpenAI’s hardware chief, a former Apple vice president, alleging he told job candidates still employed at Apple to bring “actual parts” to interviews for “show and tell,” and that another departing employee downloaded dozens of files on unreleased products. Trade-secret law protects confidential business information that gives a company a competitive edge, and the case will turn on whether OpenAI crossed the line from lawfully hiring talent—people are allowed to change jobs and use their general skills—into unlawfully exploiting Apple’s protected secrets. Given the two firms’ size and the stakes in the AI hardware race, this is shaping up to be a marquee tech dispute.

Apple sues OpenAI alleging misappropriation of trade secrets, court records show | Reuters

A federal judge has ruled that disabled Justice Department immigration lawyers can keep working from home while they press a lawsuit challenging the department’s return-to-office mandate. Two attorney-advisers at the immigration courts won a preliminary injunction from Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles in the Eastern District of Virginia, temporarily halting the no-telework policy as applied to them. Their claim rests on the Rehabilitation Act, the federal statute requiring the government, as an employer, to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities—here, remote work they say is necessary to protect their health. The administration’s broad directive ordering federal workers back to the office full-time collided with that individualized duty. A preliminary injunction isn’t a final ruling; it means the plaintiffs showed they’re likely to win and would suffer irreparable harm without relief. The significance is the tension it spotlights: a government-wide, one-size-fits-all workplace policy still has to bend to statutory disability-accommodation rights, and this ruling suggests courts will enforce that limit even against the executive’s management of its own workforce.

US judge says DOJ lawyers can work from home pending lawsuit over telework policy | Reuters

The administration extended work permits for hundreds of thousands of immigrants with Temporary Protected Status from Haiti and six other countries just hours before they were set to expire. It’s worth being precise about what actually changed. TPS is a humanitarian designation that lets people from countries in crisis live and work here legally. Last month the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to end TPS for Haitians and Syrians—but what was extended here is narrower: the validity of the employment-authorization documents that workers and employers rely on for I-9 and E-Verify purposes. Haitians got two extra weeks, to July 24; those from Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan, and Myanmar got one. The underlying TPS designations remain in legal limbo, awaiting district-court orders expected at the end of July. The significance is both humanitarian and practical: the reprieve came as some employers had already begun terminating these workers, and it underscores how much uncertainty TPS holders are living under—their ability to keep a job now measured in days and weeks while the courts sort out their status.

US extends work permits for Haitians, other immigrants with Temporary Protected Status | Reuters

And finally, a federal appeals court has sanctioned a lawyer for filing a brief riddled with fake, AI-generated case citations—the latest entry in a fast-growing genre. The Eleventh Circuit rebuked the attorney with a line destined for law-review footnotes: “Whatever the merits of artificial intelligence, it is no substitute for actual intelligence.” The problem is by now familiar: generative AI tools will, with total confidence, invent case names, citations, and quotations that do not exist—”hallucinations”—and lawyers who paste that output into filings without checking are presenting fictional law to a court. That breaches a basic professional duty. Under Rule 11 and the courts’ inherent authority, attorneys must certify that their legal contentions are grounded in real, existing law, and courts have been escalating the consequences—reimbursed fees, fines, and public reprimands—as the same mistake keeps recurring despite repeated warnings. The significance isn’t that AI is banned from law practice; it plainly isn’t. It’s that the tool doesn’t dilute the lawyer’s responsibility one bit. You can use AI to draft, but you still have to verify, because when you sign a brief you vouch for every citation in it—and “the computer made it up” is not a defense.

US appeals court rebukes lawyer over fake, hallucinated case citations | Reuters

On July 10, 1925, the trial of John T. Scopes opened in the sweltering courthouse of Dayton, Tennessee. Scopes, a young high school teacher, stood accused of violating the state’s Butler Act, which made it a crime to teach human evolution in public schools. The case became one of the most famous trials in American history—less because of what happened to Scopes, who was a willing test defendant recruited by the ACLU, than because of the collision it staged between two national figures and two worldviews.

On one side was William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and champion of the anti-evolution cause, who argued for the prosecution. On the other was Clarence Darrow, the era’s most celebrated defense attorney, who took the case to defend academic freedom and the teaching of science. The trial’s most dramatic moment came when Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible and cross-examined him mercilessly on its literal interpretation. Scopes was convicted and fined $100—a verdict later overturned on a technicality—so in the narrow legal sense, the anti-evolution side won.

But the significance of Scopes lies elsewhere. It was one of the first trials broadcast live on national radio, a spectacle that turned a local misdemeanor into a referendum on faith, science, education, and the reach of the state into the classroom. It sharpened the enduring constitutional questions—about what government may compel or forbid teachers to teach—that would return decades later in cases like Epperson v. Arkansas, which finally struck down anti-evolution laws under the First Amendment. Scopes is a reminder that some trials matter less for their judgments than for the arguments they force a country to have out loud.

The Justice Department has sued Maryland, alleging that the state’s sanctuary policies unlawfully obstruct federal immigration enforcement. The suit targets Maryland’s Community Trust Act, which limits how state and local officials may cooperate with federal immigration authorities—for example, by declining to honor routine detainer requests to hand people over. The government’s core theory is preemption: it argues that under the Supremacy Clause, states can’t erect policies that interfere with federal immigration law. Maryland and Attorney General Anthony Brown will counter that states have no obligation to affirmatively help enforce federal law—a principle known as anti-commandeering. This is the twenty-first such suit the administration has filed against sanctuary jurisdictions, part of a coordinated campaign, and it teed up the recurring constitutional question of where federal supremacy ends and a state’s right to withhold its own resources begins.

DOJ sues Maryland, alleges state policies interfere with immigration crackdown | Reuters

Proposed rule changes would require greater public disclosure when federal grand juries refuse to indict—an unusually pointed reform prompted by a string of rejected charges. Grand juries almost never decline to indict; the old line is that a prosecutor could get one to “indict a ham sandwich.” Yet over the past year, grand juries in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington rejected charges in politically sensitive cases, including a failed effort to indict six sitting members of Congress. In response, the federal court in Chicago adopted a rule filing a redacted version of the foreperson’s rejection form on the public docket, and D.C.’s chief judge ordered that the judiciary be notified whenever a grand jury turns the administration down. Because grand jury proceedings are ordinarily secret, “no true bill” outcomes usually vanish without a trace. The significance is transparency: these measures would let the public see how often the government tries to charge people and fails—turning the grand jury’s quiet power to say no into something visible.

Proposed rules call for DOJ disclosure when grand juries reject indictments | Reuters

The elite law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett is heading into a rare legal-malpractice trial in Florida next week, defending against claims seeking more than $200 million. The case comes from former Patriot National CEO Steven Mariano, who alleges the firm botched its legal work on a corporate stock transaction more than a decade ago; Simpson Thacher denies liability and argues that market forces, not its advice, caused the losses. What makes this notable is simply that it’s going to a jury at all. Malpractice claims against top-tier firms are almost always settled quietly or dismissed before trial, because both sides have strong incentives to avoid airing the details of a soured client relationship in open court. A verdict here could ripple outward—shaping how firms handle risk, how professional-liability insurers price transactional work, and how future clients frame malpractice claims against their own lawyers.

Simpson Thacher prepares for rare malpractice trial in Florida next week | Reuters

And finally, President Trump has removed the last sitting members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the bipartisan federal agency that helps states administer elections. All three commissioners were pushed out at once—the two Democratic members fired by email, the Republican member asked by phone to resign—leaving the four-seat commission entirely empty. That vacancy is the whole point: with no commissioners, the EAC cannot take official action, and because replacements require Senate confirmation, the agency could be sidelined for months heading into the midterms. The EAC isn’t a powerhouse—it sets voluntary voting-system guidelines and distributes election funding—but it’s a piece of the federal election infrastructure, and emptying it entirely is unprecedented. Voter-advocacy groups and Democratic election officials called the move reckless, and it raises the same structural question running through this week’s news: how much a president may reshape or disable the machinery that oversees elections in the run-up to a vote.

Trump terminates Election Assistance Commission members | Reuters

On July 9, 1868, South Carolina and Louisiana became the final two states needed to push the Fourteenth Amendment over the three-quarters threshold, and with their votes the amendment was ratified into the Constitution. It is, by almost any measure, the most consequential of the Reconstruction amendments and arguably the most important addition to the Constitution since the Bill of Rights.

The amendment was written to answer the central question left open by the Civil War and the abolition of slavery: what did freedom actually mean, and who was entitled to it? Its first section does an enormous amount of work in a single sentence. It establishes birthright citizenship—declaring that all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens of both the nation and their state. It then forbids any state from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens, from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, and from denying any person the equal protection of the laws. Those three clauses—privileges or immunities, due process, and equal protection—became the constitutional text on which vast stretches of modern American law are built.

The historical purpose was direct. The framers of the amendment, led in the House by John Bingham, wanted to overrule Dred Scott, which had held that Black Americans could not be citizens, and to constitutionalize the civil rights protections Congress had already tried to enact by statute—putting them beyond the reach of any future hostile Congress or Southern legislature. They understood that emancipation without citizenship and equal protection would be a hollow victory, and they wrote a guarantee that applied against the states, not just the federal government.

The significance of July 9, 1868 is hard to overstate, because so much of what we argue about today runs directly through this text. The Equal Protection Clause is the basis of Brown v. Board of Education and school desegregation, of Loving v. Virginia striking down bans on interracial marriage, and of Obergefell recognizing marriage equality. The Due Process Clause became the vehicle for incorporating most of the Bill of Rights against the states, so that free speech, free exercise, and protections for the criminally accused bind state governments too. And the Citizenship Clause is the reason that birthright citizenship is a constitutional guarantee rather than a policy preference—as the Supreme Court reaffirmed just this past term. When you hear debates about who counts as a citizen, what process the government owes a person before it takes something from them, or whether a law treats people equally, you are hearing an argument about the amendment ratified on this date.

A federal judge in Florida has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to keep giving four Republican-led states—Florida, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio—access to a federal database those states use to check whether registered voters are citizens. The order, from U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II in Pensacola, lets the states continue using the system while the underlying legal fight plays out.

The database is called SAVE—Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements—a federal system historically used to verify immigration status for benefits. After a revamp last year, it became far more powerful for election purposes: users could search many records at once, and it exposed individuals’ Social Security numbers. Several Republican-led states began comparing their voter rolls against SAVE and canceling the registrations of people the database flagged as noncitizens. The problem is what happens when the database is wrong or out of date—people who are in fact citizens can get flagged and purged.

That risk is exactly why this ruling sits in tension with another one. Just weeks earlier, on June 22, a different federal judge in Washington, D.C., restricted broader use of the database, warning that relying on it could result in eligible voters being wrongly stripped from the rolls. So you now have two federal courts pointing in different directions—one worried about wrongful purges and limiting the database’s use, and one ordering DHS to keep the spigot open for these four states. When trial courts split like this, the disagreement typically has to be resolved higher up, and it means the rules can differ depending on which state and which courtroom you’re standing in.

The significance is that this is a live fight over the machinery of voter-roll maintenance heading into a midterm election year. There’s a genuine and legitimate interest in keeping noncitizens off the voter rolls—but there’s an equally real risk that a blunt, error-prone matching process disenfranchises actual citizens who then have to fight to get back on. This ruling tilts toward giving states the verification tool; the D.C. ruling tilts toward protecting against wrongful removals. Watch the appellate courts, because the boundary between list maintenance and unlawful voter purging is about to get drawn more sharply.

US judge orders four states be given access to citizenship data for voter checks | Reuters

In a closely related development, the Justice Department has sent letters to all fifty states warning that state and local election officials could face criminal prosecution if they allow noncitizens to remain on their voter rolls. The letters, from Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Department’s Civil Rights Division, give officials just five days to respond with a plan to comply.

The federal government does have statutes on the books aimed at protecting the integrity of elections and barring noncitizens from voting, and the letters invoke several of them. But the ordinary way these laws work is that you prosecute a person who actually votes illegally, or who knowingly facilitates fraud. What’s unusual here is the target: the letters put state and local election administrators—the people who maintain the rolls—on notice that they personally could be charged. That reframes routine election administration as potential criminal exposure for the officials doing it.

Think about the position this puts an election official in. Maintaining accurate voter rolls is genuinely hard—people move, die, naturalize, and occasionally register in error—and every state already has processes for it. Now imagine being told by the U.S. Department of Justice that if the federal government later decides your rolls were inadequate, you could be a criminal defendant, and you have five days to send in a compliance plan. Even if few or no prosecutions ever materialize, the threat itself is designed to change behavior—to push officials toward more aggressive purging out of fear of personal liability. Critics call that coercion; the Department frames it as enforcement.

The significance is about federal pressure on the decentralized American election system. Elections in this country are run by states and localities, deliberately, so that no single national authority controls the vote. Democratic officials in states like Michigan pushed back hard, noting they’ve already taken extensive steps to ensure only eligible voters can vote. The letters, arriving alongside the SAVE database fight, are part of a coordinated push ahead of the midterms, and they raise a serious question about the line between legitimate federal enforcement of election laws and using the threat of prosecution to lean on the officials who administer them.

US Justice Department tells state officials they could be prosecuted over noncitizen voting | Reuters

And in a very different kind of case, a former Olympic canoe racer, David Hearn, pleaded not guilty in D.C. Superior Court to a felony charge of deliberately damaging the recently renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Hearn, who is 67 and competed in three Summer Olympics, entered his plea through an attorney at his first court appearance, and his lawyers have described the prosecution as an abuse of power built on what they call a “concocted narrative.”

The Reflecting Pool sits on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and had just undergone a roughly $16 million renovation. Hearn has said he was stopped by National Guard troops and U.S. Park Police and detained for about five hours after pausing at the pool during a 64-mile bike ride in June. He was later indicted on a single felony count of property destruction. The top federal prosecutor for D.C., U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, said six other people were arrested on misdemeanor charges connected to damage at the same site.

The legal question worth watching is the gap between the charge and the conduct. Property-destruction law generally requires proof that the defendant intentionally caused the damage, and a felony charge usually turns on the dollar value of that damage. Hearn’s defense is essentially that the government has manufactured intent and seriousness out of an innocent encounter—that a man pausing on a bike ride has been turned into a felony defendant. The judge apparently agreed there was little flight or danger risk: Hearn was released without court supervision pending an August 5 status hearing, which tells you something about how the court currently views the threat he poses.

The significance here is less about one damaged pool and more about the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Deciding whom to charge, and whether to charge a felony versus a misdemeanor versus nothing at all, is one of the most powerful and least reviewable choices in the legal system. When critics call a prosecution politically motivated or an abuse of power, they’re pointing at that discretion. Whether this case is a legitimate property-crime prosecution (it isn’t) or an overreach (it is) is exactly what the coming proceedings will test—and it’s a useful reminder that the same charging power that holds genuine wrongdoers accountable can also be aimed in ways that raise real fairness concerns.

Former US Olympian pleads not guilty in Reflecting Pool vandalism case | Reuters

On July 8, 1777, delegates meeting in Windsor adopted the Constitution of the Vermont Republic—and in doing so, Vermont became the first place in North America to write the prohibition of slavery into its founding law. At a moment when the newly declared United States tolerated and protected human bondage, a small, unrecognized republic on the frontier put a very different principle on paper.

The relevant language was striking for its era. The Vermont constitution declared that all people are born equally free and independent, and it provided that no adult could be held as a servant, slave, or apprentice against their will—specifically, no man over twenty-one and no woman over eighteen. It was not a complete abolition; the age limits meant the document did not immediately free everyone, and enforcement in practice was uneven and incomplete for years afterward. But as a matter of constitutional text, it was the first time on this continent that a government’s foundational law declared slavery inconsistent with the very idea of being born free.

The context matters. In 1777, Vermont was not yet a state—it wouldn’t join the Union until 1791—and it existed in a kind of legal limbo, claimed by both New York and New Hampshire and recognized by neither. That outsider status may have given its drafters room to be bolder than their contemporaries. While the framers of the national government were negotiating the compromises that would embed slavery in American law for another four generations—the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, the twenty-year protection of the slave trade—Vermont’s drafters wrote the opposite conviction into their first article.

The significance of July 8, 1777 is partly symbolic and partly practical. Symbolically, it established that abolition was not some later invention imposed on a reluctant founding generation, but a principle that existed at the founding itself, chosen by people who could see the contradiction between declaring all men free and holding some in bondage. Practically, Vermont’s provision became an early data point in the long argument that would run through the Northwest Ordinance, the gradual emancipation statutes of the northern states, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, and finally the Thirteenth Amendment. It’s a reminder that constitutional law is not just handed down from the most powerful actors—that sometimes the boldest legal principles come from the margins, from a place that wasn’t even sure it counted as a state, writing down what it believed the law ought to be.

A former Milwaukee County judge, Hannah Dugan, has been sentenced in federal court after being convicted of obstructing an immigration arrest outside her courtroom—a case that became a flashpoint in the fight over the Trump administration’s use of courthouses to stage immigration enforcement. Dugan, who is 67 and was an elected circuit court judge, was found guilty of obstructing a federal proceeding, though a jury acquitted her of a lesser concealment charge.

Federal immigration agents came to Dugan’s courthouse to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican man who was scheduled to appear before her on misdemeanor assault charges. Prosecutors said Dugan directed him out through a non-public “jury door” in an effort to help him avoid the agents waiting in the public hallway. It didn’t work—Flores-Ruiz walked through a public hallway with his attorney anyway, and agents arrested him outside after a brief foot chase. But the government charged Dugan criminally for what she did inside the courthouse, and a federal jury convicted her in December.

Think about the competing principles colliding here. On one side is the idea that no one, not even a judge, gets to physically obstruct federal law enforcement carrying out its duties. On the other is a real institutional worry that animated a lot of the coverage: if immigration agents stake out courthouses, people with pending cases—victims, witnesses, defendants—may stop showing up at all, which grinds the ordinary work of the state courts to a halt. Dugan’s defenders framed her actions as protecting the functioning of her courtroom; prosecutors framed them as obstruction of a federal operation. The jury sided with the government on the core charge.

At sentencing, the two sides were far apart. Federal prosecutors declined to recommend a specific term but argued the guidelines called for fifteen to twenty-one months in prison. Dugan’s lawyers disputed that calculation and asked U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman for time served—no prison at all. The significance of the case goes well beyond one judge. It’s a marker of how aggressively the administration is willing to pursue anyone perceived to interfere with immigration enforcement, up to and including a sitting judge, and it sends a message to state and local officials everywhere about the personal legal risk of getting between federal agents and their targets.

Ex-Wisconsin judge to be sentenced for obstructing immigration arrest | Reuters

Bayer is moving to bring an end to the sprawling federal litigation over its Roundup weedkiller, following a significant win at the Supreme Court. Late last month, the Court ruled 7-2 in Bayer’s favor, and the company is now trying to convert that decision into the dismissal of the failure-to-warn claims that have driven nearly a decade of lawsuits.

Thousands of plaintiffs have sued Bayer alleging that Roundup, and specifically its active ingredient glyphosate, caused their non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and that the company violated state law by failing to warn them of that cancer risk. Bayer’s winning argument was about federal preemption—the principle that when federal and state law conflict, federal law wins. Bayer argued that because the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded glyphosate poses no cancer risk and requires no cancer warning on the label, plaintiffs can’t use state failure-to-warn law to demand a warning the federal regulator affirmatively says isn’t needed. The Supreme Court agreed, overturning a $1.25 million Missouri verdict in the process.

Consider why this is such a powerful tool for Bayer. A failure-to-warn claim says, in essence, “you should have told me this was dangerous.” But if the federal agency in charge has studied the product and decided no warning is warranted, then a state jury ordering the company to warn anyway would effectively be overriding the federal regulator. Preemption resolves that conflict in favor of the federal standard. The practical effect is that the single most common theory in the Roundup litigation—failure to warn—is now largely off the table in the cases this ruling reaches.

The significance is real but, importantly, not total. This should let Bayer dismiss current warning-based claims and block future ones, which is exactly why the company is now pressing courts to wind down the federal litigation, and it’s pairing that push with a proposed $7.25 billion class-action settlement to sweep in remaining Roundup users. But the decision doesn’t make every claim disappear. Plaintiffs may still pursue theories that don’t depend on a failure to warn—like defective design—and the settlement obligations remain. So this is a milestone in Bayer’s long campaign to contain its liability, not the final word. It’s also a notable example of how federal regulatory findings can become a shield against state tort law, a doctrine with implications well beyond weedkiller.

Bayer seeks end to federal Roundup litigation after Supreme Court win | Reuters

Federal judges are sounding skeptical of a California law that bans employers from forcing workers to attend so-called “captive audience” meetings—mandatory gatherings where a company shares its views on political or religious matters, most often its opposition to unionizing. The law has already been blocked by a district court, and the signs from the bench suggest that skepticism may carry through on appeal.

Here’s what a captive audience meeting is and why it’s contested. When a union organizing drive is underway, employers have long held mandatory meetings where attendance is required and workers listen to management make the case against unionizing. Unions call these coercive; employers call them protected speech. California’s SB 399 tried to ban compelling attendance at meetings covering “political matters,” a category defined broadly enough to include unionization. Judge Daniel Calabretta of the Eastern District of California blocked the law, and his reasoning is the crux of the whole fight.

He gave two independent grounds, and it’s worth separating them. The first is federal preemption—the same principle at work in the Bayer story. Calabretta found that the National Labor Relations Act, which governs labor relations nationwide, occupies this field and preempts California’s attempt to regulate it under the Machinists and Garmon preemption doctrines. The second ground is the First Amendment: he held that the law was a content-based restriction on employer speech, singling out “political” and “religious” topics, and that it couldn’t survive strict scrutiny—the most demanding test in constitutional law, which almost nothing passes. In his view, banning all speech on those topics in mandatory meetings swept far too broadly.

The significance here is that this is a collision between the labor movement’s priorities and employers’ free-speech claims, and right now the free-speech and preemption arguments are winning in court. A number of states have passed captive-audience bans, so how the Ninth Circuit ultimately rules—California and Attorney General Rob Bonta are expected to appeal—will shape whether this entire category of worker-protection law survives. It’s a reminder that even popular labor legislation has to run a gauntlet of federal preemption and the First Amendment, and that employer speech, including anti-union speech, gets substantial constitutional protection.

US judges leery of California ban on workplace captive-audience meetings | Reuters

On July 7, 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced that he was nominating Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court of the United States. If confirmed, she would become the first woman ever to serve on the Court in its then-191-year history. The Senate confirmed her later that summer by a vote of 99 to 0, and she took her seat in September 1981.

O’Connor’s path to the Court was, in its own way, a commentary on the barriers women faced in the legal profession. She had graduated near the top of her class at Stanford Law School in 1952—ahead of, among others, William Rehnquist, who would one day be her Chief Justice—and yet law firms in California would not hire her as a lawyer. One offered her a job as a legal secretary. She built her career instead in public service and in Arizona politics, eventually rising to become the majority leader of the Arizona state senate, the first woman in the country to hold such a post, before moving to the bench as a state judge. When Reagan, who had promised during his campaign to appoint a woman to the Court, chose her, he was reaching past the federal appellate judiciary—which had almost no women on it—into state government.

On the Court, O’Connor became famous as a pragmatic, case-by-case decision-maker who resisted sweeping rules, and for roughly a quarter century she sat at the ideological center, casting decisive votes on abortion, affirmative action, campaign finance, religion, and the limits of federal power. Her approach frustrated those who wanted bright-line doctrines from either side, but it made her, for a generation, arguably the most powerful jurist in the country—the swing vote whose reasoning lower courts and litigants had to anticipate.

Her nomination matters in legal history not only because it broke a barrier that had stood since 1789, but because of what came after it. Once one woman had sat on the Court and served with distinction, the question was no longer whether a woman could do the job but why it had taken so long. O’Connor herself was characteristically understated about the symbolism, insisting that she wanted to be judged on the quality of her arguments rather than her place in history. But the two are not really separable. The fact that a brilliant lawyer could be turned away from every firm that interviewed her, and then go on to become the deciding vote on the highest court in the land, is a reminder of how much talent the profession wasted for how long—and of how quickly a barrier that seems permanent can fall once someone is finally allowed through it.

Meta has disclosed that four states are seeking as much as $1.4 trillion in penalties heading into an August trial over claims that the company deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict young users. The figure—close to Meta’s entire market value of around $1.5 trillion—came out in a court filing in which Meta argued the number is wildly excessive and, in its words, “has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement.”

California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are among the states suing Meta, alleging that the company engineered features to keep teenagers compulsively engaged—infinite scroll, autoplay, manipulative notifications—while publicly downplaying the harm to young users’ mental health. The case is set for trial in Oakland in August. The eye-popping penalty number comes from how state consumer-protection laws are structured: they typically set a fixed statutory fine per violation, and the states arrive at $1.4 trillion by multiplying that per-violation fine by an enormous number of alleged violations, one for roughly every affected young user, across years of conduct.

Think about how that math works and why it produces such a staggering figure. If a law says you owe, say, a few thousand dollars per violation, that sounds modest—until the “violations” are counted in the tens or hundreds of millions because each affected teenager, each exposure, is its own violation. Statutes written to punish a corner store for mislabeling a product start to generate astronomical numbers when applied to a platform that touches nearly every teenager in a state. That’s the tension at the heart of this filing: the states say they’re simply applying the law as written, and Meta says applying it that way produces a number no legislature could possibly have intended.

The significance here isn’t really the trillion-dollar headline, which almost no one expects to be the actual outcome. It’s what the fight over the number reveals. Penalty calculations like this are leverage—they shape settlement negotiations and signal how seriously a court might treat the underlying conduct. The case is one of the most important tests yet of whether decades-old consumer-protection statutes can be turned against the design choices of social media platforms, and whether “we built it to be addictive” can be treated as a deceptive or unfair business practice. However the penalty question resolves, the theory of liability is the thing to watch.

Meta says US states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties in August youth safety trial | Reuters

A coalition of twenty-two Democratic state attorneys general has come out against the Trump administration’s plan to impose tariffs of up to 12.5% on 59 countries and the European Union, tariffs the administration justifies as a response to trade in goods made with forced labor. The attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, call the levies unlawful and describe them as a pretext to resurrect tariff authority the Supreme Court has already rejected.

Tariffs are taxes on imports, and the Constitution gives the power to levy taxes primarily to Congress. Presidents can impose tariffs, but only when Congress has delegated them that authority through a specific statute, and each of those statutes comes with its own conditions and limits. Earlier tariffs from this administration were struck down when courts found the President had stretched his delegated power past what the law allowed. Now the administration is invoking forced-labor concerns as the legal basis for a new round. The Democratic attorneys general argue that this is the same overreach in a new costume—that dressing tariffs up as a human-rights measure doesn’t cure the underlying problem, which is that the President is claiming a taxing power Congress never handed him.

Consider the practical reach of what’s proposed. The attorneys general say these tariffs would hit roughly 99% of imports. A tariff, whatever its stated purpose, is ultimately paid by importers and passed along to consumers in higher prices. So the debate isn’t only an abstract argument about the separation of powers—it’s about who gets to decide to raise the cost of nearly everything Americans buy from abroad, and whether that decision belongs to one person in the executive branch or to Congress. The forced-labor rationale is genuinely important on its own terms; forced labor in global supply chains is a real and serious problem. But the attorneys general are making a structural point: even a good goal doesn’t authorize a power the law doesn’t grant.

The significance is that this is another front in an ongoing constitutional struggle over how far presidential trade power extends. The attorneys general are signaling they will litigate, and the courts have already shown, in striking down the earlier tariffs, that they are willing to police the boundary. Watch for whether this dispute follows the same path to the Supreme Court, because the answer will shape not just this set of tariffs but how much unilateral economic power any president can claim by pointing to a sufficiently sympathetic justification.

Democratic AGs oppose Trump plan to impose tariffs on forced labor concerns | Reuters

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has abandoned an unusual set of trademark applications it had filed to register the phrase “Board of Peace” on behalf of President Trump, walking away from the filings after sharp criticism from congressional Democrats and questions about whether the agency had any legal authority to file them in the first place. The government filed an express abandonment of the applications, ending what one member of Congress called an unlawful venture.

A trademark protects a brand—a word or logo used to identify the source of goods or services in commerce. Normally, a person or company files their own application, or has their lawyer file it for them. What happened here is that the Director of the Patent and Trademark Office, the head of the very agency that examines and grants trademarks, filed applications to register “Board of Peace” on the President’s behalf. And that raised an immediate legal problem: the Lanham Act, the federal trademark statute, generally forbids filing an application on behalf of another person unless you are that person’s attorney—and the Director specifically was not acting as Trump’s lawyer.

Think about why that rule exists and why the arrangement looked so troubling. The agency that decides who gets a trademark is supposed to be a neutral referee. When the head of that agency personally files an application for the President, the referee has stepped onto the field to play for one team. Even setting aside the specific statutory bar, it collapses the distinction between the government official who grants rights and the private party who receives them. Critics questioned not just the legality but the transparency of the whole exercise—who authorized it, on what authority, and why the trademark office was branding a presidential initiative at all.

The significance is less about the phrase “Board of Peace” and more about the guardrails around a powerful administrative agency. Trademark law has technical rules about who may file and on whose behalf, and those rules are part of what keeps the system credible. The abandonment—prompted by oversight from the House Judiciary Committee’s Democrats—shows those guardrails still functioning: an irregular filing was flagged, its legal basis questioned, and the agency backed down before a court had to intervene. It’s a small episode in the scheme of things, but a clean illustration of how ordinary statutory limits and legislative oversight can check an official who reaches beyond his role.

US trademark office abandons ‘Board of Peace’ branding rights applications | Reuters

In my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on the administration’s threat to hit countries that have digital services taxes with 100% tariffs. My argument, in short, is that this is an ill-advised response—it isn’t really a defense of the U.S. tax system at all, but an attempt to use consumer-funded trade pain to shield big tech from foreign tax bills.

Let me set up the problem. A digital services tax, or DST, is a levy some foreign governments impose on the local digital revenue of companies like Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, or Netflix. These firms can earn enormous revenue from users in a country without ever having the kind of physical presence that the traditional international tax system was built to tax. Netflix can stream into a jurisdiction, pull revenue out of it, and never owe local tax. So foreign governments invented DSTs to capture some of that. The U.S. response, apparently, is to threaten tariffs on that country’s completely unrelated goods until the tax goes away. The logic is that if Google has to pay France a modest tax on its digital revenue, someone in Cleveland might have to pay more for their champagne.

I want to be fair to both sides here, because I actually think both have a point. DSTs genuinely deserve criticism—they’re blunt instruments that tax gross revenue rather than profit, which means they can overtax low-margin business, and they’re often designed with revenue thresholds conveniently set to catch every big U.S. tech firm while sparing domestic companies. So the U.S. complaint that these taxes are tailored to skim revenue from American firms is not baseless. But foreign governments also have a legitimate grievance: the old international tax rules really do struggle to tax digital businesses that earn a fortune from local users without setting foot in the country.

Here’s where I think the tariff response falls apart. A blanket 100% tariff doesn’t fix any of a DST’s design flaws. It doesn’t determine where digital value is actually created, it doesn’t allocate taxing rights, and it doesn’t even fall on the foreign government. Tariffs are paid by importers, and most of that cost gets passed along to consumers. With last year’s tariffs, as much as ninety percent of the economic burden landed on domestic firms and consumers. So think about how strange this is as tax policy: the companies facing the foreign tax are the largest and richest technology firms in the world, but the companies and consumers who’d actually feel the tariff are unrelated domestic players. No one is literally cutting Meta a reimbursement check, but the effect is the same—American consumers and importers become the leverage used to protect Silicon Valley from foreign tax exposure.

And the bilateral approach has a nasty structural problem. The administration seems emboldened by the Canada episode—Canada moved to collect its DST, the U.S. threatened trade consequences, and Canada backed down. The apparent lesson the administration drew is that a big enough threat can make any foreign tax disappear. But if the U.S. treats tariff threats as a standing veto over other countries’ tax policy, then every DST becomes a bilateral confrontation—France, Spain, Italy, the UK, one hostage negotiation after another—and it invites everyone else to adopt the same playbook the moment U.S. firms need something from them.

So what I argue for instead is a binding, multilateral framework, and I lay out three pieces it would need. First, countries with DSTs agree to repeal them once a replacement is in place—the goal is to swap the ad hoc levies for something coherent, not stack a new rule on top of them. Second, market jurisdictions get, and help design, a predictable formula for their share of taxing rights over digital multinationals—something administrable and tied to a defensible theory of where digital profits are earned. And third, the U.S. keeps its powder dry: retaliation stays in reserve for countries that refuse the framework or discriminate against U.S. firms, applied with due process and proportionality, not as a one-size-fits-all tariff bazooka every time a foreign tax annoys Silicon Valley. Until we build that kind of system, the DST fight is just going to keep coming back.

US Tariff Threat Is an Ill-Advised Digital Services Tax Reaction | Bloomberg Tax

On July 6, 1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded at Tower Hill in London, convicted of high treason against King Henry VIII. More had been one of the most powerful men in England—a lawyer, a scholar, a former Lord Chancellor, the King’s own friend—and he went to the scaffold because he would not say the words the King demanded.

The dispute was, at its heart, about supremacy. Henry VIII had broken with Rome and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, and Parliament had passed the Act of Supremacy and an Act of Succession requiring subjects to swear an oath acknowledging the King’s new status and the legitimacy of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. More refused to take the oath. Crucially, he did not denounce the King. He said nothing at all. He believed that by staying silent he stayed within the law—that under the old maxim, silence gives consent, and no court could convict a man for what he had not said.

The Crown answered that theory with new law. The Treason Act of 1534, which took effect in early 1535, made it treason to “maliciously” deprive the King or Queen of their “dignity, title, or name”—and the government argued that More’s conspicuous silence about the King’s supremacy was itself a denial of it. More was tried on July 1, 1535, before a panel that included Anne Boleyn’s father, brother, and uncle. The decisive testimony came from Richard Rich, the solicitor general, who claimed More had privately rejected the King’s title in conversation in the Tower. More insisted the testimony was perjured. The jury deliberated for about fifteen minutes and found him guilty. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered; the King, in what passed for mercy, commuted the sentence to beheading.

More’s case endures in the legal imagination because it sits at the fault line between law as an instrument of power and law as a limit on power. More was a formidable lawyer who tried to use the law’s own rules—the presumption that silence is not a crime, the requirement of proof—to protect his conscience, and the state simply rewrote the rules and manufactured the proof. His famous last words, that he died “the King’s good servant, but God’s first,” draw the line between obedience to the state and obedience to something the state cannot command. Four centuries later, we still cite More when we argue about compelled speech, about the right to remain silent, about loyalty oaths, and about what a person owes a government that has turned the machinery of law against him. He is a patron saint of lawyers precisely because he lost—because his trial shows how thin the protection of law can be when those in power decide they would rather have a conviction than a fair one.

A federal appeals court has ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot detain migrants for more than ninety days without giving them a chance to seek release at a bond hearing. In a 2-1 decision, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—one of the most conservative in the country—sided against the administration, a ruling that could affect thousands of people held in detention in states like Texas and Louisiana.

When the government seeks to deport someone, that process can take months or even years, and in the meantime the government often detains the person. The legal question is whether the government can simply hold someone indefinitely while the case grinds on, or whether at some point that person is entitled to a hearing where a neutral decision-maker asks whether they actually need to be locked up—whether they’re a flight risk or a danger, or whether they can safely be released on bond while they wait. The administration argued that certain migrants are subject to “mandatory detention” with no such hearing at all. The Fifth Circuit said that after ninety days, that position runs into constitutional trouble.

Imagine being held in a jail cell for months, not because a judge decided you were dangerous, but because a statute was read to mean nobody ever has to ask the question. The core idea the court is protecting is an old one: the government generally cannot deprive a person of physical liberty without some individualized process, some moment where a human being reviews your particular case. A bond hearing is that moment. It doesn’t guarantee release—it guarantees that someone with authority has to look at you and decide.

The Department of Homeland Security said it disagreed with the ruling and remained confident in its legal position on mandatory detention, which signals a likely appeal, possibly to the Supreme Court. But for now, the decision draws a line: prolonged civil detention without any bond hearing is constitutionally suspect, and the length of confinement matters. The ruling is significant not only for the thousands of detainees it directly affects, but because it comes from a court that rarely rules against this administration—a reminder that even sympathetic judges have limits when the question is indefinite detention without a hearing.

Appeals court bars mandatory detention for migrants past 90 days without bond hearing | Fox News

Court Blocks Immigration Detention Without Hearings

The Supreme Court has refused to hear Donald Trump’s appeal seeking to overturn the jury verdict finding him liable for abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll. With the Court declining to take the case, the 2023 verdict and the roughly five-million-dollar judgment against him stand.

In 2023, a civil jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a New York department store in the mid-1990s and later defamed her by branding her account a lie. He was ordered to pay her about five million dollars. Trump appealed and lost in the lower courts, then asked the Supreme Court to step in. Last week the Court denied that request. When the Supreme Court denies review—what lawyers call denying “certiorari”—it isn’t endorsing the verdict or ruling on the merits. It’s simply declining to hear the case, which leaves the lower court’s decision in force. But the practical effect is the same as a loss: the judgment is final, and there are no more appeals to pursue.

It helps to separate two things people often blur together. This is a civil case, not a criminal one. Carroll didn’t send anyone to prison; she sued for money and for the harm to her reputation, and a jury of ordinary citizens weighed the evidence and believed her. The Supreme Court’s role at this stage isn’t to re-try the facts—juries find facts, and appellate courts generally don’t second-guess them. The question the Court was asked was narrower and more legal, and the Court decided it wasn’t worth their time to review.

The significance here is partly about accountability and partly about the ordinariness of the outcome. A private citizen brought a claim, a jury sided with her, the appellate courts affirmed, and the highest court in the country let that stand—the system working exactly as it’s supposed to, regardless of the defendant’s power. It’s also a marker of the limits of that power: the office does not come with a trapdoor out of a civil judgment. The verdict is now as final as verdicts get.

Supreme Court rejects Trump effort to overturn E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse and defamation verdict | NBC News

The Supreme Court’s next term, beginning in October, is already set to feature major cases involving gun rights, voting rules, LGBT rights, immigration detention, and corporate disputes. One of the highest-profile cases concerns whether states and local governments may ban assault-style rifles such as AR-15s, with challenges coming from Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois. Gun rights advocates argue that these weapons are commonly owned and protected by the Second Amendment, while government officials describe them as military-style firearms that pose serious public safety risks.

The Court will also hear a voting rights dispute over Arizona rules that would impose stricter proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration and allow removal of suspected noncitizens from voter rolls. A lower court blocked parts of that law after finding that they conflicted with federal voter registration protections. Another case involves whether certain immigrants with criminal convictions can be held for long periods during deportation proceedings without receiving bond hearings. The Trump administration is asking the Court to uphold that detention policy, while a lower court found that prolonged detention without a hearing can violate due process. The Court will also consider a religious rights case from Colorado involving Catholic groups that want an exemption from nondiscrimination rules tied to a state preschool funding program. That case adds to the Court’s ongoing disputes over how to balance religious liberty claims against LGBT anti-discrimination protections. The term will also include business-related cases involving ExxonMobil and Suncor, Apple and Epic Games, and PepsiCo.

US Supreme Court to hear gun, LGBT, voting rights cases in next term | Reuters

On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. It was one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history, and it fundamentally transformed the legal landscape by banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public accommodations, employment, education, and programs receiving federal funding.

The Civil Rights Act was the product of the Civil Rights Movement—years of courageous activism by Black Americans and their allies who marched, protested, and demanded that the law recognize their equal humanity and their constitutional rights. The movement included iconic figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and countless others whose names we’ll never know but whose courage changed America.

The Act made it illegal for hotels, restaurants, theaters, and other public places to refuse service based on race. It made employment discrimination illegal. It empowered the federal government to withhold funding from schools and institutions that discriminated. It created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate and remedy workplace discrimination.

Before the Civil Rights Act, the law itself endorsed discrimination. Southern states had explicit “Jim Crow” laws that required racial segregation. “Whites only” signs hung on businesses, schools, water fountains, and bathrooms. The law said Black Americans couldn’t use the same facilities as white Americans. The Civil Rights Act said that’s unconstitutional and illegal. It didn’t end racism—racism persisted and persists today—but it transformed the law from a tool of discrimination into a tool of protection. The Act represented a moral and legal turning point. It affirmed that the Constitution’s promise of equal protection applies to everyone, regardless of race. It showed that the law can change when people demand justice. It demonstrated that the Civil Rights Movement’s sacrifice—the beatings, the arrests, the deaths, the long struggle—could actually transform American law and create a more just society.

The Civil Rights Act remains one of the most important achievements in American legal history. Every civil rights protection we have today—protection against employment discrimination, housing discrimination, educational discrimination—traces back to that law signed on July 2, 1964. It’s a reminder that legal change comes from struggle, from people willing to demand their rights, and from a government finally willing to recognize the dignity and equality of all its citizens.

The Supreme Court’s use of its “shadow docket”—an informal process for issuing emergency decisions with minimal explanation—has expanded dramatically, and the justices are sharply divided over whether this is appropriate.

The Supreme Court has a formal process for cases: parties file briefs, the Court hears oral arguments, justices deliberate, and then the Court issues a written opinion explaining its reasoning. This is the public docket. But the Supreme Court also has an emergency process called the “shadow docket” for last-minute requests for emergency relief. For example, if someone is about to be executed and files an emergency request for a stay, the Court needs to decide quickly. Traditionally, the shadow docket was used only for these genuine emergencies. But in recent years, particularly under the current Supreme Court, the shadow docket has been used for major constitutional decisions. The Court will issue orders on the shadow docket with little or no explanation, effectively deciding important cases without full briefing, oral arguments, or written opinions.

Imagine if a school made major policy changes through emergency procedures meant only for fire drills, without explaining the policy or letting people comment on it. That’s what’s happening with the Supreme Court’s shadow docket. Conservative justices defend the practice, saying the Court needs flexibility to respond to emerging issues. Liberal justices are furious, arguing that major constitutional decisions require full briefing and transparent reasoning. They point out that decisions on the shadow docket often don’t explain the Court’s reasoning, making it impossible for lower courts to apply the law or for Americans to understand their constitutional rights. The shadow docket has been used for decisions affecting voting rights, abortion, immigration, and religious freedom—major constitutional questions that deserve full public deliberation.

The shadow docket allows the Supreme Court to reshape constitutional law without public explanation or accountability. It enables the conservative majority to implement a constitutional agenda without transparent reasoning. It divides even the justices—a sign that this practice is controversial even at the highest level. The shadow docket represents a concerning shift toward less transparent, less democratic judicial decision-making on matters of profound constitutional importance.

US Supreme Court supercharges its ‘shadow docket,’ dividing the justices | Reuters

The Minnesota Attorney General has shut down its unit dedicated to reviewing and overturning wrongful convictions, citing budget constraints. The decision has shocked criminal justice advocates who view wrongful conviction review as a core function of government. Here’s the context: Innocent people sometimes go to prison. Witnesses misidentify them. Evidence is planted or fabricated. Police coerce false confessions. Lawyers provide inadequate representation. DNA evidence may later prove innocence. Many states have created units—often within the Attorney General’s office—dedicated to reviewing cases where there’s evidence of wrongful conviction and seeking to overturn convictions when appropriate. These units have freed hundreds of innocent people from prison. In Minnesota, this unit reviewed cases, worked with innocence organizations, and petitioned courts to overturn convictions when evidence showed innocence. Now that unit is being shut down.

If you discovered you had been wrongly convicted and imprisoned for a crime you didn’t commit, you would want the government to help free you. You would want the justice system to correct its own mistakes. Wrongful conviction units exist to do exactly that—to correct serious errors in the criminal justice system. When the government shuts down its wrongful conviction unit, it’s saying it will no longer systematically look for innocent people who have been wrongly imprisoned. Think of the human cost. People serving decades in prison for crimes they didn’t commit may never have their convictions reviewed. Their appeals for help will go unanswered. The government agency that should be most interested in justice—the Attorney General—has decided it can’t afford to help innocent prisoners.

This decision signals a deprioritization of wrongful convictions and prisoner justice. It means innocent people will remain in prison because the state won’t investigate their claims. It undermines public faith in the criminal justice system. It suggests that budget concerns are more important than freeing innocent people. Criminal justice advocates worry this is part of a broader pattern: reduced funding for public defenders, reduced funding for innocence organizations, and now elimination of the state’s own wrongful conviction review unit. The decision raises a fundamental question: Do we actually care about justice, or do we only care about convictions?

Minnesota attorney general shuts unit reviewing wrongful convictions, cites Trump funding cut | Reuters

A federal judge has blocked the U.S. Postal Service from implementing restrictions that would have made mail-in voting more difficult. The ruling is a significant victory for voting rights advocates.

The Postal Service proposed new restrictions on how mail-in ballots could be delivered. These restrictions would have required mail-in voters to meet stricter deadlines, reduced ballot processing times, and imposed other requirements that voting rights groups argued would disenfranchise voters, particularly voters in rural areas and voters with disabilities who rely on mail-in voting. Voting rights advocates sued, arguing that the restrictions would violate the right to vote. The federal judge agreed and blocked the restrictions.

The right to vote is fundamental to democracy. Mail-in voting is a way many Americans exercise that right—people who are elderly, disabled, working on election day, or living in areas far from polling places depend on mail-in voting. When the government imposes restrictions that make mail-in voting harder, it’s making it harder for people to vote. The Postal Service argued it needed to implement restrictions for operational reasons. The judge said operational concerns can’t be used to interfere with voting rights. If the Postal Service needs to adjust its operations, it has to do so in ways that don’t undermine the right to vote.

This decision protects mail-in voting access at a time when voting rights are under increasing attack. It affirms that the right to vote can’t be sacrificed for bureaucratic convenience. It signals that courts will step in if government agencies try to restrict voting access. As more Americans rely on mail-in voting, protecting mail-in voting access is essential to protecting voting rights. The decision reflects a judicial recognition that voting is a fundamental right and that restrictions on voting deserve strict scrutiny, not deference to government agencies.

Judge blocks US Postal Service’s proposed restrictions on mail-in voting | Reuters

On this day in legal history, July 1, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Revenue Act of 1862, one of the most important financing measures of the Civil War. The Union war effort required enormous amounts of money, and Congress could no longer rely only on tariffs, loans, and traditional sources of federal revenue. The act created the Office of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the direct predecessor of today’s Internal Revenue Service.

This new office gave the federal government an administrative structure for assessing and collecting taxes across the country. The law also expanded the federal government’s role in the financial lives of ordinary Americans. It imposed a 3% tax on annual incomes between $600 and $10,000 and a 5% tax on incomes above $10,000. Although modest by modern standards, this was a major shift in American tax law because it treated income itself as a source of federal revenue.

The act also included taxes on goods, licenses, businesses, and other transactions, helping create a broader national tax system. Its purpose was practical and urgent: to raise the money needed to preserve the Union. But its legal significance went beyond the battlefield. The Revenue Act of 1862 helped normalize the idea that the federal government could collect taxes directly from individuals. The Civil War income tax was later allowed to expire, but the machinery of federal tax administration had been built.

Decades later, the Sixteenth Amendment would give Congress clearer constitutional authority to impose a national income tax. July 1, 1862, therefore marks a turning point in the legal history of federal taxation and the growth of national administrative power.

The Supreme Court ruled that President Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship is invalid. In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court held that children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented or only temporarily present still meet the requirements of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. Roberts wrote that the Constitution makes those children citizens at birth because they are born on U.S. soil and are subject to U.S. law.

The executive order, signed on January 20, 2025, never took effect because federal courts blocked it while lawsuits moved forward. Earlier, the Supreme Court had limited the power of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions, but the legal challenges to the order continued through class-based and case-specific proceedings.

The Court’s majority relied heavily on the history of birthright citizenship, including English common law, the purpose of the 14th Amendment after Dred Scott, and the 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Roberts rejected the administration’s argument that citizenship should depend on whether a child’s parents had permanent allegiance or domicile in the United States.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that the order was invalid, but he based his reasoning on federal statute rather than the Constitution. Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented in different ways, arguing that the majority misread the 14th Amendment’s history or failed to address important limits on birthright citizenship.

Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship | SCOTUSblog

The Supreme Court ruled that Idaho and West Virginia may enforce laws limiting girls’ and women’s school sports teams to athletes the states classify as biologically female. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the main opinion, saying the laws do not violate Title IX or the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

The Court was unanimous that the challenged laws do not violate Title IX, but the justices split over the constitutional issue, especially as applied to Becky Pepper-Jackson, the West Virginia student at the center of one case. Kavanaugh reasoned that Title IX permits schools to have separate teams based on sex and that, when the law was enacted, “sex” referred to biological sex. He also said states have important interests in safety and competitive fairness, and that courts should not be required to create individualized exceptions for athletes who have taken puberty blockers or hormones. The decision reversed lower-court rulings that had blocked Idaho and West Virginia from enforcing their bans.

Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority and wrote separately to emphasize his view that sex is binary and biological. Justice Neil Gorsuch also wrote separately, focusing on the idea that Title IX, as a funding statute, must give schools clear notice of any conditions attached to federal money. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, agreed that West Virginia’s law did not violate Title IX but dissented on the constitutional question. Sotomayor argued that the Court should have allowed more factual development on whether Pepper-Jackson, who had not gone through male puberty, was actually similarly situated to cisgender girls for athletic purposes.

Court rules that states can exclude transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams | SCOTUSblog

The Supreme Court declined to hear Cathy Harris’s appeal after lower courts allowed President Trump to remove her from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. Harris, a Democratic member and former chair of the board, had challenged her firing under a law that limited removal of board members to cases of inefficiency, neglect, or misconduct. The Court’s refusal came one day after it ruled 6-3 that similar removal protections for Federal Trade Commission members were unconstitutional. Because Merit Systems Protection Board members had nearly identical protections, Harris’s case was strongly affected by that new ruling.

The same appeals court decision that rejected Harris’s claim also upheld Trump’s firing of Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board. The Merit Systems Protection Board is especially important because it hears appeals from federal employees who have been disciplined or fired. Harris warned that the decision weakens the board and threatens the independence of the civil service system. Her removal had temporarily left the three-member board without enough members to decide certain cases, though a later Senate confirmation restored a quorum. The ruling may also affect other lawsuits brought by officials Trump removed from independent agencies. More broadly, the decision gives the White House greater authority over agencies that were originally designed to have some protection from direct political control.

After FTC ruling, US Supreme Court turns away labor board member fired by Trump | Reuters

On June 30, 1870, Ada H. Kepley became the first woman in the United States to graduate from law school. She earned her degree from Union College of Law in Chicago, an institution later associated with Northwestern University School of Law. Kepley’s achievement came at a time when women were largely excluded from the legal profession, not only by custom but often by formal barriers to admission. Her graduation showed that women could meet the academic demands of legal education, even when courts and bar authorities were not yet ready to treat them as full members of the profession.

After earning her law degree, Kepley faced the central contradiction of the era: a woman could study law, but that did not mean she could practice it. Illinois did not yet permit women to be admitted to the bar, so her degree did not immediately translate into the professional status it would have given a man. That barrier reflected a broader legal culture that treated law as a public profession reserved for men, while assigning women to private and domestic roles. Kepley later became active in reform causes, including temperance and women’s rights, using her legal training as part of a wider campaign for social change. Her story also overlaps with the long struggle of women lawyers such as Myra Bradwell, whose exclusion from the Illinois bar reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1873.

The issue was not simply whether one woman could become a lawyer, but whether the legal system would recognize women as independent civic actors. Kepley’s graduation therefore marked an early victory in legal education, even though the fight for professional admission continued after her. It reminds us that access to education and access to legal authority are related, but not the same. On this day in legal history, Ada Kepley’s law degree stood as both a milestone and a challenge to a profession still trying to decide who belonged inside it.

The Supreme Court ruled that President Trump could not immediately remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook while her legal challenge continues. In a 5–4 decision, the Court denied the government’s request to pause a lower-court order that kept Cook in office. The majority said the government had not shown it was likely to win on its argument that the president has broad, largely unchecked power to remove a Fed governor “for cause.”

The Court emphasized that the Federal Reserve is designed to be politically independent, especially because it controls monetary policy, interest rates, and other decisions that should not shift simply because a president wants different policy outcomes. The majority rejected the idea that the president’s stated reason for removal is automatically beyond judicial review. It also rejected the argument that almost any concern about a governor’s conduct, ability, or integrity is enough to satisfy the “for cause” requirement. Instead, the Court said “cause” must be meaningful and connected to whether the governor is truly unfit for the position, not just a pretext for replacing her with someone more politically aligned.

The Court ultimately resolved the stay request on a narrower ground: Cook had not received the basic process required before removal. At minimum, she was entitled to notice of the evidence against her, a chance to respond, and some deadline or procedure for doing so before a final decision was made. Because that did not happen, the Court allowed the injunction keeping her in office to remain in place. The ruling does not necessarily mean Cook wins the entire case, but it means she stays on the Fed board while the litigation continues.

The decision is a major statement that the president cannot treat Federal Reserve governors like at-will employees. It preserves the Fed’s independence, at least for now, and signals that courts can review whether a claimed “for cause” firing is legally valid.

Court prevents Trump from firing Fed governor | SCOTUSblog

The Supreme Court upheld Mississippi’s rule allowing certain absentee ballots to be counted even if they arrive after Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and received within five business days. In a 5–4 decision, the Court reversed the Fifth Circuit and held that federal election-day laws set the deadline for when voters must make their choice, not the deadline for when election officials must physically receive the ballot.

Justice Barrett’s majority opinion treated the case as a narrow timing dispute. The challengers argued that because federal law sets a single national Election Day for federal elections, all ballots must be received by that day. The Court disagreed, explaining that the word “election” has historically referred to the voters’ act of choosing a candidate. Under that view, a voter has made the choice when the ballot is cast or mailed by the deadline, even if the ballot arrives later.

The Court also relied on federal law governing military and overseas voters, which repeatedly assumes that states can set their own ballot-receipt deadlines. That mattered because if federal election-day statutes already required all ballots to be received by Election Day, those references to state receipt deadlines would make little sense. The majority also rejected the challengers’ arguments about election integrity and voter confidence, saying those are policy arguments for legislatures, not reasons for courts to rewrite the federal statutes.

The dissent, written by Justice Alito, saw the issue differently. In his view, having an election on a particular day historically meant completing the collection of ballots on that day. He argued that the electorate’s collective choice is not fully expressed until ballots are received by election officials.

States may continue to count mail ballots that are sent by Election Day but arrive shortly afterward, unless Congress clearly says otherwise. The decision does not require every state to adopt Mississippi’s rule, but it confirms that federal Election Day statutes do not automatically ban late-arriving, timely mailed ballots.

Justices uphold state law allowing for late-arriving mail-in ballots | SCOTUSblog

In my Bloomberg column this week, I argue that Coca-Cola’s transfer pricing fight with the IRS is more than a dispute over one company’s tax bill. It is an early stress test for what tax administration looks like after the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright, which ended Chevron deference and gave courts more power to decide what ambiguous statutes mean. Coca-Cola is trying to use that shift to challenge a major Tax Court loss, arguing that part of the IRS’s victory depended on regulatory deference that no longer exists. The company has already paid roughly $6 billion, and its total exposure could be far higher, so the stakes are enormous.

The underlying tax issue involves transfer pricing, or how related companies price transactions between themselves. The IRS says Coca-Cola’s foreign affiliates paid too little for the right to use the company’s valuable trademarks, formulas, and other intangible property, which left too much profit overseas and too little taxable income in the United States. Coca-Cola’s argument focuses in part on “blocked income,” where foreign law limits what a local affiliate can pay to a foreign parent. The IRS says Section 482 gives it broad authority to reallocate income to prevent tax avoidance, even when foreign payment restrictions are involved. Coca-Cola says the IRS regulation supporting that position was upheld in a world where courts deferred to agencies, and that world is now gone.

I’m not arguing that Coca-Cola is necessarily wrong. The IRS can overreach, and courts should not automatically uphold tax regulations just because the tax code is complicated. But I do argue that the post-Chevron shift may have a strong distributional tilt toward large corporations, especially multinationals with the money and incentive to reopen old disputes or press aggressive refund claims. If Coca-Cola succeeds, other companies will likely look for similar arguments, particularly in areas of international tax where Treasury regulations have long depended on broad statutory language and judicial deference.

What I think Treasury and the IRS should do now is take inventory. They need to identify which regulations were built on assumptions of deference, which parts of the transfer pricing system are most vulnerable, and which international tax rules are most load-bearing. Congress also has a choice to make, even if it makes that choice by doing nothing: should Treasury write the practical operating rules for multinational taxation, or should federal judges decide those questions case by case? The key point of my column is that statutory ambiguity did not disappear when Chevron died; it simply moved from agencies to courts.

Coca-Cola Transfer Pricing Fight Is a Post-Chevron Stress Test

On June 29, 1972, in a narrow 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court delivered what many thought was a death blow to capital punishment in America. In Furman v. Georgia, the Court held that the death penalty, as it was then being administered, violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment because it was imposed arbitrarily and inconsistently.

The case involved William Henry Furman, a man convicted of murder in Georgia. Furman was sentenced to death. But the critical issue wasn’t whether Furman committed the crime—it was whether the death penalty itself was constitutional. The Supreme Court’s nine justices were deeply divided. Five justices voted to overturn the death penalty as then applied, but they disagreed on why. Some thought the death penalty was always unconstitutional. Others thought it could be acceptable if applied fairly, but the current system was arbitrary.

Here’s why the decision was so important: Under the death penalty laws at the time, juries had nearly unlimited discretion in deciding who lived and who died. Two people could commit the same crime, but one would receive a death sentence while the other received life in prison. There was no clear standard. Race played a role—Black defendants were disproportionately sentenced to death. Geographic location mattered—you were more likely to be executed in the South than elsewhere. Whether you could afford a good lawyer mattered. The Supreme Court found this arbitrariness violated the Eighth Amendment. The Court didn’t say states could never execute anyone, but it said the current system was too random and unpredictable.

The Eighth Amendment says the government can’t impose cruel and unusual punishment. If the death penalty is imposed so randomly that there’s no consistency—no clear rules about who lives and who dies—then it becomes essentially random. It’s like a lottery where the prize is death. That randomness itself violates the Constitution’s guarantee that punishment won’t be arbitrary.

The immediate effect was stunning: Furman invalidated every death penalty statute in the country. Roughly 600 death row inmates had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. For four years, there were no executions in America.

But the story didn’t end there. States quickly rewrote their death penalty laws to address the Court’s concerns about arbitrariness. They created more detailed guidelines for when death was appropriate. They required separate penalty hearings where juries would hear aggravating and mitigating factors. By 1976, in a case called Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court approved these new, more detailed death penalty statutes. Executions resumed in 1977.

What’s remarkable about Furman is that it shows how constitutional law can shift dramatically. A 5-4 decision blocked capital punishment across the nation. But when states rewrote their laws to address the constitutional concerns, the Court allowed executions to resume. The case demonstrates both the power of constitutional law and its limits. The Constitution banned arbitrary death sentences, but it didn’t ban capital punishment itself—states just had to impose it in a more systematic way.

Furman remains one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in American history. It shows that the Constitution evolves to address serious injustices—in this case, the arbitrary imposition of death. The case is a reminder that when the Supreme Court identifies a fundamental constitutional violation, it can force the entire nation to reckon with it. For four years, there was no capital punishment in America because the Court said the system violated the Constitution. When executions resumed, they were more regulated and systematic, at least nominally, because the Court had demanded consistency and reason in what had been an arbitrary process.

Luigi Mangione, the suspect charged in connection with the killing of a health insurance company executive, appeared in court for a hearing on significant legal matters related to his case. The high-profile nature of the case has drawn intense media attention and raised important questions about corporate accountability and public anger at insurance companies. Here’s what’s at stake: A health insurance CEO was killed in what many saw as a targeted attack motivated by anger at insurance company practices. Mangione was arrested and charged. The case has sparked national debate about the role of insurance companies in healthcare and whether the widespread frustration with how they deny coverage is justified.

The case raises questions about institutional responsibility. Insurance companies make profit-driven decisions about what medical treatments to cover and what to deny. When patients can’t get coverage for necessary treatment, people die. Families go bankrupt. The anger is real and widespread. The question for the legal system is: Does that anger justify killing?

The answer from the law is no—violence is not an acceptable response, even to unjust systems. Mangione’s hearing addresses procedural questions about bail, evidence, and the rights of the accused. Whatever the merits of anger at insurance companies, everyone—including those accused of crimes—deserves due process, the right to challenge evidence, and the presumption of innocence.

The case highlights the tension between systemic injustice and individual criminal responsibility. It’s raising national conversation about what we owe each other as a society when institutions harm people. It’s also a reminder that the legal system must protect both victims and the accused, even in cases that inspire strong public emotions. The case will likely result in a trial that examines both the facts of the killing and, implicitly, the role of insurance companies in healthcare.

Mangione faces hearing ahead of trial over US health insurance CEO’s killing | Reuters

Federal immigration officials have signaled that migrants with temporary legal status should either pursue permanent residency or prepare to leave the country. The policy shift is part of the Trump administration’s broader restrictive immigration agenda.

Many migrants in the United States have “temporary protected status” (TPS) or similar temporary visa categories. These are people who fled violence, natural disaster, or persecution in their home countries and were granted temporary permission to stay and work in America. They contribute to the economy, pay taxes, and have built lives here. Some have been in America for decades. But temporary status is not permanent. The Trump administration is now saying that those with temporary status should either apply for permanent residency or leave.

Imagine you’ve been told you could stay in a house temporarily. You’ve lived there for 10 or 20 years. You’ve built a home. Your children were born there. You have a job and community. Now someone is saying you must either buy the house or leave. For many migrants with temporary status, there’s no legal pathway to permanent residency. The Trump administration makes it hard to qualify for permanent status. Some people simply can’t meet the legal requirements. They’re faced with an impossible choice: apply for status they don’t qualify for, or leave the country where they’ve built their lives.

This policy will likely push many migrants to leave the United States, disrupting industries that depend on their labor and breaking up families. It reflects the Trump administration’s philosophy that immigration should be severely restricted. It also highlights a fundamental problem: the legal immigration system doesn’t create pathways for people who are already here, contributing to society, and building lives. The policy raises questions about what we owe people who have contributed to our communities, even if they don’t yet have permanent status.

Migrants in US on temporary status should seek permanent residence or leave, Homeland Secretary says | Reuters

Bail bond insurers have agreed to pay $69 million to settle a class action lawsuit accusing them of illegally fixing prices and coordinating to keep bail bond costs artificially high. The settlement represents a significant victory for consumers who have been overcharged for bail bonds.

When someone is arrested and held in jail, they can often post bail to be released while awaiting trial. If they can’t afford bail, they can buy a bail bond from a bail bond company. The bail bondsman posts the bail amount to the court, and the defendant pays a percentage of that as a fee. The problem: Bail bond companies were allegedly coordinating with each other to keep their fees uniformly high rather than competing.

In a free market, if one company charges too much, customers go to a competitor who charges less. But if all the companies secretly agree to charge the same high price, there’s no real competition. Customers have no choice—they have to pay whatever price is set. That’s price-fixing, and it’s illegal. The companies allegedly communicated to ensure all bail bond fees stayed high, eliminating genuine price competition. This hit poor people hardest—those who are arrested and can’t afford bail are often the people least able to afford high bail bond fees. The settlement requires the insurers to pay $69 million, which will go to class members who overpaid for bail bonds.

This case shows that even industries that seem far from consumer consciousness can be subject to antitrust law and consumer protection suits. Bail bond companies thought they could secretly coordinate on pricing. A class action exposed the scheme and forced compensation. The settlement reminds us that when companies illegally eliminate competition, consumers pay. The case also highlights how the bail system itself can burden poor people—they have to pay high fees just to get out of jail while awaiting trial, which itself violates fairness principles. The settlement provides some compensation, but it also raises bigger questions about whether the bail system itself needs reform.

Bail bond insurers to pay $69 million to settle price-fixing class action | Reuters

On two separate June 26ths, exactly two years apart, the Supreme Court made history by recognizing marriage equality as a constitutional right. These decisions fundamentally transformed American law and represented victories for millions of Americans.

On June 26, 2013, in United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional. DOMA had defined marriage, for federal law purposes, as a union only between one man and one woman. This meant that even though some states had legalized same-sex marriage, the federal government refused to recognize those marriages for tax purposes, immigration, federal benefits, and countless other legal matters. Edith Windsor, a woman who had been married to her female partner for over 40 years, faced a massive federal estate tax bill after her wife’s death because the federal government refused to recognize their marriage. She sued, arguing that DOMA violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. The Court agreed. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that DOMA “violates basic due process and equal protection principles applicable to the federal government.” The decision meant that same-sex couples legally married under state law now had to be recognized by the federal government. It was a stunning victory—but not a complete one, because some states still didn’t allow same-sex marriage at all.

Two years later, on June 26, 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court took the final step. In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry under the Fourteenth Amendment. This was different from Windsor. Windsor said the federal government must recognize marriages that states allowed. Obergefell said states must allow same-sex couples to marry in the first place. The decision meant that in all 50 states, same-sex couples could get married and have their marriages recognized and protected by law. Justice Kennedy again wrote the majority opinion, describing marriage as “the foundation of the family” and emphasizing that the right to marry has been recognized as vital in our history and tradition. He wrote about the personal dignity of same-sex couples and their commitment to each other: “It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves.”

For most of American history, the law told millions of Americans they weren’t allowed to marry the person they loved. The law denied same-sex couples basic rights that heterosexual couples took for granted—hospital visitation, inheritance, tax benefits, the ability to make medical decisions for each other. Windsor and Obergefell said that’s unconstitutional. They affirmed that equal protection of the law means you can’t be denied basic rights because of who you love.

These two decisions, decided on the same date two years apart, represent one of the most dramatic shifts in constitutional law in decades. They show how the Constitution evolves to protect fundamental rights, and they demonstrate that the arc of justice, though long, bends toward equality. Millions of same-sex couples across America now have the legal right to marry, to have their marriages recognized, and to be treated equally under the law. For many, these decisions represented not just legal victories but personal affirmations that their relationships, their love, and their families matter.

The Supreme Court has signaled its approval of restrictive immigration policies, suggesting the Trump administration will succeed in making immigration law more difficult for immigrants and more favorable to enforcement.

The Supreme Court has been reviewing several immigration cases involving Trump administration policies designed to restrict immigration. Based on recent oral arguments and the Court’s questioning during those arguments, many observers believe the Court will side with the Trump administration on immigration issues. This represents a significant shift. For decades, the courts have sometimes limited executive power over immigration, recognizing that even though the President has broad authority over immigration, the Constitution still applies. Immigrants have constitutional rights, including due process protections before being deported. But the current Supreme Court appears skeptical of these limitations.

The President does have significant power over immigration—deciding who can enter the country and who must leave. But the Constitution doesn’t disappear just because immigration is involved. People facing deportation deserve notice, a chance to be heard, and due process. The Supreme Court appears to be tilting toward giving the Trump administration even broader immigration power, with fewer constitutional protections for immigrants. This signals that restrictive immigration policies will likely succeed in the courts.

If the Court rules in favor of the administration’s immigration policies, it will embolden more restrictive immigration enforcement. Immigrant communities will face greater risks of deportation. The ruling will signal that courts defer heavily to the Executive Branch on immigration matters, even when constitutional rights are at stake. This represents one of the most significant shifts in immigration law in decades, moving away from judicial protection of immigrants’ constitutional rights and toward deference to executive immigration enforcement.

On immigration, Supreme Court accedes to Trump’s restrictive agenda | Reuters

The Supreme Court has ruled to expand Second Amendment protections and has indicated it intends to take more gun rights cases in the coming years. This signals a fundamental shift in how the Court views the right to bear arms.

For decades, the Second Amendment was interpreted as primarily protecting gun ownership for militia purposes. But in 2008, in the case District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns for lawful purposes like self-defense. That decision was controversial—it overturned decades of precedent and limited gun regulations. Since Heller, courts have struggled with the question: If people have a constitutional right to own guns, what gun regulations can the government still impose? The Supreme Court has now signaled it’s willing to expand Second Amendment protections even further. The Court has indicated it will hear more gun rights cases, and recent decisions and comments suggest the Court will protect gun ownership rights broadly.

The Constitution protects free speech, but you can still have laws against yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. The question with the Second Amendment is: What reasonable regulations can the government impose while still respecting the constitutional right? Gun rights advocates say any regulation is an unconstitutional restriction. Gun safety advocates say common-sense regulations like background checks and waiting periods are reasonable. The Supreme Court is signaling it will take the gun rights side of that debate and will continue expanding Second Amendment protections beyond what was previously recognized.

This signals that many gun regulations that have existed for years—regulations that public opinion supports—may be struck down as unconstitutional. States will lose authority to regulate firearms. The Court’s expansion of Second Amendment rights will make it harder for the government to pass gun safety legislation. This represents a dramatic constitutional shift away from allowing gun regulations and toward treating gun ownership as a nearly absolute right. It will likely lead to more mass shooting deaths if gun safety measures are struck down, but it reflects the current Supreme Court’s deep commitment to gun rights.

US Supreme Court expands Second Amendment rights, eyes more gun cases | Reuters

A federal judge has ordered that settlement records in a real estate class action case be unsealed and made available to the public. The ruling represents a victory for transparency and accountability.

In class action lawsuits, many companies settle rather than go to trial. The settlement typically includes both money paid to class members and a “confidentiality agreement” that keeps the details of the settlement secret. These confidentiality clauses often protect the company’s reputation by keeping the details of what went wrong hidden from the public. In this real estate class action, a federal judge decided that the public’s right to know outweighs the company’s interest in keeping the settlement secret.

If a company deceives consumers or engages in unfair practices, and then settles the lawsuit while keeping the details secret, the public never learns what happened. Other consumers stay in the dark about the company’s practices. The company’s wrongdoing goes unexamined. The judge found that when a company settles a public lawsuit involving alleged harm to consumers, the public has a legitimate interest in knowing what the company did and what it agreed to pay. Transparency protects consumers and holds companies accountable. Settlements should not be used as a tool to hide corporate wrongdoing. The order to unseal the settlement records means the public can now read the details of what the company allegedly did, what harm it caused, and what it agreed to pay.

This ruling protects the public’s right to information about corporate misconduct. It makes it harder for companies to settle lawsuits while keeping their wrongdoing secret. It encourages companies to settle in ways that are fair, because they know the details will be public. As more settlement records are unsealed, companies will face pressure to behave more honestly, knowing their practices may be exposed in court documents. This decision represents an important check on corporate power and a protection of consumer interests.

US judge orders unsealing of settlement-related records in real estate class action | Reuters

On this day in legal history, June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, a major case on the future of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In a 5–4 decision, the Court struck down Section 4(b) of the Act, which contained the formula used to decide which states and local governments were subject to federal oversight before changing their voting laws. That oversight system, known as preclearance, had required covered jurisdictions to get approval from the federal government before making changes to election rules. The purpose of preclearance was to stop discriminatory voting practices before they could affect an election. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, concluding that the coverage formula was based on outdated data and no longer reflected current conditions.

The Court did not strike down preclearance itself, but without a valid coverage formula, the preclearance system was largely left without practical effect. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Ginsburg argued that Congress had created a strong record showing that voting discrimination still existed and that the law remained necessary. Her dissent included the now-famous warning that throwing out preclearance because it had worked was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” The decision had immediate consequences because several states that had previously been covered by the formula moved forward with voting-law changes soon after the ruling. Supporters of the decision viewed it as a limit on outdated federal control over state election systems. Critics saw it as a major weakening of one of the most effective civil-rights laws in American history. The case remains central to modern debates over voting access, election administration, federalism, and Congress’s power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment.

A federal judge has rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to force New Jersey cities to comply with federal immigration enforcement demands. The ruling is a major victory for sanctuary cities and immigrants’ rights advocates. Here’s the context: Sanctuary cities are municipalities that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities. These cities typically instruct their police departments not to ask people about immigration status during routine stops, and they decline to detain people solely based on federal immigration requests (called “detainer requests”) unless there’s a warrant signed by a judge.

The Trump administration argued that sanctuary city policies undermine immigration enforcement and violate federal law. The administration sued, claiming cities cannot refuse to cooperate with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). New Jersey cities argued they have the right to set their own police practices and that cooperating with federal immigration enforcement diverts local police resources from public safety priorities. They also pointed out that when police are seen as working with immigration authorities, immigrant communities become afraid to report crimes or cooperate with law enforcement, which makes the entire community less safe.

Local police have limited resources. A city police officer has to decide whether to use their time investigating a robbery or helping federal immigration agents deport someone. Local communities have a right to prioritize local public safety. Moreover, if immigrant families fear that any contact with police will result in deportation, they won’t report crimes, won’t testify as witnesses, and crime will increase. The federal judge agreed with New Jersey. The court found that cities have the authority to set their own police practices and cannot be forced to participate in federal immigration enforcement, particularly when federal authorities can get judicial warrants if they believe someone should be detained.

The ruling protects sanctuary city policies This decision affirms that local communities can set their own law enforcement priorities and aren’t required to become extensions of federal immigration enforcement. It recognizes that immigrants are part of communities and that community safety depends on immigrants trusting local police. The ruling will likely inspire other sanctuary jurisdictions to defend their policies against federal challenges. It represents a significant pushback against the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda.

Judge tosses Trump administration’s challenge to New Jersey cities’ ‘sanctuary’ policies | Reuters

New Jersey’s Supreme Court has ruled that police departments cannot keep their use of facial recognition technology entirely secret. The decision represents a significant victory for transparency in law enforcement. Here’s what happened: Police departments have increasingly used facial recognition software to identify suspects by comparing surveillance video or photos to databases of mugshots and driver’s license photos. The technology can help solve crimes, but it also raises serious concerns about accuracy, bias, and privacy. Civil liberties groups have argued that if police use facial recognition to investigate people, the public and defendants have a right to know about it.

Transparency is especially important because facial recognition technology has known accuracy problems, particularly when identifying people of color. If a police department relies on facial recognition to identify a suspect, and that technology is biased or inaccurate, the defendant needs to know that to challenge the evidence in court. New Jersey police departments had been claiming that their use of facial recognition was a “trade secret” or “law enforcement technique” that they could keep secret. The New Jersey Supreme Court said no.

If the government uses technology to investigate you, you have a constitutional right to know about it and to challenge it. You can’t mount a proper defense if you don’t know what evidence was used to identify you or how reliable that evidence is.

The court found that transparency about police use of facial recognition is essential to the defendant’s right to a fair trial and to public accountability. Facial recognition technology is too important and too prone to error for police to keep its use secret. This ruling sets a precedent that police departments cannot hide behind “trade secrets” to avoid disclosing their investigative methods. It opens the door to litigation challenging facial recognition evidence on grounds of accuracy and bias. It also signals that courts recognize the dangers of artificial intelligence and surveillance technology and will require transparency and accountability around their use.

New Jersey court limits secrecy around police use of facial recognition tools | Reuters

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to provide a detailed explanation for covering a mural at the Kennedy Center that depicts civil rights imagery and historical figures. The ruling centers on questions of censorship, government power, and artistic freedom.

The Kennedy Center, a performing arts venue in Washington, D.C., displays a mural that includes imagery related to the civil rights movement and depicts various historical and cultural figures. The Trump administration decided to cover the mural with tarps, presumably because it objected to the political or social messaging of the artwork. Civil liberties groups and artists sued, arguing that covering the mural violated the First Amendment by suppressing speech and political expression. The Trump administration claimed it had legitimate reasons for covering the mural, though it didn’t initially specify what those reasons were. The federal judge said the government cannot simply cover up art without explaining why.

The First Amendment protects people’s right to speak and express themselves, including through art. When the government covers up art or speech, it’s engaging in “prior restraint”—stopping speech before it happens. Courts are extremely skeptical of prior restraint because the whole point of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from censoring expression it dislikes. The government has to have a very good reason to suppress speech, and it has to be transparent about its reasons. The Kennedy Center mural at issue appears to have been covered by the administration for political reasons—it objected to the message. That’s exactly the kind of censorship the First Amendment is designed to prevent. The judge’s order requires the administration to explain its reasoning, which will allow the court to evaluate whether the government’s stated reasons are legitimate or whether this is simply political censorship.

This ruling protects artistic expression and prevents the government from secretly censoring art it dislikes. It affirms that the Kennedy Center’s mural is protected speech, not just decoration. It also sends a message that when the government restricts speech or expression, it must be transparent and justify its actions in court. The case reflects broader concerns about executive power and the limits of what a president can do to suppress expression, art, or speech that the administration objects to.US judge orders Trump administration to explain tarp obscuring Kennedy Center facade | Reuters

On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that fundamentally changed American constitutional law. The case centered on a Mississippi statute that prohibited most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In a 6–3 ruling, the Court held that the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion. The decision expressly overturned Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decided in 1992. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, arguing that abortion was not a right deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition. The ruling returned the authority to regulate abortion primarily to the states.

Almost immediately, abortion access began to vary widely across the country, depending on state law. Some states enforced near-total bans or severe restrictions, while others expanded protections for abortion access. The decision was also significant because it narrowed the use of substantive due process, the doctrine under which courts have recognized certain unenumerated constitutional rights. Supporters of the ruling argued that the Court had corrected a constitutional error and restored democratic control over abortion policy. Critics argued that the decision removed a long-recognized liberty interest and placed major personal medical decisions under state control. Dobbs also sparked renewed debate over stare decisis, the principle that courts should generally follow precedent.

For many legal observers, the case became a defining example of how changes in the Court’s membership can reshape constitutional rights. June 24 therefore stands as the date the Supreme Court ended the federal constitutional right to abortion and transformed the legal landscape of reproductive freedom in the United States.

New York’s Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, has upheld the constitutionality of a law designed to restrict hate speech on social media platforms. The ruling represents a significant victory for free speech limitations in the digital age. Here’s what happened: New York passed a law requiring social media platforms to remove or restrict content that incites hatred or violence based on protected characteristics like race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin. The law’s supporters argue that online platforms have become the new town squares where public discourse happens, and that hate speech can radicalize people and lead to real-world violence. Critics worried the law was too broad and would violate the First Amendment by punishing protected speech.

For generations, the government couldn’t regulate speech just because it was hateful or offensive. The First Amendment protected even deeply offensive speech. But online platforms create a new kind of public space where algorithms amplify divisive content, and a single post can reach millions. The question the court had to answer was: Can states regulate hate speech on these platforms the way they might regulate incitement to violence? New York’s highest court said yes, the law likely passes constitutional scrutiny.

The court found that the law targets speech that genuinely incites hatred and violence, not merely offensive opinions. It’s narrowly tailored to achieve the state’s legitimate interest in preventing violence and discrimination. This ruling opens the door for other states to pass similar laws. It represents a potential shift in how courts balance the absolute protection of offensive speech against the harms caused by hate speech in the digital age. Tech companies will likely face increased regulation around hate speech, and the definition of what counts as unprotected incitement may narrow. The decision reflects a judicial recognition that online speech operates differently than traditional speech and may warrant different legal treatment.

New York’s top court says hate speech social media law likely passes muster | Reuters

Google’s YouTube has agreed to settle a lawsuit with a plaintiff rather than face a second trial over questions of social media liability and content moderation. The settlement ends litigation that challenged YouTube’s responsibility for user-generated content that allegedly caused harm. Here’s the broad strokes context: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a federal law that shields online platforms from liability for content posted by users. In other words, if someone posts defamatory content on YouTube, the person who posted it can be sued, but YouTube itself typically cannot be held responsible.

The logic is that Section 230 encourages platforms to host diverse content by protecting them from lawsuits about every post. However, plaintiffs have been arguing that Section 230 doesn’t shield platforms from all liability, and that platforms have a responsibility for content they actively moderate or promote. Imagine you own an apartment building. If a tenant commits a crime in their apartment, you’re not responsible for that crime. But if you knowingly rent apartments to criminals or knowingly create conditions that enable crime, that’s different. The question in social media cases is: When does YouTube’s moderation and recommendation algorithms cross the line from passive hosting into active promotion that removes Section 230 protection?

YouTube settled rather than litigate this question again, suggesting the company wanted to avoid another trial where a jury might rule against it. The settlement amount and terms weren’t disclosed. Settlement doesn’t necessarily mean YouTube admitted wrongdoing, but it does avoid a precedent-setting jury verdict that could have limited Section 230 protections. This case illustrates the ongoing tension between platforms’ desire to host diverse content and their responsibility to moderate harmful material. As social media litigation continues, Section 230 protections may continue to erode, forcing platforms to be more responsible for content they host or recommend.

Google’s YouTube settles case over social media harm to children | Reuters

A federal judge has vacated (struck down) Trump administration policies that authorized immigration agents to arrest undocumented immigrants at courthouses. The ruling represents a significant limitation on immigration enforcement tactics. The Trump administration issued policies directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to conduct arrests of undocumented immigrants in and around courthouses, even during court proceedings.

The policy’s supporters argued it was an effective enforcement tool that would apprehend deportable aliens. Critics argued the policy undermined the judicial system because it chilled access to courts. If immigrants fear being arrested when they go to court, they won’t report crimes, testify as witnesses, or seek legal protection from domestic violence. They’ll be afraid to appear for required court appearances related to immigration proceedings. The federal judge agreed with the critics.

The courthouse is supposed to be a safe space where people can seek justice. Historically, both federal and state judges have issued standing orders prohibiting ICE arrests in courthouses because such arrests interfere with the administration of justice. If people are afraid to go to court because they might be arrested, the entire justice system suffers. Witnesses won’t testify, victims won’t report crimes, and the judicial process breaks down.

The judge found that the administration’s policies violated well-established principles protecting courthouse access and were an abuse of enforcement discretion. The ICE agents conducting the arrests violated state court rules and judicial orders protecting courthouse integrity. Why this matters: This ruling reaffirms that even immigration enforcement—an area where the executive branch typically has broad authority—must respect core judicial functions. The decision protects immigrants’ ability to access courts without fear of enforcement. It may encourage undocumented immigrants to report crimes, testify in cases, and pursue legal remedies. Immigration advocates see this as a significant victory. Immigration enforcement officials may argue it limits their ability to apprehend deportable aliens. The decision reflects a judicial judgment that courthouse access is so fundamental that even immigration enforcement must yield to it.

US judge vacates Trump immigration courthouse arrest policies | Reuters

On June 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the Education Amendments of 1972, a sweeping federal education law that included what became one of the most consequential civil rights provisions in American history: Title IX. Title IX stated that no person in the United States, on the basis of sex, could be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. The language was brief, but its legal effect was enormous because it tied sex-equality obligations to the federal funding received by schools, colleges, and universities. That structure gave the federal government a powerful enforcement tool: institutions that accepted federal education money also had to comply with anti-discrimination rules.

Although Title IX is often remembered for transforming women’s and girls’ athletics, the law was never limited to sports. It also affected admissions, scholarships, hiring, classroom access, pregnancy discrimination, and later legal debates over sexual harassment and institutional responsibility. Before Title IX, many educational institutions openly limited opportunities for women, including through quotas, unequal athletic resources, and restricted access to professional programs. The statute helped turn those practices into legal liabilities rather than accepted traditions. In later decades, courts and federal agencies would shape Title IX’s meaning through regulations, enforcement actions, and major cases interpreting what counts as sex discrimination in education. Its influence reached far beyond individual lawsuits because schools had to rethink policies, reporting systems, athletic budgets, and equal-access obligations.

Title IX also became a model for how civil rights law can operate through spending power, using federal money as the hook for national anti-discrimination standards. Its passage showed that a single sentence in a larger statute could become a foundation for generations of legal, political, and cultural change. On June 23, 1972, the federal government did more than amend education law; it created a durable legal framework for challenging sex discrimination wherever public money supported educational opportunity.

A federal judge in California dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit challenging Los Angeles’s limits on cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The administration had argued that the city’s ordinance was unconstitutional because it restricted the use of city resources to support federal immigration operations and limited the collection of citizenship-status information. U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin rejected that argument, finding that Los Angeles was regulating the conduct of its own employees and agencies rather than trying to control the federal government. The dismissal was not necessarily the end of the case, because the judge allowed the administration to file an amended complaint. Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto praised the ruling, saying it confirmed that local governments can decide how to use their own personnel and resources. The lawsuit was filed after immigration-related protests in Los Angeles and after Trump sent troops to the city in response to unrest over deportation operations. The case is part of a broader Trump administration effort to challenge local “sanctuary” policies in Democratic-led jurisdictions. Similar administration lawsuits against Boston and Chicago have also been dismissed by federal judges. The White House did not immediately comment on the ruling. The decision leaves Los Angeles’s ordinance intact for now while giving the federal government another chance to revise its legal claims.

US court dismisses Trump administration lawsuit over Los Angeles immigration policy | Reuters

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., blocked the Trump administration from using a revised immigration database to help states check voter rolls. The database, known as SAVE, is used by the Department of Homeland Security to verify citizenship and immigration status, but the administration had changed it to make bulk searches easier for state and local officials reviewing voter eligibility. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan sided with voting-rights and privacy groups that argued the changes made the system less reliable and could wrongly remove eligible voters from registration lists. The challengers said the database can be outdated, especially when naturalized citizens are still incorrectly listed as noncitizens. The judge also found that the revamped system raised serious privacy concerns because it gave users access to sensitive information, including Social Security numbers. DHS criticized the ruling and framed the case as part of its effort to prevent noncitizen voting. The ruling comes as the Trump administration has tried to expand the federal government’s role in election administration before the November 2026 midterm elections. Courts have already blocked several related efforts, including parts of executive orders involving proof-of-citizenship requirements and mail-ballot restrictions. The administration has also faced setbacks in lawsuits seeking full voter-roll data from states. For now, the decision limits how the federal government can use immigration records in voter-roll checks.

Judge blocks Trump’s use of revamped immigration database for voter checks | Reuters

In my Bloomberg column this week, I wrote about OpenAI’s request that Treasury update an outdated R&D tax credit rule for computer-related research expenses. My argument is that OpenAI’s position should not be dismissed as just another technology company asking for a more generous tax benefit. The problem is that the existing rule was designed for an older world of identifiable physical computers, not modern cloud computing, data centers, GPUs, and reserved compute capacity. Section 41 allows a research credit for certain amounts paid to another person for computer use in qualified research, but Treasury regulations narrow that benefit by requiring that the computer be owned and operated by someone else, located off the taxpayer’s premises, and not be a computer for which the taxpayer is the “primary user.” That “primary user” test made more sense when a taxpayer could point to a discrete machine, but it becomes unstable when a company is buying access to capacity inside a provider-owned cloud or data center.

I argue that reserved or exclusive use of computing capacity should not automatically be treated as ownership or abuse, because modern AI research may require dedicated capacity for security, speed, and performance reasons. The real question should be whether the taxpayer is buying a third-party service or has effectively acquired, operated, or taken control of the infrastructure. Treasury can still protect against abuse without treating ordinary commercial cloud arrangements as disguised ownership. I suggest that a practical safe harbor could presume service treatment where the provider owns, operates, maintains, and houses the equipment off the taxpayer’s premises while bearing the incidents of ownership. That presumption should remain rebuttable where the taxpayer bears ownership-like risks or is simply routing its own equipment through another entity to claim the credit.

The broader point is that modernizing the rule would not need to turn the R&D credit into an AI subsidy machine, but it would prevent an old regulatory framework from excluding a major category of modern research. The column closes with the idea that tax rules meant to police fake outsourcing should not end up penalizing real outsourcing just because the computing world no longer looks like it did when the rule was written.

OpenAI’s Call for Modernized R&D Credit Rule Makes Perfect Sense

On June 7, 1896, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation in the United States. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court ruled 7-1 that states could require separate facilities for Black and white people as long as those facilities were “separate but equal.” Homer Plessy, a man of mixed race, had violated a Louisiana law by sitting in a “whites only” railroad car. When arrested, he challenged the law as unconstitutional. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote for the majority that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed political and legal equality but not social equality, and that the law was reasonable. Justice John Marshall Harlan issued a lone dissent, famously writing: “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens.”

This doctrine of “separate but equal” stood for nearly 60 years, providing legal cover for Jim Crow laws and racial apartheid across the South. Schools were drastically unequal in funding and resources. Hotels, restaurants, bathrooms, and water fountains were segregated by race. The doctrine was finally overturned in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which acknowledged that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Plessy v. Ferguson represents one of the most consequential wrong turns in Supreme Court history. What made it so damaging was not just the ruling, but the Court’s apparent good faith in the “separate but equal” framework—a comfort with the idea that segregation could be constitutional if resources were distributed evenly, a comfort the Court itself never actually required states to achieve. The case shows how courts can legitimize injustice through neutral-sounding language and deference to legislatures.

A federal appeals court ruled this week that California schools cannot keep secret a student’s gender identity transition from their parents. Think of it this way: California had passed a law giving schools discretion to withhold from parents information about changes to a student’s gender expression or identity, reasoning that this protected students from potentially harmful family reactions. But the court found this violated parents’ constitutional rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children. The Supreme Court has long recognized that parents have a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children. This includes decisions about their education and health.

California’s policy attempted to create an exception to parental notification by allowing schools to conceal information about gender identity changes from parents without parental knowledge or consent. The court said California went too far. The judges acknowledged that student safety is a legitimate concern, but concluded that blanket policies allowing schools to hide information from parents violate the constitutional rights that parents have.

This case sits at the intersection of three important values: parental rights, student privacy, and student safety. On one side, parents argue they need information to support their children’s development and health. On the other, supporters of the California policy argued that some students face rejection or harm from parents if they learn about gender transitions, and that schools need confidentiality to protect vulnerable youth. The court sided with parental notification rights, but left open the question of whether schools can still withhold information in specific cases where there’s evidence of abuse or danger. The ruling doesn’t mean schools must immediately report every aspect of a student’s identity; rather, it means they generally cannot have a blanket policy of concealing gender-related information from parents.

California Gender Transition Parental Notification Case

The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a case with potentially enormous implications for citizenship law in America. Here’s what’s at stake: On his first day of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order attempting to deny birthright citizenship to children born in the U.S. if their parents entered the country illegally or are living and working in the U.S. on temporary visas. This directly challenges the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.”

For over 150 years, the United States has interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that virtually anyone born on U.S. soil becomes a U.S. citizen at birth, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Trump’s order says the clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes children of illegal aliens and temporary visa holders. The administration argues that these children are not fully “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States in the way the amendment requires. Legal scholars and immigration advocates counter that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” simply means not immune from U.S. law—which applies to everyone in the country, citizen and non-citizen alike.

This case could affect millions of people. The U.S. currently grants automatic citizenship to roughly 250,000 to 375,000 children born to undocumented immigrants each year. If Trump v. Barbara succeeds, those children would not automatically be citizens. The case will require the Supreme Court to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment—one of the most fundamental provisions in the Constitution. The Court hasn’t definitively ruled on the citizenship status of children born to undocumented immigrants in modern times. The outcome will reshape American immigration law and the path to citizenship for generations to come.

Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions

A Senate Judiciary Committee advanced two bipartisan bills that would expand camera access in the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courtrooms. The bills, the Cameras in the Courtroom Act and the Sunshine in the Courtroom Act, now move to the full Senate for possible consideration. Supporters say the measures would make the judiciary more transparent by allowing the public to see important proceedings without having to attend in person. Senator Chuck Grassley, who chairs the committee and co-sponsored both bills, argued that Americans should be able to observe cases that affect the whole country, especially at the Supreme Court. Senator Amy Klobuchar also supported the effort, comparing courtroom access to the public’s ability to watch Congress on C-SPAN.

The federal judiciary opposes the proposals and warned that cameras could create problems for jury trials, witness safety, courtroom security, and the administration of justice. The Supreme Court has traditionally barred video coverage, although it began offering live audio of oral arguments during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Cameras in the Courtroom Act would require televised coverage of public Supreme Court proceedings unless a majority of justices found that cameras would violate due process. The Sunshine in the Courtroom Act would give federal judges broader discretion to allow photography, recording, broadcasting, or televising of court proceedings. That bill also includes safeguards for jurors and witnesses, limits coverage of private conversations, and would expire after three years unless Congress renews it.

US Senate panel advances bills allowing cameras in US Supreme Court, lower courts | Reuters

On this day in 1873, in a federal courtroom in Canandaigua, New York, Judge Ward Hunt fined Susan B. Anthony one hundred dollars for the crime of voting. Anthony had walked into a polling place in Rochester on November 5, 1872, and cast a ballot for Ulysses S. Grant. She was arrested two weeks later under a federal statute, the Enforcement Act of 1870, that made it a crime to “knowingly” vote without being legally entitled to. Her defense was straightforward: the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified four years earlier, said that all persons born in the United States were citizens, and citizenship carried with it the right to vote. Judge Hunt did not let the jury decide. He directed a verdict of guilty without even letting them deliberate — something that would be plainly unconstitutional today — and then asked Anthony if she had anything to say before sentence was passed.

She did.

She told the court that it had trampled on her natural rights, her civil rights, her political rights, and her judicial rights, and that under such circumstances she would never pay a dollar of the unjust penalty.

She never did.

Hunt declined to jail her for nonpayment, which would have given her the path to appeal she wanted, and the case died without ever reaching the Supreme Court. The Nineteenth Amendment, which finally guaranteed women the right to vote, was ratified forty-seven years later, in 1920 — fourteen years after Anthony’s death. The lesson lawyers usually take from the case is procedural — about directed verdicts, about appellate review, about the ways a determined trial judge can keep a constitutional question off the docket. The lesson worth keeping today is broader. The legal system that one generation treats as obvious common sense is the one a later generation looks back on and cannot understand how anyone thought was just. Anthony lost in court and won in history. That happens more often than the daily case law makes it look.

A federal judge in Michigan ruled Wednesday against Polymarket, a platform that lets people place bets on the outcomes of sports games. Here’s what happened: Polymarket had tried to convince Michigan’s regulators that what it does is not really gambling — it’s a sophisticated financial product called a “swap,” something only the federal government regulates. Polymarket’s argument was: we’re not a sportsbook, we’re a financial market, just like commodity futures markets. A wheat farmer, for example, might use that kind of contract to lock in a price for next year’s harvest. Michigan’s gaming regulators weren’t buying it. They said Polymarket looked and acted like an illegal sportsbook — people betting on sports without a license — and shut it down. Polymarket went to federal court asking the judge to block Michigan from enforcing the law while the lawsuit continues. The judge said no.

He found that Polymarket’s argument didn’t make sense; if something is a bet on a football game, calling it something else doesn’t change what it is. The judge also said that even if Polymarket lost the Michigan market, that’s a business loss that money can compensate — not the kind of serious, immediate harm that would justify stopping Michigan from enforcing its own gambling laws. This case matters because it will help determine how the federal government and individual states regulate online prediction markets going forward. Right now, companies like Polymarket are in legal limbo, unable to operate in states that say they’re gambling, while arguing they should operate under federal financial rules. The courts need to settle which it is.

Mich. Judge Opens Door For Prediction Market Enforcement

An Illinois federal judge ruled Wednesday that a class action lawsuit can proceed against an advertising-technology company that allegedly snuck Americans’ personal information to PDD Holdings, the Chinese parent company of the discount-shopping app Temu. Think of it this way: when you visit websites or use apps, tracking code collects information about you — what you click on, what you buy, where you’re located. That’s normal ad-tech business. But this company allegedly took that data and secretly sent it to China for the Chinese parent company’s benefit. The lawsuit uses two legal theories. First: the federal wiretap law makes it illegal to secretly intercept someone’s communications or data without permission — and the plaintiffs argue this is exactly what happened.

The company embedded invisible code on websites that grabbed user data without asking. Second: there’s a new government regulation that forbids sending Americans’ sensitive personal data to countries the U.S. government considers hostile. China is on that list. The company argued the lawsuit should be dismissed, claiming what it does is standard advertising practice and not really interception. The judge disagreed. He said the lawsuit makes plausible claims of wrongdoing and can proceed. Why this matters: this is one of the first big tests of whether tech companies can keep hiding data-sharing practices in fine-print privacy policies. The judge is signaling that burying consent in a privacy policy probably isn’t enough if you’re secretly sending data to foreign adversaries. The case will now move to discovery — where lawyers dig through company records — and that’s usually expensive enough to push companies toward settlement.

Ad Seller Can’t Shake Wiretap Suit Over Temu Data Transfers

A class action lawsuit filed Wednesday accuses Hilton Grand Vacations — the timeshare and vacation club subsidiary of Hilton Hotels — of repeatedly calling consumers who had registered their phone numbers on the federal Do Not Call list. This is a straightforward violation of federal law. The Do Not Call list is the registry that exists specifically so people can stop getting telemarketing calls. If your number is on that list, companies can’t call you to pitch products unless you’ve done business with them recently or given them permission. Hilton allegedly ignored that. According to the complaint, the company and its marketing contractors called people repeatedly, sometimes years after their numbers were registered on the Do Not Call list, pitching timeshare vacation packages. Here’s why the damages can be huge: the federal law lets you sue for $500 per violation — per call. If a company makes a mistake and thinks the violation was intentional, the damages triple to $1,500 per call. In a class action involving thousands of unwanted calls, those numbers balloon fast. Hilton and other timeshare companies have historically tried to escape liability by claiming their contractors made the calls, not Hilton itself. But courts increasingly reject that defense. If Hilton controlled the marketing campaign and the contractors worked on Hilton’s behalf, Hilton is responsible. The law here is actually simpler than most litigation: a company’s obligation is clear, and the violation is easy to prove if calls were made to numbers on the federal Do Not Call list.

Hilton Facing Class Action Over Marketing Calls

On this day in 1972, at roughly 2:30 in the morning, a security guard at the Watergate office complex on Virginia Avenue in Washington named Frank Wills noticed that the latches on a stairwell door had been taped over and called the District police. The police arrested five men inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee on the sixth floor: James McCord, Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis. McCord was the security coordinator for the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Two days later, the FBI traced a $25,000 cashier’s check found in Barker’s bank account to the Committee to Re-Elect’s finance chairman. The burglary itself was a third-rate one — bad lockpicking, surveillance gear that did not work, men carrying address books that linked them to the White House — but the legal consequences took two years to play out and rewrote large parts of American constitutional law in the process.

The Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Sam Ervin of North Carolina, conducted public hearings in the summer of 1973 that produced the disclosure of the White House taping system. The Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973 — Nixon’s firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus — produced the legal scholarship that became the modern law of presidential removal and the Ethics in Government Act of 1978’s independent-counsel framework. United States v. Nixon in July 1974 produced the doctrine that executive privilege is qualified rather than absolute and must yield to a demonstrated need in a criminal proceeding, a holding that is still the foundational separation-of-powers case the Court returns to whenever an administration claims that internal deliberations cannot be subpoenaed.

The articles of impeachment voted by the House Judiciary Committee in late July 1974 produced the modern template for impeachment-as-constitutional-remedy that has been deployed four times since. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. The constitutional residue of what began with five men and a roll of tape in a Watergate stairwell is in the Federal Election Campaign Act amendments, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Inspector General Act, the Presidential Records Act, the post-Saturday-Night-Massacre statute book that defines what limits an administration faces when it tries to use the criminal-justice system politically. Fifty-four years on, the question of how much of that residue has held up is, as the saying goes, the question.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman of the Eastern District of Wisconsin on Tuesday denied former Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan’s post-trial motion to vacate her December 2025 conviction for felony obstruction of a federal proceeding. Dugan had been charged after she let Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who had appeared in her courtroom in April 2025 on a state misdemeanor, and his attorney leave through a side door of her courtroom after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had assembled in the public hallway to arrest him on a federal civil immigration warrant. A jury found Dugan guilty of obstruction and acquitted her of the lesser concealing-an-individual count.

Her post-trial motion pressed two principal arguments. The first was that the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision in United States v. Edwards — which addressed the scope of 18 U.S.C. § 1505 obstruction as applied to interference with administrative agency proceedings — applies to ICE warrant service and so the trial court should have given a narrower jury instruction. The second was that her conduct was protected by the doctrine of judicial immunity for acts taken on the bench. Judge Adelman rejected both. On Edwards, the court held that the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning addresses a different statutory provision and a different agency context, and that Dugan’s case is governed by Seventh Circuit precedent on the obstruction statute she was convicted under.

On judicial immunity, the court held that the doctrine is a civil shield against private damages liability and does not bar federal criminal prosecution for affirmative conduct in aid of evading federal law-enforcement officers. Dugan’s team has announced that the case will go to the Seventh Circuit. Sentencing is now back on the calendar. The appellate question that will dominate the briefing is the one Judge Adelman teed up: whether a state judge taking administrative action in the courthouse — guiding a litigant to a back exit — falls inside or outside the federal obstruction statute’s reach when the action is calculated to defeat federal law-enforcement service. That issue has not been squarely decided in the Seventh Circuit. The case is going to be the vehicle.

Ex-Judge Loses Bid To Undo ICE Obstruction Conviction | Law360

A Maryland federal judge on Tuesday denied SCOTUSblog co-founder Thomas C. Goldstein’s post-trial motion for acquittal or, in the alternative, a new trial on the twelve counts on which a jury had convicted him in February — tax evasion, assisting in the preparation of false returns, willful failure to pay over employment taxes, and false statements to mortgage lenders. The case is one of the more striking falls in modern Supreme Court practice. Goldstein had argued for years before the Court and was, for two decades, one of the most visible private SCOTUS practitioners in the country, with SCOTUSblog itself becoming the standard public-facing reference for Supreme Court news.

The criminal case grew out of his recreational high-stakes poker, which prosecutors used to build out a pattern of unreported gambling income, gambling debts paid out of law-firm funds, and gambling losses claimed as business expenses. The post-trial motion principally argued that the trial court’s jury instructions on willfulness improperly conflated the negligence standard with the higher mens rea Cheek v. United States requires in federal tax-evasion prosecutions, and that the court had wrongly excluded evidence going to Goldstein’s claimed reliance on his accountants’ advice. The court rejected both. On the willfulness instruction, the court found the instruction tracked the Fourth Circuit’s pattern instruction on Cheek and made clear to the jury that a good-faith misunderstanding of the law was a defense. On the accountant-reliance evidence, the court held that the offer of proof was insufficient to establish that Goldstein had actually relied on professional advice in the particular omissions the indictment turned on, as opposed to relying on his own judgment. Sentencing is now the next event.

The federal sentencing guidelines on the tax counts alone, with the loss amount the jury found, point to a substantial custodial term. Watch for an appeal that focuses on the willfulness instruction; that is the cleanest reversible-error vehicle in the record.

SCOTUSblog Founder Goldstein Denied Acquittal Or Retrial | Law360

A Delaware federal judge on Tuesday denied Guardant Health’s post-trial motion to vacate, reduce, or stay enforcement of the $83.4 million jury verdict TwinStrand Biosciences won against it in late 2023 for willful infringement of diagnostic-sequencing patents covering duplex-sequencing technology used in liquid-biopsy cancer-screening assays. The court also declined to enhance the award under 35 U.S.C. § 284, even though the jury had found willfulness, reasoning that the multi-factor Read v. Portec analysis the Federal Circuit has refined in Halo Electronics and its progeny cut both ways here: Guardant’s pre-suit notice and continued use of the accused technology supported some enhancement, but its defenses on infringement and validity, while ultimately rejected, were not objectively reckless.

The decision is notable for two doctrinal reasons. First, it reflects how district courts are continuing to deploy Halo’s discretion-based framework in the post-pandemic-era diagnostic-patent landscape, where the gap between objectively defensible defenses and reckless infringement is being drawn case by case in a way that is making certworthy issues for the Federal Circuit and, eventually, the Supreme Court. Second, it underscores the $83.4 million is significant but not transformative: the broader competitive question in the diagnostic-sequencing space is whether Guardant can design around the asserted claims fast enough to keep its cancer-screening assays on the market without paying a recurring royalty to TwinStrand. Guardant has indicated it will appeal to the Federal Circuit. Both the underlying infringement findings and the no-enhancement ruling are likely to be appealed in parallel — Guardant on infringement and validity, TwinStrand on the refusal to enhance. The verdict stands for now.

Del. Judge Upholds $83.4M Patent Verdict Against Guardant | Law360

My Bloomberg Tax column this week argues that the IRS’s disclosure of taxpayer address information to ICE should be understood less as a narrow immigration-enforcement controversy and more as a tax-data governance failure.

I argue that Section 6103 does not make IRS data impossible to share, but it does make confidentiality the default and disclosure the exception. That distinction matters because a statutory exception should not become a bulk-transfer mechanism whenever another agency wants access to IRS records. The IRS holds unusually sensitive information because taxpayers are legally compelled to provide it, so any interagency disclosure should require necessity, precision, security, and auditability on a record-by-record basis.

The TIGTA report is troubling because the IRS apparently built an automated matching process that was vulnerable to bad ICE inputs, inconsistent formatting, malformed records, and weak matching rules. ICE also had unresolved safeguard issues and missed corrective-action deadlines before the data transfer. In my view, that combination means the problem was not simply that data moved; it was that protected taxpayer information moved through a process that treated matching quality and backend security as implementation details rather than core privacy protections.

The broader point is that bad data inputs are not just a programmer’s inconvenience. If the IRS relies on another agency’s messy file to decide whether protected tax information can be disclosed, the quality of that file becomes part of the taxpayer-confidentiality analysis. Loose input standards and crude matching rules effectively expand the statutory exception beyond what Congress authorized.

My proposed fix is straightforward: before the IRS discloses taxpayer information, requesting agencies should have to provide clean, structured, validated data; legally certify the need for each record; meet defined match-confidence thresholds; submit ambiguous cases for manual review; and accept strict limits on use, retention, and auditing. The column’s central line is that Section 6103 exceptions should operate like locked doors, not loading docks.

IRS Sharing Taxpayer Info With ICE Is a Data Governance Issue

On this day in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt signed three pieces of legislation that closed out what the country has been calling the Hundred Days ever since: the Banking Act of 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the Farm Credit Act, with the Home Owners’ Loan Act having been signed three days earlier. The Banking Act of 1933 is the one most lawyers know, because the popular name attached to it — Glass-Steagall — has been doing rhetorical work in financial-regulation debates for ninety-three years.

Carter Glass of Virginia and Henry Steagall of Alabama, the Senate Banking chair and the House Banking chair respectively, built the statute around two structural propositions: that commercial banks should be separated from investment banking and the speculative securities business that had helped pull the country into the Great Depression, and that depositors at member banks should be protected by a federal deposit insurance scheme so that a panic at one bank did not become a panic everywhere.

The deposit insurance piece became the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The separation piece was the part that got partially repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999 and then revisited in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The National Industrial Recovery Act, signed the same day, set up the National Recovery Administration and the Public Works Administration and was meant to coordinate industry-wide codes of fair competition; the Supreme Court struck the centerpiece codes provision down two years later in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States in 1935 on nondelegation and Commerce Clause grounds, an opinion that nearly killed the early New Deal and prompted Roosevelt’s court-packing plan two years after that. The Farm Credit Act consolidated and refinanced the agricultural lending system that the Great Depression had taken to the brink.

The legal point worth remembering is that this last day of the Hundred Days was, in retrospect, the moment the federal regulatory state of the twentieth century stopped being a collection of post-Civil-War commissions and started being the integrated structure of agencies, deposit-insurance funds, securities oversight, labor regulation, and welfare administration that the country has lived inside ever since. The fact that the Schechter Court was waiting in the wings to strike down the most ambitious piece of that day’s work is part of the lesson. The constitutional question of how much economic ordering a Congress and a President can do at once was not answered on June 16, 1933 — it was framed.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up E.D. v. Noblesville School District, a free-speech challenge brought by the parents of an Indiana high-school student whose school district had refused to let her post flyers for her student-run anti-abortion club on classroom and hallway walls. The student, identified in court papers by initials because she was a minor when the case was filed, had been the founder of Noblesville High School’s Students for Life chapter. The flyers she wanted posted featured images of demonstrators holding “Defund Planned Parenthood” signs. Noblesville Schools removed the flyers under a district policy giving administrators content-based authority over student materials displayed on school property, and the parents sued under the First Amendment.

The Southern District of Indiana sided with the district in 2024, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed in 2025, both applying Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the 1988 case that lets public schools regulate the content of school-sponsored expressive activities if the regulation is reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns. The cert denial leaves Hazelwood intact in the Seventh Circuit and everywhere else.

The piece worth flagging is Justice Alito’s dissent from denial, joined by Justice Thomas, which urged the Court to grant review and use the case to revisit Hazelwood’s framework. The dissent argues that Hazelwood was wrongly decided to the extent that it lets schools draw viewpoint-based lines under the cover of pedagogical-concern review, and that the doctrinal distinction Hazelwood draws between school-sponsored speech and Tinker-style independent student speech has become unworkable in the age of student clubs, distributed school messaging, and post-Mahanoy off-campus speech. Two votes are not five votes. But two votes naming a case as the vehicle they wanted are how the next decade of student-speech cases gets queued up. The Court has now told litigants what kind of vehicle it might be looking for. Expect a steady drumbeat of cert petitions teeing up the Hazelwood revisit over the next several terms.

US Supreme Court turns away free speech claim by anti-abortion student | Reuters via Maryland Daily Record

The Supreme Court also turned away on Monday the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s challenge to New York’s General Business Law § 898, the public-nuisance statute the New York legislature passed in 2021 to let the state and certain private plaintiffs sue firearms manufacturers, distributors, and dealers for endangering the public through the marketing and distribution of their products.

The challenge was supported by Smith & Wesson, Sturm, Ruger, Beretta, Glock, and Sig Sauer, and went up on appeal from a 2024 Second Circuit decision that held the New York statute is not preempted by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, the 2005 federal statute that broadly immunizes the gun industry from civil liability arising from the criminal misuse of firearms.

The Second Circuit reasoned that the PLCAA’s “predicate exception” — which preserves state-law claims when the firearms industry has violated a state or federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of firearms — covers a state public-nuisance statute that, by its terms, regulates the sale and marketing of firearms. The cert denial leaves the Second Circuit’s reading in place, leaves New York’s statute on the books and enforceable, and leaves the industry with a litigation exposure it had hoped to neutralize.

The strategic part of the case is going to be the copycat statutes. California, New Jersey, Washington, Delaware, Illinois, and Hawaii have all enacted versions of the New York approach since 2021, and other states have similar bills in committee. Each of those statutes is going to invite its own PLCAA-preemption fight in its own circuit, and the cumulative jurisprudence is going to get built case by case until either Congress amends PLCAA or the Court decides one of these cases is the right vehicle to step in. Today’s denial was not that vehicle.

SCOTUS Upholds NY Law Allowing Lawsuits Against Gunmakers | The Daily Signal

The third notable cert denial on Monday was the end of the road for Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. in its long-running trade-secret fight with DXC Technology — the successor in interest to Computer Sciences Corporation. TCS had asked the Court to review a Fifth Circuit decision that affirmed a $168 million judgment against it for misappropriating CSC’s life-insurance-administration software trade secrets and using them to build TCS’s own BaNCS platform, which TCS then used to win a $2.6 billion contract with the insurer Transamerica.

The Northern District of Texas verdict, returned in 2022, had been $56 million in compensatory damages and $112 million in punitives, and the Fifth Circuit upheld the punitives ratio in 2025 over TCS’s BMW v. Gore and State Farm v. Campbell challenge to the proportionality of the punitive award and over its Defend Trade Secrets Act extraterritoriality arguments. The cert petition pressed both points and pressed a circuit split on the standard for proving misappropriation by an independent contractor that had been given access to source code under a nondisclosure agreement, but the Court declined.

The practical immediate effect is that TCS will recognize a roughly $70 million one-time exceptional charge in Q1 of its 2027 fiscal year and the total exposure on the matter — combining the affirmed judgment with previously taken provisions — settles in around $220 million. The broader effect is doctrinal stability. The Fifth Circuit’s analysis on cross-border trade-secret damages and on the extraterritoriality limits of the DTSA stand. Both questions are going to recur, and the next vehicle that brings them up may catch the Court in a different mood, but for now the law is what the Fifth Circuit said it was.

US Supreme Court rejects TCS challenge in $168 million trade secrets case | Business Standard

On this day in 1215, in a meadow at Runnymede on the south bank of the Thames, King John of England affixed his seal to a document the rebellious English barons had drafted, in which the king conceded a series of limits on his own royal authority. We call it Magna Carta — the Great Charter. The immediate political context was a baronial revolt against John’s tax exactions for his disastrous French wars, and most of the sixty-three chapters as drafted in 1215 are concerned with the highly specific grievances of a feudal aristocracy: scutage, wardship, the inheritance fees of widows, the freedom of the church, the standardization of weights and measures in the king’s markets. The two chapters that the centuries have remembered are 39 and 40. Chapter 39 says that no free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. Chapter 40 says that to no one will the king sell, deny, or delay right or justice. The Charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III within ten weeks of sealing — the pope held that John, as a vassal of the Holy See, could not be bound by a treaty extracted under duress — and the country immediately collapsed into the First Barons’ War. But John died in October 1216, his nine-year-old son Henry III’s regents reissued the Charter as a tactical concession the next month, it was reissued again in 1217 and 1225, and by the late thirteenth century the 1225 version had been confirmed by successive kings as a foundational statute of the realm. Edward Coke, writing in the seventeenth century, transformed Chapter 39’s “law of the land” into the doctrine of due process, and the founding generation of the American Republic picked up Coke’s reading and wrote it directly into the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The phrase “due process of law” in those amendments is the most consequential American inheritance from the Runnymede document. The principle the barons were trying to extract from a beleaguered king — that the law constrains the sovereign too — is the substrate on which everything we recognize as constitutionalism is built. Eight hundred and eleven years on, the principle is still the work.

The Rhode Island travel-ban lawsuit we covered on June 8 took a sharp turn on Friday. Chief Judge John J. McConnell, Jr., of the District of Rhode Island held a status conference in Dorcas International Institute v. USCIS at which he was openly frustrated with the Justice Department for failing to immediately implement his June 5 vacatur of the four USCIS benefit-freeze policies for nationals of the thirty-nine travel-ban countries. The judge’s message, in plain terms, was that vacatur under the Administrative Procedure Act is self-executing — the moment the order was entered, the policies ceased to exist, and the agency was obligated to resume processing affirmative benefits, asylum claims, and adjudicator-instruction reviews on the prior pre-freeze basis.

The Trump administration, after the hearing, told the court it would comply, restart adjudications, and clear the backlog. It also did what defendants typically do when they have lost on the merits and lost again on compliance: it filed a notice of appeal with the First Circuit and asked the appellate court to stay the vacatur pending appeal. That is the live question now. The First Circuit’s stay analysis runs through the standard Nken v. Holder factors — likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm, the balance of equities, and the public interest — and the administration’s strongest argument on each is going to be familiar: the executive needs administrative breathing room to implement a travel ban, mass restoration of adjudications creates national-security risk, the harm to applicants is reversible if their adjudications are paused for a few more weeks.

The plaintiffs’ strongest counterarguments are also familiar: the policies were unlawful when adopted and the agency had no business adopting them, the harm to applicants from continued delay is concrete and accruing daily, and the First Circuit is not in the business of staying vacaturs of unlawful agency action in order to let the agency continue acting unlawfully. Watch the First Circuit’s calendar this week. The stay motion is the next inflection point.

Trump officials agree to resume asylum processing after being scolded by judge | The Washington Post

Google filed suit on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against a China-based cybercrime network it calls the “Outsider Enterprise,” alleging that the network’s members used Google’s Gemini large-language model to generate the code, copy, and templates for a phishing-as-a-service platform that has built more than nine thousand fraudulent websites and sent two and a half million scam text messages in the two weeks ending June 1 alone. The complaint is significant for two reasons.

First, it is, to Google’s knowledge, the first time the company has affirmatively sued threat actors for using its own generative-AI product as the input to a scaled criminal operation, as distinct from the more usual posture of suing scammers who impersonate Google brands. The legal theories are a mix of Lanham Act false-designation-of-origin and trademark-infringement counts, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act counts based on Outsider’s unauthorized access to Google services, breach-of-contract counts on the Gemini terms of service, and a RICO count.

Second, the factual record will be a road map for the next decade of AI-misuse litigation. The complaint describes Telegram channels in which Outsider members trade prompts that get Gemini to write phishing code, a library of two hundred and ninety prebuilt templates impersonating brands ranging from the U.S. Postal Service to state DMVs to E-ZPass, and an FBI estimate that the broader campaign Outsider participates in has stolen roughly 3.87 million card numbers and caused $1.9 billion in losses since July 2023.

The remedy Google is seeking is a permanent injunction shutting the operation down, plus domain seizures and account terminations across Google’s services and at major U.S. carriers, which Google says it has been coordinating with the FBI, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The deeper legal question the case may end up clarifying is whether and to what extent platforms can use private civil suits as the front-line enforcement mechanism against AI-augmented criminal activity that the public criminal-justice system has had trouble keeping up with.

Google sues Chinese cybercrime ring that weaponized Gemini AI for phishing scams | TechCrunch

A federal district judge in Washington on Friday issued a preliminary injunction barring the Trump administration from continuing to implement Executive Order 14253, the order under which the National Park Service had been scrubbing exhibits, signage, and online materials at sites administered by the Department of the Interior. The judge gave the administration three weeks to restore the materials it had already removed.

The order at issue, signed in March, directed federal cultural agencies to identify and remove content that, in the executive’s view, reflected “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” or “partisan” framing. In the months that followed, the National Park Service had taken down or altered displays addressing slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, climate change, and the histories of Native American dispossession at sites including the Stonewall National Monument, Independence Hall, and the Manzanar National Historic Site.

The case is American Historical Association v. Department of the Interior, brought by historians’ professional associations and a coalition of plaintiffs that includes affected park employees and visitor-experience contractors. The legal theory pleaded was multi-strand: First Amendment viewpoint discrimination as applied to government speech that has taken on a public-forum character, Administrative Procedure Act challenges on the ground that the agency failed to provide a reasoned basis for the removals and failed to consider statutory commands under the Organic Act of 1916, and a Federal Records Act challenge to the destruction of materials that constituted federal records.

The judge held that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the First Amendment claim and the APA claim, found irreparable harm in the ongoing loss of public access to the underlying historical materials, and found that the public interest was best served by restoration. The administration is widely expected to appeal to the D.C. Circuit. In the meantime, the three-week restoration clock is running.

Judge blocks Trump national parks order, calling it “censorship” | The Washington Post

On this day in 1967, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous opinion in Loving v. Virginia striking down Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and, with it, the anti-miscegenation statutes that sixteen states still had on the books. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the Court. The case had come up from a county courthouse in Caroline County, Virginia, where Richard Loving, a white bricklayer, and Mildred Jeter, a Black and Native American woman, had been arrested in their bedroom in the middle of the night in 1958 by a sheriff acting on an anonymous tip — they had been married in the District of Columbia and returned home to Virginia, where their marriage was a felony. The Lovings pleaded guilty, accepted suspended sentences on the condition that they leave the state for twenty-five years, and lived in exile in Washington until Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy that landed eventually with the ACLU, which took the case.

The Supreme Court’s opinion did two things at once. It held that Virginia’s statute violated the Equal Protection Clause because it drew an explicit racial classification with no legitimate state purpose beyond preserving “White Supremacy” — the Court used the phrase the Virginia statute itself had used — and it held that the statute violated the Due Process Clause because the freedom to marry is “one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” That second holding, the marriage-as-fundamental-right strand, is the through-line that runs from Loving to Zablocki v. Redhail in 1978, to Turner v. Safley in 1987, to Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 — every one of those decisions cites Loving and treats it as the foundational case. Whether the Court’s substantive due process marriage doctrine survives the next decade is, as we discussed earlier this week, one of the open questions in American constitutional law. But Loving itself remains intact, and on June 12, 1967, the Court said something it had not said cleanly before: that the right to marry is the kind of liberty interest the Constitution actually protects.

The Supreme Court on Thursday reversed the Second Circuit in FS Credit Opportunities Corp. v. Saba Capital Master Fund, Ltd., holding 6-3 that the Investment Company Act of 1940 does not give private parties a cause of action to seek rescission of fund bylaws or other contractual terms. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority. The dispute came out of a campaign by Boaz Weinstein’s Saba Capital against eleven closed-end funds — funds that, under Maryland’s Control Share Acquisition Act, had adopted bylaws limiting the voting power of any shareholder who accumulated a disproportionate stake without the consent of other shareholders. Saba sued under Section 47(b) of the ICA, which makes contracts that violate the Act unenforceable, and the Second Circuit held that Section 47(b) implied a private right to rescind the bylaws.

The Court told the Second Circuit to look harder at the modern implied-cause-of-action doctrine, which since Alexander v. Sandoval in 2001 has been hostile to inferring private rights of action that Congress did not write into the statute. The opinion reads as a continuation of that line: the ICA’s enforcement structure is committed to the SEC, not to private plaintiffs, and Section 47(b) is a defense against contracts the SEC has already determined to be unlawful, not an offensive cause of action. The dissent, by Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, argued that this is a misreading of Section 47(b)’s text and that the majority is gratuitously narrowing the enforcement of the federal securities laws. The practical impact is significant. Activist investors who had been pushing closed-end funds to convert to open-end form, or to alter investment strategies, lose a federal-court tool they had been using; the funds themselves and their independent directors gain a meaningful structural defense. Expect the next round of activist campaigns to move to state-court fiduciary-duty theories instead.

US Supreme Court rules against private suits brought under key securities law | US News

The Court on Thursday also decided Keathley v. Buddy Ayers Construction, Inc., vacating the Fifth Circuit 9-0 in an opinion by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The case is small in its facts and large in its doctrine. Thomas Keathley filed a Chapter 13 bankruptcy in 2019 and failed to disclose, on his schedule of assets, a personal-injury claim he later brought against a construction company over a truck accident. The Fifth Circuit barred the personal-injury suit on judicial-estoppel grounds — the longstanding equitable doctrine that prevents a party from taking one position in one proceeding and a contradictory position in another — using a three-factor test under which a debtor’s mere knowledge of the facts plus a motive to conceal was enough to bar the later claim.

The Supreme Court said no.

To determine whether the omission was inadvertent or mistaken for judicial-estoppel purposes, the Court held, the lower courts must look to the totality of the circumstances, not just to whether the debtor knew of the facts and had a motive. The doctrinal interest of the case lies in two concurrences. Justice Sotomayor, concurring, wrote that judicial estoppel should likely never apply in an open bankruptcy case at all — the trustee can simply amend the schedule and pursue the claim for the estate, which solves the problem judicial estoppel was invented to address. Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, went further and questioned whether federal courts have any inherent authority to apply judicial estoppel as a freestanding doctrine, period — a position that, if it ever gets five votes, would unwind a doctrine that has been part of American practice since the 1850s. None of that is the holding. But the votes to revisit one of the duller corners of equitable estoppel are now visibly on the table.

Keathley v. Buddy Ayers Construction, Inc. | SCOTUSblog

The third unanimous decision of the day was Abouammo v. United States, in which the Court reversed the Ninth Circuit and vacated the obstruction-of-an-FBI-investigation conviction of Ahmad Abouammo, a former Twitter employee whose underlying case was one of the more striking Saudi-Arabia infiltration prosecutions of the last decade. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion. The facts are simple and the constitutional point cleaner than the facts. Abouammo, while working at Twitter’s San Francisco office in 2014 and 2015, accessed and passed on confidential user information about Saudi dissidents to a Saudi official, in exchange for a $42,000 watch and $200,000 in wire transfers. The FBI eventually came to interview him at his home in Seattle, where he had moved by 2018, and during those interviews he created and emailed agents a fake invoice intended to make the wire transfers look like a legitimate consulting fee. The Justice Department charged the obstruction count along with foreign-agent and wire-fraud counts in the Northern District of California, and a San Francisco jury convicted him on all of them.

The Supreme Court held that the obstruction count belonged in the Western District of Washington, not California, because the act of creating and sending the false invoice — the only act that supported the obstruction charge — happened entirely in Seattle. Article III’s venue clause and the Sixth Amendment’s vicinage requirement together do not let the government try a defendant in a state where no element of the charged offense occurred, no matter how convenient the prosecution. The obstruction conviction is vacated. The foreign-agent and wire-fraud convictions, which had different venue facts and were not before the Court, stand. Abouammo will not walk free. But the prosecution will need to decide whether to retry the obstruction count in Seattle, and the case is now a clean precedent that the venue clause has real teeth in a multi-district federal investigation.

US Supreme Court overturns ex-Twitter employee’s obstruction conviction in Saudi spy case | US News

On this day in 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace physically stood in the doorway of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to block the registration of Vivian Malone and James Hood, the two Black students whose enrollment had been ordered by a federal district court. Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” was the culmination of a long campaign of state defiance of federal desegregation orders that ran from Brown v. Board in 1954 through Cooper v. Aaron in 1958 — the case in which a unanimous Supreme Court told the Little Rock school district, and by extension every state actor, that federal constitutional rulings are the supreme law of the land and that state officials may not nullify them.

President Kennedy responded to Wallace’s stand by issuing Executive Order 11111, which federalized the Alabama National Guard, and ordering Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach down to Tuscaloosa to confront the governor. Wallace gave a long speech invoking states’ rights and Tenth Amendment sovereignty, then stepped aside, and Malone and Hood walked in and registered. That night, Kennedy went on national television and delivered the civil rights address that put the Civil Rights Act of 1964 onto the national agenda. The legal and political throughline matters: the schoolhouse door, the executive order federalizing the Guard, the televised address, and the omnibus civil rights legislation that followed were a single coordinated federal response to massive resistance, and the institutional habit they built — the willingness of the federal political branches to back federal court orders with whatever force is necessary — is the substrate on which the modern enforcement of civil rights law sits. Whether that habit holds up under contemporary pressure is one of the live constitutional questions of our moment.

The “Anti-Weaponization Fund” saga we have been following all week reached at least a partial resolution on Wednesday when Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia declined to extend her temporary restraining order against the program into a preliminary injunction. The reason, in essence, is that the Justice Department has now formally represented to the court, in writing and through acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, that the $1.8 billion fund is “not going forward.” Brinkema took DOJ at its word for present purposes and dissolved the TRO, which under standard mootness doctrine is the right call when a defendant credibly commits to abandoning the challenged program. But she also did something practical: she warned the government in plain terms not to “play possum with this court,” language that gives the plaintiffs a built-in mechanism to come back fast if the fund quietly re-emerges under a different name.

The substantive theory the plaintiffs were pressing — that the fund is an unappropriated expenditure of public money, that the underlying Trump-IRS settlement was a litigation in which the United States was never really adverse to the President in his personal capacity, and that the program’s payout criteria are based on political characterizations of past prosecutions rather than any neutral standard — is now preserved for another day rather than litigated to judgment. The practical lesson is the durability of voluntary-cessation doctrine: a government defendant who is willing to abandon a program in court usually wins on mootness, but the cost is real, because future revivals get scrutinized against the prior representation. Watch the Federal Register and the DOJ component-level budget submissions for the next six months — if there is a successor program coming, those are where the first signal appears.

Judge declines to halt “anti-weaponization fund” since Blanche says it’s dead, but warns DOJ not to “play possum” | CBS News

A coalition of environmental and tribal-nation plaintiffs filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Wednesday seeking to block a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-approved land exchange that would transfer 715 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge to SpaceX, in return for 683 acres of privately owned land elsewhere. The plaintiffs are the Center for Biological Diversity, Save RGV, the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, and the South Texas Environmental Justice Network.

The legal theory of the case is unusually multi-statute: the complaint alleges violations of the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act of 1997, the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act, with the central administrative-law argument being that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s environmental analysis failed to grapple seriously with impacts on endangered ocelots, aplomado falcons, and a long list of migratory species whose habitat the refuge was designed to protect when Congress created it in 1979. The plaintiffs describe this as one of the largest national-wildlife-refuge land exchanges outside Alaska, and the suit asks for vacatur of the exchange decision rather than damages — the standard APA remedy.

The political and infrastructural backdrop is hard to miss: SpaceX’s Starbase facility at Boca Chica has been expanding into the Lower Rio Grande Valley for years now, and the exchange would consolidate the company’s footprint on land previously held for the protection of one of the last remaining ocelot ranges in the country. The merits of the case will turn on the rigor of the FWS environmental analysis. Expect a request for a preliminary injunction within weeks.

Lawsuit challenges Trump administration’s land swap with SpaceX in Texas | The Washington Post

A Los Angeles County jury on Wednesday added $22 million in punitive damages to the $176 million compensatory verdict already entered against socialite and former philanthropist Rebecca Grossman and former Major League Baseball pitcher Scott Erickson, bringing the total civil award to the Iskander family to roughly $198 million.

The underlying facts of the case are stark: in September 2020, Grossman and Erickson left a Westlake Village restaurant after drinking and street-raced separate Mercedes SUVs through a residential neighborhood, with Grossman striking and killing two young brothers, Mark and Jacob Iskander, then 11 and 8, as they crossed a marked crosswalk with their parents.

Grossman was convicted of two counts of murder in 2024 and is serving 15 years to life. The civil case the family brought is the wrongful-death companion, and the punitive damages award the jury added on Wednesday is the part that does the most policy work: the jury split the punitive award $21 million against Grossman, $1.17 million against Erickson, which under California’s reprehensibility-and-net-worth framework reflects both the much greater direct culpability of Grossman as the driver and the substantial disparity in their respective financial positions.

The case is notable beyond the parties involved because of how clean it is on the standard punitive-damages analysis the Supreme Court laid out in BMW v. Gore and State Farm v. Campbell: high reprehensibility, a relatively modest single-digit ratio of punitive-to-compensatory damages, and an underlying compensatory award that itself was supported by the gravity of the loss. Watch for an appeal that focuses on the compensatory rather than the punitive number — that is where the appellate leverage actually is.

Jury Ups Philanthropist, Ex-Pitcher Crash Verdict To $198M | Law360

On this day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, the first federal statute aimed directly at sex-based wage discrimination. The law took the form of an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which meant that it slid into an existing enforcement framework run by the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor — a deliberate choice that bypassed the need to build new institutional machinery and harnessed thirty years of FLSA caselaw and habits of compliance. The legal hook is the Act’s “equal pay for equal work” command: employers may not pay employees of one sex less than employees of the opposite sex for jobs requiring “equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions.”

Four affirmative defenses are written into the text — a seniority system, a merit system, a system measuring earnings by quantity or quality of production, or “any other factor other than sex” — and that fourth catch-all has done more work in litigation than the other three combined, shaping how courts evaluate market-based, education-based, and prior-salary-based pay differentials decades later. The wage gap at the moment Kennedy signed was about 59 cents on the dollar; six decades on, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s standard measure, it sits closer to 84 cents. That tells you something about how a clean, structurally well-designed statute can still leave a lot of the work undone, because the gap is and always was about more than identical pairs of jobs at the same employer.

The Equal Pay Act is not the whole story of American workplace-equality law; Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and a long line of state-law analogues do much of the modern enforcement work. But June 10, 1963 is the day Congress, with the President’s signature, said for the first time that paying a woman less than a man for the same work was unlawful, full stop. Everything that has followed in this corner of the law has been built on top of that sentence.

The Federal Circuit on Monday affirmed a Delaware district court judgment invalidating four Purdue Pharma patents covering an abuse-deterrent, low-toxicity version of the opioid OxyContin, in a decision the patent bar has been waiting on for months. The case is Purdue Pharma L.P. v. Epic Pharma LLC. The patents covered Purdue’s reformulation of OxyContin to make the pills crush-resistant and to reduce a manufacturing impurity, and the asserted innovation grew, the company said, out of its discovery of the source of a particular toxic impurity that had previously eluded chemists at competing labs. Purdue’s argument on appeal was, in essence, that the discovery of the impurity’s source was itself nonobvious, and that the resulting patents inherited that nonobviousness. The Federal Circuit said no.

The panel held that the relevant obviousness inquiry asks whether the claimed reformulation — not the discovery that motivated it — would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention, and that once the prior art is taken into account, the answer is yes. The practical consequence of the ruling is large. It opens the door wider for generic abuse-deterrent OxyContin alternatives and clarifies a doctrinal point pharmaceutical companies have been pressing on for years: a hard-won research insight does not, on its own, automatically save a patent from obviousness if the resulting product was within the prior art’s reach. Purdue’s options now are a rehearing petition at the Federal Circuit, a cert petition at the Supreme Court (which the company has already pursued in a related case last spring), or quiet acceptance. Expect a cert petition. Expect the cert petition to be denied. Watch the generic-drug filings that follow.

Fed. Circ. Panel Backs Invalidation Of OxyContin Patent

The plaintiffs in the Eastern District of Virginia lawsuit over the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — a story we covered earlier htis week— went back to Judge Leonie Brinkema on Tuesday and asked for permission to conduct limited discovery into whether the Justice Department’s recent representation that it would stop work on the fund is a real commitment or a litigation convenience.

The plaintiffs’ problem is straightforward: acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has filed papers saying the program is “not going forward,” but President Trump publicly described the fund last week as a “great idea” that many Republicans support, and the executive order that created the fund has not been formally rescinded. From a litigation-strategy standpoint, the plaintiffs do not want to walk away from a live case on the strength of a DOJ filing, accept dismissal as moot, and then find out three months later that the fund has been quietly resurrected under a different name.

Judge Brinkema has a hearing scheduled for Friday, June 12, on whether to extend the temporary restraining order into a preliminary injunction. The Tuesday filing teed up the broader mootness fight that will dominate Friday’s hearing: when does a federal agency’s promise to stop doing something actually deprive a court of jurisdiction to enjoin the underlying program, and what discovery, if any, is a plaintiff entitled to before that determination is made. The doctrine here — voluntary cessation, capable of repetition yet evading review, and the heavy burden the Supreme Court has placed on the party claiming mootness — favors the plaintiffs procedurally. Whether Brinkema agrees on Friday is the question to watch.

‘Anti-weaponization’ fund challengers question its demise – Roll Call

SCOTUSblog’s John Elwood walked through a useful relist roundup on Tuesday, and the four cases sitting in the relist pile are worth flagging because each of them touches a different load-bearing wall in federal practice. The first is a prolonged-detention challenge to immigration custody under Section 1226(c). The ACLU is asking the Court to clarify that very long mandatory-detention periods trigger procedural due process review under the Mathews v. Eldridge balancing test, picking up on the Second Circuit’s willingness to do so. The second is Newberry v. Texas, a case where Texas itself has confessed error — a rare procedural posture in which the State agrees the defendant should win — and the question is what the Court does when the parties on both sides ask for the same remedy. The third is Kian v. Florida, a Sixth Amendment challenge to the use of six-person juries in serious felony cases, on the theory that the historical understanding of “jury” in the founding era assumed twelve and that the Court’s mid-twentieth-century cases approving six-person juries were wrong on the originalist analysis. The fourth is Maxwell v. Thomas, a federal habeas case asking whether the First Step Act‘s halfway-house and home-confinement provisions are properly enforceable through 28 U.S.C. § 2241 habeas petitions, an issue with a real circuit split. None of these have been granted yet — they are relists, which means at least one Justice is interested but the Court has not yet decided whether to hear them — but the mix is the part to watch: it tells you what the Justices are circling without committing to. Expect at least one of these to be granted before the term ends.

A random assortment of relists: prolonged detention, confessions of error, small juries, and new rules on habeas | SCOTUSblog

On this day in 1772, a Royal Navy revenue schooner called HMS Gaspee, captained by a notably overzealous Lieutenant William Duddington, ran aground in shallow water in Narragansett Bay while chasing a Rhode Island packet boat called the Hannah. Within hours of the grounding, roughly sixty Providence merchants, sailors, and “Sons of Liberty” — led by John Brown, one of the wealthiest men in the colony — rowed out under cover of darkness in eight longboats, boarded the Gaspee, shot Duddington, and burned the ship to the waterline. The legal significance lies in what came next. The Crown convened a Royal Commission of Inquiry with authority to ship the perpetrators across the Atlantic for trial in England, bypassing colonial juries entirely, a procedural maneuver that the colonies read as a direct attack on the right to jury trial in the vicinage.

The Virginia House of Burgesses responded in March 1773 by forming the first Committee of Correspondence, a sustained intercolonial communication network that became, two years later, the institutional skeleton of the Continental Congress. The Gaspee Affair never produced a single prosecution — the commission could not get the colonial governor or the Rhode Island courts to cooperate, and witness testimony evaporated — but it produced something more durable: the colonial conviction that the Crown’s willingness to detour around local juries was itself a constitutional grievance worth organizing against. The right-to-jury-in-the-vicinage point that Madison wrote into the Sixth Amendment seventeen years later is, in a real sense, the Gaspee Affair’s longest-lived legacy.

The Supreme Court on Monday granted, vacated, and remanded the D.C. Circuit’s decision in American Gas Association v. Department of Energy, sending the long-disputed Biden-era Department of Energy efficiency rule on non-condensing residential gas furnaces and commercial water heaters back to the D.C. Circuit “for further consideration in light of the position asserted by the Solicitor General.” That last phrase is the operative one. The new Solicitor General, on behalf of the second Trump administration’s DOE, told the Court in late April that the prior administration’s reading of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act was, in DOE’s current view, wrong, and that the rule effectively bans non-condensing units that millions of homes and small commercial properties were built around. A confessed-error from a new administration doesn’t automatically win a case, but the procedural vehicle — a grant-vacate-remand, or “GVR” — is the Court’s standard way of saying “go look at this again with the new posture in mind” without resolving the merits itself.

The trade-group plaintiffs, led by the American Gas Association and the American Public Gas Association, framed the rule from the start as a de facto product ban dressed up as efficiency standards. The environmental and consumer groups that intervened to defend the rule will get another bite at the apple on remand, but their position is harder when their own client agency has switched sides. Watch the D.C. Circuit’s case calendar over the next few weeks for an expedited briefing schedule.

Supreme Court Vacates Decision Outlawing Gas Stoves, Water Heaters | NewsBusters

SCOTUSblog on Monday published a careful overview of an increasingly organized litigation campaign to ask the Supreme Court to overrule Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The campaign now includes Liberty Counsel, MassResistance, and the Southern Baptist Convention, which last year voted overwhelmingly to urge the Court to reverse the decision. The underlying ground for the push is partly the Court’s reasoning in Dobbs four years ago, which gave conservative litigants a road map for unwinding substantive due process precedents, and partly the gradual erosion of public-opinion support for same-sex marriage in one slice of the polling, with Republican support falling from 55 percent in 2022 to 37 percent now. The legal headcount at the Court is, however, the part of the story that is not yet there.

Only Justice Thomas has been a consistent vote to revisit Obergefell, having said so in his Dobbs concurrence. Justice Alito, despite being one of Obergefell’s original dissenters, recently emphasized in a public speech that he is not suggesting the case should be overruled, citing stare decisis. Justice Gorsuch’s dissent in 303 Creative seems to concede that Obergefell is good law and tries instead to carve out specific exceptions to it. None of which is a reason for litigants on the marriage-equality side to relax. The path Dobbs opened up is wider than any single justice’s current voting pattern, and the campaign is plainly playing a long game.

The next round of test cases on standing and ripeness will start to surface in the lower courts in the next term or two — that is when the campaign’s seriousness becomes measurable.

The campaign to overrule Obergefell | SCOTUSblog

The third and most constitutionally significant story of the day is one we’ve been watching: the litigation over President Trump’s $400 million ballroom — built on the site of the demolished East Wing — is on track to land in front of the Supreme Court, SCOTUSblog reported Monday. The D.C. Circuit panel that heard the case for more than two hours in late April has not yet ruled, but the questioning made clear that a more substantial opinion is coming and that an appeal to the Court is the likely next stop regardless of which side wins. The legal question is unusually fundamental. The plaintiff, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, argues that the President has no “free-floating” power to construct major federal buildings without an appropriation from Congress, and that the Antideficiency Act and the Public Buildings Act both require the kind of statutory authorization the East Wing ballroom never received.

The administration’s response, delivered in a tone that several court-watchers described as unusually defiant, has essentially been that construction has “gone too far to be stopped” and that the courts have no role in second-guessing a presidential building decision once the steel is up. The structural separation-of-powers questions here — what does the Appropriations Clause actually constrain, and can a federal court enjoin a President from continuing to build something that is partially constructed — are large enough that the Supreme Court will almost certainly want to take the case if it reaches the high court. Construction, meanwhile, continues. The most likely Supreme Court resolution is a narrow opinion on standing or remedies, with the broader Appropriations Clause questions deferred for another day. We will see.

White House ballroom battle may soon arrive at the Supreme Court | SCOTUSblog

In my Bloomberg Tax column this week, I argue that the SALT deduction cap’s biggest problem is not that it is unconstitutional, but that it is badly designed. The latest failed challenge, Sims v. United States, involved two New Jersey taxpayers who claimed the cap violated the 10th Amendment, the 16th Amendment, and broader federalism principles. The federal district court rejected those arguments, finding that Congress has broad authority to tax income and decide which deductions are allowed, limited, or denied. My point is that opponents of the SALT cap should stop looking for constitutional defects that courts are unlikely to find and instead focus on forcing Congress to fix the policy it created.

I explain that the cap has always been politically loaded: supporters see it as a needed limit on a deduction that benefits many high-income taxpayers in high-tax states, while critics see it as a targeted attack on those states. But unfair or politically motivated tax policy is not automatically unconstitutional. The real weakness, I argue, is the cap’s uneven design, especially the pass-through entity tax workaround. Many business owners can effectively get around the cap when state taxes are paid at the entity level, while wage earners, sole proprietors, and many individual taxpayers remain stuck behind it.

That creates a serious mismatch: two taxpayers can live in the same state, earn similar income, and face similar state tax burdens, but receive different federal treatment depending on whether one has the right business structure. I argue that this kind of selective relief may be a more promising target for a narrower administrative or legal challenge than another broad constitutional attack on Congress’s taxing power. Congress partly recognized the problem when it raised the cap from $10,000 to $40,000, but I note that the fix is temporary, only lightly indexed, and still leaves major structural problems in place. The marriage penalty remains especially glaring because married couples filing jointly do not receive double the cap available to similarly situated unmarried taxpayers.

I also criticize the phaseout design because it can create cliffs or marginal-rate spikes that reward tax gamesmanship rather than sound policy. A better fix, in my view, would make the higher cap permanent, index it meaningfully, eliminate the marriage penalty, smooth out the phaseout, and require Treasury to rationalize the treatment of pass-through entity taxes. The lesson from Sims is that courts may uphold the SALT cap, but that does not make it good tax policy. If the cap is unfair, incoherent, or selectively porous, Congress owns that problem.

SALT Deduction Cap Falls Short in Design, Not Constitutionality

On this day in 1789, James Madison rose from his seat in New York’s Federal Hall — then the temporary capital of the new federal government — and gave the speech in which he introduced a list of amendments to the Constitution that we now know as the Bill of Rights. Madison had been, until quite recently, a skeptic of attaching a bill of rights to the federal Constitution: he had argued at the Constitutional Convention and in The Federalist that the structure of enumerated and separated powers was a better protection of liberty than a “parchment barrier” of textual rights, and he worried that any enumeration would be read to imply that whatever was not enumerated was not protected. What changed his mind was politics.

The Antifederalist opposition in several states had made ratification conditional on amendments protecting individual rights, and Madison — by then a member of the First Congress — concluded that introducing such amendments himself was the surest way to defuse a broader constitutional convention movement that might unravel the work of 1787. The list he proposed on June 8 was longer and somewhat different from what eventually became the Bill of Rights; the House debated it through the summer, passed seventeen amendments in August, the Senate reduced them to twelve in September, and ten of those — the ones we now call Amendments I through X — were ratified by the states on December 15, 1791. June 8 is the date a reluctant convert stood up and made the case that has carried American constitutional law ever since: the proposition that the government’s structural restraint is necessary but not sufficient, and that the rights of speech, conscience, due process, and the rest deserve to be written down where everyone can read them.

Chief Judge John J. McConnell, Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island on Friday vacated four U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services policies that had, since late last year, frozen work permits, green-card adjudications, naturalization, and asylum claims for nationals of roughly 39 countries on the second Trump administration’s travel ban list. The case, Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island v. USCIS, No. 1:26-cv-00132, was brought by a coalition of immigrant-service organizations and labor unions. Judge McConnell held that all four policies — a “Benefits Hold” freezing affirmative benefits for travel-ban country nationals, a Global Asylum Hold halting asylum processing across the board regardless of country of origin, a Comprehensive Re-Review Policy requiring USCIS to re-examine previously approved benefits, and a separate adjudicator-instruction policy treating travel-ban country origin as a negative factor — are unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act.

The legal hook is familiar APA territory: the agency, McConnell concluded, failed to provide a reasoned explanation for the freezes and failed to account for the substantial reliance interests of hundreds of thousands of pending applicants. What makes this ruling stand out is the remedy. Other district courts that had blocked these policies in the last six months issued preliminary injunctions limited to named plaintiffs; McConnell vacated the policies themselves, which under standard APA practice means they cease to operate nationwide. That puts USCIS in the position of either rescinding the policies, going back to the drawing board with proper rulemaking, or appealing to the First Circuit and trying to get the vacatur stayed. Expect movement on all three fronts this week.

US Judge Strikes Down Trump Policies Targeting Immigrants From 39 Countries | US News

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia entered a temporary restraining order on Friday blocking the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” from disbursing any money while the underlying lawsuit proceeds. The fund — created by executive order earlier this year and funded out of a settlement the administration brokered in the Trump-IRS litigation we covered in early June — was meant to compensate people the administration described as victims of the Biden Justice Department’s “weaponization” of federal law enforcement, with the first contemplated payments going to defendants and witnesses from the January 6 prosecutions. Plaintiffs include former DOJ attorney Andrew Floyd and other former federal prosecutors who argue, in essence, that the fund is an unauthorized expenditure of public money: Congress never appropriated it, the settlement that supposedly funds it is itself under judicial review for whether the United States was actually adverse to the President in his personal capacity, and the program’s payout criteria are based on political characterizations of past prosecutions rather than any neutral standard.

Judge Brinkema’s order, narrowly drawn to “ensure that no funds are irreversibly disbursed,” set a June 12 hearing on whether the freeze should be extended into a preliminary injunction. By the end of last week the situation had escalated further: on June 5 the Justice Department told two federal judges, in writing, that it would stop work on the fund altogether and that the lawsuits challenging it are now moot. That representation will be tested at this Friday’s hearing, because the plaintiffs are not satisfied with a unilateral DOJ promise and want a binding court order before they go away. Watch for what Brinkema does with that disagreement on Friday.

Justice Department says it will stop work on $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” after judge’s ruling | CBS News

A divided Seventh Circuit panel on Friday upheld Indiana’s law restricting who may attend an execution at the Indiana State Prison, holding that the First Amendment does not give reporters a right of access to be present at the execution itself. Judge Michael Scudder wrote the 2-1 majority. The plaintiffs — the Associated Press, the Indiana Capital Chronicle, Gannett, WISH-TV, and TEGNA, represented by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press — had argued that the long line of Supreme Court cases recognizing a First Amendment right of press and public access to criminal proceedings, from Richmond Newspapers forward, extends to the carrying out of capital sentences, particularly given Indiana’s recent resumption of executions after a long pause and a 2024 statute that omitted journalists from the list of permitted witnesses. The panel disagreed.

The majority emphasized that Indiana’s witness list — the warden, execution staff, the prison physician, a chaplain, the prisoner’s spiritual adviser, up to eight family members of the victim, and up to five unspecified additional witnesses — leaves journalists free to interview those who did attend, report on every other aspect of the proceeding, and comment on the state’s choice to impose or carry out the sentence, and that there is no constitutional difference between watching the execution and reporting on it secondhand. The opinion’s most striking passage, candidly weighed against the press claim: allowing “uninvited strangers with no immediate connection to the underlying crime” to watch a prisoner die “risks offending the dignity of their final moments.” The dissent argued the press’s structural role in informing public deliberation over the death penalty depends on first-hand observation. The split sets up a possible petition for rehearing en banc and, in the longer run, a circuit-split-ready vehicle if other circuits go the other way.

7th Circ. Says Ind. Can Bar Press From Attending Executions | Law360

On this day in 1933, Congress passed the Joint Resolution that voided the gold clauses written into nearly every long-term contract and bond obligation in the United States, both public and private. The resolution declared that any provision purporting to require payment “in gold or a particular kind of coin or currency” was “against public policy,” and that obligations could be discharged dollar for dollar in whatever legal tender currency was in force at the time of payment. It was a remarkable act of legislative power: a one-paragraph statute that rewrote the payment terms of millions of existing contracts overnight, in the middle of the Great Depression, to make Franklin Roosevelt’s recent abandonment of the gold standard actually stick. The Supreme Court took up the inevitable challenge two years later in the Gold Clause Cases — Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio, Nortz v. United States, and Perry v. United States — and in February 1935 it upheld the resolution as applied to private contracts by a 5-4 vote, while telling the United States, in Perry, that it had violated its own contractual word in repudiating gold-payment promises on government bonds, but that the bondholder had suffered no compensable injury. The doctrinal residue of that compromise is still with us: Congress can use its monetary powers to alter private contract terms retroactively when monetary policy requires it, the rule that has quietly underwritten every major monetary intervention since, from Bretton Woods to the post-2008 emergency lending programs. June 5 is not a day most lawyers mark on the calendar, but the resolution Congress passed on this date is one of the cleanest examples in American law of a legislature using its enumerated powers to dissolve a contract term that had been considered, until that moment, untouchable.

The Supreme Court on Thursday handed Hikma Pharmaceuticals — and the entire generic drug industry — a 9-0 win in a case that had been hanging over the so-called “skinny label” pathway for years. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for a unanimous Court in Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma, Inc., held that Amarin, the maker of the brand-name fish-oil drug Vascepa, had not plausibly alleged that Hikma actively induced infringement of Amarin’s patents covering a still-patented cardiovascular use of the drug. The skinny label is a feature of Hatch-Waxman generic-drug law that lets a generic manufacturer copy only the unpatented uses of a brand drug by literally carving the patented uses out of its FDA-approved label, which is supposed to let cheaper generics reach the market for the unpatented indications even while patents on other indications are still in force. Brand companies have been trying for years to sue around that carve-out under the active inducement statute, 35 U.S.C. § 271(b), by pointing to generic press releases, marketing language, or website descriptions and arguing that doctors could read those statements as encouragement to prescribe the generic for the still-patented use. The Federal Circuit had bought a version of that argument and revived Amarin’s case. The Supreme Court rejected that approach, and the test that Justice Jackson articulated is meaningful: the question is not how doctors might interpret what a generic manufacturer said, but whether the manufacturer itself actively encouraged the infringing use. Neutral statements that could be read as instructions to infringe do not count. The practical effect is to shore up the skinny label pathway and make it harder for brand companies to weaponize induced infringement against generic competition. The decision was originally framed as a pharmaceutical-industry case, but its inducement standard will reach across patent law generally and into every industry where § 271(b) gets litigated.

It’s unanimous: SCOTUS agrees with Hikma in ‘skinny label’ case vs. Amarin | Fierce Pharma

Also unanimous on Thursday: the Supreme Court in Sripetch v. SEC held that the Securities and Exchange Commission can obtain disgorgement of a wrongdoer’s ill-gotten gains without having to prove that any individual investor lost money. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for a 9-0 Court, which is itself a small surprise given the Court’s recent pattern of skepticism toward broad SEC remedial powers. The case came out of a penny-stock pump-and-dump scheme that Ongkaruck Sripetch ran across some 20 small companies — buy shares quietly, promote them aggressively, sell into the bubble — and the SEC won an order requiring him to disgorge roughly $3 million. Sripetch’s argument on appeal was that disgorgement is supposed to be tied to investor harm, that the SEC had not shown specific pecuniary losses traceable to him, and that the order was therefore not the kind of equitable relief the Court approved in its 2020 Liu v. SEC decision. The Court disagreed, on traditional equity principles: disgorgement, the Court explained, is measured by the defendant’s unjust gain, not the plaintiff’s quantified loss, and equity has always been willing to strip a wrongdoer of profit even when the victim cannot mathematically prove harm. The practical importance for the SEC is enormous — the agency reports collecting roughly $1.4 billion in disgorgement in fiscal 2025 alone, and a contrary ruling would have forced the SEC into an evidentiary burden that pump-and-dump and insider-trading cases are notoriously bad at supplying. The opinion is also a reminder that the Court’s recent administrative-state skepticism is not all in one direction: when the question is grounded in old equity doctrine, the same justices who narrowed SEC adjudication in Jarkesy are willing to leave the agency’s remedial toolkit intact.

US Supreme Court Backs SEC in Fight Over ‘Disgorgement’ Power | US News

The third and most constitutionally significant of Thursday’s rulings was FCC v. AT&T, in which the Supreme Court upheld 8-1 the Federal Communications Commission’s longstanding practice of imposing forfeiture penalties on regulated carriers through its own in-house process, without first giving the carrier a jury trial. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority, with Justice Clarence Thomas the lone dissenter. The case grew out of the FCC’s headline-making fines against AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint for selling access to real-time customer location data to third parties without consent — fines that ran nearly $200 million across the four carriers, with AT&T’s portion at $57 million and Verizon’s at $46.9 million. The carriers challenged the fines on Seventh Amendment grounds, arguing that the Court’s 2024 decision in SEC v. Jarkesy — which struck down the SEC’s in-house adjudication of securities-fraud penalties as a violation of the jury-trial right — should reach FCC forfeitures too. The Court said no, on a structural distinction that matters: an FCC forfeiture order is not self-executing. The FCC cannot collect on its own. If a carrier refuses to pay, the matter is referred to the Justice Department, which then has to file a civil action in federal district court — a proceeding in which the carrier is entitled to a full jury trial and the government has to prove the violation de novo, with no deference to the FCC’s findings. That collection-stage jury trial, Roberts wrote, is enough to satisfy the Seventh Amendment, even though the agency itself first issues the penalty. Justice Thomas’s dissent argued the in-house process is no less coercive than the SEC adjudication the Court rejected in Jarkesy and would have extended Jarkesy here. The practical takeaway: agency in-house penalty proceedings survive after Jarkesy if there is a real, downstream jury-trial backstop. Expect every regulator with a similar two-step enforcement structure to point to this opinion the next time someone tries to push Jarkesy further.

Court rules against cell service providers over right to jury trial in FCC proceedings | SCOTUSblog

On this day in 1919, the U.S. Senate voted 56 to 25 to approve the Nineteenth Amendment, sending to the states a one-sentence constitutional rule that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The House had already passed it two weeks earlier, by a comfortable margin, and the question now moved to the states, where ratification would take fourteen months of careful organizing and a now-legendary single vote by a Tennessee legislator named Harry Burn — cast on his mother’s instruction — to clinch the 36-state threshold in August 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment did not by itself enfranchise all American women: Black women in the South, women of color across the country, and Native women living on tribal land would face decades more of state-level disenfranchisement that did not begin to ease until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and would not be fully addressed even after that. But June 4, 1919 was the day that women’s suffrage stopped being a state-by-state campaign and became, at the federal level, a constitutional commitment. The structural lesson is one worth holding onto: in the United States, voting rights live not just in the Constitution but in the day-to-day administration of elections by the states — which is why the fight over them is never quite over.

Senators John Kennedy of Louisiana and Ron Wyden of Oregon — a Republican and a Democrat who do not often appear in the same headline — jointly introduced the Open Courts Act on Tuesday, a bill that would do something the federal judiciary has talked about for two decades and never quite accomplished: replace PACER, the public court records system, with a modern interface, eliminate the per-page fees, and harden the cybersecurity around the federal judiciary’s electronic filing system. PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, and right now it charges users ten cents a page to read federal court filings, which adds up alarmingly quickly when you’re trying to follow a case of any size. The bill would also require the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to build a new system funded outside the regular appropriations cycle, which the sponsors argue would save taxpayers about $60 million a year in operating costs and avoid the budget-fight ritual that has stalled past reforms. The cybersecurity piece is not incidental: the federal courts have suffered two significant intrusions in recent years, one reportedly tied to Russian actors in 2025 and a similar one in 2020, and Wyden has been pushing for an independent security review since last year. The legal stakes here are unusual because PACER is a public-access tool that has historically been priced like a paywalled subscription product, which is a kind of legal-transparency contradiction the U.S. has tolerated longer than almost any peer democracy. Kennedy’s framing — “Americans should not have to sell plasma or wrestle with clunky government websites just to read public court records” — is the kind of soundbite the bill needs to actually move. Whether it actually moves is another question; previous versions of this bill have died quietly. Watch the Judiciary Committee in the next month.

Bipartisan Bill Would Modernize Court Records Systems | Law360

The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into former U.S. Representative George Santos for possible insider trading on Kalshi, the federally-regulated prediction-market exchange, after Kalshi itself reportedly flagged a pattern of suspicious wagers to prosecutors. The story, broken by Reuters on Wednesday, is one of the first big public test cases for how insider trading principles map onto event-based contracts — which are not stocks, are not commodities in the traditional sense, and have spent the better part of the last two years in regulatory limbo while Kalshi and the CFTC fought in federal court over whether the platform could list its contracts at all. The legal challenge is real: insider trading liability under Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5 historically requires a “security,” and Kalshi contracts are not securities — they sit under the CFTC’s authority as “event contracts.” That leaves DOJ working with commodities-fraud theories, wire-fraud statutes, and potentially Santos’s own conditions of release from his prior unrelated criminal sentencing, all of which apply differently and less neatly than they would in an old-fashioned stock-trading case. If you are wondering how an ex-Congressman ends up with material nonpublic information worth betting on Kalshi, you are asking the right question, and it is also the question prosecutors will have to answer if they want any of this to stick. Expect this to become a defining test case for how event-contract markets get policed.

DOJ investigating ex-US lawmaker Santos for insider trading on Kalshi, source says | Reuters

In my column for Bloomberg this week, I write about a pattern emerging across California, Minnesota, Oregon, Illinois, Washington, Maine, and other states: lawmakers are reaching for the politically powerful phrase “wealth tax” to describe what are, on inspection, just new top brackets or surtaxes on high-income earners. I argue that the slippage is not just sloppy branding, it is a strategic mistake. A wealth tax and an income surtax are not the same thing — wealth is a stock and income is a flow, and a higher rate on income realized this year will never reach the accumulated balance-sheet fortunes that the wealth-tax conversation was actually designed to capture. The “buy, borrow, die” critique that motivates much of the wealth-tax movement is precisely about taxpayers who never realize income because they never need to: they hold appreciating assets, borrow against them for liquidity, and defer or escape income-tax recognition entirely. Adding a few points to the top marginal income-tax rate, I write, is just a slightly higher toll at the same toll booth — it does not reach the wealth that bypassed the toll entirely. The political-capital point is what worries me most. Wealth taxes pick a specific kind of fight — about asset valuation, billionaire flight, capital mobility, constitutional limits, and the like — and to spend that capital fighting that fight on behalf of what is in fact a different and more familiar policy is a strange trade. I think a more honest framing would serve both sides better: if states want a real wealth tax, they need to design one — with valuation rules, third-party reporting, anti-avoidance, residency standards, and liquidity protections — and if they want a high-income surtax, they should call it that and defend it on its own merits. The middle ground gets you the burden of a tax hike without the benefits of either. Half measures that cost full price in political capital, I conclude, are not helping anyone.

States Should Avoid Using ‘Wealth Tax’ Rhetoric for Income Taxes | Bloomberg Tax (Technically Speaking)

On this day in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Defense Act, the law that quietly built the legal scaffolding for how the United States deploys soldiers, both abroad and at home, for the next century-plus. The Act roughly tripled the size of the regular Army, formally created the National Guard as a federalized reserve force out of the patchwork of state militias that had existed since the founding, and established the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at colleges and universities.

The legal hook is the dual-status structure that the Act created and that we still use today: the National Guard belongs simultaneously to its state and to the federal government, normally takes orders from the governor, but can be “federalized” by the President under specific statutory authorities and pulled out of state command for federal missions. That structure has driven a long line of constitutional fights about the limits of presidential authority to call up the Guard, about whether and when the Insurrection Act applies, and about how the Posse Comitatus Act constrains the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement. June 3 is not a day most people associate with American military law, but the 1916 statute is doing quiet work behind every modern headline about troops at a border, troops in a city, or troops in a hurricane.

The Eleventh Circuit on Tuesday handed down a ruling that strips hip-hop group 2 Live Crew of the copyrights it thought it had successfully clawed back to five of its albums, including “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” because one member’s bankruptcy from the 1990s swept his future termination rights into the bankruptcy estate. Federal copyright law has a wonderfully democratic provision in Section 203: an author who signed away a copyright can, 35 years later, send a termination notice and take it back, regardless of what the original contract said.

The catch the Eleventh Circuit identified is Section 541 of the Bankruptcy Code, which scoops up almost everything you own into the bankruptcy estate when you file — including, the court said, the right to send that termination notice years later, even though the right cannot be sold or contracted away in any other context. The practical consequence for 2 Live Crew is that member Mark Ross, who performed as Brother Marquis, had unwittingly transferred his future termination interests to his bankruptcy trustee when he filed Chapter 7 years earlier, so when the group’s heirs and surviving members later tried to take the copyrights back from Lil’ Joe Records in 2020, they were one vote short of the majority the statute requires.

The case, Lil’ Joe Records v. Christopher Won Jr. et al., No. 24-13978, is described in the opinion as “a question of first impression at the intersection of copyright and bankruptcy” — which is lawyer-speak for “we just made up the rule, and now it’s the rule.” Expect every copyright-termination case where any author has ever filed for bankruptcy to cite this decision for the next decade.

11th Circ. Reverses 2 Live Crew’s Copyright Clawback Win | Law360

President Trump on Tuesday quietly signed a finalized version of the AI cybersecurity executive order that he had abruptly scrapped during a planned signing ceremony on May 21, and the final version is notably narrower than the one that was on the table a month ago.

The new order asks Treasury, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and other federal agencies to design a voluntary framework under which developers of so-called frontier AI models — the largest and most general-purpose systems — would share their models with the federal government for up to 30 days before public release so the government can scan for security vulnerabilities. The legal posture is worth pausing on: this is a voluntary framework, not a regulation, which means it lives in the same constitutional space as a chamber-of-commerce best-practices document rather than as a binding rule subject to APA notice and comment.

That structure is partly a workaround for the fact that there is no federal statute giving any agency authority to mandate pre-release safety testing of AI models, and partly a response to industry pressure: Trump explained on May 21 that he scrapped the earlier 90-day version because he thought it could be “a blocker” to U.S. leadership in AI. Whether developers actually opt in is the open question, and the order is structured so that participation will likely depend on a mix of national-security pressure, federal procurement leverage, and quiet diplomacy with the major labs. Expect the first real fight to be over what counts as a “frontier” model, and who decides.

Finalized Trump Order Seeks Early Cyber Tests Of AI Models | Law360

The U.S. Senate on Tuesday confirmed Katie Lane to be a federal district judge in Montana, making her the first judicial nominee of Trump’s second term to be confirmed despite a “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary. The ABA’s role here is informal but historically important: since 1953 the Standing Committee has rated federal judicial nominees as “well qualified,” “qualified,” or “not qualified” based on professional competence, integrity, and judicial temperament, and the rating has carried real weight with senators of both parties — until it didn’t.

The Trump administration formally cut ties with the ABA review process during the first term, on the theory that the ABA’s ratings reflected an ideological bias against conservative nominees, and the second administration has been even more open about ignoring “not qualified” ratings as a matter of policy. The legal stakes of this are modest in any individual case — a “not qualified” judge serves the same lifetime appointment with the same constitutional power as a “well qualified” one — but cumulatively the practice changes the relationship between the bar and the bench in a way that is hard to undo, and it nudges the federal judiciary in a direction that depends almost entirely on the political branches’ definitions of professional fitness.

Lane, who is now confirmed, will join the District of Montana, a small but busy bench. Watch this space: there are several more nominees in the pipeline with similar ratings.

US Senate confirms Trump judicial nominee deemed ‘not qualified’ by ABA | Reuters

On this day in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, also called the Snyder Act, declaring that all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States were U.S. citizens. It is one of those laws that sounds, in retrospect, like it cannot possibly have been necessary — and yet it was. For most of the country’s first 150 years, the federal government treated Native people as members of separate sovereign nations whose status under American law was, at best, ambiguous. Earlier vehicles for citizenship — the Fourteenth Amendment, the Dawes Act, military service in World War I — had reached only some Native people, and a string of Supreme Court decisions had taken the position that being born inside the United States to a member of a tribe did not, on its own, make a person a citizen.

The Snyder Act fixed that with a single sentence.

What it did not fix was voting: many states continued to bar Native citizens from the ballot for decades afterward, on a variety of pretexts that were eventually struck down one by one. The Act also did not affect tribal citizenship — Native people are dual citizens of their tribe and the United States, which is part of why federal Indian law continues to occupy a separate doctrinal universe. June 2 is a quietly important date on the calendar of American citizenship, and a reminder that the seemingly obvious questions of who counts as an American have, for long stretches of our history, not been obvious at all.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced Monday that his office has filed a civil lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, arguing that the company is misleading parents about the safety of ChatGPT and pointing to incidents in which young users were allegedly nudged toward violence by the chatbot. The complaint follows a criminal investigation Uthmeier’s office opened in April, after a deadly mass shooting at Florida State University in 2025 that the AG says ChatGPT helped facilitate. Florida is asking for civil penalties and an order forcing OpenAI to redesign the product, including adding meaningful parental controls.

The legal angle here is essentially a state consumer-protection theory: a state attorney general claiming that the company’s marketing of a product as safe-for-kids is deceptive, and that the company is therefore on the hook under the state’s unfair-trade laws. Whether that survives a motion to dismiss is going to depend a lot on whether the court treats ChatGPT as a “product” in the traditional sense — software has, for decades, gotten more leeway than physical products under product-liability law, and Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act has historically immunized platforms for what users post.

The new wrinkle is that generative AI doesn’t fit neatly into either bucket — ChatGPT produces its own output rather than hosting somebody else’s — and several courts are now beginning to grapple with that distinction. Expect this case to be one of the early test cases for how AI companies get sued in the U.S.

Florida AG Sues OpenAI, Says ChatGPT Spurs Violence | Law360

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal from asbestos victims who had challenged a corporate bankruptcy tactic known as the “Texas Two-Step” — leaving in place a Fourth Circuit ruling that lets companies use the maneuver to corral mass-tort claims into bankruptcy court.

The Two-Step works like this: a healthy company splits itself into two using a Texas state-law provision that allows divisional mergers, dumps its asbestos or talc or opioid liabilities into the newly created spinoff, and then puts only the spinoff into Chapter 11. The result is that injury claimants get herded into a bankruptcy proceeding where their leverage is sharply limited, even though the parent company that actually caused the harm is still solvent and operating.

The case the Supreme Court turned away involved Bestwall, a spinoff of Georgia-Pacific that has been in Chapter 11 since 2017. The Third Circuit threw out a similar Johnson & Johnson talc-unit bankruptcy in 2023 on the ground that the spinoff wasn’t actually in financial distress, but the Fourth Circuit went the other way in this case, and the Supreme Court’s denial of review leaves that split standing for now. The bigger picture: a powerful settlement-shaping tool stays on the menu for corporate defendants facing waves of mass-tort litigation, and the next big talc, opioid, or asbestos defendant looking to manage a docket of claims now knows the Two-Step is at least available in the Fourth Circuit.

Justices Won’t Hear Challenge To ‘Texas Two-Step’ Ch. 11 | Law360

A group of IKEA customers filed a proposed class action against the Swedish retailer Monday in U.S. federal court, arguing that they overpaid for furniture during the period when President Trump’s import tariffs were in effect — tariffs that the Supreme Court has since struck down — and that they are entitled to a share of the refunds the company will now collect from the federal government. It is one of the first big consumer-side cases to follow the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling, and the legal theory is novel: importers paid the tariffs, then passed those costs through to consumers in the form of higher sticker prices, and now that the government is sending refunds back to importers, the customers who effectively bore the cost are asking for a piece of that money.

Some major shippers like FedEx and UPS have already publicly committed to passing tariff refunds back to their customers; IKEA, the suit alleges, has not. Whether the claim survives depends largely on whether the court is willing to treat the relationship between retailer and customer as something like a constructive trust or unjust enrichment, rather than an arm’s-length sale at a final price. If even one of these cases succeeds, expect copycat suits against every other large importer that quietly built tariff costs into retail prices over the last several years.

IKEA customers sue for share of Trump tariff refunds | Reuters

On this day in 1789, President George Washington signed the first statute ever enacted by Congress under the new Constitution — “An Act to Regulate the Time and Manner of Administering Certain Oaths,” codified at 1 Stat. 23. The substance was modest: the law prescribed the form of the oath that members of Congress, federal judges, and executive officers were to take to support the Constitution, and gave the states a window in which to swear in their own officials. But the symbolism was enormous. It was the first time the new federal government did the thing governments actually do, which is to pass a law and require people to obey it, and the choice of subject was telling.

Before Congress regulated commerce, levied taxes, or built courts, it bound its own officers to the Constitution by oath. The oath clauses in Article II and Article VI have been doing quiet doctrinal work ever since: they ground the Supremacy Clause, they undergird Marbury’s claim that judges are bound to follow the Constitution as supreme law, and they sit at the center of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3 disqualification debate that the Supreme Court took up in Trump v. Anderson just two years ago. The Oath Act of 1789 is not the kind of statute that gets quoted on bar exams, but it is the original instance of Congress speaking in legal form, and everything the federal government has done since rests on top of it.

Uber went after one of its own bellwether plaintiffs Friday in the sprawling multidistrict litigation over alleged passenger sexual assaults, asking U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa J. Cisneros in the Northern District of California to impose sanctions on plaintiff B.L. and her counsel at Wagstaff Law Firm for what Uber called “pervasive bad faith” in discovery.

The headline accusation, made by Kirkland & Ellis’s Michael Vives for Uber, is that B.L.’s privilege log cites cases that don’t exist — what Vives suggested may be “hallucinated case law” generated by an AI tool — and Vives floated that as an independent basis for sanctions on top of the alleged document withholding, redactions, and undisclosed witnesses Uber catalogued in its April motion.

he legal vehicle here is Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37, which gives a federal court a tiered menu of sanctions for discovery misconduct — fees and costs at the low end, adverse-inference instructions and claim preclusion at the high end — and Uber is asking the court to throw B.L.’s case out of the next bellwether wave entirely. Judge Cisneros noticed during the hearing that what struck her about the briefing was the pattern, not any single incident; she pointed to one example where the plaintiff identified a person as a “friend” and only later produced a fuller set of text messages showing the person was actually a therapist.

The judge ordered the plaintiff to file a sur-reply by Thursday before ruling, which means a sanctions order is now teed up. The case sits within In re Uber Technologies, Inc., Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation (MDL No. 3084) before Judge Charles R. Breyer, and any sanctions ruling will set the tone for how the rest of the bellwether pool conducts discovery. If the hallucinated-caselaw piece sticks, this also becomes one of the first real Rule 11 / Rule 37 hybrid sanctions vehicles for generative AI misuse in the MDL context — and the bar will be reading it closely.

‘Pervasive Bad Faith’: Uber Targets Sex Assault MDL Plaintiff | Law360

The Seventh Circuit on Friday told the Northern District of Illinois that the now-standard practice of serving Chinese e-commerce defendants by email in “Schedule A” trademark cases doesn’t fly under the Hague Service Convention — at least not when the convention applies, which is a question the district court has to actually answer first. The dispute came up in Kangol LLC v. Hangzhou Chuanyue Silk Import & Export Co., No. 25-2205, where the hat-maker Kangol sued more than twenty Chinese vendors for trademark infringement and identified them on a sealed “Schedule A” exhibit attached to the complaint — the same procedural pattern that drives the enormous Schedule A docket in Chicago’s federal court.

Kangol got a default judgment after serving the defendants by email, but one defendant, Hangzhou Chuanyue, appeared and moved to vacate, arguing that the Hague Convention prohibits email service in China and that the convention applies because Hangzhou’s address is discoverable. The legal hook is Article 10(a) of the Hague Service Convention, which permits service “by postal channels” only when the destination state has not objected — and China has affirmatively objected to Article 10(a), full stop.

The Seventh Circuit, citing the Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Water Splash, Inc. v. Menon, held that whether or not email counts as a “postal channel,” Article 10(a) is unavailable in China, so email service in this case was improper if the convention applied at all. The panel — Judges Thomas Kirsch, Candace Jackson-Akiwumi, and Doris Pryor — reversed the denial of Hangzhou’s motion to vacate and sent the case back for the threshold question the district court skipped: did Kangol make reasonably diligent efforts to find Hangzhou’s address, which would have triggered the convention.

The practical fallout will reach hundreds, possibly thousands, of pending Schedule A cases in Chicago that rely on email service as a matter of course, and plaintiff firms in this space will be scrambling to redo their service strategy.

7th Circ. Revives Chinese IP Defendants’ Email Service Case | Law360

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation on Thursday transferred Randall King’s proposed class action — the vehicle for a proposed $7.25 billion Roundup settlement with Monsanto — into the Northern District of California MDL before Judge Vince Chhabria, despite vehement objections from absent class members who want the case to stay in Missouri state court.

The case-within-a-case is unusual: the King action was filed and preliminarily settled in Missouri state court, then a group of objectors (represented by Keller Postman) removed it to federal court under the Class Action Fairness Act, and the JPML then tagged it for transfer to the consolidated Roundup MDL. The legal hook here is 28 U.S.C. § 1407, the JPML’s transfer authority — paired with CAFA’s removal rules, which the settling plaintiffs argue were misused because the objectors aren’t “defendants” within the meaning of § 1453 and so cannot remove.

The objectors counter that the $7.25 billion deal “launders a liability-management scheme through the courts” by funneling claims of Roundup cancer victims through a Missouri state-court class that an MDL judge would never approve, and they want federal-court scrutiny under Rule 23 and the standards Judge Chhabria has spent years developing in the Roundup litigation. Monsanto, for its part, is on the objectors’ side of the venue question — at least tactically — telling Law360 that the case should go back to Missouri state court and it will move to oppose the transfer order.

The whole fight is also tied up with the Supreme Court’s pending decision in a separate Monsanto case that will determine whether the deal survives at all, because the proposed $7.25 billion is structured around what the Court does there. Whichever way this remand/transfer fight comes out, it is going to be cited in every future class-settlement-jurisdiction tug-of-war for the rest of the decade.

$7.25B Roundup Deal Sent To Calif. MDL | Law360

A U.S. district judge in Florida said Saturday she will take a closer look at the settlement the Trump administration has reached with itself — or more precisely, with President Trump in his personal capacity — over a long-running IRS lawsuit, scheduling further proceedings to examine whether the deal can stand.

The procedural posture is what makes this one interesting: the case involves a federal agency under the President’s control settling claims with the President personally, which raises immediate questions about whether anyone is actually adverse to anyone, and whether the resulting consent decree or stipulation can carry the legal weight a normal settlement does.

The legal mechanism the judge appears to be invoking is the federal court’s inherent supervisory authority over consent decrees and settlements involving the federal government, an authority that runs through cases like Local No. 93 v. City of Cleveland and that the Tunney Act formalizes for antitrust settlements — though here there is no Tunney Act, just the general principle that a federal court doesn’t have to rubber-stamp a settlement when there are serious questions about whether the United States was actually represented in the negotiation.

The hearing on the issue was set for late May in Miami, with the judge reportedly skeptical that the deal can be approved without further factual development. The political stakes are obvious, but the legal stakes are arguably bigger: if the court can refuse to approve the settlement on the ground that the executive branch was not adverse to itself in any meaningful way, it would create a precedent that constrains every future administration’s ability to make its own personal litigation go away through agency action. Expect this one to generate appellate motion practice within weeks.

US judge orders review of Trump’s IRS lawsuit settlement | Reuters

On this day in 1790, Rhode Island became the thirteenth and final original state to ratify the United States Constitution, doing so by a margin of 34 to 32 at a convention in Newport. Rhode Island’s hesitation had been considerable: the state refused to send delegates to the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, and twice rejected ratification in popular referenda — a curiously democratic method for refusing to join a constitutional union founded in part on the premise that pure direct democracy is dangerous. The state’s small-farmer and debtor classes, the same constituencies that had backed the paper-money policies that horrified Madison, were deeply suspicious of a strong federal government that would constrain state-issued currency, ban impairment of debt contracts (Article I, Section 10), and override state-level debtor protections.

Ratification finally came under the gun: Congress, frustrated by the foot-dragging, was openly threatening to treat Rhode Island as a foreign nation for tariff purposes, which would have devastated the Providence merchants. The convention’s narrow margin reflected a hostile deal more than a meeting of constitutional minds.

Importantly, Rhode Island’s ratification was conditioned on a lengthy list of proposed amendments — many of them mirroring the Bill of Rights that James Madison had already shepherded through Congress in September 1789 and that would be ratified in December 1791. With Rhode Island in, the original Union was at last complete, and the practical question of whether the new federal government could function with one stubborn holdout fell away. The episode is a useful reminder that the constitutional founding was not so much a singular moment as a slow, contested, occasionally coerced bargain — one that ended in Newport on a humid Saturday in May.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday handed down a narrow 5-4 ruling in Pitchford v. Cain, reviving a Mississippi death row inmate’s challenge to the prosecutor’s race-based use of peremptory strikes at his 2006 capital trial. Justice Kavanaugh, writing for a majority that included Chief Justice Roberts plus Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, held that the Mississippi Supreme Court unreasonably applied Batson v. Kentucky’s three-step framework for challenges to peremptory strikes.

The Court found the trial judge accepted the prosecutor’s race-neutral explanations without giving defense counsel a meaningful opportunity to argue that those reasons were pretextual, and the state appellate court compounded the error by treating that omission as a waiver. The prosecutor, Doug Evans, used four of his twelve strikes to remove four of the five Black prospective jurors, leaving a jury of eleven white jurors and one Black juror in a Mississippi county that was then roughly 40 percent Black.

The Court leaned heavily on its 2019 Flowers v. Mississippi decision, which involved the same prosecutor and the same trial judge and had already found Evans’s pattern of striking Black jurors discriminatory. Federal habeas relief was appropriate because the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act’s deferential “no fair-minded jurist could agree” standard cannot rescue a state-court ruling that simply skips Batson’s third step. Justice Gorsuch dissented, joined by Justices Alito, Thomas, and Barrett, arguing the record showed counsel chose silence rather than being denied an opportunity. The case now returns to the Fifth Circuit for further proceedings.

Justices Revive Mississippi Death Row Inmate’s Batson Claim | Law360

Caesars Entertainment agreed Thursday to be acquired by Tilman Fertitta’s privately-held Fertitta Entertainment in an all-cash deal valued at roughly $17.6 billion, including the assumption of approximately $11.9 billion of Caesars’ outstanding debt. Shareholders will receive $31 per share, a 49 percent premium over Caesars’ unaffected share price as of February 25, and the company will be delisted from Nasdaq upon closing. The agreement includes a go-shop period running through approximately July 11 — a Delaware deal-protection mechanism that lets the target board solicit competing bids without triggering a termination fee, and that helps insulate the sale process from a Revlon-flavored fiduciary-duty challenge by signaling the board actively tested the market after signing.

Latham & Watkins and Skadden are representing Caesars (the latter on antitrust), White & Case is advising Fertitta, and Freshfields is counseling the Carano family, which holds a roughly 5 percent stake and will roll part of its equity into the combined entity. The combined company would control more than 60 casino resorts and over 200 retail sports betting locations under the William Hill brand. Antitrust review will be the inflection point given the overlap on the Las Vegas Strip — where Caesars operates eight properties — and across digital betting. Funding will come from Fertitta equity and committed debt financing arranged by a syndicate of ten banks.

4 Firms Steer Fertitta’s $17.6B Caesars Entertainment Buy | Law360

The Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday finalized a long-awaited overhaul of the federal Independent Dispute Resolution process under the No Surprises Act of 2021, the statute that pulls most out-of-network billing fights out of the patient’s hands and into a baseball-style arbitration between provider and payer. The headline change slashes the per-party administrative fee from $115 to $15 per case, undoing a sharp 2023 hike that providers had successfully challenged in the Eastern District of Texas as having been adopted without notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act.

The rule also expands batching, so economically similar items and services can be bundled into a single arbitration, which the agency says will cut transaction costs and ease the chronic IDR backlog. HHS is also rolling out a centralized federal dispute portal and a payer registry intended to fix the persistent problem of providers being unable to identify which entity is actually on the hook in any given case. Reactions from physician and radiology groups have been mixed, with broad support for the fee cut but lingering concern that the qualifying payment amount methodology — the benchmark arbitrators must consider — still tilts the field toward insurers. APA Section 706 challenges to portions of the earlier IDR framework remain pending in the Fifth Circuit.

US HHS finalizes rule to streamline dispute resolution under No Surprises Act | Reuters

ABC’s New York affiliate WABC-TV filed an objection with the FCC on Thursday, calling Chairman Brendan Carr’s April order requiring early license renewals for all eight ABC-owned stations an “unconstitutional” act of viewpoint-based retaliation barred by the First Amendment. WABC submitted its renewal under protest, arguing the agency has not demanded simultaneous early renewals from a commonly owned station group in more than fifty years and that the Media Bureau’s stated rationale — possible violations of the Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC’s nondiscrimination rules — is pretext for punishing disfavored editorial speech.

The doctrinal hook is the Bantam Books line of cases through last term’s NRA v. Vullo, which holds that government officials cannot use the implicit threat of regulatory sanction to coerce private intermediaries into suppressing protected expression. The order followed a separate FCC inquiry into whether “The View” has been violating the agency’s equal-time rule for political candidates, and came against the backdrop of repeated White House demands that Disney fire Jimmy Kimmel. Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez has openly urged Disney not to “flinch.”

On the same day, the FCC issued a broader notice warning all broadcasters that licenses could be reviewed early if stations are deemed to be failing their statutory public-interest obligation — a posture that drops the question of broadcast licensing back into Red Lion-era First Amendment territory.

FCC Targeting ABC Licenses To Punish Speech, Station Says | Law360

On this day May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the federal government to “negotiate” the relocation of Native American tribes east of the Mississippi to lands in what is now Oklahoma. On its face the statute framed displacement as voluntary, treaty-based, and compensated; in practice it became the legal scaffolding for the forced expulsion of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations, culminating in the Trail of Tears.

The bill passed the House by just five votes, with Davy Crockett among its most prominent dissenters. The years that immediately followed produced the Marshall Court’s foundational Indian law trilogy — Johnson v. M’Intosh, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, and Worcester v. Georgia — the last of which Jackson famously (and probably apocryphally) refused to enforce. The doctrinal residue of the Removal era is still in force today: tribes remain “domestic dependent nations,” Congress still claims a “plenary power” over them, and the Supreme Court is still relitigating what reservation boundaries actually mean — most recently in McGirt v. Oklahoma in 2020 and Haaland v. Brackeen in 2023. The 1830 Act was not the beginning of dispossession in North America, but it was the moment Congress took ownership of the policy and dressed it in the language of statute. Whatever else May 28 marks on the calendar, in legal history it marks the day removal became American law.

Dutch coatings giant AkzoNobel, the maker of Dulux paint, told Sherwin-Williams and Nippon Paint Wednesday that their €12.5 billion ($14.6 billion) joint takeover proposal is not a “superior proposal” and that the board would stay the course on its already-agreed merger with Axalta Coating Systems. The rejected offer, made at €73 per share, would have carved AkzoNobel up — Nippon taking the decorative paints business, Sherwin-Williams taking industrial coatings — and was the second pass after an earlier bid that the board had swatted away in April.

AkzoNobel’s reasons read like a Dutch corporate-law primer: the offer “did not come close to adequately reflecting” long-term value, the deal-certainty risk around regulatory clearances was too high, and the “interests of AkzoNobel stakeholders” were not adequately safeguarded. That last word is the legal tell. Under Dutch law, a listed company’s board is not bound by anything resembling Delaware’s Revlon duty to maximize shareholder value in a sale; it answers to a stakeholder model that explicitly weighs employees, creditors, suppliers, and the long-term interests of the enterprise alongside the shareholders. That gives a Dutch board far more room to reject a premium cash bid than a comparable U.S. target would have, especially with a friendly all-stock merger of equals (the Axalta deal) already on the table.

The combined AkzoNobel-Axalta entity, announced last November and worth roughly $25 billion, plans to list on the NYSE with dual HQs in Amsterdam and Philadelphia and Dutch tax residency — a structure that itself preserves the Dutch governance model post-close. The CMA in the U.K. has already opened a public comment period on the Axalta deal, and antitrust review is likely the live front to watch from here.

AkzoNobel Snubs €12.5B Sherwin-Williams, Nippon Paint Bid | Law360

The Trump administration is preparing to halt federal immigration and customs processing at airports located in jurisdictions it deems “sanctuary cities” or “sanctuary states,”, according to a report Reuters published. The mechanism, if implemented, would have Customs and Border Protection officers stop staffing inbound international arrival processing — meaning international passengers landing at, say, San Francisco, Boston, or Seattle would be unable to clear customs at those airports and would have to be diverted. The legal architecture here is unusual because CBP staffing decisions sit at the discretionary end of federal administrative law: the agency has wide latitude to deploy officers where it wants, and there is no statutory entitlement for any particular city to host a federal port of entry.

That said, a decision to use that discretion as punishment for a state or municipality’s refusal to honor ICE detainers would invite a familiar set of challenges — South Dakota v. Dole-style coercion arguments dressed up as preemption, anti-commandeering claims under Murphy v. NCAA and Printz v. United States, and APA challenges under State Farm to whatever administrative record the agency assembles. Several of the targeted jurisdictions have already won injunctions in earlier rounds of sanctuary-city funding fights, including against the prior conditioning of Byrne JAG grants on detainer compliance. The political move is obvious; the legal move is less so, and the administration will need to articulate a non-pretextual reason for the staffing change if it wants to survive arbitrary-and-capricious review. Whether airlines, airport authorities, or the states themselves will have standing to sue — and what kind of irreparable harm a redirected flight inflicts — is going to be the first set of questions a court has to answer.

US draws up plans to halt immigration, customs processing at ‘sanctuary city’ airports | Reuters

The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the Fourth Circuit’s decision reviving the National Association of Immigration Judges’ First Amendment challenge to a federal rule restricting what sitting immigration judges may say publicly about the agency that employs them. The per curiam opinion’s holding is narrow but striking: the Fourth Circuit, the justices said, committed an abuse of discretion by reviving the suit on a theory neither party briefed, a “drastic departure from the principle of party presentation” laid out in cases like United States v. Sineneng-Smith. The party-presentation principle is one of those background structural rules that doesn’t get a lot of airtime — the basic idea is that federal courts are passive instruments that decide the cases the parties bring them, not the cases judges wish the parties had brought — but here it became outcome-determinative.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, wrote separately to say the Fourth Circuit was also wrong on the merits because it ignored Elgin v. Department of the Treasury, the 2012 decision holding that the Civil Service Reform Act’s administrative-channeling regime is the exclusive route for covered federal employees to challenge adverse employment actions, even constitutional ones. The practical effect is that the immigration judges’ union now has to litigate its First Amendment claim through the Merit Systems Protection Board and then the Federal Circuit rather than in district court, and the case bounces back to the Fourth Circuit to redo the analysis on whatever ground the parties did actually raise. The Court also denied a cross-petition from the union. The case is Margolin v. National Association of Immigration Judges, No. 25-767; the merits cross-petition was No. 25-1009.

Justices Order Redo In Immigration Judges’ Free Speech Suit | Law360

A Sixth Circuit panel on Tuesday affirmed the dismissal of an attempt by Right to Life of Michigan and a group of parents to block enforcement of Proposal 3, the 2022 Michigan ballot initiative that wrote a fundamental right to reproductive freedom into Article I, Section 28 of the state constitution. The panel did not reach the merits — the case stopped at standing — and the opinion, written by Judge John K. Bush, is a clean illustration of how high the Article III standing bar is for pre-enforcement challenges of this kind. Standing requires the plaintiff to show an injury that is fairly traceable to the defendant’s conduct and likely to be redressed by a favorable decision, and the parents here couldn’t make the traceability link work: their theory was that the amendment might allow schools or other actors to help minors obtain contraception or abortion care without parental consent, but the complaint identified no specific enforcement action by Governor Whitmer, Attorney General Nessel, or Secretary of State Benson that was causing or threatening any such injury.

The panel reiterated the Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife framework and quoted approvingly the rule that a “general allegation” that an executive officer is “generally responsible for executing” state law does not, by itself, establish standing to sue that officer. The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ attempt to bootstrap standing off the AG’s and governor’s authority to enforce Michigan’s consumer protection and civil rights statutes, calling those allegations too speculative. This is going to be the template for the next several rounds of post-Dobbs challenges to state constitutional reproductive-rights amendments: the merits questions about scope and federal preemption will keep coming, but plaintiffs are going to need a concrete enforcement target to even get a hearing.

6th Circ. Rejects Mich. Reproductive Rights Challenge | Law360

On May 27, 1935 — a day quickly dubbed “Black Monday” by the press — the United States Supreme Court delivered three unanimous decisions that gutted central pieces of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in a single morning. The most consequential was A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, in which the Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act. The case grew out of the prosecution of a Brooklyn kosher poultry slaughterhouse for violating the “Live Poultry Code,” one of the hundreds of industry codes drafted by trade groups and given the force of federal law by the National Recovery Administration. The Court held that the NIRA’s code-making scheme was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to private actors and the executive, and that the federal government’s Commerce Clause authority did not reach the intrastate sale of poultry to local butchers. Justice Cardozo, concurring, famously described the statute as “delegation running riot.”

The same day, in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the Court cabined the President’s power to remove members of independent regulatory commissions, a holding that would shape the constitutional status of agencies like the FTC, SEC, and FCC for the next ninety years. And in Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford, the Court invalidated the Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act as an uncompensated taking from secured creditors. Roosevelt was, by all accounts, furious — and Black Monday became the proximate cause of his 1937 court-packing plan, which failed in Congress but is generally credited with prompting the “switch in time” that produced the more deferential commerce-clause and administrative-law jurisprudence of Jones & Laughlin Steel and the decades that followed. The nondelegation doctrine the Court announced in Schechter has, famously, not been used to strike down a federal statute since — though it has been the subject of growing interest from the current Court’s conservative majority, which makes the ninety-first anniversary of Black Monday more than just a historical footnote.

Former President Joe Biden has sued the Department of Justice to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts from his interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, the prosecutor who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents and declined to bring charges. According to the filing, Biden argues that releasing the recordings would skirt federal law restricting disclosure of materials gathered in a special counsel probe, and would effectively turn protected investigative material into political fodder. The suit follows a 2024 Freedom of Information Act action by the conservative Heritage Foundation seeking the same recordings, and comes against the backdrop of repeated efforts by the current administration to make Hur-era material public — efforts the Biden team has argued are intended to embarrass the former president rather than to serve any legitimate investigative or oversight function. The transcripts of the Hur interviews were released back in 2024, but the audio itself has been the subject of executive privilege fights ever since. Worth watching for what the court does with the privilege claims, and for how the Special Counsel regulations are treated now that there is an ex-president on each side of these disputes.

Former President Biden sues DOJ over release of interview audio | Reuters

The Trump administration is asking a California federal judge to throw out an expanded challenge to its sweeping reorganization of the federal workforce, calling the litigation a “litigation safari.” In a Friday motion to dismiss filed in AFGE v. Trump, the administration urged Judge Susan Illston to toss a supplemental complaint that broadened the case to cover, among other things, the downsizing of FEMA and a set of forward-looking workforce planning documents the administration issued last October. The original suit, filed in April 2025 by a coalition including the American Federation of Government Employees, SEIU, and the cities of Chicago, Baltimore, and San Francisco, challenged layoffs and reorganizations at more than twenty federal agencies. Judge Illston enjoined the workforce plans last May, but the Supreme Court stayed her injunction in July, and she has since declined to dismiss the case outright.

The administration’s argument is essentially jurisdictional: that the October planning documents are too tentative to constitute “final agency action,” that there is no specific DHS order behind the FEMA contract lapses the plaintiffs point to, and that individual FEMA terminations must run through the administrative civil-service process rather than land in district court. The “litigation safari” framing — that the plaintiffs are simply “roving the executive branch to explore various employment issues” — is rhetorically catchy but glosses over the more interesting underlying question: how cleanly the Administrative Procedure Act’s “final agency action” requirement maps onto a coordinated, rolling, and openly cross-agency reorganization. A ruling on the dismissal motion is expected later this summer.

Trump Admin Looks To Ax Expanded Suit Over Staffing Cuts - Law360

Billionaire insurance magnate Greg Lindberg was sentenced in the Western District of North Carolina to twelve years in federal prison across two separate criminal cases — eighty-seven months on charges that he tried to bribe the state’s insurance commissioner, and 144 months on wire-fraud charges arising from a $2 billion scheme in which prosecutors said he treated the insurance companies he controlled as a personal piggy bank. The sentences will run concurrently. Judge Max Cogburn also entered a preliminary restitution order of $1.6 billion based on a court-appointed special master’s recommendation, which Lindberg’s defense team described as the largest restitution award in state history.

Prosecutors said the scheme harmed more than two hundred thousand victims, most of them elderly annuity holders, at least twenty thousand of whom died before any promised payouts arrived. The bribery case has its own complicated history — Lindberg was first convicted in 2020, had that conviction vacated by the Fourth Circuit in 2022 over faulty jury instructions, and was reconvicted on retrial in 2024. He pleaded guilty to the separate wire-fraud and money-laundering counts in November 2024. Judge Cogburn credited Lindberg’s “extraordinary cooperation” with prosecutors and the special master, but also noted, with what reads like real exasperation in the transcript, that Lindberg has continued to file pro se civil lawsuits against the insurance companies he once owned and that the case illustrates how much of our regulatory apparatus can be “bought and sold like sacks of potatoes.” The government had sought roughly fourteen and a half years; Lindberg had asked for four.

‘Regretful’ Billionaire Gets 12 Years For $2B Fraud, Bribery - Law360

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a debt buyer suing a consumer must attach to its complaint a non-affidavit writing that actually shows the buyer owns that consumer’s debt — not just a generic bill of sale showing that the buyer purchased some bundle of receivables from the original creditor. The case, Wright v. Portfolio Recovery Associates, involved a $671.29 Victoria’s Secret credit-card balance that Comenity Bank had sold to Portfolio Recovery in 2018. Portfolio Recovery’s complaint attached a bill of sale and an affidavit identifying the last four digits of Wright’s account number, and the lower courts found that sufficient under Colorado’s Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The Colorado Supreme Court, in the first opinion authored by recently appointed Justice Susan Blanco, reversed and held the affidavit could not cure a complaint that didn’t first satisfy the statute’s non-affidavit-writing requirement.

The practical consequence is significant: the four largest debt buyers alone filed close to forty thousand cases in Colorado county courts between 2013 and 2015, accounting for around eight percent of the state’s county-court civil docket, and many of those complaints have historically relied on exactly the kind of generic bill-of-sale-plus-affidavit packaging the court just rejected. Consumer advocates argue the ruling will help consumers — most of whom never had any relationship with the debt buyer — understand and respond to the suits filed against them; the debt-buying industry will, in the near term, need to retool its pleading practices statewide.

Colo. Justices Say Debt Buyer Must Show It Owns The Debt - Law360

On May 26, 1868, the United States Senate ended the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, bringing one of the most dramatic constitutional confrontations in American history to a close. Johnson had been impeached by the House of Representatives earlier that year after clashing repeatedly with Congress over Reconstruction. At the center of the dispute was the future of the defeated South and the legal status of formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. Johnson favored a more lenient approach toward former Confederate states, while the Republican-controlled Congress sought stronger protections for freedmen and stricter conditions for reentry. The immediate trigger for impeachment was Johnson’s attempt to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, which Congress argued violated the Tenure of Office Act. The Senate had already voted on one article of impeachment on May 16, and Johnson survived by a single vote. Ten days later, on May 26, the Senate voted on two more articles, with the result again falling one vote short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction. The final vote of 35 to 19 meant Johnson would remain in office.

After that result, the Senate adjourned as a court of impeachment and the trial came to an end. The acquittal did not make Johnson politically strong, but it preserved the principle that removing a president required more than intense political disagreement. The trial also tested the separation of powers during a period when Congress and the presidency were fighting over who would control Reconstruction. In later years, the Tenure of Office Act was repealed, and its constitutionality remained deeply suspect. Johnson’s impeachment became a lasting example of how legal rules, political conflict, and constitutional design can collide in moments of national crisis.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has advanced a major five-year transportation funding bill that would send about $580 billion toward roads, bridges, transit, rail projects, and highway safety programs. The measure, called the BUILD America 250 Act, passed the committee by a 62-2 vote after a lengthy markup and now heads to the full House. The bill is meant to replace the current surface transportation law, which was part of the 2021 infrastructure package and is set to expire at the end of September. Supporters from both parties framed the proposal as a way to keep infrastructure funding moving while giving states flexibility and speeding up project delivery.

One of the most closely watched additions is a rail safety package inspired by the 2023 Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. That section would require at least two crew members on many trains, add inspection requirements, regulate defect detectors, and place limits on certain hazardous-material trains. Rail labor groups and the White House have backed stronger rules, while the major railroads argue the proposal is driven more by politics and labor demands than by the causes of the East Palestine crash.

The bill would also create a first federal regulatory structure for autonomous commercial vehicles, including automated trucks, buses, and other larger vehicles. Industry supporters say that framework would help the United States compete globally in autonomous transportation, while transit labor leaders say the bill includes important human-oversight protections to keep workers involved and improve safety. Another contested provision would impose a new annual federal registration fee on electric vehicle owners, starting at $130 and later rising to $150, to help support the Highway Trust Fund.

Backers say EV drivers should contribute to road funding because they do not pay federal gas taxes. Electric vehicle advocates, however, call the fee punitive and argue it would discourage EV adoption without meaningfully solving the trust fund’s long-term funding gap.

What’s In The House Surface Transportation Funding Bill? - Law360

The Justice Department has asked a federal court to lift an injunction blocking work on President Donald Trump’s ballroom project, arguing that a recent shooting outside the White House shows why stronger security is needed. In a short filing Sunday, DOJ said the incident highlights the need for high-level security upgrades at the White House, including the ballroom, and again sought dismissal of the lawsuit challenging the project. The case was brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has opposed the project and previously refused to withdraw its suit after an alleged foiled attack connected to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April. DOJ had already cited that earlier incident in asking the court to end the case. According to the Secret Service, the person who fired at a White House checkpoint on Saturday was shot by officers and later died at a hospital. The filing ties the shooting to the government’s broader argument that the project is important for national security.

US Justice Department seeks to lift injunction on ballroom project after shooting | Reuters

My column for Bloomberg this week argues that Tennessee’s recent decision in SAP America, Inc. v. Gerregano shows how poorly traditional state tax categories fit modern software. The court treated SAP’s software licenses as nontaxable intangible property, while allowing Tennessee to tax cloud hosting and cloud-based services delivered electronically into the state. That split made sense because SAP’s products were cleanly separated into licenses, hosting, and cloud services. But the column argues that most modern software is not so tidy. Even products that seem local often rely on remote tools for logins, updates, syncing, storage, analytics, customer support, or payment processing. As AI becomes built into ordinary software, the line between software and cloud-based service will become even harder to draw.

The column focuses on the “true-object” test, which asks what the customer is really buying when a transaction has multiple elements. That test works when the taxable and nontaxable pieces are visible and separately priced, but it becomes much harder to apply when remote processing is hidden inside a product the customer experiences simply as software. The piece argues that states should adopt a software-specific safe harbor rather than treating every remote feature as taxable cloud access. Under that approach, software would be presumed to remain software when remote functions are limited to things like authentication, updates, syncing, security, or modest product enhancements. A state could rebut that presumption if the customer is really buying hosted processing, managed infrastructure, AI model access, inference, or other platform-level functionality. The point is not to abandon the true-object test, but to give it a clearer threshold for hybrid software. Without that guardrail, AI could give states an easy but flawed path to reclassify almost any software product with a remote model feature as taxable cloud access.

On May 22, 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed legislation authorizing American aid to Greece and Turkey, giving legal force to what became known as the Truman Doctrine. The law provided economic and military assistance to both countries at a moment when U.S. leaders feared that instability in the eastern Mediterranean could expand Soviet influence. Greece was in the middle of a civil war, while Turkey faced pressure over control of strategic territory and access between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Britain had previously played the leading role in supporting Greece and Turkey, but after World War II it told the United States it could no longer bear that burden.

Truman responded by asking Congress to approve aid, arguing that the United States had to support “free peoples” resisting outside pressure or armed minority movements. By signing the bill, Truman transformed that broad statement of foreign policy into statutory authority backed by federal money. Legally, the act mattered because it showed how Cold War policy would often be made: the president would identify a global threat, and Congress would authorize funds and tools to respond. It also helped normalize large peacetime commitments abroad, a sharp change from earlier American reluctance to enter long-term foreign entanglements. The statute became an early foundation for the national security state that grew through later aid programs, alliances, intelligence activities, and military commitments.

The Truman Doctrine also raised enduring questions about the balance of power between Congress and the president in foreign affairs. Congress approved the aid, but the broader doctrine gave presidents a flexible language for intervention that could be invoked well beyond Greece and Turkey. In that sense, May 22, 1947, was not just a date in diplomatic history; it was a legal turning point in how the United States authorized, funded, and justified its Cold War role in the world.

A Ninth Circuit panel appeared uncertain about whether Jack Daniel’s proved enough to win its trademark dilution-by-tarnishment claim against VIP Products over the “Bad Spaniels” dog toy. The judges focused especially on whether Jack Daniel’s had shown that anything beyond the words “Jack Daniel’s” was famous enough to qualify for dilution protection. Judge Andrew Hurwitz pressed Jack Daniel’s counsel on whether the company could rely on the fame of its name to protect broader elements of its label and bottle design. Jack Daniel’s argued that the court should consider the full context of the toy, including its bottle-like appearance and bathroom-humor references. VIP, by contrast, argued that the analysis should be limited to the famous mark itself and the allegedly diluting mark, not the entire product presentation.

The case began after VIP made a dog toy parodying a Jack Daniel’s bottle with poop-themed jokes, prompting years of litigation over trademark infringement, dilution, parody, and free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court previously ruled that VIP could not use the Rogers test because the toy used another company’s trademark-like features to identify VIP’s own product. On remand, the district court rejected Jack Daniel’s infringement claim but again found dilution by tarnishment, which VIP appealed. VIP also raised a First Amendment challenge to the federal tarnishment law, though both VIP and the federal government suggested the Ninth Circuit could decide the case without reaching that constitutional issue. The Justice Department intervened to defend the law’s constitutionality while also acknowledging that waiver or insufficient proof could let the panel avoid the First Amendment question.

9th Circ. Questions Jack Daniel’s’ TM Win Over ‘Bad Spaniels’ - Law360

Meta has settled a closely watched lawsuit brought by Breathitt County School District in Kentucky over costs allegedly tied to youth mental health harms from social media. The case was important because it was the first school-district case against social media companies scheduled for trial on these claims. Breathitt had accused Meta, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok of designing platforms that kept young users engaged in harmful ways and contributed to anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other student mental health problems. The district sought more than $60 million, including money for a 15-year mental health program and an order requiring changes to allegedly addictive platform features. Meta’s settlement follows earlier settlements by YouTube, Snap, and TikTok, meaning Breathitt’s case is now fully resolved.

The case was a bellwether, meaning it was chosen as a test case to help courts and parties evaluate similar lawsuits. About 1,200 school districts are pursuing related claims, and thousands of other social-media addiction lawsuits are pending in California state and federal courts. Meta said it resolved the case amicably and pointed to teen-safety tools such as Teen Accounts and parental controls. Lawyers for the school district said they remain focused on claims brought by the other districts. The settlement avoids a June 15 trial that could have shaped settlement talks and strategy across the broader litigation. Other major school systems, including Los Angeles and New York City, have filed similar lawsuits, while DeKalb County, Georgia, has claimed billions in future mental health costs.

Meta settles first US case over school costs tied to youth mental health, court filing shows | Reuters

OpenAI has expanded its group of outside law firms as it faces major litigation, complex business deals, and a possible future IPO. Reuters reports that the company, recently valued at $852 billion, now works with more than a dozen large U.S. law firms. OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman, and lawyers from Wachtell Lipton and Morrison & Foerster recently defeated Elon Musk’s lawsuit claiming that OpenAI had departed from its original nonprofit mission. That ruling removed one potential obstacle to a possible IPO, which sources have said could happen as soon as September. Wachtell has also handled major OpenAI transactions since ChatGPT launched, including large fundraising deals involving Microsoft, Nvidia, and other investors.

Wachtell is a central player for OpenAI in both deal work and litigation. The firm is defending OpenAI in a lawsuit from Musk’s xAI alleging that OpenAI and Apple monopolized markets involving smartphones and generative AI chatbots. In a separate xAI trade secrets case, OpenAI hired Munger, Tolles & Olson. Latham & Watkins has worked on OpenAI deals, including a $4 billion credit line, and is also helping defend the company in copyright lawsuits brought by authors, comedians, and news organizations. OpenAI is arguing in those copyright cases that using material to train AI systems is protected by fair use. Wilson Sonsini is defending OpenAI in a case claiming ChatGPT engaged in unauthorized practice of law, an allegation OpenAI rejects by arguing that ChatGPT is not a lawyer and does not practice law.

OpenAI grows stable of law firms for high-stakes lawsuits, deals | Reuters

On May 21, 1901, Connecticut became the first U.S. state to pass a law regulating the speed of motor vehicles. The law set a speed limit of 12 miles per hour in cities and 15 miles per hour on country roads. That may sound almost comically slow now, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, the automobile was still a new and disruptive technology. Roads were shared by pedestrians, horses, carriages, bicycles, and early automobiles, often without clear rules about who had priority or how fast anyone could travel. Connecticut’s law reflected a growing legal problem: the common law of negligence could punish dangerous driving after an accident, but legislatures increasingly saw the need to prevent danger before it happened. Speed limits were one of the earliest ways states tried to turn automobile use from a private novelty into a regulated public activity. The law also showed how technological change often forces legal systems to create new categories of public safety regulation.

Before automobiles, road law had developed around animals, wagons, and local travel; cars introduced greater speed, heavier machinery, and new risks of injury. By setting numerical limits, Connecticut moved toward a more modern model of traffic law, where drivers could know in advance what conduct was illegal. This kind of rule also made enforcement easier for police and courts because the question was no longer only whether someone drove “recklessly,” but whether they exceeded a stated limit. Other states and municipalities soon followed with their own automobile rules, licensing systems, registration requirements, and broader traffic codes. The Connecticut statute is a reminder that everyday legal rules often begin as responses to unfamiliar technologies. What started as a modest speed limit helped lay the groundwork for the complex system of motor-vehicle regulation that now shapes daily life on American roads.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has sued Minnesota to stop the state from enforcing a new law banning prediction markets. Minnesota became the first state to enact a total ban on platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, which let users trade contracts based on the outcome of future events, including sports and elections. Governor Tim Walz signed the law on May 18, 2026, and it is scheduled to take effect on August 1. The CFTC argues that Minnesota’s law conflicts with federal authority because prediction-market contracts are derivatives regulated by the agency under federal law. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said the law would effectively turn lawful market operators and users into criminals.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said his office is reviewing the lawsuit and raised concerns that prediction markets can be addictive and harmful, especially to young and low-income people. Kalshi and Polymarket both welcomed the federal challenge, arguing that state bans undermine the federal regulatory system and may push users toward offshore platforms. The dispute is part of a broader fight between state gambling regulators and prediction-market companies over whether these products are financial contracts or illegal wagering. The CFTC has also sued other states to block enforcement actions against prediction-market operators. It recently obtained an order stopping Arizona from pursuing a criminal case against Kalshi, while Nevada remains the only state with a court-enforced ban against Kalshi. Massachusetts is also considering whether to uphold an injunction that would block Kalshi from offering sports-event contracts there.

US regulator sues to block Minnesota’s first-in-nation ban on prediction markets | Reuters

Two police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol during the January 6, 2021 attack have sued to stop a nearly $1.8 billion fund created under President Donald Trump’s administration. Former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn and Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges filed the lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C. They argue that the fund is an improper use of taxpayer money and could be used to compensate January 6 defendants or groups tied to political violence. The complaint describes the fund as a “slush fund” and seeks a court order blocking any payments from it. The fund was created after Trump settled a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns during his first term.

As part of that settlement, the Justice Department established a fund to compensate people who claim they were victims of political “weaponization.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told lawmakers that the fund is not limited to January 6 defendants and could apply to people from any political party. He also said the eligibility standard is broad and tied to claims of having experienced political weaponization. Dunn has publicly described the physical and racist abuse he faced during the Capitol attack, as well as his later struggles with PTSD. Hodges was seriously assaulted during the riot in an incident captured on widely circulated video and has also testified before Congress about his experience.

Police officers who guarded Capitol sue to block Trump’s $1.8 billion ‘slush fund’ | Reuters

Lee Mendelson Film Productions, the company behind A Charlie Brown Christmas, has sued GameMill Entertainment in Manhattan federal court over music used in the video game Snoopy & The Great Mystery Club. The company claims GameMill copied or closely imitated Vince Guaraldi’s well-known Peanuts music without getting the proper license. According to the lawsuit, GameMill had permission to use Peanuts characters in the game but not Guaraldi’s compositions.

The complaint focuses on music that allegedly resembles “Linus and Lucy” and “Skating,” two songs strongly associated with the 1965 holiday special. Mendelson argues that GameMill wanted the emotional and nostalgic effect of the original Peanuts soundtrack while avoiding the cost of licensing it. The lawsuit says the game’s background music is substantially similar to Guaraldi’s work and could make players think they were hearing the actual songs or recordings. A Charlie Brown Christmas remains a major part of American holiday culture, and Guaraldi’s soundtrack has sold millions of copies. GameMill’s game, released in 2025, follows Snoopy as he solves mysteries. The production company is accusing GameMill of copyright infringement and is seeking monetary damages. Neither side had immediately commented on the complaint when the article was published.

‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ maker sues over music in ‘Snoopy’ video game | Reuters

On May 20, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law, creating one of the most consequential land distribution systems in American history. The statute allowed eligible settlers to claim 160 acres of federal land, so long as they lived on it, improved it, and cultivated it for a required period of time. At a basic level, the law treated land ownership as something that could be earned through residence and labor rather than purchased outright. That idea made the act especially powerful for many farmers, immigrants, formerly enslaved people, and poor white settlers who otherwise had limited access to property. But the promise of “free land” was never as simple as it sounded.

Much of the land made available under the Homestead Act had already been occupied, used, or governed by Native nations, and federal land policy often operated alongside removal, broken treaties, and military force. The act therefore expanded private property rights for some while deepening dispossession for others. It also reflected the federal government’s growing role in shaping settlement, agriculture, and economic development across the West. By requiring claimants to improve and farm the land, Congress used property law to encourage a particular vision of citizenship: independent, landowning, agricultural, and tied to national expansion. Over time, the law transferred vast amounts of public land into private hands. By the 1930s, roughly 270 million acres had been distributed under the Homestead Act, about 10% of the land area of the United States. Its legal legacy can be seen in debates over public lands, Indigenous sovereignty, property ownership, and the federal government’s power to define who gets access to opportunity.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told senators that a nearly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” tied to President Trump’s IRS settlement is “not a slush fund,” but there are several reasons to treat that assurance cautiously. The DOJ says Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization will accept only a formal apology and no direct damages, while the fund will be available to other people who claim they were victims of government “weaponization” or “lawfare.” The problem is that DOJ has not clearly defined who qualifies, what proof is required, or what would disqualify someone from receiving money. When Sen. Chris Van Hollen asked whether people who assaulted police officers on January 6 could apply, Blanche did not rule it out and instead said anyone could apply if they believed they were a victim. Blanche also said he would not personally write the eligibility rules, though senators noted he will appoint most of the commissioners who will oversee the fund. DOJ’s public announcement says the fund was created as part of Trump’s settlement with the IRS after Trump agreed to drop his lawsuit over the leak of his tax documents.

The comparison to the Obama-era Keepseagle settlement is shaky. Keepseagle involved a discrimination case brought by Native American farmers and was approved by a federal judge, while this fund appears to be created through a settlement involving the sitting president and the IRS, without the same kind of judicial approval described here. Democrats also objected that Obama was not personally a plaintiff in Keepseagle, while Trump is directly connected to this settlement. The most legally significant part may be the addendum saying the IRS is permanently barred from examining certain Trump-related tax matters, including returns filed before the settlement’s effective date. That makes the deal look larger than a privacy settlement over leaked tax documents, because it may also limit future tax enforcement. Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune said there are “a lot of questions” the administration will have to answer, which is a notable sign that concern is not limited to Democrats.

$1.8B IRS Deal Fund ‘Not Slush Fund,’ Blanche Tells Senators - Law360

Workers at another Wells Fargo branch have moved to drop their union, showing that a once-fast-moving labor campaign inside the bank has lost momentum. The Communication Workers of America gave up representing nine employees at a Wilmington, Delaware, branch after one worker sought a vote to decertify the union. That branch had voted unanimously to unionize in early 2024 and was part of a broader organizing push that brought hundreds of Wells Fargo workers at 28 locations into the union. The campaign was notable because union representation is extremely rare in U.S. banking, where less than 1% of workers are unionized. Organizers had focused on complaints about understaffing, flat wages, sales pressure, and the lingering effects of Wells Fargo’s fake-accounts scandal.

The recent Delaware development is the fifth Wells Fargo branch where workers have ousted the union, with other decertifications in Florida, New Jersey, and North Carolina, and another petition pending in Wyoming. Wells Fargo said it supports employees’ right to choose whether they want union representation. The anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which has helped workers challenge union representation, framed the decertifications as evidence that employees are rejecting CWA involvement. The CWA, for its part, has blamed Wells Fargo for slowing contract talks and has accused the bank of retaliating against union supporters and cutting benefits at unionized branches. Wells Fargo denies wrongdoing and says delays are tied partly to the difficulty of negotiating some of the first union contracts in retail banking. The broader context is also unfavorable for unions, with fewer union elections held in 2025 than in 2024 and labor advocates arguing that changes at the National Labor Relations Board under President Trump have made organizing harder.

Wells Fargo workers nix another union as tide turns in novel labor campaign | Reuters

Anthropic is challenging the Defense Department’s decision to label it a supply chain risk and bar it from government contracting, arguing that the move was an extreme response to a contract dispute over how its Claude AI models could be used. The dispute began during negotiations over the department’s GenAI.mil platform, where the government wanted contract terms allowing all lawful uses of Claude, while Anthropic sought exceptions for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems. Anthropic argued that the department’s main theory was wrong because once Claude was deployed on the department’s classified network, it would be air-gapped and Anthropic could not secretly interfere with it during a military operation. The company also said the government had less drastic options, such as declining to buy future Claude models, instead of using a blacklisting authority that had apparently never been used this way before. One D.C. Circuit judge seemed strongly skeptical of the government’s action, calling the supply-chain-risk designation a major overreach. Other judges were less certain, asking whether the opaque and unpredictable nature of AI models could justify the government’s concern that hidden limits might affect military uses.

The government argued that Anthropic’s own proposed red lines created a real operational risk, especially if the company expected officials to seek real-time exceptions during military activity. But the judges also pressed the government on why it needed such broad freedom to use AI, including for fully autonomous weapons, given known concerns about AI reliability. They also questioned why the department went straight to a supply-chain-risk designation instead of simply ending or narrowing the relationship. Anthropic said the government skipped required procedural steps, including a joint recommendation and a 30-day response period, before issuing the designation. The government claimed it had to act quickly because Claude was already being used on several Defense Department platforms. Anthropic countered that this urgency argument was weakened by the department’s decision to phase out Claude over six months rather than immediately remove it.

Anthropic Says Defense Dept. Smeared It Over AI Red Lines - Law360

A Massachusetts judge refused to let Morgan & Morgan lawyer T. Michael Morgan appear in civil litigation against Harvard Medical School over the theft and sale of body parts from donated cadavers. The judge said Morgan’s earlier sanction in a Wyoming case, where court filings included fake AI-generated case citations, showed a failure to meet basic ethical duties. Morgan had disclosed the prior sanction when asking to appear as an out-of-state lawyer in the Harvard case, but the judge said he did not explain enough about how he had changed his practices to prevent the same problem from happening again. The judge also criticized Morgan for procedural problems with the Massachusetts application, including not having local counsel submit it and paying the wrong fee.

Morgan & Morgan said Morgan had accepted responsibility for the earlier mistake and that the firm had added safeguards around AI use. The underlying Harvard litigation involves families who say Harvard mishandled donated bodies after its former morgue manager, Cedric Lodge, stole and sold body parts; Harvard has condemned Lodge’s actions but denies civil liability. Lodge was sentenced to eight years in prison in December. The ruling adds to a growing line of cases where lawyers have been sanctioned or warned for relying on AI tools without verifying the accuracy of legal citations.

Lawyer barred from Harvard morgue scandal case over fake AI citations | Reuters

On May 19, 1992, the 27th Amendment to the United States Constitution was officially published in the Federal Register, ending one of the longest and oddest ratification stories in American legal history. The amendment provides that any law changing the compensation of members of Congress cannot take effect until after an election for the House of Representatives has taken place. Put more simply, Congress may vote to change its own pay, but it cannot make that change immediate. The rule gives voters a chance to respond before the pay change takes effect.

What makes the 27th Amendment unusual is not only what it says, but how long it took to become law. It was originally proposed by James Madison in 1789 as part of the same set of amendments that produced the Bill of Rights. Most of those amendments were ratified quickly, but this one lingered for more than two centuries. Because Congress had not set a ratification deadline, the amendment remained legally available for state approval. In the 1980s, a renewed ratification campaign helped bring it back to public attention. Michigan became the 38th state to ratify it in May 1992, giving it the three-fourths approval required by Article V of the Constitution.

The amendment’s publication in the Federal Register on May 19 marked the formal public recognition that it had become part of the Constitution. Its ratification raised a serious legal question about whether an amendment proposed in the 18th century could still be valid in the 20th century. The answer, at least for amendments without a deadline, was yes. The 27th Amendment stands as a reminder that constitutional change can move slowly, sometimes across generations, and still become binding law.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case about whether Title IX’s protections against sex discrimination in federally funded education programs extend to employees, including college professors and coaches. The case was brought by former Augusta University professor Thomas Crowther and former Georgia Tech women’s basketball coach MaChelle Joseph, both of whom lost their jobs after workplace-conduct investigations. Crowther claimed Augusta University retaliated against him and discriminated against him based on sex after it suspended him and declined to renew his contract. Joseph argued that Georgia Tech fired her in retaliation for her complaints about unequal treatment of women’s athletics and female athletes. Their cases reached the Eleventh Circuit together, where the court ruled that Title IX clearly protects students, but that its application to employees is less certain. That ruling placed the Eleventh Circuit on one side of a broader circuit split.

The Fifth, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits have taken a narrower view of Title IX employment claims, while the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Circuits have allowed employees to bring certain Title IX claims. The solicitor general agreed with the Eleventh Circuit’s narrower reading but urged the Supreme Court to take the case because lower courts are divided. The case gives the justices a chance to decide whether professors, coaches, and other school employees can use Title IX directly to sue for workplace sex discrimination or retaliation.

High Court To Examine Title IX Protections For Coaches, Profs - Law360

A New York state judge partially granted Luigi Mangione’s request to keep certain evidence out of his upcoming murder trial. Mangione is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel in December 2024 and has pleaded not guilty. Justice Gregory Carro ruled that police unlawfully searched Mangione’s backpack during his arrest in Pennsylvania without a warrant. Because of that, some items found during the first search, including a loaded handgun magazine, a cellphone, and a computer chip, will be suppressed. But the judge allowed other evidence from a later police-station search of the backpack, including a gun, silencer, USB drive, and red notebook.

Carro also rejected Mangione’s effort to suppress his initial statements to police, finding that they were not obtained through an illegal interrogation. The ruling gives the defense a partial win, but prosecutors say they still have substantial evidence tying Mangione to the shooting, including DNA, fingerprints, video footage, and other items. Mangione’s state trial is scheduled to begin on September 8 and is expected to last about six weeks. He also faces separate federal charges, though earlier rulings in that case removed the possibility of the death penalty.

Judge grants accused CEO killer Mangione’s bid to suppress evidence due to unlawful search | Reuters

State lawmakers have rejected dozens of anti-vaccine bills backed by Make America Healthy Again supporters, showing limits to the movement’s influence in state legislatures. The bills sought to roll back or end policies such as school vaccination requirements, but public health groups and medical associations mounted successful opposition campaigns. Groups including American Families for Vaccines and the American Academy of Pediatrics argued that vaccine mandates remain broadly supported and are important for public health. Their strategy focused especially on Republican-controlled states, where advocates used polling and personal appeals to persuade lawmakers that opposing vaccines could be both medically risky and politically unpopular. Anti-vaccine proposals increased this year because MAHA-aligned groups coordinated efforts across multiple states. Still, bills failed in places including Idaho, West Virginia, Tennessee, South Dakota, Florida, and Iowa. The debate is unfolding as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic, has taken steps against mandatory immunization policies, though some changes have been paused in litigation. Both sides expect the issue to continue, with anti-vaccine advocates encouraged by hearings and organizing momentum, while public health advocates say more legislation is likely to appear in future sessions.

US states reject anti-vaccine bills as public health groups fight MAHA | Reuters

My column for Bloomberg this week argues that a federal gas tax holiday would be a poor answer to rising gas prices because it would do little for household affordability while further weakening transportation funding. Gas prices are being driven by forces Congress cannot easily fix by statute, including conflict involving Iran and instability around the Strait of Hormuz.

Lawmakers are nevertheless showing bipartisan interest in suspending the federal gas tax, including President Donald Trump, Sen. Josh Hawley, and House Speaker Mike Johnson. The political appeal is clear because gas prices are highly visible and give lawmakers a simple way to say they are responding to voters’ economic pain. But the federal gas tax has been frozen at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, even as infrastructure costs have continued to rise. Suspending it would take revenue away from the Highway Trust Fund, which helps pay for highways, roads, bridges, and mass transit.

The column argues that Congress should separate the problem of household hardship from the problem of transportation finance. Instead of cutting the gas tax, lawmakers could provide targeted help through refundable credits, direct payments, commuter assistance, or flexible transportation support for low- and moderate-income households.

If Congress insists on a gas tax holiday, it should at least pair it with an immediate dedicated backfill and longer-term reforms such as indexing the gas tax to inflation, adopting mileage-based fees, or modernizing road-use charges. The larger point is that high gas prices are real, but a gas tax holiday is a badly targeted discount financed by a transportation system that is already financially strained.

On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson, a case that became one of the most infamous constitutional decisions in American history. The dispute arose from a Louisiana law requiring separate railroad cars for Black and white passengers. Homer Plessy, who was of mixed race, deliberately sat in a whites-only rail car to challenge the law. After he was arrested, Plessy argued that the statute violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Supreme Court rejected that argument and held that racial segregation did not violate the Constitution as long as the separate facilities were considered equal. This became known as the “separate but equal” doctrine.

In practice, the doctrine gave legal cover to segregation across the South and helped support the broader Jim Crow system. The Court treated segregation as a matter of public policy rather than as a badge of racial inferiority imposed by law. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote the majority opinion, reasoning that enforced separation did not necessarily imply inequality. Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, warning that the Constitution should be color-blind and that the ruling would become as harmful as the Court’s decision in Dred Scott. His dissent later became one of the most important statements in American civil-rights law. For nearly six decades, Plessy allowed governments to maintain racially separate schools, transportation, and public facilities.

The decision was finally undermined in 1954, when the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education and rejected segregation in public education. Plessy remains a stark example of how constitutional interpretation can either protect civil rights or help entrench systems of inequality.

A proposed class action filed in Washington federal court accuses Amazon of keeping money it allegedly collected from customers through prices inflated by now-invalidated Trump administration tariffs. The plaintiffs say Amazon could seek refunds from the federal government after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the tariffs, but has refused to do so because it wants to stay in President Trump’s good graces. The lawsuit claims Amazon passed tariff costs on to shoppers, then failed to commit to returning that money even though other retailers have allegedly pursued refunds. The customers point to Amazon’s abandoned plan to show tariff-related price increases on product pages as evidence that the company can identify both the tariff amounts and the consumers who paid them. They also claim Amazon backed away from that plan after criticism from the Trump administration and a call involving Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

The complaint alleges violations of the Washington Consumer Protection Act, unjust enrichment, and money had and received. The plaintiffs say Amazon misled consumers by suggesting tariffs were not increasing prices, while allegedly raising prices on certain low-cost goods after the tariffs took effect. They also argue Amazon failed to tell customers it would not seek tariff refunds even if the tariffs were later found unlawful. The proposed class would include Amazon customers who paid tariff-related surcharges from February 4, 2025, through February 20, 2026. The suit estimates the class could include tens of millions of buyers and seeks to recover money the plaintiffs say belongs to consumers. Similar lawsuits have been filed against other major companies, including Nike, Sony, Nintendo, Costco, Temu, and FedEx.

Amazon Skipped Tariff Refunds To Appease Trump, Suit Says - Law360

The Federal Circuit held its biennial judicial conference in Washington, D.C., bringing together its active judges, agency leaders, district judges who have recently sat by designation, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Solicitor General D. John Sauer. Chief Judge Kimberly Ann Moore opened the event with lighter moments, including praise for Senior Judge Raymond C. Clevenger and the debut of an AI-generated Federal Circuit theme song meant to make the court feel more accessible. The conference did not address the ongoing suspension of Judge Pauline Newman, although she attended the event while continuing to challenge the suspension at the Supreme Court. Judge Moore said the court issued 630 opinions in 2025, its highest total in a decade, and noted an effort to use fewer one-line Rule 36 affirmances. Still, court leaders and practitioners criticized Rule 36 decisions, especially because they give lower courts and litigants little explanation.

The judges also discussed en banc arguments, emphasizing that lawyers must stay focused because full-court arguments leave little time for extended exchanges with any one judge. A major theme was the renewed use of district judges sitting by designation, with 23 visiting judges helping decide nearly 200 cases since February 2024. Visiting district judges said the experience gave them a new appreciation for appellate work, the quality of Federal Circuit advocacy, and the process of narrowing trial records into appealable issues. Federal Circuit judges also described sitting on other courts, including in criminal sentencing matters, which several said gave them a deeper appreciation for the workload and human stakes faced by district judges. The judges offered practical advice to lawyers, urging them to narrow issues, address weaknesses directly, provide full context for citations, and make appropriate concessions. USPTO Director John Squires also appeared and defended his approach to discretionary denials of inter partes review petitions, saying he is returning the process to what Congress intended under the America Invents Act.

Fed. Circ. Drops A Theme Song, Talks Guest Judges - Law360

President Donald Trump has dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury Department, a move linked to discussions about creating a $1.8 billion compensation fund for people who claim they were unfairly investigated by prior administrations. The court filing did not describe any settlement, but Trump’s lawyers said the case was still early enough that he could dismiss it without court permission or IRS approval.

The dismissal was filed “with prejudice,” meaning Trump cannot bring the same claim again. Trump and his sons filed the lawsuit in January, accusing the IRS of failing to protect confidential tax information after his tax records were leaked. A former IRS contractor, Charles Littlejohn, was sentenced to prison for leaking Trump’s tax information as well as records belonging to many others. Trump brought the case as a private citizen, not in his official role as president. The federal judge overseeing the case had already questioned whether a sitting president could properly seek personal monetary damages from an agency inside the executive branch.

The dismissal follows settlements in lawsuits brought by Trump allies, including Michael Flynn and Carter Page. Shortly after Trump’s filing, House Democrats submitted a brief accusing him of self-dealing and arguing that any attempt to use the court process to support a settlement should be closely reviewed.

Trump drops lawsuit against IRS amid talks of establishing a $1.8 billion fund for allies | CNN Politics

On May 15, 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned from the United States Supreme Court, becoming the first justice to leave the Court under the threat of impeachment. Fortas had been appointed to the Court in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a close friend and political ally. His reputation had already been damaged in 1968, when Johnson tried to elevate him to Chief Justice and the nomination failed after senators criticized his outside income and ties to the president. The controversy deepened when it became public that Fortas had accepted a financial arrangement from the family foundation of Louis Wolfson, a financier who was later convicted of securities violations. Although Fortas returned the money, the arrangement created the appearance that a sitting Supreme Court justice might be financially entangled with someone who had legal troubles. That appearance alone was enough to cause a major crisis for the Court’s legitimacy.

Members of Congress began discussing impeachment, and Fortas ultimately resigned before a formal impeachment process could remove him. His departure became an important example of how judicial ethics are not limited to actual corruption, but also include conduct that undermines public confidence in judicial independence. The episode also showed the tension between life tenure and accountability for federal judges. Article III judges are protected from political pressure through lifetime appointments, but they can still face removal through impeachment for serious misconduct.

Fortas’s resignation left a lasting mark on debates over Supreme Court ethics, outside income, recusals, and financial disclosure. More than fifty years later, the Fortas controversy is still cited when questions arise about whether Supreme Court justices should follow clearer and more enforceable ethics rules.

Closing arguments ended Thursday in Elon Musk’s federal trial against OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft, with the case now headed to a nine-member jury. Musk’s lawyer argued that OpenAI violated its charitable mission by shifting assets, employees, and value from its nonprofit structure into a for-profit enterprise now worth hundreds of billions of dollars. He focused heavily on Altman’s credibility, telling jurors that OpenAI’s defense depends on believing Altman and pointing to testimony and documents that Musk says show dishonesty, conflicts, and self-enrichment. Musk’s side also attacked Brockman’s large equity stake and cited old journal entries as evidence that OpenAI insiders were thinking about personal wealth while controlling a nonprofit mission. Microsoft was portrayed by Musk’s team as helping the alleged breach by investing billions and gaining major access to OpenAI’s intellectual property and business structure. OpenAI’s lawyers responded that Musk’s claims are late, unsupported, and driven by his status as a competitor rather than by concern for charitable law. They argued Musk’s donations were not legally restricted gifts, that he once sought control of OpenAI himself, and that he did not object to earlier restructuring documents. OpenAI also emphasized that the nonprofit remains in control and now holds a stake worth roughly $200 billion, which its lawyers described as enormous value created for the charity, not stolen from it. Microsoft’s lawyer argued the company did not know of any specific conditions on Musk’s donations and was not involved in the core events Musk complains about. In rebuttal, Musk’s lawyer said OpenAI and Microsoft were distracting the jury from documents and texts showing that Musk funded OpenAI based on a specific nonprofit safety mission. The jury is scheduled to begin deliberations Monday.

‘Who’s Telling The Truth?’ Musk-OpenAI Fight Goes To Jury - Law360 UK

Musk accused of ‘selective amnesia,’ Altman of lying as OpenAI trial nears end | Reuters

The Senate Banking Committee advanced the Clarity Act, a major crypto regulation bill that would set clearer rules for digital assets and define which regulators oversee different parts of the industry. The Republican-led committee approved the bill with support from all Republicans and two Democrats, Senators Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks, giving the measure a better chance of reaching the full Senate. Even so, both Democrats warned they may not support the final version unless negotiations change. The bill is important to the crypto industry because it would help determine when tokens are treated as securities, commodities, or something else, which companies say is necessary for growth and legal certainty. Several Democrats objected that the proposal does not go far enough on anti-money laundering protections and should do more to stop public officials from profiting from crypto ventures. Banks are also fighting part of the bill because they fear crypto companies could use stablecoin rewards to compete with traditional deposits. The dispute led to tense committee negotiations, including a late compromise that Chairman Tim Scott allowed while rejecting some other Democratic amendments. Crypto groups have pushed hard for the legislation after spending heavily to support pro-crypto candidates in 2024. The White House is also backing crypto reform, and the House already passed its version of the Clarity Act last year. Supporters see the committee vote as a milestone after years of work, while critics, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, warn the bill favors the crypto industry at the expense of consumers, investors, national security, and the financial system. The bill now moves to the full Senate, where lobbying from crypto companies, banks, and consumer-protection advocates is likely to intensify.

US Senate committee advances crypto bill in milestone for digital assets | Reuters

A federal appeals court in Washington heard arguments over the Trump administration’s attempt to revive executive orders targeting four major law firms: Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey. The firms had previously won in lower court, where judges found the orders unconstitutional. The executive orders punished the firms over issues including their legal work, hiring practices, diversity policies, and political connections. They also sought to restrict the firms’ lawyers from federal buildings, cancel government contracts held by their clients, and remove security clearances from firm employees. The Justice Department argued that the firms’ business relationships and hiring decisions are not protected by the First Amendment, and that courts should not second-guess presidential decisions involving national security. Judges on the D.C. Circuit appeared skeptical of the administration’s broad view of presidential authority, especially the claim that security clearance decisions are unreviewable even when allegedly made for improper reasons. Paul Clement, arguing for the firms, said the orders threatened the First Amendment and the ability of lawyers to represent unpopular clients without government retaliation. He warned that accepting the administration’s theory could allow presidents to punish lawyers or firms based on political affiliation. Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, seemed more receptive to the administration’s argument that courts have limited power to review security clearance decisions. The case is part of a broader fight over presidential power and whether the government can use executive authority to punish lawyers and firms viewed as political opponents. The appeals court also heard a related case involving lawyer Mark Zaid’s security clearance. Any ruling from the D.C. Circuit could eventually be appealed to the Supreme Court.

US appeals court questions Trump’s push to punish major law firms | Reuters

On May 14, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Frontiero v. Richardson, a major case in the development of constitutional protections against sex discrimination. The case began when Sharron Frontiero, a lieutenant in the United States Air Force, sought dependent benefits for her husband. Under federal law at the time, a male service member could automatically claim his wife as a dependent, but a female service member had to prove that her husband depended on her for more than half of his support. Frontiero argued that this rule treated women in the military as less legitimate breadwinners than men. The Supreme Court agreed that the policy violated the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. A plurality of the Court reasoned that sex-based legal classifications often reflected outdated assumptions about women’s roles in family and public life.

The decision came only a year after Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification, giving the case a larger political and constitutional backdrop. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then working with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, filed an amicus brief urging the Court to treat sex discrimination with the same suspicion it applied to race discrimination. The Court did not produce a majority for strict scrutiny in sex-discrimination cases, but Frontiero still marked a sharp move away from judicial tolerance of laws based on gender stereotypes. Justice William Brennan’s plurality opinion emphasized that women had long faced legal and social discrimination, including restrictions on property ownership, voting, employment, and civic participation.

The ruling helped establish that administrative convenience was not a sufficient reason for the government to impose unequal burdens on women. It also signaled that servicewomen were entitled to equal treatment within institutions, including the military, that had historically been structured around male service members. In later cases, the Court would settle on an intermediate scrutiny standard for sex-based classifications, but Frontiero remains one of the key cases that pushed constitutional law in that direction.

The U.S. Department of Justice has settled an investigation into PayPal over a 2020 investment program aimed at supporting Black- and minority-owned businesses. The DOJ said PayPal’s Economic Opportunity Fund gave preferences based on race, color, and national origin without being tied to a specific remedy for past discrimination. PayPal did not admit liability, and the settlement says the DOJ did not make a formal finding that the company violated the Equal Credit Opportunity Act or other federal law. As part of the agreement, PayPal will create a new small business initiative that waives processing fees on $1 billion in transactions.

The fee waivers are valued at about $30 million and will apply to small businesses in farming, manufacturing, and technology, as well as businesses certified through the SBA’s Veteran Small Business Certification Program. PayPal must also submit plans for the initiative, train employees on ECOA requirements, and report annually to the government. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the settlement as part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to challenge corporate DEI programs. PayPal said it was pleased to launch the new initiative and emphasized its long history of helping small businesses use digital financial tools. The settlement follows another recent DOJ resolution with IBM over workforce diversity-related allegations, showing continued federal scrutiny of corporate DEI practices.

PayPal Settles Gov’t DEI Probe With Small Biz Program - Law360

The SEC and Elon Musk are scheduled to appear before a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to defend their proposed $1.5 million settlement over Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter. The SEC’s lawsuit accused Musk of delaying his disclosure that he had acquired a 5% stake in Twitter, allegedly allowing him to save about $150 million before the market reacted. Musk later bought Twitter for $44 billion.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan has not automatically approved the deal and said she must evaluate whether it is fair, in the public interest, and free from improper collusion or corruption. She ordered both sides to appear in court and be ready to suggest a schedule for briefing in support of the settlement. The SEC filed the case in January 2025, shortly before President Biden left office. Musk has argued the case was politically motivated and has said the late disclosure was accidental.

The proposed settlement would not require Musk to admit wrongdoing or surrender the money the SEC claimed he saved. Although the amount is much lower than what the SEC initially sought, a source told Reuters it was still the largest SEC penalty for that type of disclosure violation.

US SEC, Musk to argue for Twitter settlement before DC judge | Reuters

U.S. law firms saw strong client demand and higher billing rates in the first quarter of 2026, but those gains were limited by rising expenses and lower productivity. According to the Thomson Reuters Institute’s latest Law Firm Financial Index, the quarter was healthy overall but not as financially impressive as firms might have expected given the level of demand. The report suggests that 2026 may not match the strong profit growth many firms saw in 2025, though analysts said it is still too early to draw firm conclusions. Average demand rose 2.7% from the same period last year, which the report described as an unusually strong increase. M&A work grew 4.4%, while litigation and overall corporate work each rose 2.9%. Large firms continued to push billing rates sharply higher, with Am Law 100 firms raising rates by 9.8%, while midsized firms increased rates by 5.3%. But expenses climbed almost as quickly, with direct expenses up 8.1% and overhead up 8.3%. A major driver of overhead growth was spending on technology, including artificial intelligence tools.

Geopolitical instability, including the war in Iran, has also created uncertainty, with deal activity slowing in March and restructuring work not rising as expected. The report frames the market as still strong, but with enough warning signs that firms may need to watch costs, productivity, and client demand closely in the next quarter.

Rising US law firm expenses offset strong demand and rate hikes in first quarter - report | Reuters

A U.S. appeals court has temporarily paused a lower court ruling that had favored three challengers to the Trump administration’s 10% global tariff. The pause means the tariffs remain in effect for two businesses and Washington state while the appeal continues. The U.S. trade court had ruled against the tariffs last week but did not issue a broad order stopping their collection nationwide. The Trump administration appealed that decision, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a short-term administrative stay while it considers whether to grant a longer pause. The challengers now have seven days to argue against keeping the lower court ruling on hold. Washington state qualified as an importer in the case because the University of Washington, a public research institution, paid tariffs. The tariff was imposed in February under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, after the Supreme Court struck down most of Trump’s 2025 tariffs. Unless Congress extends it, the 10% global tariff is scheduled to expire in July.

US appeals court pauses ruling against Trump’s 10% global tariff | Reuters

On May 13, 1846, Congress approved President James K. Polk’s request for a declaration of war against Mexico, formally beginning the Mexican-American War. Polk had told Congress that Mexico had “invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil,” after a clash between Mexican forces and American troops near the Rio Grande. The problem was that the land where the clash occurred was disputed: the United States claimed the Rio Grande as the border of Texas, while Mexico maintained that the border was farther north at the Nueces River. Congress accepted Polk’s framing and passed the war declaration, but the vote did not settle the legal question of whether the president had maneuvered the country into war. Many Whigs saw the conflict not as a defensive war, but as a war of expansion designed to seize Mexican territory.

One of the sharpest critics was a young Whig congressman from Illinois, then serving his only term in the House of Representatives. In December 1847, a one Abraham Lincoln introduced what became known as the Spot Resolutions, demanding that Polk identify the precise “spot” where American blood had supposedly been shed. Lincoln wanted to know whether that spot was truly American soil, or whether U.S. troops had been sent into disputed territory first. In one of the resolutions, he asked whether “the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed” was actually American soil at the time. The challenge was simple but devastating: if Polk could not prove the location was within the United States, then his legal justification for war began to fall apart.

Lincoln’s attack did not stop the war, and it made him unpopular with many voters who thought he was undermining American soldiers in the field. Critics even mocked him as “Spotty Lincoln.” But the episode revealed an early version of the Lincoln who would later become president: a lawyer-politician who focused on the exact words used to justify government power. The May 13 declaration therefore stands not only as the beginning of a war, but as an early constitutional fight over presidential war-making, disputed borders, and whether Congress had been asked to approve a war on a false premise.

Texas has sued Netflix in state court, accusing the company of misleading subscribers about how it collects and uses viewing data. The lawsuit claims Netflix built its reputation by presenting itself as a paid, ad-free alternative to companies that rely heavily on user tracking and advertising. According to Texas, Netflix nevertheless collected large amounts of information about what users watched, how they browsed, and how they interacted with the platform.

The state alleges that Netflix profited from that data by using it for advertising and sharing or selling it to outside companies without proper consent. The petition also criticizes features such as autoplay, describing them as design choices that push users toward binge-watching by removing natural stopping points. Texas further claims that Netflix marketed itself as family-friendly while still tracking children’s viewing and browsing behavior, even if it has not yet targeted children with ads. Attorney General Ken Paxton said the company misrepresented itself as safer and more privacy-protective than it really was.

The lawsuit brings claims under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and seeks civil penalties, an injunction, and an order requiring Netflix to delete data allegedly collected through deceptive practices.

Texas Sues Netflix Over ‘Staggering’ Data Logging - Law360

Federal prosecutors have brought the first criminal charges against companies involved in operating the M/V Dali, the container ship that struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge in March 2024. The indictment names Singapore-based Synergy Marine, India-based Synergy Maritime, and Radhakrishnan Karthik Nair, who served as technical superintendent for the ship. Prosecutors accuse them of recklessly operating the vessel, falsifying inspection records, failing to report a hazardous condition to the Coast Guard, obstructing agency proceedings, and lying to National Transportation Safety Board investigators. The crash killed six construction workers, destroyed the bridge, disrupted access to the Port of Baltimore, and allegedly caused billions of dollars in economic losses. According to prosecutors, the Dali had electrical and mechanical problems that made it vulnerable to blackouts, and Synergy employees improperly used a flushing pump as a regular fuel supply pump for generators.

The government claims that if the proper pumps had been used, the ship could have regained power in time to avoid the bridge. The indictment also includes environmental allegations tied to pollutants released into the Patapsco River, including oil, shipping containers, and bridge debris. Synergy denies wrongdoing and says the Justice Department is wrongly treating a tragic accident as a crime. The company argues that the crash was caused by a loose wire, consistent with the NTSB’s findings, and says the DOJ’s theory conflicts with maritime experts’ conclusions. Separate civil litigation over liability is still moving forward, including claims by Maryland, Baltimore, cargo interests, insurers, and others. Maryland also finalized a $2.25 billion settlement with Grace Ocean and Synergy Marine, while continuing claims against the shipbuilder, HD Hyundai Heavy Industries. Planning for the Key Bridge replacement is underway, with the new bridge expected to cost between $4.3 billion and $5.2 billion and be completed by late 2030.

Ship Managers Indicted Over Baltimore Bridge Disaster - Law360

In my column for Bloomberg this week, I wrote about how Congress made the adoption tax credit partially refundable beginning in 2025, a change that could help families manage the high costs of adoption. The policy is meant to make the credit more useful when families actually need the money, since adoption can involve major expenses such as agency fees, legal bills, travel, and other costs that arrive long before any tax benefit is received. But refundable credits also raise fraud concerns for the IRS because they can result in direct payments from the government.

The column warns that the IRS may respond by delaying refunds, issuing broad documentation requests, and placing legitimate families through lengthy reviews. That concern is based on what happened in 2010 and 2011, when the adoption credit was fully refundable and the IRS subjected many claims to extra scrutiny. During the 2012 filing season, 90% of returns claiming the credit received additional review and 69% were selected for audit. Adoption claims are often complex, not suspicious, because they can involve international agencies, state courts, amended documents, failed placements, special-needs rules, and unusual expense records. The IRS should issue clear guidance before filing season so families know what documents they need to submit with Form 8839.

It should also create a standardized checklist or attachment and a dedicated review track staffed by employees trained on adoption-credit rules. Without better guidance and staffing, the refundable portion of the credit may become less useful because families could face audits, professional fees, delayed refunds, or fear of claiming the benefit at all. The broader point is that Congress cannot expand a benefit, demand fraud prevention, reduce administrative capacity, and then be surprised when taxpayers get stuck in delays.

Adoption Credit’s Refundability Makes It Valuable—and Vulnerable

On May 12, 1896, New York City adopted one of the country’s best-known early anti-spitting laws, aimed at stopping the spread of tuberculosis. At the time, tuberculosis was one of the deadliest diseases in American cities, and public health officials were increasingly focused on sputum as a source of infection. The new rule made it illegal to spit in public places, including streets, sidewalks, public buildings, and transit spaces. That may sound like a small matter today, but in the late nineteenth century it was part of a much larger legal campaign to use city power to fight disease.

The law reflected the growing belief that personal habits could become public harms when they created risks for others. It also showed how local governments were beginning to treat public health as a matter of regulation, enforcement, and criminal penalty. Violators could face fines, and in some cases arrest, which turned a common social habit into a legally punishable act. The ordinance was not just about cleanliness; it was about using law to change behavior before illness spread.

New York’s approach influenced other cities, which passed similar anti-spitting rules as tuberculosis campaigns expanded across the country. The measure also raised a familiar legal question: when does protecting public health justify limiting individual freedom in public spaces? That question would appear again in later fights over quarantine, vaccination, sanitation, smoking bans, and other health regulations.

Anti-spitting laws are a reminder that public health law often develops through ordinary, everyday conduct rather than dramatic courtroom battles. The legal element here is the police power, because the ordinance shows how local governments used their authority to protect health, safety, and welfare by regulating conduct in shared public spaces.

Andrew Left, the founder of Citron Research and a well-known short seller, is set to go on trial in Los Angeles over federal criminal charges that he manipulated the market and misled investors. Prosecutors say Left used his public profile, including social media posts and television appearances, to announce trading positions in companies such as Nvidia and Tesla while secretly closing those positions soon after price moves. The government alleges that this strategy allowed him to make at least $16 million.

Prosecutors also claim Left gave hedge funds advance notice of his public calls in exchange for compensation and hid those arrangements through fake invoices. Left has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers argue that he made honest market commentary in good faith. They also say there is no law requiring an investor to hold a position for any particular amount of time after speaking publicly about it. Jury selection is expected to begin this week, and the trial could include testimony from retail investors and other witnesses. The case has drawn attention because short sellers often argue that their work is protected speech and that they help expose fraud or overvaluation in public companies.

Some legal experts see the prosecution as an aggressive theory, especially because investors are generally allowed to change their minds about trades. At the same time, the Justice Department appears to be trying to prove more than ordinary opinion or trading strategy by alleging deception, secret coordination, and knowingly false statements. If convicted of securities fraud, Left could face a lengthy prison sentence.

Short seller Andrew Left to stand trial in LA over manipulation charges | Reuters

Some incoming law students are starting school in May or June instead of waiting until the fall so they can qualify under the current federal student loan system before new limits take effect on July 1. A few law schools already had summer start programs, but demand has increased as students try to avoid the new loan caps for professional degrees. Stetson University College of Law and Rutgers Law School even created summer start options specifically to help students borrow under the existing rules. Under the expiring system, graduate and professional students can borrow up to the full cost of tuition and living expenses through federal loans.

The new system will cap federal borrowing for professional programs at $50,000 per year and $200,000 total, which could leave some law students needing private loans. That is a major concern because private loans may have higher interest rates, stricter credit requirements, and fewer protections than federal loans. Stetson’s dean said the early start option may be especially helpful for students with poor credit or existing debt. The Education Department has defended the new caps as a way to reduce excessive borrowing and pressure schools to lower costs. Several schools, including Seattle University, Rutgers, Ave Maria, and Drexel, report increased interest in summer programs. Administrators say the loan changes are driving much of that demand, though some worry that many applicants still do not understand how much the new rules could affect them.

Some US law students enroll early to beat the federal loan clock | Reuters

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., refused to immediately approve Elon Musk’s $1.5 million settlement with the SEC over his delayed disclosure of a large Twitter stake. The SEC had accused Musk of waiting too long to report that he had acquired more than 5% of Twitter’s shares before later revealing a 9.2% stake in April 2022. According to the agency, that delay allowed Musk to save about $150 million before he ultimately bought Twitter for $44 billion. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said she needs more information before approving the deal, including whether it is fair, serves the public interest, and is free from improper collusion or corruption. She ordered Musk and the SEC to appear in court on May 13 and be ready to propose a schedule for briefs defending the settlement. The proposed deal would not require Musk to admit wrongdoing or return the money the SEC says he saved. Musk has said the delayed filing was accidental and has argued that the lawsuit was politically motivated. The case also comes as the SEC, now under Chairman Paul Atkins, is shifting its enforcement priorities under the Trump administration. The timing of the settlement talks has drawn attention because they were disclosed shortly after the SEC’s enforcement chief left her post. For now, the judge made clear that she will not simply sign off on the agreement without scrutiny.

US judge will not rubber-stamp Elon Musk settlement with SEC | Reuters

On May 11, 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law making it illegal to celebrate Christmas. The law imposed a fine of five shillings on anyone who observed the holiday by feasting, taking the day off from work, or engaging in other forms of celebration. To modern readers, this can sound like a strange kind of anti-holiday law, but it reflected the religious and legal culture of Puritan New England. Many Puritans rejected Christmas because they believed it had no clear biblical foundation and was associated with Catholic tradition, disorderly public behavior, and old English customs they considered improper. In their view, the law was not merely about stopping a party; it was about enforcing a disciplined religious society.

The colony’s leaders used law as a tool to shape public morality, religious practice, and daily life. This was common in early colonial legal systems, where civil authority and religious authority were often closely connected. The Christmas ban also shows how different early American ideas of “religious liberty” could be from later constitutional understandings. Rather than protecting a broad right to celebrate or worship differently, the Massachusetts Bay Colony often used law to preserve a particular religious order. The five-shilling fine was not enormous, but it was meaningful enough to signal that Christmas observance was legally disfavored.

The law remained part of a broader colonial effort to regulate conduct that officials believed threatened communal discipline. Over time, attitudes toward Christmas changed, especially as New England became more religiously diverse and less strictly Puritan. The episode stands as a reminder that American legal history includes not only the expansion of rights, but also earlier moments when law was used to suppress customs now considered ordinary.

The legal industry added 2,400 jobs in April, bringing total sector employment to about 1.24 million, according to seasonally adjusted data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was a rebound from a small decline in March and placed legal employment slightly above both March and February levels. Compared with the same time last year, the sector had 20,800 more jobs. The legal sector numbers include lawyers, paralegals, and other legal-related professional roles.

The rebound follows a long stretch of legal industry growth that was interrupted by March’s dip. Two major firms recently announced job cuts: McDermott Will & Schulte is trimming a small number of associates, while Allen Overy Shearman Sterling is reducing roles in its business services team. Across the broader U.S. economy, employers added 115,000 jobs in April, while the unemployment rate stayed at 4.3%.

Legal Industry Bounces Back, Gaining 2,400 Jobs In April - Law360

Virginia’s Supreme Court struck down a Democratic-backed congressional map that had been designed to improve the party’s chances in four Republican-held U.S. House districts. The court ruled 4-3 that Democratic lawmakers failed to follow the proper process when they moved quickly to put the redistricting plan before voters. The map had been approved by voters in an April special election, but Republicans challenged the measure, arguing that the required intervening election had not properly occurred before the second legislative approval. The court’s majority agreed, emphasizing that more than 1.3 million early votes had already been cast by the time lawmakers first approved the proposed constitutional amendment.

Democrats criticized the ruling as overriding the will of voters, while Republicans celebrated it as a major win ahead of the midterm elections. Virginia Democrats said they would seek emergency review from the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling could make it harder for Democrats to regain control of the U.S. House, where Republicans hold a very narrow majority. The dispute is part of a broader national fight over mid-cycle redistricting, with both parties seeking favorable maps before the November elections. Republican-led states in the South are pursuing their own redistricting efforts after a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision weakened a key part of the Voting Rights Act. Election analyst Kyle Kondik said the Virginia ruling improves Republican odds, though broader political conditions could still affect the outcome in November.

Virginia court tosses Democratic map, dealing major blow to party’s midterm hopes | Reuters

Instructure, the company behind the Canvas learning management platform, is facing at least seven proposed class actions after disclosing unauthorized activity in its system. Canvas is widely used by schools and universities to manage coursework, grades, assignments, and communications. Instructure first announced the incident on May 1, then later reported more unauthorized activity connected to the same breach and temporarily took Canvas offline. The company has since restored much of the platform, but its Free-for-Teacher accounts remain disabled because Instructure believes a vulnerability there may have been exploited.

The lawsuits, filed in Utah and New York federal courts, accuse Instructure of failing to adequately protect personal information belonging to students, teachers, and staff. The data allegedly at risk includes names, email addresses, student ID numbers, private messages, enrolled courses, and confidential communications with teachers. The complaints say the hacking group ShinyHunters claimed to have accessed information tied to more than 275 million users.

Plaintiffs argue Instructure should have used stronger safeguards, including better encryption, access controls, employee training, monitoring, and protocols for handling sensitive data. They also claim affected users now face loss of control over their information and a heightened risk of identity theft. One New York plaintiff also sued KKR, which acquired Instructure in 2024, and argued the breach was foreseeable in light of earlier major attacks on education software companies. Instructure has said it is investigating, communicating with affected customers, and strengthening protections around access, permissions, token management, monitoring, and related workflows.

EdTech Platform Canvas Accused Of Lax Security After Breach - Law360

The Trump administration appealed a U.S. Court of International Trade ruling that rejected its use of a 1970s trade law to impose a 10% global tariff. The court ruled 2-1 that Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 was not designed to address trade deficits caused by the United States importing more goods than it exports. The decision only blocked the tariffs as applied to the three plaintiffs who sued: two small businesses and the state of Washington. Even though the tariffs were temporary and set to expire in July unless Congress extended them, the ruling marked another legal setback for the administration’s broader tariff agenda.

The case followed a separate Supreme Court decision that invalidated earlier Trump tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. After that loss, the administration turned to Section 122 as a replacement authority for a 10% import tariff. President Trump criticized the trade court’s ruling, while U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the administration expected to win on appeal. The dispute could lead to another major fight over tariff refunds, potentially involving billions of dollars. The timing is also significant because the ruling came shortly before Trump was scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss trade tensions.

The administration is separately pursuing broader tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act, which addresses unfair trade practices and has survived past legal challenges.

Trump administration appeals latest court loss on tariffs | Reuters

On May 8, 1945, the Allies celebrated Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, after Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender brought the European theater of World War II to an end. The surrender did more than end a military campaign; it opened the door to one of the most important legal reckonings in modern history. In the months that followed, the Allied powers created the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to prosecute major Nazi leaders for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. These trials helped establish that individuals, including heads of state and military officials, could be held personally responsible under international law. That principle was a major departure from older ideas that treated war primarily as a matter between nations rather than as a source of individual criminal liability.

V-E Day also set the stage for the legal rejection of the defense that officials were merely “following orders” when participating in atrocities. The postwar prosecutions influenced later human rights law, including the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They also helped shape the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which strengthened protections for civilians, prisoners of war, and wounded soldiers. The legal aftermath of V-E Day showed that victory would not be measured only by military surrender, but also by whether law could respond to mass violence. It forced courts and governments to confront how ordinary legal systems had failed under fascism and how international law might prevent future atrocities. The Nuremberg legacy remains central to modern debates over command responsibility, aggressive war, and accountability for crimes committed during armed conflict. May 8 therefore stands not only as a day of celebration, but as a turning point in the development of international criminal law.

A U.S. trade court ruled that President Trump’s latest temporary 10% global tariffs were not properly justified under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. The decision was narrow, blocking the tariffs only for two private importers, Basic Fun! and Burlap & Barrel, along with the State of Washington. The tariffs remain in place for all other importers while the Trump administration considers an appeal, and they are currently set to expire in July. The court found that Section 122, which allows short-term tariffs to address serious balance-of-payments problems or protect the dollar, did not fit the trade deficits cited by Trump. Most of the state plaintiffs were denied broader relief because the court found they lacked standing, since they had not shown they directly paid or would pay the tariffs. Washington was treated differently because it submitted evidence that tariffs were paid through the University of Washington. The ruling follows a Supreme Court decision that had already struck down a separate set of Trump tariffs imposed under a national emergency law. The administration is expected to keep pursuing tariffs through other legal routes, especially Section 301 of the Trade Act, which deals with unfair trade practices. Lawyers and trade experts expect further appeals and possible lawsuits from other importers seeking similar relief or refunds. For now, the ruling is legally important but limited in practical effect because it does not stop the tariffs nationwide.

US trade court rules Trump tariffs illegal, but issues narrow block | Reuters

New York is preparing to ban law enforcement officers, including ICE agents, from wearing masks during ordinary duty operations. Governor Kathy Hochul announced the plan as part of a broader agreement with state lawmakers on New York’s 2027 budget. The proposal would allow masks only in limited situations where there is a real operational need, such as the use of a gas mask. The budget agreement also includes immigration-related limits on cooperation between state law enforcement and ICE. Under the plan, state law enforcement would be barred from helping ICE carry out federal immigration actions. ICE would also be restricted from entering schools, healthcare facilities, homes, and other sensitive locations unless agents have a judicial warrant. State officials expect the Democratic-led legislature to approve the measures soon. Similar mask restrictions have been pursued in California and New Jersey. Those efforts have already drawn lawsuits from the U.S. Justice Department. A federal judge struck down California’s ban earlier this year, finding that it unlawfully discriminated against federal officers. That history suggests New York’s measure is likely to face a federal legal challenge as well.

New York state set to ban law enforcement, including ICE, from wearing masks | Reuters

Illinois lawmakers advanced an amended bill meant to limit outside investor influence over law firms. The state Senate Judiciary Committee approved the measure 8-1, sending it to the full Senate for further consideration. The bill targets arrangements involving law firm management services organizations, often called MSOs, and other non-lawyer-owned entities connected to legal practices. It would bar those entities from interfering with lawyers’ professional judgment, hiring decisions, or access to firm documents. It would also prevent outside entities from charging fees tied directly or indirectly to a law firm’s fees or revenue. The amended version allows law firms to repay loans or credit from outside entities, as long as repayment is not tied to the firm’s financial performance. It also narrows the bill so that it applies to Illinois lawyers and firms representing clients at least partly on a contingency-fee basis. Lawyers would have to disclose MSO agreements to their clients. Supporters say the bill is designed to keep legal decisions in the hands of attorneys rather than investors seeking profits. Critics argue the bill is too broad and may interfere with the Illinois Supreme Court’s authority to regulate the legal profession. The Illinois House already passed an earlier version, but it would need to approve the amended bill before it could go to the governor.

Illinois advances bill to limit investor influence on law firms | Reuters

On May 7, 1873, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase died, ending one of the most unusual legal and political careers in American history. Chase had been an antislavery lawyer, a U.S. senator, governor of Ohio, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of the Treasury, and then Chief Justice of the United States. He was also one of the many talented and ambitious men around Lincoln who did not begin as an admirer of him. Before Lincoln became president, Chase had encountered him as a lawyer and reportedly did not think much of him, viewing him as a rough western attorney rather than a national figure. After Lincoln defeated him for the Republican nomination in 1860, Chase had reason to believe a summons to the White House might be an occasion for Lincoln to enjoy the victory. Instead, Lincoln offered him one of the most important jobs in the government: secretary of the Treasury.

It was a revealing moment in Lincoln’s political genius, because he was willing to place a rival who had underestimated him in a position of enormous responsibility during the Civil War. Chase helped finance the Union war effort and became closely associated with the creation of a national banking system and the issuance of paper currency. In 1864, Lincoln elevated him again by appointing him Chief Justice of the United States.

As Chief Justice, Chase presided over the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, a major constitutional test of presidential power and congressional authority. Near the end of his life, Chase dissented in the Slaughter-House Cases, one of the first major Supreme Court interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s majority read the Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause narrowly, limiting a provision that many had hoped would become a strong source of federal protection for civil rights. Chase’s dissent placed him on the side of a broader understanding of Reconstruction’s constitutional promise. His death mattered not only because of the offices he held, but because it came at a moment when the Supreme Court was deciding whether the Civil War amendments would transform American law or be read down almost as soon as they were adopted.

Apple customers have asked a California federal judge to preliminarily approve a proposed $250 million settlement over claims that Apple overstated the artificial intelligence features available on the iPhone 16. The proposed class includes people who bought any iPhone 16 model or certain iPhone 15 models between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025. The customers allege Apple advertised enhanced Siri capabilities as part of its Apple Intelligence rollout even though those features were not yet available. Under the settlement, eligible class members who submit valid claims would receive $25 per device, with payments possibly rising to $95 per device depending on participation. Apple is also expected to provide additional Siri-related Apple Intelligence updates in the future at no extra cost.

The plaintiffs said settlement made sense because AI-related consumer claims are still legally novel and would carry risk if the case continued. Apple had argued that its marketing was not deceptive because it had already released many Apple Intelligence features and had disclosed that other features would arrive over time. The case began in March 2025 and later became part of a consolidated set of related lawsuits in the Northern District of California. The parties conducted discovery, consulted experts, and participated in three full-day mediation sessions before reaching the proposed deal. Plaintiffs’ lawyers plan to seek up to $70 million in fees, plus up to $600,000 in expenses. The settlement does not resolve separate securities or shareholder cases claiming Apple misled investors about the timing of the Siri rollout. Apple said it settled to remain focused on developing products and services, while maintaining that it has already introduced numerous Apple Intelligence tools.

Apple Reaches $250M Deal Over Claims It Overhyped IPhone AI - Law360

Bayer has agreed to acquire Perfuse Therapeutics, a San Francisco biopharma company, in a deal worth up to $2.45 billion. The transaction gives Bayer full rights to PER-001, a drug candidate in phase-two clinical development for glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. Bayer will pay $300 million upfront, with the rest tied to development, regulatory, and sales milestones. Perfuse focuses on treatments that improve blood flow to the retina, with the goal of addressing conditions that can lead to blindness. Bayer said the acquisition strengthens its ophthalmology pipeline and supports its effort to develop new therapies for serious eye diseases.

The deal is being handled legally by Baker McKenzie for Bayer, with partners Alan Zoccolillo, Oren Livne, and Jieun Tak leading the team. Goodwin Procter is advising Perfuse. The transaction still needs antitrust clearance and approval from Perfuse shareholders. Bayer is being advised financially by BofA Securities, while Centerview Partners is advising Perfuse. Bayer and Perfuse said glaucoma could affect about 112 million people by 2040, while diabetic retinopathy could affect 160 million people by 2045.

Baker McKenzie-Led Bayer To Buy Perfuse For Up To $2.45B - Law360 UK

The California Supreme Court is considering whether drugmakers can be held legally responsible for stopping development of a potentially safer drug while continuing to sell an already-approved medication. The case involves Gilead Sciences and roughly 24,000 HIV patients who took drugs containing tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, or TDF. TDF-based drugs received FDA approval in 2001, but they were associated with possible kidney and bone side effects. Gilead later began developing a related drug, tenofovir alafenamide fumarate, or TAF, which patients say had fewer side effects. The company stopped developing TAF in 2004, arguing that it was not different enough from TDF to justify further investment.

The patients claim Gilead delayed TAF for business reasons, including to protect TDF sales and time TAF’s release around the expiration of TDF patents. Gilead argues that allowing the negligence claims to proceed would punish companies for researching possible improvements and could discourage innovation. The company says the lower court rulings effectively create a “duty to innovate,” even when the drug already on the market is not alleged to be defective. The patients respond that the case is not about forcing endless research, but about whether Gilead unreasonably delayed a safer alternative for profit. A ruling for the patients could expand product-liability exposure for pharmaceutical companies, while a ruling for Gilead could limit claims based on decisions not to commercialize drugs still in development.

California’s highest court to consider whether drugmakers have ‘duty to innovate’ | Reuters

On May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law. The law imposed a 10-year ban on the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States. It also made Chinese immigrants already in the country ineligible for naturalized citizenship, marking a major turn toward federal immigration restriction. The National Archives describes it as the first significant U.S. law restricting immigration and notes that it targeted an ethnic working group on the theory that it threatened public order.

The law grew out of anti-Chinese racism and labor anxiety, especially in the American West, where Chinese workers were blamed for low wages and job competition. Although the Act formally applied to “Chinese laborers,” its enforcement burdened many Chinese people seeking entry, including those who claimed exempt status. The National Archives notes that the law helped create a broader framework for later race- and class-based exclusionary immigration policy.

The Act was not temporary in practice. Congress extended it through the Geary Act of 1892, later made the exclusion regime permanent, and did not repeal the ban until 1943, during World War II, when the United States and China were allies.

OpenAI president Greg Brockman testified in federal court that Elon Musk once supported changing OpenAI from a nonprofit into a for-profit company, but wanted full control of the organization as part of that shift. Brockman said Musk believed the nonprofit model could not raise enough money to build advanced AI systems. According to Brockman, Musk also said he needed an $80 billion stake to help fund a self-sustaining city on Mars. Brockman described a tense 2017 meeting where Musk allegedly rejected a proposed equity structure, became angry, took a painting made for him by Ilya Sutskever, and left while threatening to pause funding.

Musk’s lawsuit claims OpenAI and Sam Altman misled him into donating $38 million to a nonprofit that later abandoned its charitable mission in favor of profit. Musk is seeking $150 billion in damages for the nonprofit and wants Altman and Brockman removed from leadership. OpenAI argues that Musk is upset because he left before the company became highly successful and is now trying to gain control while also advancing his own AI company, xAI. Brockman also faced questions about his own financial interests, including testimony that his OpenAI stake is worth nearly $30 billion and evidence of an old diary entry about reaching $1 billion. OpenAI later created a for-profit unit controlled by the nonprofit, which helped it raise massive sums for computing power, hiring, and expansion.

Musk wanted $80 billion to colonize Mars, OpenAI president testifies at trial | Reuters

Publishers Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill, along with author Scott Turow, sued Meta in federal court in Manhattan over its AI training practices. The lawsuit claims Meta used millions of copyrighted books and journal articles without permission to train its Llama large language models. The works allegedly included textbooks, scientific publications, and novels, such as books by N.K. Jemisin and Peter Brown. The publishers are seeking class-action status so they can represent a broader group of copyright owners. They are also asking for monetary damages.

Meta responded that AI training can qualify as fair use and said it plans to fight the case. The publishers argue that using allegedly pirated copies of creative and scholarly works is not the same as lawful innovation. The case joins a growing wave of lawsuits by authors, news organizations, artists, and other creators against AI companies, including Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. These lawsuits largely turn on whether using copyrighted works to train AI models is legally protected because the resulting systems create something new and transformative. Courts have not yet settled the issue, and early rulings have pointed in different directions. Anthropic previously resolved one major author lawsuit for $1.5 billion, showing how financially significant these disputes can become.

Major publishers sue Meta for copyright infringement over AI training | Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court allowed its recent Louisiana voting-rights ruling to take effect earlier than usual, clearing the way for political and legal consequences before the November midterm elections. The Court’s April 29 decision had struck down a Louisiana congressional map that created a second Black-majority district. That ruling weakened a major part of the Voting Rights Act by limiting challenges to maps that allegedly dilute minority voting power. Normally, the Supreme Court waits 32 days before issuing its formal judgment, giving the losing side time to seek rehearing. Here, the Court agreed to speed up the process after a request from the voters who had won the case.

The move helps Louisiana Republicans pursue a new congressional map and may weaken lawsuits challenging Governor Jeff Landry’s decision to delay the state’s May 16 congressional primaries. Some challengers had argued that Landry acted too soon because the Supreme Court’s ruling had not formally taken effect yet. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, saying the Court’s accelerated action had created disorder in Louisiana. The case is part of a broader national fight over redistricting, especially as both parties seek advantages in House races. The dispute began after Louisiana drew a second majority-Black district in 2024 to address a prior court ruling that the old map harmed Black voters under the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court later held that the replacement map relied too heavily on race, violating equal protection principles.

US Supreme Court lets Voting Rights Act ruling take effect ahead of schedule | Reuters

On this day in legal history, May 5, 2014, the Supreme Court decided Town of Greece v. Galloway, a major Establishment Clause case about prayer at local government meetings. The town of Greece, New York, opened its monthly board meetings with prayers delivered by invited clergy. For years, nearly all of those clergy were Christian, and many of the prayers used explicitly Christian language. Two residents sued, arguing that the practice aligned the town government with Christianity and made non-Christian attendees feel like outsiders in their own local government.

In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the town’s practice. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Court, emphasizing the long historical tradition of legislative prayer in the United States, including Congress’s own use of chaplains dating back to the Founding era. The majority reasoned that the Establishment Clause does not require legislative prayers to be stripped of sectarian references. Instead, the key question was whether the practice coerced participation, denigrated other faiths, or proselytized in a way that crossed a constitutional line.

The dissent, led by Justice Elena Kagan, saw the case differently. She argued that town board meetings are not like sessions of Congress: ordinary citizens attend them to seek zoning changes, permits, and other direct government action. In that setting, she warned, repeated explicitly Christian prayers could pressure residents to participate or mark them as outsiders before officials who held power over their daily lives. The case matters because it illustrates how much Establishment Clause doctrine turns on competing ideas of history, coercion, equality, and civic belonging. Town of Greece did not end the debate over prayer in public life; it sharpened the question of when tradition becomes exclusion.

The Supreme Court temporarily restored a federal rule allowing mifepristone, the abortion pill, to be prescribed through telemedicine and delivered by mail. Justice Samuel Alito issued an administrative stay that pauses a 5th Circuit order reinstating an older requirement that patients receive the drug only after an in-person clinician visit.

The stay is temporary and mainly gives the justices time to consider emergency requests from mifepristone manufacturers Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro. Louisiana, which brought the challenge, must respond by Thursday, and the stay is set to expire May 11 unless the Court extends it or acts more formally.

The case is another front in the post-Dobbs fight over abortion access. The Supreme Court rejected an earlier challenge to mifepristone restrictions in 2024 on standing grounds, but Louisiana’s new case argues that the Biden-era FDA rule expanding mail and telehealth access unlawfully interferes with the state’s near-total abortion ban. Abortion-rights groups frame the challenge as political and contrary to medical evidence, while anti-abortion advocates argue that relaxed access rules remove important safety safeguards.

US Supreme Court lets abortion pill mail delivery restart for now | Reuters

New Mexico is asking a state judge to declare Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms a public nuisance and order $3.7 billion in abatement funding, along with major design changes aimed at protecting minors. The case follows a March jury verdict finding that Meta misrepresented the safety of its platforms for young users and awarding $375 million in damages, a verdict Meta says it will appeal.

This phase of the case is being tried to Judge Bryan Biedscheid, who must decide whether Meta’s platforms amount to a public nuisance under New Mexico law. If he agrees, he could order broad remedies, including age verification, changes to recommendation algorithms for minors, and limits on features such as autoplay and infinite scroll.

Meta argues that New Mexico is trying to stretch public nuisance law beyond its traditional bounds. Its lawyer said the state is not alleging interference with a public right like clean air or open roads, but instead seeking sweeping regulation based on individual harms—something Meta says should be handled by legislators, not a single judge. The judge himself signaled concern that some requested remedies might be overreach, noting that he is not a regulator or legislature.

New Mexico counters that Meta knowingly designed addictive platforms and failed to protect children from mental health harms and sexual exploitation. The case is significant because it could test whether public nuisance law can be used not just to seek damages from social media companies, but to force platform-level design changes.

New Mexico seeks $3.7 billion, changes to Meta platforms in youth harm trial | Reuters

Massachusetts’ highest court sounded skeptical of Kalshi’s argument that only federal commodities regulators can oversee its sports-event contracts. Kalshi says it is a federally regulated prediction market, registered with the CFTC, and that its contracts are swaps governed exclusively by federal law under Dodd-Frank.

Massachusetts argues that, whatever Kalshi calls the product, users are effectively betting on sports without a state gaming license. Several justices pressed Kalshi on how its contracts differ from ordinary sports bets, with one justice noting that if someone wants to gamble on a game, Kalshi offers a way to do it.

The case is part of a broader national fight over prediction markets, sports betting, and federal preemption. Kalshi recently won a favorable ruling from the 3rd Circuit in a dispute with New Jersey regulators, and the CFTC has supported Kalshi’s position in Massachusetts. But the Massachusetts justices appeared concerned that accepting Kalshi’s theory would sharply limit states’ traditional authority over gambling unless Congress clearly said it intended that result.

If the state wins, Massachusetts could become the second state after Nevada to have a court-ordered ban on Kalshi sports-event contracts. The larger issue is whether prediction markets can avoid state gambling law by framing sports wagers as federally regulated financial contracts.

Massachusetts top court appears open to state ban on Kalshi sports betting | Reuters

My column for Bloomberg this week argues that if the United States wants to become the world’s crypto capital, France’s experience with crypto kidnappings and alleged tax-data leaks should be treated as a warning. I’m not arguing against crypto tax reporting; in fact, better reporting can make tax compliance more realistic for taxpayers and enforcement more administrable for the IRS. But I argue that crypto reporting creates a different kind of privacy risk because identity-linked ownership data can become a physical safety risk, not just a financial-fraud risk.

The core point is that crypto is unusually portable, irreversible, and vulnerable to coercion. If criminals learn that someone owns valuable crypto, the path from threat to transfer can be frighteningly short. That makes tax and compliance databases more dangerous than ordinary financial records if access is poorly controlled or if insiders, contractors, vendors, or hackers can expose taxpayer information.

So in the piece I argue Congress should not build crypto reporting rules first and think about privacy later. If lawmakers want more reporting from exchanges, platforms, vendors, and taxpayers, they also need a crypto-specific privacy architecture: data minimization, role-based access controls, automated access logs, audits, breach notifications, and real penalties for misuse. My takeaway is that pro-crypto policy cannot just mean lower taxes, lighter regulation, and friendlier rhetoric. If the government wants crypto brought into the mainstream financial system, it also has to build rules that protect taxpayers from having compliance data turned into a criminal target list.

On May 4, 1961, the first Freedom Riders left Washington, D.C., by bus for New Orleans, beginning a direct challenge to segregation in interstate travel. The riders were an interracial group organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, and they set out to test whether Southern states and private carriers would follow federal law. The Supreme Court had already made clear in cases such as Boynton v. Virginia that segregation in facilities connected to interstate bus travel was unconstitutional. But in much of the South, those rulings existed more on paper than in practice. Bus stations, waiting rooms, lunch counters, and restrooms remained divided by race, often with the cooperation or indifference of local officials.

The Freedom Riders deliberately entered that space between legal doctrine and daily reality. By riding together, sitting together, and using facilities marked for white and Black passengers, they forced the country to confront the failure of enforcement. Their journey showed that a constitutional right means little when states, businesses, and police can ignore it without consequence. The riders were met with arrests, intimidation, and mob violence, making the legal stakes impossible for federal officials to avoid. Their campaign placed pressure on the Kennedy administration and the Interstate Commerce Commission to act more forcefully.

Later in 1961, federal regulators issued rules requiring the desegregation of interstate bus and rail facilities and the removal of segregation signs. The Freedom Rides therefore became more than a protest against Jim Crow transportation rules. They became a test of whether federal constitutional law could overcome local resistance. May 4 stands as the date when a small group of riders exposed the difference between winning rights in court and making those rights real in public life.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez won a major jury verdict against Meta in March, with jurors ordering the company to pay $375 million over claims that it concealed the harms Instagram and Facebook pose to minors and failed to protect young users from sexual exploitation, bullying, and harmful content. The next stage of the case is a bench trial before Judge Bryan Biedscheid, where the state will seek court-ordered changes to Meta’s platforms and argue that the company’s apps amount to a public nuisance. New Mexico is asking for a wide range of remedies, including safety warnings, stronger detection of child sexual abuse material, limits on teen usage, removal of infinite scroll, hidden like counts, restrictions on AI chatbot interactions with minors, and appointment of a child safety monitor. Meta argues that these requests are sweeping, technically unrealistic, and would effectively require a different version of Instagram to operate in New Mexico. The company also says some requested remedies, such as warning labels about teen mental health harms, would violate the First Amendment by compelling speech.

Legal experts say the injunction phase may be even more significant than the damages award because it could reshape how digital platforms are designed and regulated. They also note that the case raises difficult questions about whether public nuisance law is an appropriate way to address alleged harms from social media platforms. The judge declined to delay the second phase, saying the evidence from the jury trial remains fresh and will help him evaluate the requested relief. The state argues the trial should be more streamlined than the first phase and says Meta cannot claim surprise over the public nuisance theory. Meta maintains that New Mexico is wrongly focusing on one platform while ignoring the many other apps teens use, and says the proposed mandates would interfere with parental rights and free expression.

What To Watch For As Meta Stares Down NM Injunction Trial - Law360 UK

The Department of Defense announced new agreements with several major technology companies to bring their artificial intelligence tools into classified military network environments. The deals involve companies including Nvidia, Google, SpaceX, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, and are meant to support lawful operational use of AI at high security levels. The Pentagon framed the move as part of a broader effort to make the U.S. military more AI-centered and to help service members make faster and better decisions across different areas of conflict.

The announcement also emphasized that the department does not want to rely on only one AI company or model. Instead, it plans to offer access to a range of AI systems so it can preserve flexibility and avoid becoming dependent on a single vendor. Anthropic was not included in the new agreements, which is significant because the company is currently in litigation after the Pentagon labeled it a supply chain risk to national security. OpenAI had previously reached its own agreement with the Defense Department for use in classified settings and reportedly asked the department to include other AI companies as well.

The Pentagon also said more than 1.3 million personnel have used its official AI platform, GenAI.mil. Amazon Web Services said it has long supported military technology needs and says it will continue helping the department modernize its systems.

Pentagon Reaches AI Deals For Classified Network Use - Law360

A federal appeals court temporarily blocked a 2023 FDA rule that allowed mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortion, to be dispensed by mail rather than in person. The unanimous decision came from a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit, which said Louisiana was likely to succeed in its challenge to the Biden-era rule. The ruling is not final, but it immediately narrows access to mifepristone, especially for patients in states that have banned or sharply restricted abortion.

Louisiana argued that the FDA failed to adequately consider safety risks when it removed the in-person dispensing requirement. The Biden administration had defended the rule by pointing to evidence that mifepristone is safe and effective, with serious adverse events occurring in fewer than 1% of patients. Abortion rights advocates warned that restoring in-person dispensing rules would create confusion and make abortion care much harder to obtain. The decision comes amid a broader set of lawsuits over mifepristone, including challenges to the drug’s original approval and later FDA rules expanding access.

Drugmakers Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro have intervened to defend the FDA’s regulation because their businesses depend heavily on mifepristone sales. The case may next go to the full Fifth Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling also intersects with newer fights over telehealth abortion prescriptions and state shield laws protecting providers in states where abortion remains legal.

US court blocks mail-order access to abortion drugs, for now | Reuters

On May 1, 1958, the United States marked the first Law Day, a civic observance created after President Dwight D. Eisenhower designated the date as a national occasion to honor the rule of law. Eisenhower’s proclamation called on lawyers, journalists, broadcasters, schools, and civic groups to help the public better understand the American legal system. Congress later gave the observance formal status in 1961, making May 1 the country’s official annual Law Day. The American Bar Association traces the idea to its former president Charles S. Rhyne, who wanted a national celebration of the legal system and the constitutional principles that support it.

But May 1 already carried a different legal meaning long before it became Law Day. In the 1880s, organized labor made May 1 central to the campaign for the eight-hour workday. Labor leaders had called for May 1, 1886, to be the date when eight hours would be treated as the standard legal day’s work. Workers around the country responded with strikes and rallies, turning May Day into an enduring symbol of labor rights. In Chicago, the demonstrations led into the Haymarket events, where violence, prosecutions, death sentences, and later pardons made the episode a lasting part of the legal history of labor organizing, criminal justice, and political speech.

That makes May 1 one of the more complicated dates on the American legal calendar. Officially, it is Law Day, a celebration of courts, constitutional government, and respect for legal institutions. Historically, it is also May Day, a reminder that many legal protections were not simply handed down by courts or legislatures. They were demanded by workers, protesters, organizers, and communities willing to challenge existing law in the hope of changing it.

A California federal trial over Elon Musk’s challenge to OpenAI’s shift toward a for-profit structure was paused Thursday after Musk’s lawyers appeared to accidentally make Musk’s $97.4 billion offer for OpenAI assets fair game at trial. The issue began when Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office, testified that he helped organize investors who made the offer because they believed Sam Altman’s role on both sides of OpenAI’s restructuring created a conflict. OpenAI’s lawyers then challenged Birchall’s testimony, arguing that his views about Altman were partly based on what attorneys told him rather than his own firsthand knowledge.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers sent the jury home early and questioned Birchall herself, pressing him on how the investor group arrived at the massive offer amount. She seemed unconvinced by his answers and told Musk’s counsel that they had “opened the door” to evidence that previously had been limited by a magistrate judge. The judge then demanded to know who on Musk’s team suggested asking Birchall about the offer, and attorney Marc Toberoff ultimately said he had. Birchall also acknowledged that Toberoff created the financial analysis behind the offer and sent a letter to California regulators opposing OpenAI’s restructuring.

Musk’s lawyers argued that OpenAI first brought up the offer letter during Musk’s cross-examination and that there had been confusion about whether the document was admitted by agreement. Judge Gonzalez Rogers did not immediately decide how to handle the dispute and set a Friday hearing on the issue and jury instructions. The broader trial centers on Musk’s claim that OpenAI, Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft breached OpenAI’s charitable-trust obligations by moving away from its nonprofit mission for private gain. Earlier in the day, the judge also barred Musk’s AI expert from testifying about broad catastrophic risks of artificial intelligence, saying the case is about breach of trust, not the future danger of AI.

OpenAI Judge Pauses Trial To Probe Musk Attys On $97B Bid - Law360 UK

Purdue Pharma received approval from a New York bankruptcy judge for a $125 million settlement with McKinsey & Co. over claims connected to McKinsey’s consulting work on Purdue’s opioid sales and marketing. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean H. Lane found the deal fair and reasonable, allowing Purdue to stay on schedule to exit Chapter 11 and activate its $7.4 billion bankruptcy plan. McKinsey will pay the settlement in two parts, starting with $65 million shortly after Purdue leaves bankruptcy. About $50 million from that first payment will go to personal injury claimants, while the remaining money will benefit state and local governments and Native American tribes through a trust.

The deal followed mediation involving Purdue, the unsecured creditors committee, and other parties, with the creditors committee prepared to sue McKinsey if settlement talks failed. Purdue’s bankruptcy has been heavily shaped by disputes over opioid-related liability, the Sackler family’s contributions, and the legality of releasing third-party claims. The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling against nonconsensual third-party releases forced Purdue and its creditors to renegotiate the plan. The revised plan now includes a $6.5 billion Sackler family contribution and $900 million from Purdue. Purdue will be dissolved and replaced by Knoa Pharma, a public benefit company focused on addiction treatment and overdose reversal medications. The settlement also comes after McKinsey separately agreed to pay $650 million to resolve federal charges tied to its Purdue work.

Purdue’s $125M McKinsey Deal Gets OK Ahead Of Ch. 11 Exit - Law360

A Reuters analysis found that Big Law hiring remains heavily concentrated among a small group of elite law schools, even though remote recruiting was expected to broaden access. In 2025, only 16 law schools sent at least half of their graduating class into associate jobs at firms with 251 or more lawyers. By contrast, 89 ABA-accredited schools placed 10% or fewer of their graduates in those jobs, and 11 schools placed none. Half of all law schools together produced only 10% of the 7,869 new large-firm associates, while just 21 top schools produced half of them.

Nikia Gray of the National Association for Law Placement said the profession’s emphasis on pedigree continues to block opportunities for capable students outside elite schools. During the pandemic, large-firm recruiting moved online, which made it easier for firms to interview students from more schools. But that change has not significantly widened the hiring pipeline. One reason is that firms are recruiting earlier, sometimes during students’ first year before law school grades are available. With less law-school performance data to review, firms may lean more on undergraduate records, work experience, and the prestige of the law school itself.

The article also notes that Columbia Law School had the highest percentage of 2025 graduates going to large firms, at 78%, and that most of the schools sending at least half their graduates into Big Law are also among the U.S. News “T-14.” The broader message is that recruiting technology changed, but the underlying hierarchy did not. Remote interviews may have made access to interviews easier, but they have not erased the structural advantage held by students at the most prestigious law schools.

Pipeline to Big Law jobs stays narrow despite recruiting shifts | Reuters

On April 29, 1992, a California jury acquitted four Los Angeles police officers charged in the beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist whose assault had been captured on videotape the year before. The beating took place on March 3, 1991, after a police chase, when officers repeatedly struck King while a bystander recorded the incident from nearby. The footage became one of the most important pieces of video evidence in modern American legal history, not because it settled the matter, but because it showed how even seemingly clear evidence can be interpreted differently in a courtroom.

To much of the public, the video appeared to show obvious police brutality. To the defense, it became something to be slowed down, segmented, and reframed as a series of split-second decisions by officers claiming fear and loss of control. When the jury acquitted the officers, the verdict landed in Los Angeles as a statement about far more than one criminal prosecution. For many residents, especially Black Angelenos, it confirmed the belief that the legal system was unwilling or unable to hold police accountable for violence against Black citizens.

The verdict triggered several days of unrest across Los Angeles, leaving more than 60 people dead, thousands injured, and large portions of the city damaged. The case also forced the country to confront the relationship between race, policing, prosecutorial burden, and jury perception. The state-court acquittals did not end the legal story, because federal prosecutors later brought civil rights charges against the officers.

In 1993, two officers, Laurence Powell and Stacey Koon, were convicted in federal court, while two others were acquitted. King also later received a civil damages award from the City of Los Angeles. April 29 remains a major date in legal history because it revealed the limits of video evidence, the difficulty of prosecuting police officers, and the deep public consequences that can follow when a courtroom verdict collides with what millions of people feel they have already seen.

Purdue Pharma was sentenced in federal court in New Jersey to $5.5 billion in fines and penalties tied to its 2020 guilty plea over misconduct connected to OxyContin sales. The sentencing helps clear the path for Purdue to wind down through bankruptcy and fund a broader $7.4 billion opioid settlement. Before approving the plea deal, Judge Madeline Cox Arleo heard hours of testimony from people who described addiction, death, and family devastation connected to the opioid crisis. More than 200 victims submitted letters, and more than 40 people spoke in court.

Purdue’s chairman, Steve Miller, apologized directly to victims after the judge instructed him to do so. Arleo also apologized from the bench, telling victims that the government had failed them by missing opportunities to stop Purdue’s conduct earlier. Many speakers said financial punishment was not enough and argued that Purdue’s owners, the Sackler family, or company executives should face prison time. The judge said she could not impose jail time because the Justice Department had charged the company, not the individual owners or executives. Although the formal sentence is $5.5 billion, most of that amount will not actually be paid, with the government expected to collect $225 million if Purdue uses its remaining assets to pay creditors.

The settlement includes money for governments and an $865 million fund for individuals, but many victims worry they will be excluded because they cannot produce old prescription records. Purdue says it is on track to exit bankruptcy as a new nonprofit company focused on opioid addiction treatment and overdose-reversal medicines.

Purdue Pharma receives $5.5 billion sentence, paving way for opioid settlement | Reuters

The Justice Department has indicted former FBI Director James Comey over a 2025 Instagram post showing seashells arranged as “86 47,” which prosecutors say amounted to a threat against President Donald Trump. The case was filed in federal court in North Carolina and charges Comey with threatening the president’s life and transmitting a threat across state lines. Comey has said he did not intend violence, explaining that he deleted the post after learning some people interpreted the numbers that way.

Trump and his allies had argued the message was a threat, with “47” referring to Trump as the 47th president and “86” being read by them as a call to remove him violently. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the indictment as a standard threat case, while critics and Comey’s lawyers say it looks like a politically motivated prosecution. The Secret Service had previously looked into the post and interviewed Comey, but he was not charged at that time. One should also place the indictment in the broader context of Trump’s Justice Department pursuing cases against people and groups seen as political opponents.

Comey already faced a separate criminal case over alleged false testimony to Congress, but that case was dismissed after a judge found a problem with the prosecutor’s appointment, and the government is appealing. Comey’s lawyers are expected to argue that the new case is both retaliatory and protected by the First Amendment. The central legal fight will likely be whether the post was a “true threat” or protected political speech.

Trump’s DOJ indicts former FBI director James Comey over ‘86 47’ post | Reuters

The Trump administration has fired all current members of the National Science Board, according to two former board members who spoke to Reuters. The board, created in 1950, helps oversee the National Science Foundation and advises both the president and Congress on science and engineering policy. It had more than 20 members, who were appointed to six-year terms, and most of them came from academia, with others from national labs, nonprofits, and private industry. Former board members Yolanda Gil and Keivan Stassun said they were told by email that their removals were effective immediately.

According to Gil, all 22 current members were terminated and no explanation was given. Stassun said the move was disappointing but not surprising in light of other Trump administration actions affecting scientific research and independent federal bodies. The National Science Foundation referred questions to the White House. A White House official said the NSF’s work would continue without interruption and suggested that the board’s congressionally created powers may need to be updated. The firings fit into a broader pattern described by political experts as an effort by the administration to reshape independent institutions by replacing existing officials with more loyal leadership.

Trump administration fires entire National Science Board | Reuters

On April 28, 1788, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution. The state’s ratifying convention met in Annapolis from April 21 to April 28, ending with Maryland’s formal approval of the new federal charter. This was a major legal step because Article VII of the Constitution required ratification by nine states before the Constitution could take effect. Maryland’s vote therefore brought the country within two states of replacing the Articles of Confederation with a stronger national government.

The decision also mattered because Maryland occupied an important position between northern and southern states, giving its approval broader political weight. Unlike some states where ratification debates were bitter and closely divided, Maryland approved the Constitution by a wide margin. Its delegates accepted the proposed structure of separated powers, a bicameral Congress, a single executive, and a federal judiciary. They also accepted the Constitution’s grant of greater national authority, including the power to tax, regulate interstate commerce, and enforce federal law. For supporters of ratification, Maryland’s approval showed that the Constitution was gaining momentum beyond the earliest Federalist strongholds. For opponents, it underscored how quickly the new framework was becoming a legal and political reality.

Maryland’s ratification did not itself put the Constitution into force, but it helped make that outcome increasingly likely. By June 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify, satisfying Article VII and allowing the new constitutional government to begin. Maryland’s April 28 vote thus stands as one of the key legal milestones in the transition from confederation to constitutional union.

The U.S. Supreme Court formally reinstated a Texas congressional map that could help Republicans gain seats in the U.S. House in the 2026 midterm elections. The ruling made official an earlier interim decision from December, when the Court allowed Texas to use the map while the litigation continued. The map had been approved by the Republican-controlled Texas legislature in August 2025 and signed by Governor Greg Abbott.

Reuters reports that the map could shift as many as five Democratic-held House seats toward Republicans. A lower court had previously blocked the map after finding that it was likely racially discriminatory and potentially violated constitutional protections. The Supreme Court reversed that lower court decision, with the three liberal justices dissenting. The case comes amid a broader fight over mid-decade redistricting, in which both Republican- and Democratic-led states have redrawn maps outside the usual once-a-decade cycle for partisan advantage. California, for example, was allowed by the Supreme Court in February to use a new map designed to benefit Democrats after the Texas redistricting effort. The stakes are high because Republicans hold narrow majorities in Congress, and a shift in either chamber could affect President Trump’s legislative agenda and congressional oversight. The ruling does not end the larger national debate over when redistricting crosses the line from lawful political mapmaking into unconstitutional discrimination.

US Supreme Court formally reinstates pro-Republican Texas voting map | Reuters

The United States has agreed to adjust its Venezuela sanctions so the Venezuelan government can pay for Nicolás Maduro’s defense lawyer in his U.S. drug trafficking case. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were taken from Caracas by U.S. special forces on January 3, brought to New York, and charged with offenses including narcoterrorism conspiracy. Both have pleaded not guilty and are being held in Brooklyn while awaiting trial. Maduro’s lawyer, Barry Pollack, had asked U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein to dismiss the case, arguing that sanctions blocking Venezuela from paying legal fees interfered with Maduro’s constitutional right to the lawyer of his choice. The defense said neither Maduro nor Flores could afford private counsel without Venezuelan government support. Prosecutors argued that the sanctions served national security and foreign policy interests, and that courts should not force the Treasury Department to change sanctions because foreign policy belongs mainly to the executive branch.

Judge Hellerstein appeared unwilling to dismiss the case, but he also questioned whether blocking payment was justified when Maduro and Flores were already in U.S. custody and U.S.-Venezuela relations had improved after Maduro’s ouster. The government’s decision to allow the payments removes a procedural obstacle that could have complicated or delayed the prosecution. The case remains politically charged, with U.S. officials accusing Maduro of corruption and drug trafficking, while Maduro denies the allegations and says they are a pretext for U.S. control over Venezuela’s oil resources. The dispute shows how sanctions, criminal prosecution, and constitutional criminal procedure can collide when a foreign former leader is brought into a U.S. courtroom.

US to let Venezuela pay Maduro’s lawyer in drug trafficking case | Reuters

My column for Bloomberg this week argues that the IRS’s potential settlement with President Donald Trump and his family over leaked tax data presents a legitimacy problem as much as a legal one. The agency may be able to resolve the case through ordinary settlement procedures, but this is not an ordinary plaintiff: Trump is the head of the executive branch that ultimately oversees the IRS. That creates a serious perception risk, because the public may view the dispute as the administration negotiating with itself. The column argues that any settlement should be tied clearly to remedies available under Section 7431 of the Internal Revenue Code, which governs civil damages for unauthorized tax disclosures. It also stresses that similarly situated taxpayers affected by the same IRS contractor’s leak should be treated consistently, or at least that any differences in treatment should be publicly explained.

The concern is that a major payout to Trump or his family could appear to create a two-tier tax system, even if the technical legal process is defensible. I compare the risk to the Teapot Dome scandal, where public confidence suffered because people believed insiders were benefiting from a different set of rules. The column also points to another high-profile tax leak case involving a billionaire, where the resolution focused on apology, acknowledgment of policy failures, and stronger data safeguards rather than a massive damages award. That prior case provides a useful benchmark, even though not every case must settle the same way. To protect credibility, I argue that DOJ recusal, an independent arbiter, or similar safeguards may be necessary so the process has visible independence. The larger point is that the IRS depends heavily on voluntary compliance, and voluntary compliance depends on taxpayers believing the system is fair. If the agency appears to give special treatment to the most powerful taxpayer in the country, the long-term cost may be far greater than any settlement amount.

On April 27, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln authorized military officials to suspend the writ of habeas corpus along the rail lines between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. The order came in the opening weeks of the Civil War, when Washington was vulnerable, Union troops were moving through hostile territory, and federal officials feared sabotage and rebellion along critical transportation routes.

Habeas corpus is one of the oldest protections in Anglo-American law, allowing a detained person to demand that the government justify their imprisonment before a court. By suspending it, Lincoln allowed military authorities to detain certain people without immediately producing them for judicial review. The legal problem was that the Constitution says habeas corpus may be suspended “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it,” but it does not clearly say which branch of government may do the suspending.

Lincoln argued that the rebellion created an emergency that required swift executive action. Critics argued that the suspension power belonged to Congress, not the president, because the Suspension Clause appears in Article I, the part of the Constitution dealing mostly with legislative powers. The conflict soon came to a head in Ex parte Merryman, after John Merryman, a Maryland secessionist, was arrested by military authorities and denied ordinary habeas review.

Chief Justice Roger Taney, sitting as a circuit judge, ruled that Lincoln had exceeded his constitutional authority and that only Congress could suspend the writ. Lincoln did not comply with Taney’s order, maintaining that the survival of the Union justified extraordinary action. Congress later gave statutory support for wartime habeas suspension, but the controversy over Lincoln’s initial action has remained central to debates over presidential power, civil liberties, and constitutional government during crisis.

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a case involving Cisco Systems and the Alien Tort Statute, focusing on whether U.S. companies can face liability for allegedly helping foreign governments commit human rights abuses. The case comes from Falun Gong practitioners who claim Cisco built surveillance tools for China’s “Golden Shield” program that helped officials identify, detain, torture, and persecute members of the religious movement. A federal district court dismissed the case, but the Ninth Circuit revived much of it in 2023, finding the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged that Cisco aided and abetted violations of international law. Cisco argues that the Ninth Circuit improperly expanded the Alien Tort Statute by recognizing aiding-and-abetting liability even though Congress did not expressly create that cause of action. The company says the ATS was originally meant to cover only a narrow set of claims, such as piracy, violations of safe conduct, and harms to ambassadors. Cisco also relies on Supreme Court precedent to argue that courts should not create secondary liability unless Congress clearly authorizes it.

The Falun Gong plaintiffs respond that aiding-and-abetting liability has long been part of international law and is especially important when serious abuses require technology, infrastructure, or corporate support. They argue that torture, extrajudicial killing, disappearances, and prolonged arbitrary detention are already recognized as serious international-law violations that can support ATS claims. Business groups and the federal government warn that expanding ATS liability could chill foreign investment and interfere with U.S. foreign relations by forcing American courts to judge the conduct of foreign governments. Supporters of the plaintiffs argue that corporate accountability can discourage companies from profiting from foreign repression and can promote fair competition for businesses that follow human rights standards. The Supreme Court’s ruling could shape how much legal risk U.S. companies face when selling technology or services to governments accused of human rights abuses.

Justices To Focus On Alien Tort Statute In Cisco Spying Case

The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing Bayer’s attempt to limit or end a large wave of lawsuits over Roundup, the weedkiller Bayer acquired when it bought Monsanto in 2018. The case involves John Durnell, a Missouri man who won a $1.25 million jury verdict after claiming years of Roundup exposure contributed to his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Bayer argues that federal pesticide law should block state-law failure-to-warn claims because the Environmental Protection Agency has approved Roundup labels without a cancer warning. The company says EPA approval shows the product was not legally “misbranded” and that Bayer could not substantially change the label without agency approval. Durnell’s lawyers argue that EPA registration does not make the label immune from challenge and that Missouri warning law mirrors federal requirements rather than adding new ones.

The dispute turns on the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, which regulates pesticide labeling and limits states from imposing requirements that differ from federal law. Bayer says more than 100,000 plaintiffs have brought Roundup-related cancer claims and that a Supreme Court win could largely end the litigation. The company has also proposed a $7.25 billion settlement to resolve many current and future claims, though some pending appeals and excluded claims would remain outside the deal. Agricultural and crop industry groups, along with the Trump administration, support Bayer, while environmental, farmworker, and public health groups support Durnell. Bayer warns that the lawsuits could threaten its ability to keep supplying glyphosate products to farmers. A decision is expected by the end of June.

US Supreme Court hears Bayer’s fight against Roundup lawsuits | Reuters

Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft is headed to trial in federal court in Oakland, California. Musk claims OpenAI betrayed its original nonprofit mission by creating a for-profit structure after he left the board, while using his name and early financial support to build what he calls a profit-driven enterprise. He is reportedly seeking $150 billion in damages, with money going to OpenAI’s charitable arm, and also wants OpenAI returned to nonprofit status. OpenAI denies wrongdoing and argues that Musk’s real motive is to regain control and help his own AI company, xAI. Microsoft also denies collusion and says its partnership with OpenAI began after Musk had left.

The trial is expected to feature testimony from major tech figures, including Musk, Altman, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Internal documents are likely to play a major role, including diary entries from Brockman that reveal tension inside OpenAI over Musk’s influence and the organization’s future. Musk’s side points to those materials as evidence that OpenAI’s leaders became focused on profit rather than the public-benefit mission. OpenAI’s side says Musk knew about possible restructuring plans, wanted to be CEO, and later attacked the company after it became successful. The case comes as OpenAI faces heavy competition, major computing costs, and possible IPO plans, while Musk’s xAI is also trying to compete in the AI market. The broader fight is not just about money, but about who controls one of the most influential companies in artificial intelligence.

Elon Musk’s trial against Sam Altman to reveal the ongoing power struggle for OpenAI | Reuters

Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old California man, is expected to appear in Washington federal court after allegedly trying to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner while President Donald Trump was present. Authorities say Allen shot at a U.S. Secret Service agent at a hotel checkpoint before being tackled and arrested. The agent was hit, but a tactical vest stopped the shot, and the agent was later released from the hospital. Formal charges had not yet been filed at the time of the report, but prosecutors said Allen is expected to face charges including assault on a federal officer and using a firearm during a crime of violence. Officials also said more serious charges, including attempted assassination, could still be considered as the investigation continues.

Authorities say Allen traveled from California to Washington by train and booked a room at the Washington Hilton, where the dinner was held. They also say he left family members a manifesto referring to himself as the “Friendly Federal Assassin” and discussing plans to target senior Trump administration officials. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Trump may have been among the intended targets. The shooting disrupted the high-profile dinner, forced attendees to take cover, and led security personnel to move senior officials out of the room. Monday’s court hearing is expected to be brief, with a judge advising Allen of his rights and prosecutors likely asking that he remain detained. The incident has renewed concerns about security for Trump and other public officials.

Suspect in Washington dinner shooting set to appear in court | Reuters

On April 24, 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court received submissions in Nix v. Hedden, the famous case asking whether a tomato should be treated as a fruit or a vegetable. The question sounds like the setup to a joke, but the legal issue was practical and financial: under the Tariff Act of 1883, imported vegetables were taxed, while fruits were not.

That meant the classification of tomatoes had real consequences for importers bringing tomatoes into the United States. The plaintiffs argued that tomatoes are fruits in the botanical sense because they grow from the flower of the plant and contain seeds. The government argued that, whatever botanists might say, tomatoes were commonly bought, sold, cooked, and eaten as vegetables.

The Supreme Court sided with the government. In its decision, the Court held that the tariff law should be read according to the ordinary meaning of the words “fruit” and “vegetable,” not their technical scientific meanings. Justice Horace Gray explained that tomatoes are usually served with dinner, not dessert, and are understood in common speech as vegetables.

The case became a lasting example of how courts interpret statutes by looking at the way language is used in everyday life. It also shows that legal disputes often turn less on abstract definitions than on context, usage, and consequences. Nix v. Hedden remains memorable because it turns a simple grocery-store question into a lesson about statutory interpretation: the tomato may be a fruit to a botanist, but for tariff law in 1893, it was a vegetable.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged U.S. Army Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke with allegedly using classified information to profit from prediction-market bets tied to a military raid involving former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Van Dyke, who was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, allegedly helped plan and carry out the operation that resulted in Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, being brought to New York in January.

Prosecutors say he began trading on Polymarket markets related to Maduro and Venezuela on Dec. 26, 2025, shortly before the Jan. 3, 2026 raid. According to the indictment, Van Dyke made more than $400,000 from those trades. The government alleges that, after making the money, he tried to hide the proceeds. He is charged with violating the Commodity Exchange Act, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission also brought a related enforcement action against him. Van Dyke was expected to appear first in federal court in North Carolina before later appearing in the Southern District of New York. Counsel information for him was not immediately available.

Soldier Aware Of Maduro Raid Bet On Polymarket, Feds Say - Law360

U.S. District Judge Esther Salas warned that proposed federal data privacy legislation could undermine state laws meant to protect judges and other public officials from having their personal information exposed online. Salas has pushed for stronger privacy protections since 2020, when a lawyer went to her New Jersey home and killed her 20-year-old son, Daniel Anderl. Congress later passed the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, which shields federal judges’ personal information online. Since then, more than a dozen states, including New Jersey, New York, and Maryland, have adopted similar protections for state judges, and some laws also cover law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and family members.

Salas raised her concerns at an American Bar Association conference in Boston as House lawmakers consider federal privacy bills that would create national standards and preempt state laws. The bills, called the GUARD Financial Data Act and the SECURE Data Act, would require covered companies to limit collection of consumer data and give people rights to access or delete their information. But unlike New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law, the federal proposals would not let individuals sue companies for privacy violations. Salas said replacing stronger state protections with weaker federal rules could put judges across the country at greater risk. House committee representatives either declined to comment or did not respond.

NJ judge whose son was killed warns against weakening state data privacy laws | Reuters

Spirit Aviation told a New York bankruptcy judge that it is in advanced talks with the federal government over a major financing package that could help keep its second Chapter 11 case on track. The airline’s lawyer, Marshall Huebner of Davis Polk, confirmed that negotiations are underway but did not verify reports about the possible size of the package or whether the government would receive an ownership stake. He said the proposed funding could do more than simply support the bankruptcy case and could position Spirit to compete strongly after restructuring. Spirit plans to seek court approval of the financing on April 30.

The financing discussions come after the war involving the U.S., Israel, and Iran caused jet fuel prices to rise sharply, disrupting Spirit’s existing reorganization plan. The airline had previously proposed canceling general unsecured claims and restructuring around support from secured noteholders, but it postponed seeking approval to send that plan to creditors. Judge Sean Lane approved a $533 million sale of about 20 aircraft to CSDS Aircraft and also granted Spirit a 90-day extension of its exclusive right to file a Chapter 11 plan. Spirit also disclosed that it missed an interest payment, triggering a default under its debtor-in-possession loan. The noteholder group funding much of that loan said it intends to enforce its rights and would oppose any relief that harms the lenders.

Spirit In ‘Advanced’ Talks With Gov’t For Ch. 11 Financing - Law360

On April 23, 1969, Sirhan Sirhan was formally sentenced to death for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, a crime that had shaken the United States the previous year. The sentencing came after a highly publicized trial in Los Angeles, where prosecutors argued that the killing was deliberate and politically motivated. Evidence presented at trial included eyewitness accounts placing Sirhan at the scene and actively firing the fatal shots. His own recorded statements, which expressed hostility toward Kennedy, played a key role in establishing intent. The defense raised questions about Sirhan’s mental state, but these arguments did not overcome the prosecution’s narrative of premeditation.

The jury ultimately found him guilty of first-degree murder, leading to the imposition of the death penalty under California law at the time. The sentence reflected both the gravity of the crime and the broader national trauma surrounding political assassinations in the 1960s. However, the legal status of capital punishment in California soon shifted dramatically. In 1972, the California Supreme Court decided People v. Anderson, which held that the death penalty as then applied violated the state constitution. As a result, Sirhan’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, aligning his case with others affected by the ruling.

The Sirhan case remains significant in legal history for its intersection with issues of political violence and criminal accountability. It also illustrates how broader constitutional developments can reshape individual sentences long after a trial concludes. Debates about his culpability and mental state have persisted, raising ongoing questions about the standards for criminal responsibility. At the same time, the case is frequently cited in discussions about the fairness and consistency of the death penalty. It stands as a reminder of how legal systems respond to acts that carry both criminal and profound national consequences.

Anthropic has asked a federal court in California to rule in its favor in a copyright lawsuit brought by major music publishers, including Universal Music Group, over the use of song lyrics to train its AI chatbot, Claude. The company argues that its use of copyrighted lyrics qualifies as “fair use” because it is transformative, meaning the material was used to help the AI understand language rather than to reproduce songs. Anthropic claims this kind of use supports innovation across fields like science, business, and education.

The publishers, including Concord and ABKCO, disagree and argue that the AI system can generate outputs that resemble or compete with their lyrics, potentially harming the market for original works. They originally filed the lawsuit in 2023, alleging that Anthropic copied lyrics from hundreds of songs by well-known artists without permission. This dispute is part of a broader wave of legal challenges against AI companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms, over how training data is used.

Anthropic is seeking summary judgment, which would allow it to win the case without a full trial if the judge agrees that its actions were legally protected fair use. The outcome could be highly influential, as courts are currently split on whether AI training on copyrighted material is permissible. The company also emphasizes that copyright law is intended to benefit the public by encouraging innovation, not just to compensate creators.

At the center of the case is a key legal question: whether copying large amounts of copyrighted material to train AI systems can be considered transformative use under copyright law. This issue is likely to shape future rulings as similar cases continue to move through the courts.

Anthropic seeks pivotal court win in music publisher lawsuit over AI training | Reuters

The U.S. Department of Labor has introduced a proposed rule to clarify when multiple employers can be held jointly responsible for wage and hour violations. The rule, titled Joint Employer Status Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, Family and Medical Leave Act, and Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, is designed to create a clearer and more consistent standard across federal law. Officials say the goal is to resolve conflicting interpretations among federal courts and make compliance easier for businesses.

According to acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, the proposal aims to both simplify regulations for employers and strengthen protections for workers. The rule would mark the agency’s first formal guidance on joint employment since the prior regulation from an earlier administration was rescinded without replacement. Unlike that earlier version, the new proposal would apply to multiple statutes, including the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act.

The Department believes a uniform standard will reduce confusion, encourage better business practices, and ensure workers can recover wages or benefits even if one employer fails to pay. Wage and Hour Division Administrator Andrew Rogers emphasized that clearer rules can improve enforcement and reduce litigation.

The proposal is currently open for public comment through June 22 and follows earlier signals that the agency planned to revisit joint employer standards.

BREAKING: DOL Unveils Joint Employer Rule Proposal - Law360

The U.S. Supreme Court signaled that it may side with the Federal Communications Commission in a dispute over how the agency issues fines to wireless carriers. The case involves major companies like Verizon Communications and AT&T, which argued that the FCC’s internal enforcement process violates their constitutional right to a jury trial. The fines stem from findings that the companies failed to properly protect customer location data, resulting in penalties totaling over $100 million.

During oral arguments, several justices expressed doubt about the companies’ claims, suggesting that the FCC’s forfeiture orders are not final or binding unless enforced in court. This distinction appeared central, as it implies companies still have the option to challenge the penalties before a judge and jury. Justices, including Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson, compared the process to a legal choice—either accept the penalty or contest it through litigation.

Some members of the Court, however, raised concerns about whether companies may feel pressured to comply due to uncertainty or reputational harm. John Roberts suggested the issue might be more about public perception than a direct legal burden, while Brett Kavanaugh questioned whether the FCC had been fully clear about the non-binding nature of its orders.

The dispute comes amid broader scrutiny of federal agency power, especially following a 2024 decision limiting enforcement proceedings at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Despite that precedent, the justices did not appear ready to apply the same reasoning to the FCC’s system. Lower courts had previously split on the issue, prompting Supreme Court review.

A final decision is expected by late June and could clarify how far federal agencies can go in using internal processes to impose financial penalties.

US Supreme Court leans toward FCC in clash with wireless carriers over fines | Reuters

On April 22, 1994, Richard Nixon died at the age of 81, marking the end of a presidency that left a lasting imprint on American legal history. Nixon’s legacy is inseparable from the Watergate scandal, a constitutional crisis that tested the limits of presidential power. The scandal began with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and expanded into a wide-ranging investigation of abuse of executive authority. As evidence mounted, legal battles emerged over whether a sitting president could withhold information under claims of executive privilege.

The issue came to a head in the landmark Supreme Court case United States v. Nixon, where the Court unanimously ruled that the president must comply with a subpoena to release tape recordings. This decision significantly narrowed the scope of executive privilege, establishing that it is not absolute and cannot be used to obstruct justice. The ruling reinforced the principle that even the president is subject to the rule of law. Facing near-certain impeachment, Nixon resigned in August 1974, becoming the first U.S. president to do so.

His resignation demonstrated the strength of constitutional checks and balances, particularly Congress’s oversight authority and the judiciary’s role in resolving disputes over executive power. In the years that followed, Watergate prompted reforms such as the War Powers Resolution and amendments to campaign finance laws. Legal scholars continue to cite the episode as a defining moment in the development of accountability for high-ranking officials. Nixon’s death in 1994 closed a chapter, but the legal principles shaped during Watergate remain central to debates over presidential authority.

West Virginia reached an $11 million settlement with Roblox to address concerns about child safety on the platform. The agreement follows a nine-month investigation led by Attorney General JB McCuskey, which found that existing safeguards exposed children to explicit content and potential predators. As part of the deal, Roblox must implement mandatory age verification before users can access chat features, aiming to reduce anonymous misuse. The platform will also restrict adults from contacting users under 16 unless they are verified trusted connections. Additional protections include default safe-content settings for minors and alerts when young users enter private chats for the first time.

The settlement allocates funds over several years, including money for public safety campaigns, internet safety specialists, and educational workshops. Roblox stated that the agreement aligns with its broader goal of improving digital safety and collaborating with regulators. This deal comes amid similar actions by other states, including a recent agreement in Nevada with comparable age verification measures. Multiple lawsuits across the country accuse Roblox of failing to prevent adults from exploiting minors on the platform. Many of these cases have been consolidated in federal court in California, where plaintiffs allege harm resulting from online grooming.

W.Va. Strikes $11.5M Deal With Roblox Over Kid Safety - Law360

A divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that Texas can require public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, overturning a lower court order that had blocked the law. The decision upheld Texas Senate Bill 10, finding that the requirement does not violate the Constitution’s protections against government establishment of religion or its guarantees of religious freedom. The majority reasoned that the law does not force anyone to adopt religious beliefs or interfere with how individuals practice their faith.

The challenge was brought by families from various religious and nonreligious backgrounds, who argued that the mandate infringes on their right to control their children’s religious upbringing. Their attorney indicated plans to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton praised the decision, calling it a victory for the state and emphasizing the historical influence of the Ten Commandments.

The ruling was not unanimous, with a strong dissent arguing that the court ignored binding Supreme Court precedent. The dissent pointed to a 1980 Supreme Court decision that struck down a similar Kentucky law, suggesting the Texas measure should also be unconstitutional. By reversing the earlier injunction, the appeals court cleared the way for the law to take effect while further appeals are expected.

Texas can require Ten Commandments in classrooms, US appeals court rules | Reuters

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer stepped down from her role in U.S. Department of Labor amid controversy tied to an internal watchdog investigation into alleged misconduct. The probe reportedly examined claims of an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, along with other workplace concerns, though some allegations were publicly disputed. Her departure follows weeks of media coverage and discussion during a congressional oversight hearing.

The White House announced that Chavez-DeRemer will move to a private-sector position, while Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling will serve as acting head of the agency. In public statements, Chavez-DeRemer highlighted her efforts to support workers, expand job training, and address economic issues during her tenure, while administration officials praised her leadership.

The situation also involved broader personnel disruptions, including reports that several aides were placed on leave or left their positions. Additional complaints and allegations—some denied or unproven—contributed to scrutiny surrounding her leadership. Her husband was also investigated over separate allegations, though no charges were filed.

Chavez-DeRemer’s exit adds to other recent Cabinet-level departures during Donald Trump’s administration. Lawmakers, including Representative Rosa DeLauro, criticized the situation as a leadership failure and called for a replacement focused on the department’s mission. Observers noted that Sonderling could be a leading candidate for the permanent role, though no official nomination has been announced.

Trump’s Labor Secretary Steps Down - Law360

A federal appeals court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, ruled that a nearly 160-year-old ban on home distilling is constitutional, deepening a disagreement with another appellate court. The court said the prohibition is a valid way for Congress to ensure collection of excise taxes on distilled spirits, reasoning that allowing home production could lead to widespread tax evasion. The case was brought by John Ream, who wanted to distill whiskey at home for personal use.

The ruling comes shortly after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion, finding the same law unnecessary and unconstitutional. This disagreement between appellate courts—known as a circuit split—raises the likelihood that the U.S. Supreme Court will step in to resolve the issue. Ream’s legal team has already indicated plans to appeal.

The law at issue dates back to 1868, when Congress enacted it during Reconstruction to combat liquor tax evasion. Violations can carry significant penalties, including prison time and fines. In upholding the ban, the majority opinion emphasized Congress’s longstanding rationale that prohibiting home distilling encourages consumers to buy taxed alcohol instead. A dissenting judge, however, argued the case should not proceed because Ream failed to show he faced a real risk of prosecution.

US appeals court calls 158-year-old home distilling ban constitutional, creates split | Reuters

On April 21, 1789, John Adams was sworn in as the first Vice President of the United States, becoming one of the earliest officials to assume office under the newly ratified U.S. Constitution. His inauguration followed the formation of the new federal government and helped signal that the Constitution was not merely theoretical but fully operational. At the time, the role of Vice President was not yet clearly defined, leaving Adams to shape many of its early norms through practice rather than precedent. The Constitution assigned him the duty of presiding over the Senate, placing him at the intersection of the executive and legislative branches. This hybrid function raised early questions about separation of powers, a core principle embedded in the constitutional structure. Adams himself reportedly found the position frustrating, as it carried limited executive authority while restricting his participation in Senate debates. Despite these limitations, his service helped establish procedural expectations for how the Vice President would engage in legislative affairs.

The peaceful assumption of office by Adams also reinforced the legitimacy of the new constitutional system at a time when its durability was uncertain. It demonstrated that leadership transitions could occur within a stable legal framework rather than through upheaval or force. This moment contributed to the broader development of constitutional governance by modeling adherence to formal legal processes. Early officeholders like Adams played a critical role in translating the Constitution’s text into functioning institutions. His tenure also highlighted ambiguities in the document, many of which would later be addressed through political practice and constitutional amendments. Over time, the vice presidency evolved into a more active executive role, but its foundation was laid during this initial transition period. Adams’s swearing-in remains a key example of how early constitutional actors shaped the practical meaning of the nation’s governing document.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit directed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to revisit its denial of a whistleblower award to an anonymous claimant. The court granted a partial win to the individual, sending the case back to the agency for a clearer explanation of its reasoning. Although the court’s full opinion remains sealed, earlier oral arguments suggested the judges were focused on whether the claimant’s actions met the legal definition of “voluntary” under Dodd-Frank Act. The SEC had previously rejected the claim, stating that it only learned of the information after contacting the individual, who had first shared allegations with the media. The claimant argued that this sequence should not disqualify them from receiving an award.

Whistleblower awards under Dodd-Frank apply when provided information leads to enforcement actions with penalties exceeding $1 million, with awards ranging from 10% to 30% of collected sanctions. Because of this structure, the denied award in this case could amount to a significant financial loss. The court’s decision signals concern that the SEC may not have adequately justified its interpretation of the law. The ruling does not guarantee the claimant will receive an award but requires the agency to reconsider and better articulate its position. The case highlights ongoing tension over how strictly the SEC defines eligibility requirements for whistleblowers. It also underscores the importance of transparency in agency decision-making when financial incentives and legal protections are at stake.

DC Circ. Orders SEC Rethink Of Whistleblower Claim - Law360

A Reuters investigation found that Tesla, Inc. has paid little to no U.S. federal income tax over most of its history, including reporting a zero-dollar tax bill for 2025 despite generating substantial revenue. While some of these low tax obligations are explained by earlier business losses and government incentives for clean energy, the report highlights another major factor: profit shifting through foreign subsidiaries. Specifically, Tesla units in the Netherlands and Singapore recorded about $18 billion in profits that were not taxed in those countries and likely avoided U.S. taxation as well. Experts cited in the report estimate this strategy may have reduced Tesla’s U.S. tax burden by more than $400 million.

The mechanism appears tied to transferring intellectual property rights to overseas entities, allowing profits tied to those assets to be recorded in lower-tax jurisdictions. One Dutch-linked entity, structured as a partnership, reportedly had no employees and functioned mainly as a conduit for income. These arrangements are legal and commonly used by multinational corporations, though they remain controversial and are often criticized as exploiting gaps in international tax systems. The findings contrast with past public comments by Elon Musk, who has expressed skepticism about using aggressive tax loopholes. The report found no evidence that Tesla violated tax laws, but it underscores ongoing debates about corporate tax practices and transparency.

Musk scorned “shady” loopholes, yet offshore tax tricks likely saved Tesla hundreds of millions | Reuters

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the $6.2 billion merger between Nexstar Media Group and Tegna Inc., finding that challengers are likely to prove the deal would harm competition. The ruling came from a California federal court, which issued a preliminary injunction stopping the companies from integrating while lawsuits from DirecTV and several state attorneys general move forward. The court said the merger could lead to higher fees for distributors, fewer choices for consumers, and reductions in local journalism. It also warned that combining the companies would increase leverage to threaten “blackouts,” where broadcasters pull channels during fee disputes, potentially leaving viewers without access to sports and local news.

The judge emphasized that Nexstar must keep Tegna operating as an independent competitor for now, noting that further integration could cause irreversible harm, including layoffs and station closures. Although the deal had already received approval from regulators like the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice, the court found that oversight did not sufficiently address antitrust concerns. State officials and DirecTV argue the merger would create the largest local TV station owner in the U.S., reaching a vast majority of households and concentrating too much control in one company. Nexstar has said it will appeal the decision and continues to defend the merger as beneficial for local broadcasting.

To understand the stakes, it helps to know what these companies control. Nexstar is already the largest owner of local TV stations in the U.S., operating more than 200 stations affiliated with major networks like NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox, and it also owns the cable network NewsNation. Tegna owns dozens of local TV stations across major markets, many of which also carry network programming and produce local news. DirecTV, while not a broadcaster, distributes these channels to subscribers and would be directly affected by any increase in fees. Together, Nexstar and Tegna would control over 250 stations nationwide, raising concerns about pricing power, reduced competition, and the future of local news coverage.

Nexstar-Tegna Deal Blocked Amid DirecTV, AGs’ Challenge - Law360

My column for Bloomberg this week argues that states rushing to tax prediction markets are trying to regulate something they haven’t yet clearly defined. That uncertainty creates a real risk: policymakers could end up taxing the wrong base entirely. Until there is clarity about what these platforms actually are, restraint is the more defensible approach.

Prediction markets have grown rapidly, with trading volume skyrocketing in just a few years. That growth has drawn attention from lawmakers at both the state and federal levels, but the central question remains unresolved. If these platforms are gambling, then state sports betting frameworks might apply. If they function more like financial instruments, they fall under the jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. And if they are neither, forcing them into an existing category may create more confusion than clarity.

I explain that the case for treating them like gambling platforms is understandable, since users are effectively betting on real-world outcomes. But the comparison breaks down when you look at how these platforms operate. Unlike sportsbooks, they don’t act as “the house” or take on risk. Instead, they function more like exchanges, matching users who take opposite sides of a contract and earning revenue through transaction fees rather than betting outcomes.

This distinction matters for tax policy. Sportsbooks are typically taxed on gross gaming revenue, which reflects the house’s winnings after payouts. That model assumes operators profit from users losing bets. Prediction markets don’t fit that structure, because they don’t generate meaningful gaming revenue in the traditional sense. Treating trading volume as taxable revenue risks overstating the size of the tax base.

At the same time, the CFTC has asserted federal authority and begun challenging state efforts in court. As these disputes move through the judiciary, there is a growing possibility of conflicting rulings that could ultimately require resolution by the Supreme Court of the United States. Even if states succeed in the short term, their tax systems could rest on shaky legal ground.

I also emphasize that prediction markets are inherently borderless digital platforms, which makes fragmented state-by-state regulation difficult to sustain. If they are closer to financial exchanges than local gambling operations, a coherent federal framework may be more appropriate.

A more durable solution would be a federal system that taxes platform fees rather than mischaracterized gaming revenue. But that approach would require policymakers to explain why prediction markets deserve distinct treatment from other financial intermediaries. Once the gambling analogy is set aside, that justification becomes harder.

None of this eliminates a role for states, particularly in areas like consumer protection and fraud enforcement. But the core questions—what prediction markets are, how they generate income, and how they should be taxed—are national in scope and should be treated that way.

On April 20, 1999, a mass shooting at Columbine High School became one of the most consequential events in modern American legal history. Two students carried out a planned attack that resulted in the deaths of 13 people and injured many others, shocking the nation and prompting immediate legal scrutiny. In the aftermath, victims’ families filed multiple lawsuits against the Jefferson County School District, arguing that officials failed to act on warning signs and threats. These claims raised difficult questions about foreseeability and the extent of a school’s duty to protect students from third-party violence. Courts examining these cases often had to balance negligence standards against doctrines like governmental immunity, which can shield public entities from liability.

The tragedy also intensified national debate over gun control laws, particularly regarding background checks and access to firearms by minors. Legal discussions extended to the role of parents, as some lawsuits attempted to hold the shooters’ families accountable for failing to secure weapons. Additionally, Columbine influenced how courts and policymakers viewed threats made by students, contributing to stricter enforcement and zero-tolerance policies in schools. The event led to expanded use of security measures such as surveillance, school resource officers, and emergency preparedness protocols.

Columbine’s legal legacy can be seen in later case law addressing school liability and student safety, where courts often referenced the limits of institutional responsibility. It also shaped legislative efforts at both the state and federal levels aimed at preventing school violence. The case highlighted the challenges of proving causation in negligence claims involving unpredictable criminal acts. Over time, it became a foundational example in discussions of tort law, particularly in cases involving public institutions and risk prevention.

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to consider the scope of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s authority to seek “disgorgement,” a remedy that forces wrongdoers to give up profits obtained through illegal conduct. The case arises from a challenge by Ongkaruck Sripetch, who was ordered to repay more than $3 million tied to a fraudulent stock scheme. Although the SEC’s general ability to pursue disgorgement is well established and supported by Congress, the dispute focuses on whether the agency must prove that investors suffered actual financial harm before recovering those profits.

Sripetch argues that the SEC failed to show his actions caused investors measurable losses, and therefore should not be entitled to the repayment order. The federal government, defending the SEC, maintains that disgorgement is meant to strip unlawful gains from violators rather than compensate victims, making proof of financial harm unnecessary. Lower courts, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, sided with the SEC’s broader interpretation of its authority. However, other appellate courts have disagreed, creating a legal split that prompted Supreme Court review.

The case highlights the significance of disgorgement as one of the SEC’s primary enforcement tools, with billions of dollars recovered in recent years under different administrations. The outcome could clarify the limits of the agency’s power and reshape how securities fraud penalties are pursued, particularly in cases where direct financial harm to victims is difficult to quantify.

US Supreme Court to consider SEC’s ‘disgorgement’ power | Reuters

American Airlines publicly denied reports that it is considering a merger with United Airlines, stating that no discussions are taking place and that it has no interest in pursuing such a deal. The denial followed speculation that United’s CEO had raised the idea during a recent meeting with federal officials. American emphasized that a merger between the two major carriers would likely harm competition and consumers, signaling concerns about antitrust implications in an already concentrated airline market.

The company also suggested that such a combination would conflict with broader regulatory principles aimed at preserving competition. Instead of pursuing a merger, American stated it will remain focused on its own long-term strategy and operations. United did not comment on the reports.

While a deal between the two largest airlines appears off the table, smaller industry transactions are still moving forward. Allegiant Travel Company is proceeding with its acquisition of Sun Country Airlines after receiving regulatory approval to operate both carriers separately under shared ownership. Similarly, Alaska Airlines previously completed its purchase of Hawaiian Airlines in 2024 with government approval. These developments highlight that, despite scrutiny of large mergers, regulators are still permitting consolidation among smaller airlines under certain conditions.

American Airlines Shuts Down United Merger Rumors - Law360

Lawyers for Donald Trump and the Internal Revenue Service are negotiating a potential settlement in Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit over the leak of his tax returns. The parties have asked a federal court to pause the case for 90 days to allow negotiations, suggesting a resolution could avoid extended litigation. The lawsuit stems from disclosures made by former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn, who leaked Trump’s tax information and data on other wealthy individuals to media outlets.

Trump and co-plaintiffs, including his business entities and family members, claim the leak caused financial damage and reputational harm. Littlejohn pleaded guilty to unlawful disclosure and was sentenced to prison, establishing the underlying misconduct. A settlement could raise complex issues because Trump, as president, is effectively suing a federal agency within the executive branch, creating potential conflicts for government lawyers representing the IRS.

The case also carries financial implications, as any settlement payout would likely come from public funds. Beyond this dispute, Trump has pursued several other high-value lawsuits against media organizations, reflecting a broader legal strategy tied to alleged reputational and political harm.

Trump, IRS in talks to settle US president’s $10 billion lawsuit | Reuters

April 17 has marked several important moments in legal history, particularly in the development of constitutional law, civil rights, and international justice. One notable event occurred in 1961, when the Bay of Pigs Invasion began, raising serious legal debates about executive war powers in the United States. Although primarily a military operation, it prompted scrutiny over presidential authority to engage in covert foreign interventions without explicit congressional approval. The failed invasion quickly became a focal point for constitutional scholars questioning the limits of executive power. At the time, the U.S. Constitution granted Congress the authority to declare war, yet presidents increasingly relied on covert or limited military actions without formal declarations. This tension highlighted a growing gap between constitutional text and modern geopolitical practice.

Legal analysts began to examine whether such actions fell within the president’s role as Commander in Chief or exceeded constitutional boundaries. The episode also contributed to broader concerns about secrecy and accountability within the executive branch. In the years that followed, these concerns helped shape legislative responses aimed at reasserting congressional authority. Most notably, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution to limit unilateral military engagements by the president. The law requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying armed forces and limits the duration of such deployments without approval. While debated and sometimes contested, it reflects an ongoing effort to balance executive flexibility with legislative oversight.

The legal legacy of April 17, 1961, therefore lies not only in the event itself but in the constitutional questions it intensified. These debates continue to influence how courts, lawmakers, and scholars interpret the separation of powers in matters of war and foreign policy.

The head of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, Daniel Aronowitz, faced extended questioning from House Democrats during an oversight hearing focused on both agency policy and leadership conduct. Lawmakers pressed him about allegations involving Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, including reports of an inspector general investigation into alleged workplace misconduct and claims of a hostile work environment. Representative Mark Takano challenged Aronowitz on his awareness of these reports, but Aronowitz stated he was unfamiliar with them and defended the secretary’s professionalism.

Democrats also questioned the department’s recent shift in enforcing mental health parity requirements for employer-sponsored health plans. Representative Donald Norcross asked why the agency appeared to step back from stricter enforcement under the current administration. Aronowitz responded by emphasizing his personal experience with insurance denials for mental health treatment, arguing that the agency remains committed to removing barriers to care. He noted, however, that he could not discuss certain regulatory details due to ongoing litigation.

Aronowitz further explained that the agency has elevated mental health access as a top priority, even as it reevaluates specific enforcement strategies. His remarks drew support from Representative Mark DeSaulnier, who praised his openness about personal experiences with behavioral health issues.

DOL Benefits Chief Pressed On Labor Secretary’s Conduct - Law360

Hundreds of legal academics, students, and professional organizations are urging the American Bar Association to keep its law school diversity requirement as it considers eliminating the rule. During a public comment period, the ABA received dozens of submissions supporting the standard and only a small number favoring its repeal. The rule requires accredited law schools to show a commitment to diversity in areas like admissions, hiring, and student programs.

Supporters argue the requirement is important for improving representation in the legal profession, which remains less diverse than the broader U.S. population. They also contend the rule does not mandate unlawful discrimination but instead promotes inclusion. Some critics, however, claim the standard encourages improper consideration of race and detracts from other priorities, such as academic preparation.

The debate comes amid broader political pressure, including actions by the Trump administration challenging diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. An executive order has even called into question the ABA’s role as the official accreditor of U.S. law schools.

The ABA had already suspended the diversity rule earlier in 2025, citing legal uncertainty at both state and federal levels. Its governing council is expected to decide whether to permanently eliminate the requirement at an upcoming meeting.

Law professors defend ABA’s law school diversity rule ahead of elimination vote | Reuters

QVC Group Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Texas with a prepackaged restructuring plan aimed at reducing about 80% of its $6.6 billion debt. The company expects to cut its debt down to roughly $1.3 billion and emerge from bankruptcy within about 90 days. The filing includes more than 70 affiliated entities, though most international operations are excluded.

The restructuring follows ongoing financial struggles driven by declining cable television viewership, weak consumer demand, and external pressures like tariffs. Despite efforts to modernize—such as launching live shopping on social media platforms and targeting new customer demographics—the company has been unable to return to sustained growth.

Historically, QVC and its subsidiary HSN were pioneers in televised retail, but shifting consumer habits toward e-commerce have eroded their traditional business model. In recent years, the company has taken cost-cutting steps, including layoffs affecting over 1,000 employees and consolidating operations.

Financial strain intensified as revenue continued to decline and credit ratings dropped deeper into non-investment-grade territory. With billions in outstanding obligations, including loans nearing maturity, the company pursued a restructuring agreement with lenders to stabilize its finances.

Under the Chapter 11 plan, creditors will exchange existing debt for new debt or equity, while vendors and suppliers are expected to be paid in full to maintain operations. The company also plans to continue business as usual during the restructuring process, supported by over $1 billion in available cash.

QVC Hits Ch. 11 With Prepackaged Plan To Slash $6.6B Debt - Law360

On April 16, 1947, a catastrophic industrial disaster struck Texas City, Texas, when a ship loaded with ammonium nitrate exploded, killing nearly 600 people and injuring thousands more. The blast devastated the surrounding area, leveling buildings and igniting fires that burned for days. In the aftermath, victims and their families turned to the courts, seeking accountability from the federal government for its role in overseeing the shipment and handling of the hazardous material. Their claims were brought under the Federal Tort Claims Act, a relatively new law at the time that allowed private citizens to sue the government for certain negligent acts.

The resulting litigation eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Dalehite v. United States, a case that would shape the boundaries of government liability for decades. Plaintiffs argued that federal officials had been negligent in the planning and execution of the fertilizer export program that led to the explosion. The government, however, maintained that its actions involved policy decisions protected from liability. In a closely watched decision, the Supreme Court sided with the government, holding that the challenged conduct fell within the “discretionary function” exception of the statute. This exception shields the government from lawsuits based on decisions grounded in public policy considerations.

The Court’s ruling effectively barred recovery for many victims, drawing criticism for limiting access to remedies in cases of large-scale harm. At the same time, the decision established an enduring legal principle: not all government actions, even if harmful, are subject to judicial review through tort claims. The case has since been cited frequently in disputes involving regulatory decisions, disaster response, and federal oversight. Its legacy continues to influence how courts distinguish between operational negligence and protected policy judgment.

A Manhattan federal jury found that Live Nation Entertainment and its subsidiary Ticketmaster unlawfully maintained monopoly power in the concert ticketing market. Jurors concluded that the companies controlled primary ticketing services for major venues and used exclusionary tactics to limit competition. One key finding was that Live Nation tied access to its large amphitheaters to the use of its promotional services, restricting competitors. The jury also determined that this conduct harmed competition across dozens of states and led to measurable overcharges for some consumers.

The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of states and originally included the U.S. Department of Justice, which settled during the trial. That settlement proposed structural changes, including making Ticketmaster’s technology available to rivals and limiting certain exclusive venue agreements. It also included a financial component, though many states rejected the deal and continued litigating. The jury ultimately found violations of multiple state laws and confirmed anticompetitive effects in the live entertainment industry.

Despite the verdict, key issues remain unresolved, including how much damages the companies will owe and whether structural remedies—such as forcing a sale of Ticketmaster—will be imposed. Live Nation has indicated it will challenge the ruling and pursue post-trial motions and appeals. The case is significant because it addresses how vertical integration across ticketing, promotion, and venues can influence market power.

Jury Finds Live Nation Monopolized Concert Ticketing - Law360

Freedom Forever, a California-based home solar installer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware with more than $500 million in debt. The company reported liabilities between $500 million and $1 billion, compared to assets estimated between $100 million and $500 million. Among its largest creditors are affiliates of Mosaic, which are owed about $114 million in unsecured claims.

Founded in 2011, Freedom Forever has completed over 150,000 residential solar installations across 32 states and employs roughly 3,000 workers. Its bankruptcy comes amid broader financial strain in the home solar industry, where several companies have recently filed for Chapter 11. Industry-wide challenges include declining demand driven by higher interest rates, which make financing solar projects more expensive, and the expiration of a key federal tax credit for residential solar installations.

Other major solar companies, including SunPower and Sunnova, have also faced financial distress in recent years. The case highlights ongoing instability in the residential solar sector as companies struggle with shifting economic conditions.

Solar Co. Freedom Forever Hits Ch. 11 With Over $500M Debt - Law360

John Eastman, a former lawyer for Donald Trump, was disbarred by the California Supreme Court for his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The decision followed earlier findings by the State Bar of California that he violated professional ethics rules by making false statements and misleading courts. Although the court has not yet issued a full written opinion, it upheld conclusions that his legal arguments lacked factual and legal support.

Eastman had promoted theories that then–Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to certify certain electoral votes, a position Pence rejected as unconstitutional. He also filed unsuccessful litigation seeking to invalidate election results in multiple states and spoke at the rally preceding the January 6 Capitol attack. These actions were central to the findings that he breached his duty of honesty and undermined the legal system.

Eastman plans to appeal the disbarment to the U.S. Supreme Court and has pleaded not guilty to related criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia, some of which have since been dropped. The ruling underscores that attorneys can face severe professional consequences for advancing unsupported legal claims, particularly in matters affecting democratic processes. At the same time, disbarment is a professional penalty rather than a criminal one, meaning Eastman is facing significantly less severe consequences than individuals in past attempts to overturn the government—such as participants in the Confederacy—who were met with far harsher legal and historical repercussions.

Trump ally John Eastman is disbarred over bid to overturn 2020 election | Reuters

On this day in 1955, Ray Kroc opened his first franchise location for McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois, marking a turning point in American business and legal history. Although franchising existed before this moment, Kroc’s model introduced a new level of uniformity and control that reshaped how franchise systems operate. He required strict adherence to standardized procedures, branding, and product quality, which became central features of modern franchise agreements. These agreements are legally binding contracts that define the relationship between franchisors and franchisees, including fees, territorial rights, and operational obligations. As McDonald’s expanded rapidly, it exposed gaps in existing business laws governing franchising practices. This growth led to increased scrutiny over issues such as disclosure requirements and fairness in contract terms.

By the 1970s, concerns about deceptive practices and unequal bargaining power prompted regulatory responses, including the Federal Trade Commission’s Franchise Rule. This rule requires franchisors to provide detailed disclosures to prospective franchisees, improving transparency and reducing fraud. Kroc’s model also raised legal questions about liability, particularly whether franchisors could be held responsible for the actions of independently owned franchise locations. Courts have since developed tests to determine the level of control necessary to establish such liability. Additionally, franchise law has evolved to address disputes over termination rights and non-compete clauses. The McDonald’s system became a case study in how private contracts can shape an entire industry’s legal framework. Today, franchising remains a major part of the global economy, with legal standards that can be traced back to the system Kroc helped popularize.

The NAACP filed a lawsuit against xAI in federal court in Mississippi, alleging that the company violated environmental laws while operating a gas-powered plant tied to its data center near Memphis. The complaint claims xAI built and ran the plant without obtaining required permits under the Clean Air Act. According to the NAACP, the plant emits harmful pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde, which are linked to serious health risks including asthma, heart conditions, and cancer. The organization argues that these emissions disproportionately affect nearby communities with large Black populations.

The lawsuit also alleges that xAI deliberately avoided regulatory oversight by skipping the permitting process, which would have required pollution controls and environmental review. The plant is described as a major regional source of smog-forming emissions, potentially releasing large quantities of pollutants into the air. The NAACP is seeking court orders to halt operations until proper permits are obtained, require emission controls, and impose financial penalties for violations. The case reflects broader concerns about environmental justice, corporate compliance, and the rapid expansion of infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence technologies.

NAACP Sues Musk’s XAI Over Data Center Pollution In Miss. - Law360

Albertsons has agreed in principle to pay $773 million to resolve claims brought by several states, local governments, and Native American tribes over its alleged role in the opioid crisis. The agreement involves attorneys general from states including California, Colorado, Illinois, and Oregon, though some terms—such as requirements for future conduct—are still being negotiated. The states claim the company contributed to the public health crisis through its pharmacy operations, while Albertsons maintains the settlement does not admit wrongdoing.

This deal is part of a broader wave of opioid-related litigation targeting companies across the pharmaceutical supply chain. Governments have accused pharmacies, distributors, and manufacturers of contributing to widespread addiction through improper practices. Other major settlements, including those involving Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, have pushed total payouts in opioid cases beyond $50 billion nationwide.

Funds from the Albertsons settlement are expected to support addiction treatment, prevention, and recovery programs, with allocation plans already in place in some states. Officials emphasized that these settlements aim to both address past harm and fund ongoing efforts to combat the opioid epidemic.

State AGs, Albertsons Chain Reach $773M Opioid Deal - Law360

Amazon has agreed to acquire Globalstar for about $11.6 billion as part of its push into satellite-based internet services. The deal will give Amazon access to Globalstar’s satellite network, spectrum rights, and infrastructure, helping expand its low Earth orbit (LEO) system aimed at providing global connectivity without relying on traditional cell towers.

Under the agreement, Globalstar shareholders can receive either cash or Amazon stock, with the total deal value capped at $90 per share. A majority of Globalstar shareholders have already approved the transaction, but it still requires regulatory clearance and fulfillment of certain operational conditions before closing, which is slotted for 2027.

The acquisition positions Amazon to compete more directly in the growing satellite internet market, where companies like SpaceX’s Starlink currently dominate. Globalstar’s existing technology and planned satellite upgrades are expected to strengthen Amazon’s ability to deliver direct-to-device connectivity worldwide. The deal also ties into Amazon’s partnership with Apple, supporting satellite features on devices like iPhones and Apple Watches.

Paul Weiss, Skadden Lead Amazon’s $11.6B Globalstar Deal - Law360

A law student at Texas Tech University has filed a federal lawsuit claiming the school violated her First Amendment rights by disciplining her over comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk. The student, Ellen Fisher, alleges she was unfairly singled out for punishment while other students who discussed the same topic were not disciplined. She received a written reprimand, which she argues could negatively affect her ability to become a licensed attorney.

Fisher maintains that her statements were part of normal academic discussion and did not celebrate Kirk’s death, despite claims from at least one witness. She also argues the university’s investigation was flawed because it ignored testimony supporting her version of events. The university concluded her remarks could have been perceived as celebratory and violated professional conduct standards.

The lawsuit seeks to block the disciplinary action, obtain damages, and secure a ruling that the university infringed on her constitutional free speech rights. The case comes amid broader national debates over campus speech and how universities respond to controversial or sensitive political discussions.

Texas law student sues to stop sanctions over Charlie Kirk comments | Reuters

On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth, an act that would alter the trajectory of Reconstruction and American legal history. Lincoln’s life story makes the moment even more striking: born in poverty in a Kentucky log cabin, largely self-educated, and rising through persistence rather than privilege, he embodied a form of democratic possibility rare among world leaders. Over time, his legal and political thinking evolved in meaningful ways, particularly on questions of equality and civil rights. While early in his career he held more limited views, the Civil War years reshaped his outlook, pushing him toward support for Black suffrage and, by some accounts, openness to broader enfranchisement, including for women.

Frederick Douglass, who met with Lincoln during the war, captured this complexity well, noting that Lincoln was “preeminently the white man’s President,” yet also “the first to show any respect for the rights of the black man.” Douglass emphasized that Lincoln’s greatness lay not in perfection, but in growth—his capacity to move, under pressure and moral reflection, toward justice. By April 1865, Lincoln was publicly advocating limited Black voting rights, particularly for Black soldiers and educated men, a position that suggested further expansion might follow in his second term.

That possibility was cut short on the night of April 14, when Booth entered the presidential box during a performance and fired a single shot at close range. Lincoln died the following morning, and with him vanished a moderating but increasingly progressive force in Reconstruction policy. In the years that followed, many of the shortcomings we associate with Reconstruction—including the narrowing of federal protections seen in cases like United States v. Cruikshank—took hold in a political environment Lincoln never had the chance to shape. His assassination opened the door to a more fractured and often less protective approach to civil rights enforcement.

A little-known but striking footnote to this story involves Edwin Booth, the brother of Lincoln’s assassin, who months earlier had unknowingly saved the life of the president’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln. At a crowded train platform in Jersey City, Robert slipped and fell between the train and the platform just as the car began to move. Edwin Booth, standing nearby, quickly grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to safety, preventing what could have been a fatal accident. The two men did not recognize each other at the time, and Booth only later learned whose life he had saved. The incident has since taken on a symbolic quality in legal and historical writing, illustrating the strange intersections of fate surrounding the Lincoln family in the days leading up to April 1865.

Legally and historically, April 14 stands as a hinge moment: not only the loss of a president, but the loss of a developing constitutional vision. Lincoln’s trajectory suggests that Reconstruction might have unfolded differently under his continued leadership, particularly on voting rights and federal protection of equality. Douglass later reflected that Lincoln’s legacy should be judged not by where he began, but by how far he traveled. That journey—from humble origins to an evolving commitment to equality—remains central to understanding both the promise and the unfinished work of American law.

After his death, Abraham Lincoln’s body was carried on a funeral train that retraced, in reverse, the route he had taken to Washington as president-elect in 1861, passing through many of the same stations and drawing massive crowds at every stop. The train’s journey from Washington, D.C. to Springfield became a rolling national mourning, with citizens lining the tracks to pay their respects to the fallen leader. In a deeply symbolic sense, the trip marked the completion of Lincoln’s final journey—returning him to the place where his political life had taken root, even as the nation he led struggled to carry forward the work he unwittingly left unfinished.

President Donald Trump announced plans to nominate Matthew Schwartz, his personal lawyer in the New York hush money case, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Schwartz is a longtime partner at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and joined Trump’s legal team in 2025 to handle the appeal after prior attorneys moved into government roles. Trump praised Schwartz as a strong opponent of government overreach and highlighted his experience in high-level federal and state litigation. In addition to the criminal appeal, Schwartz is also representing Trump in a civil fraud case brought by Letitia James, where his team recently urged the state’s highest court to dismiss the claims as politically motivated. Schwartz previously clerked for Samuel Alito and worked at Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP, and he is a graduate of Columbia Law School.

Trump Taps Personal Attorney for Second Circuit

An Illinois jury in Cook County added $17 million in punitive damages to an earlier $53 million award against Abbott Laboratories in a case brought by four mothers whose premature infants developed necrotizing enterocolitis after being fed the company’s formula. The jury previously found in favor of the plaintiffs on claims including failure to warn, negligence, and product defect, awarding individual damages based on the harm suffered by each child, all of whom survived but face lasting health complications.

Plaintiffs argued they were not informed of the risks associated with the formula and would have made different feeding decisions had they known. Abbott disputed liability, maintaining that its products are safe and that scientific evidence does not support a causal link between its formula and the condition, and said it plans to appeal. The trial judge allowed punitive damages after finding evidence the company may have withheld risk information, and also criticized testimony suggesting mothers should not be told about such risks. The case is part of broader, ongoing litigation over infant formula, with mixed outcomes in courts across the country.

Ill. Jury Adds $17M Punitive Award To Baby Formula Verdict - Law360

In my column for Bloomberg this week, I argue that new IRS guidance on opportunity zones largely revives the original program from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act without addressing its core flaws—and may even worsen them. While the framework still aims to direct private capital into distressed communities through tax incentives, the updated rules expand where zones can be drawn and lower investment thresholds, particularly in rural areas. In practice, that means more projects will qualify, but fewer are likely to deliver the kind of transformative impact the policy was designed to achieve.

The first iteration showed that investment tended to flow toward already developing areas with stronger returns, not the communities most in need, and the new guidance does little to change that incentive structure. Governors retain broad discretion in selecting zones, a feature that previously led to politically influenced designations rather than data-driven ones. By easing standards like the “substantial improvement” requirement, the revised rules make it easier for incremental upgrades—not meaningful redevelopment—to receive tax benefits. As a result, the program risks continuing to function more as a subsidy for already viable projects than as a tool for economic revitalization. I suggest that a more effective approach would tie both zone designation and tax benefits to measurable outcomes like housing growth, job creation, or business investment, while reducing discretionary selection in favor of objective economic criteria.

On April 13, 1873, one of the most violent and legally significant event of the Reconstruction era unfolded in Louisiana with the Colfax Massacre. The conflict arose from a disputed gubernatorial election, as competing groups claimed control of local government in Grant Parish. Black citizens, many of them formerly enslaved, gathered at the courthouse in Colfax to defend the Republican-backed election outcome. White supremacist militias, determined to overturn Reconstruction governments, attacked the courthouse with overwhelming force. By the end of the confrontation, dozens of Black men had been killed, many after surrendering, making it one of the deadliest incidents of racial violence during Reconstruction.

In the aftermath, federal prosecutors sought to hold members of the attacking group accountable under the Enforcement Acts, which were designed to protect the civil rights of newly freed citizens. These prosecutions led to the landmark Supreme Court case United States v. Cruikshank. The Court ultimately overturned the convictions, ruling that the federal government’s authority to prosecute such crimes was limited. It held that the Fourteenth Amendment constrained only state actions, not the conduct of private individuals. This interpretation sharply narrowed the scope of federal power to intervene in cases of racial violence and civil rights violations.

The decision effectively left Black citizens in the South vulnerable to attacks by private groups, as state authorities were often unwilling to prosecute perpetrators. It also signaled a broader retreat from Reconstruction policies, undermining efforts to enforce equality through federal law. For decades, this ruling stood as a major barrier to civil rights enforcement, shaping the legal landscape well into the twentieth century. The legacy of Colfax and Cruikshank illustrates how judicial interpretation can either strengthen or weaken constitutional protections, particularly during periods of social and political upheaval.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has launched a new initiative aimed at investigating so-called “birth tourism” networks. These are groups that allegedly help pregnant foreign nationals enter the United States on temporary visas with the goal of giving birth so their children obtain U.S. citizenship. The effort is part of a broader immigration crackdown under President Donald Trump’s administration, which has emphasized stricter controls on both legal and illegal immigration.

An internal ICE directive instructs agents to identify fraud and organized operations that may be facilitating these activities. While giving birth in the U.S. is not illegal, authorities are focusing on potential misuse of visas and false statements in applications. A 2020 regulation already bars individuals from using tourist visas primarily for the purpose of securing citizenship for a child, meaning violations could lead to fraud charges.

The administration has also used birth tourism as a justification for attempting to limit birthright citizenship, a right grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment. Trump issued an executive order seeking to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents, but multiple courts have blocked the policy, and the issue is now before the Supreme Court. Government lawyers argue that birthright citizenship has encouraged an industry built around these practices, though data suggests such cases represent only a small fraction of total U.S. births.

ICE’s initiative will focus on uncovering fraud and dismantling organized networks, similar to past prosecutions involving “birth houses” that catered to foreign clients. However, the overall scale of birth tourism remains unclear, and officials have not indicated how many cases they expect to pursue.

Exclusive: ICE launches new effort to uncover US ‘birth tourism schemes’ | Reuters

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Meta Platforms must face a lawsuit brought by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell. The lawsuit claims that Instagram was intentionally designed to be addictive for children and teenagers. This decision is significant because it is the first time a state high court has addressed whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act can shield a company from claims focused on platform design rather than user-generated content.

The court unanimously found that the case can proceed because it targets Meta’s own conduct, not the content posted by users. Specifically, the lawsuit argues that Instagram’s features—such as notifications, “likes,” and endless scrolling—exploit young users’ psychological vulnerabilities. It also alleges that Meta misled the public about the platform’s safety and ignored internal research showing harm to teenagers.

Meta disagrees with the ruling and maintains that the distinction between content and design is flawed, expressing confidence it will ultimately prevail. Meanwhile, the decision is part of a broader wave of litigation across the United States, with multiple states and plaintiffs accusing social media companies of contributing to a youth mental health crisis. Some recent cases have already resulted in significant financial penalties and verdicts against Meta and similar companies.

Meta must face youth addiction lawsuit by Massachusetts, court rules | Reuters

You’re getting a double dose of Meta today, with a second development tied to the growing wave of social media addiction litigation.

Meta Platforms announced it will remove advertisements on Facebook and Instagram that were being used by law firms to recruit plaintiffs for lawsuits alleging its platforms are addictive to young users. The company said it is actively defending itself in thousands of ongoing cases and does not want attorneys using its services to find clients while simultaneously arguing those platforms are harmful. This move comes shortly after major courtroom setbacks, including jury verdicts that ordered Meta to pay millions in damages tied to alleged harms from youth social media use.

The broader litigation landscape is large and still expanding. Thousands of cases are pending in both state and federal courts, many involving claims that platforms like Instagram were designed to encourage compulsive use and contributed to mental health issues among minors. Plaintiffs include individuals as well as public entities like school districts and states, which argue they have had to spend resources addressing the effects of social media on young people. Meta and other tech companies deny these allegations and maintain they have taken steps to improve user safety.

The ads at issue are part of a common practice in mass tort litigation, where law firms seek out large numbers of plaintiffs to build cases. These firms often work on contingency, meaning they only get paid if they win or settle, which creates an incentive to recruit clients through widespread advertising. Some attorneys criticized Meta’s decision, arguing that blocking ads could make it harder for potential victims to learn about their legal options.

Meta pulls ads aimed at recruiting plaintiffs for social media addiction lawsuits | Reuters

On April 10, 1947, Jackie Robinson signed his contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, marking a pivotal moment in both sports and legal history. At the time, racial segregation was deeply entrenched in American society, including in professional athletics, where informal but rigid “color lines” excluded Black players. Robinson’s signing, orchestrated by Dodgers executive Branch Rickey, directly challenged this exclusionary system. Although no court decision mandated integration in baseball, the move carried significant legal implications by undermining accepted norms of segregation.

Robinson’s entry into Major League Baseball occurred just years before landmark civil rights rulings, including Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. His success on the field helped shift public opinion, demonstrating that integration was both possible and beneficial. This cultural shift played an indirect but meaningful role in supporting broader legal challenges to segregation. At the same time, Robinson faced hostility, threats, and discriminatory treatment, highlighting the gap between evolving social practices and existing legal protections.

The federal legal framework addressing discrimination was still underdeveloped in 1947, with major statutes like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 nearly two decades away. Robinson’s breakthrough contributed to the growing momentum for such legislation by exposing the injustice and inefficiency of segregated systems. His experience also illustrated the limits of private action in achieving equality without formal legal enforcement mechanisms. Over time, his role became part of a larger narrative demonstrating how social change can precede and influence legal reform.

Robinson’s signing stands as an example of how non-judicial actions can shape the development of law by altering public attitudes and expectations. It underscores the interplay between private institutions and constitutional principles, particularly in the realm of equal protection. The event remains a key reference point in discussions about the relationship between cultural progress and legal change in the United States.

A California federal judge has ordered another evidentiary hearing in the ongoing dispute between Epic Games and Google over proposed changes to an antitrust injunction governing Android app distribution. U.S. District Judge James Donato expressed frustration that each revised proposal introduces new elements, warning the parties that the court will not continue reviewing endless iterations. The latest proposal follows Epic’s earlier trial victory, where a jury found Google had monopolized the Android app marketplace.

Although the companies claim their revised plan better aligns with the original injunction, the judge raised concerns about potential anticompetitive effects. In particular, he questioned Google’s idea of a “registered app store” program, suggesting it might create barriers for rival app stores. He also flagged possible issues with fees that could undermine competition. As a result, the court will require more detailed explanations before deciding whether to approve the changes.

The dispute stems from litigation filed in 2020 challenging restrictions that limited alternative app stores and required developers to use Google’s billing system. After Epic’s win, the court imposed an injunction requiring Google to open its platform to competitors. While the revised proposal keeps some pro-competition measures—such as allowing alternative billing and preventing exclusionary deals—it has drawn mixed reactions.

Supporters argue the new terms still promote competition, but critics, including Microsoft and advocacy groups, say the changes weaken the original order. They highlight concerns about new fees and provisions that could make it harder for competitors to enter the market. Some also argue that shifting key terms into private agreements reduces judicial oversight. Judge Donato indicated this upcoming hearing will likely be the final step before a decision, emphasizing the need to resolve the matter without further revisions.

‘Not Going To Keep Doing This,’ Judge Warns Epic, Google - Law360

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into whether the National Football League is engaging in anticompetitive practices that could harm consumers. While the exact scope of the probe is unclear, it appears to focus on how the league distributes broadcasting rights for its games. Concerns have grown among regulators, lawmakers, and broadcasters about the increasing shift of sports content from free television to paid streaming platforms.

Critics argue that this trend makes it harder and more expensive for fans to watch games, with some estimates suggesting it could cost over $1,500 annually to access all NFL broadcasts across multiple services. The NFL has defended itself by noting that most of its games are still available on free broadcast television, particularly in local markets. Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission has also begun reviewing the broader migration of live sports to subscription-based platforms.

The issue has drawn political attention, including a request from Senator Mike Lee for federal agencies to examine whether the NFL’s longstanding antitrust exemption should still apply. That exemption, established by a 1961 law, allows leagues to bundle and sell broadcasting rights collectively.

US Justice Department opens probe into NFL over anticompetitive practices, source says | Reuters

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled that the U.S. Department of Defense failed to comply with a prior court order protecting journalists’ access and reporting rights at the Pentagon. U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman found that the department’s revised media policy effectively recreated the same unconstitutional restrictions it had already been ordered to remove. The dispute arose after The New York Times and reporter Julian Barnes challenged rules limiting journalists’ ability to seek information from government sources.

Although the Pentagon changed the wording of its policy, the judge said the new language still prohibited routine journalistic practices, such as requesting non-public information. He rejected the government’s argument that the revisions fixed the issue, calling them a clear attempt to sidestep the court’s ruling. The opinion also criticized a provision that presumed journalists acted improperly if they offered anonymity to sources, noting that this is a standard practice in reporting.

The judge further found that the Pentagon undermined the order by restricting reporters’ physical access, including closing a designated workspace and requiring constant escorts inside the building. He dismissed the government’s security justification, stating that existing screening procedures were never removed and that the new limitations appeared designed to weaken press access.

Ultimately, the court ordered the government to restore prior conditions and comply fully with its ruling. Judge Friedman emphasized that the policy violated First Amendment protections by chilling press freedom and limiting the flow of information to the public. He warned that suppressing political speech and controlling media access are hallmarks of authoritarian systems, underscoring the constitutional importance of an independent press.

‘Mark Of Autocracy’: Court Says Pentagon Defied Press Order - Law360

US judge says Pentagon violated court order to restore press access | Reuters

A U.S. trade court is considering whether President Donald Trump’s 10% global tariff on imports is lawful. The tariffs, introduced in February, are being challenged by a coalition of 24 states and small businesses, who argue that the policy exceeds presidential authority and improperly bypasses Congress. The case is being heard by a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade.

The Trump administration defends the tariffs as a valid response to ongoing trade deficits, relying on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. This provision allows temporary tariffs during serious balance-of-payments issues. However, the challengers argue that the law was intended for short-term economic emergencies, not persistent trade imbalances, and that the administration is stretching its meaning.

The dispute comes shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down many of Trump’s earlier tariffs imposed under a different statute, ruling he had overstepped his authority. Plaintiffs claim the new tariffs are an attempt to work around that decision using a different legal justification.

US trade court weighs legality of Trump 10% global tariff | Reuters

On April 9, 1866, the United States Congress took a decisive step in shaping post-Civil War legal order by overriding President Andrew Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. This marked the first time in American history that a major piece of civil rights legislation became law over a presidential veto. The Act established that all persons born in the United States were citizens, directly challenging the legacy of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had denied citizenship to African Americans. By affirming equal protection under the law, Congress sought to secure basic civil rights for newly freed individuals in the aftermath of the Civil War. The override demonstrated a powerful assertion of legislative authority during the Reconstruction era.

The law also reflected growing tensions between Congress and the executive branch over how to rebuild the nation. Johnson had argued that the Act overstepped federal authority, but Congress rejected that view, signaling a shift toward stronger federal protection of individual rights. This moment helped redefine the balance of power within the federal government. It also underscored the role of Congress in enforcing civil rights when the executive resisted such measures. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 would later serve as a foundation for the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which constitutionalized its key principles.

In practical terms, the Act granted citizens the right to make contracts, sue in court, and own property regardless of race. Although enforcement remained uneven, the statute represented a critical legal milestone in the transition from slavery to citizenship. It also set an enduring precedent for future civil rights legislation. The events of April 9, 1866, illustrate how constitutional mechanisms like veto overrides can shape the trajectory of American law.

A former DLA Piper associate, Anisha Mehta, testified in federal court that she was unexpectedly fired shortly after announcing her pregnancy, despite receiving positive feedback on her work. She told the jury she handled significant responsibilities, including managing trademark portfolios for major corporate clients, and believed her performance was strong. Mehta said her supervisor initially reacted supportively to her pregnancy but soon raised vague performance concerns that she had not previously encountered. She described feeling shocked and distressed when she was terminated during a call with her supervisor and an HR representative in August 2022.

Mehta claims the firm violated federal and New York City laws by discriminating against her based on pregnancy, while DLA Piper maintains she was dismissed for poor performance. She testified that she attempted to challenge the termination and requested to go through a formal evaluation process, but was denied. After her firing, she continued working briefly until her system access was cut off when she declined a severance agreement.

Following her termination, Mehta applied to hundreds of jobs while pregnant but struggled to find employment. She eventually secured a position at eBay in 2024, earning significantly less than her prior salary. During cross-examination, the defense highlighted several alleged mistakes, including minor errors in client communications and administrative oversights, to support its claim of poor performance. Mehta acknowledged some errors but characterized them as minor and not indicative of overall poor work.

At the center of the case is whether Mehta’s termination was motivated by unlawful pregnancy discrimination or legitimate performance concerns. The legal issue involves employment protections under anti-discrimination laws, which prohibit adverse actions based on pregnancy while still allowing employers to terminate at-will employees for lawful reasons.

Pregnant DLA Piper Atty Recounts Firing: ‘This Feels Wrong’ - Law360

A federal judge in Rhode Island ruled that a coalition of states can proceed with their lawsuit challenging a major restructuring of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.. U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose denied the federal government’s motion to dismiss, finding that the states presented plausible claims under both the Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act. She also criticized the government for repeating jurisdictional arguments that had already been rejected earlier in the case and by the appellate court.

The lawsuit, brought by 19 states and Washington, D.C., challenges a sweeping overhaul that aimed to significantly reduce the agency’s workforce and restructure key programs. The states argue that the changes disrupted essential public health services, including disease detection, tobacco control efforts, and lead poisoning prevention. They also claim the restructuring caused missed regulatory deadlines, canceled health initiatives, and confusion around federal grants.

Judge DuBose had previously issued a preliminary injunction blocking layoffs, noting that the states demonstrated real and ongoing harm. In this latest ruling, she emphasized that courts have the authority to review and stop government actions that may violate constitutional principles, including separation of powers. The states allege the overhaul exceeded executive authority and violated both statutory requirements and constitutional limits on government power.

The federal government argued that the states lacked standing, that the court lacked jurisdiction, and that the agency’s actions were lawful internal management decisions. However, the judge rejected these arguments, stating they had already been considered and did not undermine the plausibility of the claims. As a result, the case will move forward, allowing the states to continue challenging the legality of the HHS restructuring.

HHS Must Face States’ Suit Over RFK’s ‘Dramatic Overhaul’ - Law360

John Deere has agreed to a $99 million settlement to resolve a class action lawsuit brought by farmers who accused the company of restricting competition in the repair market for its equipment. The farmers alleged that John Deere limited access to necessary diagnostic tools and software, effectively forcing customers to rely on authorized dealers for repairs at higher costs. The company denied wrongdoing but said the agreement resolves the dispute and allows it to move forward.

The settlement includes both monetary compensation and significant changes to repair access. Farmers who paid for repairs through authorized dealers since 2018 will be eligible for compensation, with total payouts expected to exceed $100 million with interest. Experts estimated that the alleged overcharges ranged much higher, making the recovery a relatively strong percentage compared to typical antitrust settlements.

In addition to financial relief, John Deere agreed to provide independent repair shops and equipment owners with access to diagnostic tools and software over a 10-year period. This change is intended to allow farmers to repair their own equipment or use third-party providers, addressing concerns about restricted competition. Plaintiffs described this as a major shift that breaks down the company’s control over the repair market.

The lawsuit, filed in 2022, claimed that John Deere monopolized the aftermarket for repairs by designing equipment that required proprietary tools. A federal judge previously allowed the case to proceed, finding sufficient evidence of potential market power. While this settlement resolves the private lawsuit, similar claims brought by the Federal Trade Commission remain ongoing.

John Deere Inks $99M Deal In Farmers’ Right-To-Repair Suit - Law360

On April 8, 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution became part of the Constitution after receiving the necessary number of state ratifications. This amendment fundamentally changed the method of selecting U.S. senators, shifting the power from state legislatures directly to voters. Prior to its adoption, senators were chosen by state lawmakers, a process that had increasingly drawn criticism for corruption and political deadlock. Reformers argued that legislative selection allowed special interests to exert undue influence over Senate seats. The amendment emerged during the Progressive Era, a period marked by widespread efforts to make government more democratic and transparent. By mandating direct elections, it aimed to increase accountability and restore public trust in the federal government. The change also reduced the frequency of vacancies caused by legislative gridlock in the states. Supporters viewed the amendment as a necessary correction to a system that had strayed from democratic principles. Critics, however, warned that it weakened the role of states within the federal structure. The ratification process itself reflected strong public pressure for reform across many states. Over time, the amendment reshaped the political dynamics of the Senate, making senators more responsive to public opinion. It also aligned the Senate more closely with the House of Representatives in terms of democratic legitimacy. Today, the Seventeenth Amendment remains a cornerstone of how Americans participate in federal elections, illustrating the enduring impact of Progressive Era reforms.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that Donald Trump has both the right and responsibility to influence federal investigations, including those involving people Trump views as adversaries. Speaking publicly for the first time since taking the role, Blanche rejected claims that the Justice Department was improperly targeting Trump’s opponents. He argued that a president is expected to guide national priorities, even when that includes investigations tied to personal or political conflicts.

The Justice Department has recently pursued multiple investigations involving individuals connected to past inquiries into Trump, as well as political opponents and donors. Some of these efforts have faced resistance in court, with judges and grand juries limiting or dismissing certain cases. Blanche pointed to past prosecutions against Trump as justification, saying the president is seeking accountability for what he views as misuse of the legal system.

Blanche’s appointment followed Trump’s firing of former Attorney General Pam Bondi, reportedly due to frustration over the pace and results of investigations. Blanche did not say whether he wants to remain in the role permanently, emphasizing that the decision rests with Trump. He also indicated he would step aside if asked, expressing loyalty to the president.

Acting DOJ chief Blanche says Trump has ‘right’ to influence investigations | Reuters

Yale Law School lost its long-held No. 1 position in the latest U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, marking the first time in 36 years it has not topped the list. Stanford Law School now holds the sole No. 1 spot, while Yale is tied for second with University of Chicago Law School. A slight drop in Yale’s employment rate for graduates appears to have contributed to the shift, though other metrics like bar passage and LSAT scores remained stable.

The rankings also saw broader changes among the traditionally top 14 law schools, known as the “T-14.” University of California, Berkeley School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center both fell out of that group, while Cornell Law School and Vanderbilt University Law School moved up in the rankings. Other schools, including University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and University of Virginia School of Law, saw smaller gains, while Harvard Law School remained steady.

These fluctuations reflect changes in the ranking methodology introduced in recent years after several top schools, including Yale and Berkeley, criticized the system. The updated approach relies more heavily on data reported to the American Bar Association, making small differences in employment and bar passage rates more influential.

Yale loses longtime No. 1 spot on latest US law school ranking | Reuters

AI startups are increasingly targeting law students as part of a broader effort to capture the legal services market. Companies like Harvey AI and Legora are offering free access and training at top law schools, hoping students will continue using their tools once they enter law firms and corporate legal roles. This strategy comes as the legal AI sector expands rapidly, fueled by advances in generative AI since the rise of ChatGPT.

These startups compete with established providers like LexisNexis and Westlaw, which have long dominated legal research and are now integrating AI into their platforms. While legacy companies rely on proprietary legal databases, newer entrants build tools on large language models and focus on tasks like drafting, research, and litigation preparation. Some partnerships have even emerged between startups and traditional providers to combine strengths.

Law students are already using these tools for exam preparation, memo writing, and simulating legal arguments. Schools and companies also view this exposure as a way to teach both the benefits and risks of AI, including issues like inaccurate or “hallucinated” outputs. The broader goal is to create familiarity early, making future lawyers more likely to adopt these tools in practice.

Other legal tech companies, including Clio and Spellbook, are pursuing similar partnerships, expanding access across hundreds of law schools. As competition grows, early access and training are becoming key battlegrounds for shaping the next generation of legal professionals.

AI startups court law students in fight for lawyer market | Reuters

On April 7, 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO) was officially established when its constitution entered into force, marking a pivotal moment in the development of international law. The creation of the WHO reflected a growing recognition among nations that public health challenges transcend borders and require coordinated legal and institutional responses. Its constitution set out a broad definition of health as a fundamental human right, helping to shape future legal frameworks and policy discussions worldwide. By joining the organization, member states accepted binding obligations, particularly in the areas of disease surveillance, reporting, and cooperation. These obligations were designed to promote transparency and rapid response to emerging health threats, which had historically spread unchecked due to limited coordination.

The WHO’s legal framework also empowered the organization to issue regulations and recommendations, including what would later become the International Health Regulations, a key tool in managing global health emergencies. This marked an important shift toward formalized international governance in public health, moving beyond informal cooperation to structured legal commitments. The constitution further established the World Health Assembly, giving member states a forum to negotiate and adopt health-related policies with legal and political significance. Over time, the WHO has played a central role in shaping international responses to pandemics, vaccination efforts, and health equity initiatives. Its authority, while not absolute, carries significant influence in both legal and diplomatic contexts.

A group of YouTube creators has filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that the company improperly used their copyrighted videos to train its AI video-generation tool, Nova Reel. The plaintiffs claim Amazon bypassed YouTube’s technological safeguards to access and download large amounts of video content without permission. According to the complaint, Amazon used automated scraping tools and techniques like rotating IP addresses to avoid detection while extracting videos at scale. The creators argue that this conduct violated both YouTube’s terms of service and federal copyright law.

The lawsuit specifically alleges violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, focusing on Amazon’s alleged circumvention of technological protection measures designed to safeguard content. Plaintiffs claim their videos were then used for Amazon’s commercial benefit in developing its AI system, without compensation or consent. They also argue that once content is used to train AI models, it cannot be effectively removed, causing lasting harm to creators. The complaint challenges Amazon’s characterization of its training data as “publicly available,” arguing that availability does not equal lawful use.

The creators seek to represent a nationwide class of individuals whose content may have been similarly used. They are asking for damages, injunctive relief, and a declaration that Amazon’s actions were willful. The case highlights broader tensions between content creators and AI developers over data sourcing practices. Similar lawsuits have been filed against other AI companies, reflecting a growing wave of litigation in this area.

YouTube Creators Say Amazon Scrapes Videos To Train AI - Law360

The Supreme Court of the United States has sent a long-running lawsuit over alleged FBI surveillance of Muslims in Southern California back to a lower court for reconsideration. The case, brought by several individuals including Sheikh Yassir Fazaga, claims the FBI unlawfully monitored their community using an informant after 9/11. The justices did not rule on the merits but instead instructed the lower courts to revisit the case in light of new factual developments and the government’s motion to dismiss.

At the center of the dispute is the state secrets privilege, a legal doctrine that allows the government to block litigation if it risks exposing national security information. The FBI has argued that continuing the case could reveal sensitive intelligence methods and weaken this protection. Previously, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit allowed parts of the lawsuit to move forward, reasoning that courts should not dismiss claims too early without fully examining whether secret evidence is truly necessary. The appellate court suggested possible ways to proceed while protecting classified information, such as limited judicial review of sensitive materials.

The Supreme Court’s earlier 2022 decision confirmed that the state secrets privilege applies but left open how it should be used in this case. The Ninth Circuit later revived some claims, while still dismissing others against individual agents. The government challenged that ruling, arguing it forces courts to rely on protected information in ways that undermine the privilege. Plaintiffs, however, maintain their case can proceed using non-classified evidence and that the subject matter itself is not a state secret.

The remand keeps the case alive but unresolved, requiring the lower courts to reassess whether it can proceed without endangering national security. The outcome could shape how courts handle similar conflicts between civil rights claims and government secrecy.

Justices Remand State Secrets Dispute In FBI Spying Case - Law360

In my column for Bloomberg this week, I examine how a major IRS modernization effort fell short—not simply because of execution issues, but because of chronic underfunding. A recent report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration shows that funds from the Inflation Reduction Act that were intended for modernization were largely redirected to cover basic operations. Instead of transforming systems and rebuilding long-term capacity, the IRS used much of the money to sustain staffing and maintain existing IT infrastructure. In my view, this outcome was predictable given the agency’s longstanding resource constraints.

I explain how budget cuts and workforce reductions undermined the modernization initiative from the start. Even with new funding, the IRS still had to meet its core obligation of processing hundreds of millions of tax returns each year. Faced with those pressures, it prioritized immediate operational needs over long-term upgrades, including spending significant sums on routine IT maintenance. I also point out that contractor spending surged, reflecting a growing reliance on outside support rather than investment in internal expertise.

The report highlights inefficiencies as well, including canceled or reworked contracts that consumed large amounts of funding without delivering meaningful results. At the same time, labor costs remained elevated due to the complexities of downsizing, creating a situation where the IRS was both shrinking its workforce and paying contractors to compensate for lost capacity. I argue that this pattern is better understood as institutional outsourcing rather than modernization.

Ultimately, I contend that real modernization cannot occur without stable baseline funding for core operations. Without that foundation, any new investment will continue to be diverted toward keeping the agency running. My conclusion is that Congress attempted to modernize the IRS without first ensuring its institutional stability, making the outcome not just disappointing, but largely inevitable.

On April 6, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 into law, marking a major expansion of federal civil rights protections. Commonly known as the Fair Housing Act, the legislation aimed to eliminate discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. It prohibited unequal treatment based on race, religion, and national origin, later expanding to include sex and other protected characteristics. The law emerged during a period of national unrest, passed just days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.. King had long advocated for fair housing as a central component of racial equality, particularly in Northern cities.

The Act addressed systemic practices such as redlining, steering, and discriminatory lending that had historically segregated communities. It gave the federal government authority to enforce fair housing standards, though early enforcement mechanisms were relatively weak. Over time, amendments strengthened the law, adding protections for people with disabilities and families with children. The statute also allowed individuals to file complaints with the Department of Housing and Urban Development or pursue private lawsuits. Courts have since played a key role in interpreting the scope of the Act, especially in recognizing claims based on disparate impact.

A central legal concept tied to the Fair Housing Act is disparate impact, which refers to policies that appear neutral but disproportionately harm protected groups. Unlike intentional discrimination, disparate impact does not require proof of discriminatory intent, only that a practice has an unequal effect. This theory became firmly established in housing law through later litigation and was upheld by the Supreme Court in cases interpreting the Act. It remains a critical tool for challenging structural inequality in housing markets.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 represented both a response to national tragedy and a continuation of the broader civil rights movement’s legislative achievements.

A federal judge refused to reverse his earlier decision blocking subpoenas targeting Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, effectively pausing a criminal investigation and setting up a likely appeal. Chief Judge James Boasberg ruled that prosecutors failed to show any valid basis for suspecting wrongdoing and criticized the lack of evidence supporting fraud allegations. He had previously found that the subpoenas were issued for an improper purpose, suggesting they were meant to pressure Powell to lower interest rates or step down.

The subpoenas, issued by prosecutor Jeanine Pirro, sought information about cost overruns at the Federal Reserve’s headquarters and Powell’s prior congressional testimony. However, the court found no good-faith basis for believing a crime had occurred. Prosecutors argued the judge applied too strict a standard and misread the timeline of the investigation, but the court rejected those claims. Pirro’s office has said it will appeal the ruling, a move supported by Justice Department leadership.

The dispute reflects broader tensions between Powell and allies of President Donald Trump, with Powell arguing the investigation is an attempt to influence Federal Reserve policy. The appeal could delay efforts to confirm Kevin Warsh as a replacement for Powell, as some lawmakers have pledged to block the nomination while the case continues. Powell has said he will remain in his role until the legal challenge is resolved.

US judge upholds block on subpoenas to Fed’s Powell, teeing up likely appeal | Reuters

A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from requiring public universities in 17 states to provide extensive admissions data related to race and sex. Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV issued a preliminary injunction after state attorneys general challenged the policy, arguing it was imposed too quickly and created legal risks for schools. The data request came from the Department of Education, which sought seven years of information to evaluate whether colleges were complying with the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that ended affirmative action in higher education.

The states argued that the reporting requirement was confusing and could expose universities to penalties for accidental errors. The court agreed that the rollout was “rushed and chaotic,” noting that officials failed to properly consider concerns raised by universities. At the same time, the judge acknowledged that the Department of Education does have legal authority to collect such data in general. The issue, he emphasized, was how the policy was implemented, not necessarily the underlying power itself.

The ruling also pointed to practical problems, including staffing shortages within the agency after workforce reductions, which made it harder to manage the data collection process. Officials in states like New York and California supported the decision, saying schools should not be forced to produce large amounts of sensitive information under unclear requirements.

Trump administration can’t make colleges provide race-related data, judge rules | Reuters

The Trump administration filed an emergency motion asking an appeals court to allow construction to resume on a planned White House ballroom after a judge ordered the project paused. The administration argued that stopping the work creates serious security risks, claiming the site has been left vulnerable and could endanger the president, staff, and the building itself. The pause was ordered by Judge Richard Leon, who halted construction while a legal challenge moves forward.

The lawsuit was brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which argues that President Donald Trumpexceeded his authority by demolishing the historic East Wing and beginning a $400 million replacement project without congressional approval. In response, the administration claims the lawsuit is legally flawed and that the president has full authority to renovate the White House. It also argues that the plaintiffs lack standing, meaning they do not have a sufficient legal stake to bring the case.

Judge Leon temporarily paused his own order for 14 days to give the administration time to appeal, and the new emergency motion asks the appellate court to lift the construction halt entirely. The administration further contends that the lower court should not have heard the case at all, characterizing the claims as based on subjective concerns rather than legal injury.

Trump administration files emergency motion to resume ballroom work, citing security issues | Reuters

On April 3, 1948, the United States formally enacted the Marshall Plan signing, a landmark legal and economic initiative designed to rebuild war-torn Europe after World War II. Officially known as the Economic Cooperation Act, the law authorized billions of dollars in aid to Western European nations. It represented a major expansion of U.S. foreign policy, grounded in Congress’s constitutional power over spending and international commerce. The legislation also reflected a strategic legal response to the growing influence of the Soviet Union, using economic assistance as a tool of containment.

The Marshall Plan required participating countries to cooperate with one another, creating legal agreements that promoted trade liberalization and economic integration. This cooperation laid early groundwork for institutions that would later evolve into the European Union. Domestically, the law raised important questions about the limits of federal authority in directing funds abroad and the role of the executive branch in administering large-scale international programs. Congress delegated significant discretion to the executive, particularly the State Department, to oversee implementation.

One key legal element of the Marshall Plan was its use of conditional aid, meaning recipient countries had to meet certain economic and political requirements to receive funding. This introduced a model for future foreign aid programs, where compliance with specified conditions became a standard legal mechanism. The program also required oversight and reporting, ensuring accountability for how funds were spent, which helped shape modern administrative law practices.

In practice, the Marshall Plan proved highly successful, contributing to rapid economic recovery and political stabilization in Western Europe. It also reinforced the legal concept that economic policy could serve as an instrument of international law and diplomacy. By blending domestic statutory authority with international agreements, the plan set a precedent for how the United States engages in global economic governance.

President Donald Trump announced that Attorney General Pam Bondi will step down after serving about 14 months at the Department of Justice. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will assume the role on an acting basis while Bondi transitions out over the next month. Trump praised Bondi’s tenure, highlighting reductions in violent crime and calling her service highly successful. Bondi also expressed pride in her role and indicated she will move into a private-sector position while continuing to support the administration’s agenda.

Her time in office, however, drew bipartisan criticism, particularly over the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which Congress had required to be released. Lawmakers from both parties accused the department of mishandling transparency and failing to fully pursue accountability. Some Republicans voiced frustration with delays in releasing information, while Democrats argued Bondi oversaw unequal treatment in related prosecutions.

Bondi also faced scrutiny over political pressure to investigate individuals viewed as opponents of the president, raising concerns about the independence of the Justice Department. Her background included prior service as Florida’s attorney general and involvement in Trump’s political and legal efforts before her appointment.

​​Bondi Out As Attorney General After Contentious Time At DOJ - Law360

Trump fires Pam Bondi as US attorney general | Reuters

DLA Piper is set to face a rare jury trial in federal court over allegations that it fired a pregnant associate after she requested maternity leave. The lawsuit was brought by Anisha Mehta, who claims she was terminated in 2022 while six months pregnant, shortly after seeking leave. She argues the firm acted to avoid paying her during a period of reduced work and financial pressure.

DLA Piper disputes the claims, asserting that Mehta was dismissed for performance issues and did not meet expectations for a senior associate. However, the presiding judge, Analisa Torres, found enough conflicting evidence—such as Mehta’s prior bonuses and strong client work—to allow the case to proceed to trial. The claims include violations under federal, state, and New York City anti-discrimination laws, as well as interference and retaliation under the Family and Medical Leave Act.

The case is notable because employment discrimination trials involving large law firms are uncommon, as such disputes are often settled privately. A public trial could expose sensitive internal practices, including evaluation systems and compensation structures.

A key legal issue in this case is the protection of employees under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). This law guarantees eligible workers the right to take unpaid leave for certain family and medical reasons, including pregnancy, without fear of losing their jobs. Mehta’s claim centers on whether the firm unlawfully interfered with that right or retaliated against her for attempting to use it.

Law firm DLA Piper faces jury trial over pregnancy bias claims | Reuters

A federal judge is scrutinizing President Donald Trump’s proposal to build a large “Independence Arch” near the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Tanya Chutkan questioned whether the administration has the legal authority to move forward without clear approval from Congress, especially given the scale of the project. The proposed structure, expected to be taller than both the Lincoln Memorial and Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, has raised concerns about its impact on a protected historic area.

The lawsuit, brought by local residents, seeks to block construction before it begins, arguing that the project could cause irreversible damage to federally protected land. Plaintiffs contend that any major construction on such land requires explicit congressional authorization. The administration, however, argues that Congress previously granted broad authority for structures in that area and delegated oversight to the National Park Service.

During the hearing, Judge Chutkan expressed skepticism about whether earlier congressional approvals actually cover a project of this magnitude. She also pressed government lawyers on conflicting signals between official agency statements—describing the project as preliminary—and Trump’s public comments suggesting it is moving forward quickly.

The judge has not yet ruled on whether to halt the project but is considering an injunction and may require additional disclosures about planning, permits, and contracts. She also asked whether the administration would agree not to proceed without proper approvals.

A central legal issue in this case is the separation of powers, particularly Congress’s authority over federal land and spending. The dispute turns on whether the executive branch can rely on prior delegations of authority or must obtain new legislative approval for a major project like this.

Judge questions Trump plan for ‘Independence Arch’ near the National Mall | Reuters

On April 2, 1792, the United States took a major step toward economic independence with the passage of the Coinage Act of 1792. This law created the first national mint, later known as the United States Mint, and established a standardized system of coinage for the young nation. Before this act, Americans relied heavily on foreign coins, including Spanish dollars, which made trade inconsistent and difficult to regulate. The law introduced the U.S. dollar as the official unit of currency and set its value based on both gold and silver, adopting a bimetallic standard. It also defined specific denominations, including cents, dimes, and eagles, many of which are still in use today.

A key legal feature of the act was its detailed regulation of coin composition and weight, ensuring uniformity and public trust in the currency. The law imposed strict penalties for debasing coins, including severe criminal consequences, reflecting how seriously the government treated monetary integrity. It also placed the Mint under federal authority, reinforcing the Constitution’s grant of power to Congress to coin money and regulate its value. By standardizing currency, the act helped stabilize commerce and supported the growth of a national economy.

The Coinage Act also carried symbolic importance, as it marked a break from colonial dependence on European financial systems. It demonstrated the federal government’s capacity to create and enforce complex economic regulations. Over time, the framework it established influenced later monetary policies and reforms. The act remains a foundational piece of American financial law, shaping how currency is produced and regulated even today.

The Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments on April 1, 2026, over President Donald Trump’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship, with Trump attending part of the session in person. The case centers on an executive order directing agencies to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. if their parents are not citizens or permanent residents. Several justices from both ideological wings questioned the administration’s lawyer closely, signaling skepticism about the legal basis of the policy.

The administration argues that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitutiondoes not guarantee citizenship to all individuals born on U.S. soil, emphasizing the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Government lawyers claim this language excludes children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors. However, multiple justices challenged that interpretation, noting that historical understanding and past precedent support a broader reading.

Chief Justice John Roberts described the administration’s argument as difficult to reconcile with the narrow historical exceptions previously recognized. Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed to legislative history suggesting lawmakers intended citizenship to apply broadly to those born in the country. Justice Elena Kagan also questioned whether the administration relied on weak or selective historical sources. Conservative justices, including Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, raised practical concerns about how the policy would be enforced, especially regarding determining parental intent to remain in the U.S.

The challengers argue that the Court already settled the issue in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which affirmed birthright citizenship for children born on U.S. soil to foreign parents. Some justices suggested that Trump’s position may conflict with that precedent. The case could have wide-reaching consequences, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of births each year and requiring families to prove citizenship status.

The legal dispute reflects broader tensions over immigration policy and constitutional interpretation, particularly how historical meaning should be applied to modern circumstances. The Court is expected to issue a decision by late June, which could significantly reshape the understanding of citizenship in the United States.

​​With Trump present, Supreme Court questions administration’s lawyer on birthright citizenship | Reuters

A federal judge has allowed a lawsuit by the American Bar Association to move forward against the administration of Donald Trump. The case claims the administration created an unlawful policy to target law firms based on their past legal work, diversity efforts, and political affiliations. U.S. District Judge Amir Ali found that the ABA plausibly alleged a coordinated effort to intimidate lawyers and firms whose views the government opposed.

According to the ruling, the ABA provided enough detail to suggest the policy may have discouraged firms from taking cases against the administration. The organization argues this created a “chilling effect,” causing some lawyers to avoid certain clients or legal challenges out of fear of retaliation. The lawsuit seeks a declaration that the policy is illegal and an order preventing its enforcement.

The dispute stems from executive orders issued by Trump that targeted specific law firms by restricting their access to federal resources, revoking security clearances, and threatening government contracts tied to their clients. Several courts previously blocked those orders, finding they likely violated constitutional protections such as free speech and due process. The administration has appealed those earlier rulings.

Government lawyers argued the ABA should not be allowed to sue because it was not directly targeted and therefore lacks standing. They also denied that any broader policy to intimidate firms exists and described the claims as speculative. However, the ABA pointed to statements suggesting additional firms could be targeted and argued the effects are ongoing.

Judge Ali’s decision does not resolve the case but allows it to proceed, meaning the courts will continue to examine whether the administration’s actions unlawfully interfered with the legal profession.

Trump administration must face ABA lawsuit over law firm orders, judge rules | Reuters

Luigi Mangione appeared in federal court seeking to delay his upcoming trial related to the killing of a health insurance executive. Mangione is facing federal stalking charges connected to the 2024 shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and has pleaded not guilty. His lawyers argue the trial should be postponed because he is also preparing for a separate New York state murder trial scheduled to begin earlier in the summer. They say handling two major cases at once would make it difficult for him to prepare an adequate defense.

Prosecutors oppose delaying the federal trial, though they are open to adjusting parts of the pretrial process, such as juror questionnaires, to ensure fairness. Jury selection in the federal case is currently set for September, with opening statements planned for October. Mangione has been in custody since his arrest shortly after the shooting.

A significant development in the case is that the federal murder charge was dismissed earlier, removing the possibility of the death penalty. The judge found that charge conflicted legally with the remaining stalking charges. Even so, Mangione could still face life in prison if convicted federally, along with a lengthy sentence in the state case.

The case has drawn public attention, with some condemning the killing while others have expressed sympathy for Mangione due to broader frustrations with the U.S. healthcare system.

Luigi Mangione due in court in bid to delay federal trial over CEO killing | Reuters

On April 1, 2005, a major shift in the structure of the United Kingdom’s legal system began with the passage of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. This legislation fundamentally reshaped the relationship between the judiciary and the other branches of government. Before the Act, the highest court functions were carried out by the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords, blending judicial and legislative roles in a way that raised concerns about separation of powers. The reform sought to modernize the constitution by clearly distinguishing judicial authority from Parliament. It also redefined the role of the Lord Chancellor, stripping away many of that office’s judicial and legislative functions to reduce institutional overlap.

One of the most important outcomes of the Act was the creation of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, which would eventually take over as the country’s highest appellate court. Although the Court did not begin hearing cases until 2009, the legal foundation for its existence was firmly established on this date. The reform also created a new Judicial Appointments Commission, designed to make the process of selecting judges more transparent and independent from political influence. By doing so, the Act aimed to strengthen public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary.

The legislation reflected broader constitutional trends toward accountability and institutional clarity in democratic systems. It also aligned the UK more closely with other nations that maintain a clear separation between judicial and legislative bodies. Critics at the time questioned whether the changes were necessary in a system that had long functioned without a formal written constitution. Supporters, however, argued that the reforms were overdue and essential for maintaining the rule of law in a modern state. Over time, the changes introduced by the Act have become a defining feature of the UK’s constitutional framework, shaping how justice is administered at the highest level.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., blocked plans by Donald Trump to build a large ballroom on the White House grounds, granting a preliminary injunction requested by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Judge Richard J. Leon concluded that the nonprofit is likely to succeed on its claim that the administration acted beyond its legal authority. He emphasized that Congress had not approved the project and that no statute gives the president power to construct new buildings on White House grounds without authorization. The court relied in part on the Constitution’s Property Clause, which gives Congress control over federal land. The judge rejected the administration’s argument that existing statutes or agencies, such as the National Park Service, provided sufficient authority. He also criticized the government for shifting explanations about which entity was responsible for the project.

The lawsuit stems from the administration’s decision to demolish the historic East Wing and move forward with construction without completing required reviews. These include environmental assessments, planning approvals, and congressional authorization. The court found that the potential harm to the White House’s historical and cultural value justified immediate intervention. The judge also dismissed claims that delaying construction would create national security risks, calling those arguments unpersuasive. Although the project was described as privately funded, the court said that funding sources do not override statutory limits. As a result, construction must stop unless Congress explicitly approves the project. The judge temporarily paused enforcement of the injunction to allow the government time to appeal.

‘Construction Has To Stop!’: Judge Blocks Trump’s Ballroom - Law360

Judge orders Trump to halt $400 million White House ballroom project, for now | Reuters

The Supreme Court of the United States is considering whether Donald Trump can restrict birthright citizenship through an executive order, a move that could significantly change how citizenship is granted in the United States. The policy would deny citizenship to children born on U.S. soil if their parents are neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents. Lower courts blocked the order, finding it likely violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and existing federal law. The justices are now reviewing that decision on appeal, with a ruling expected later this year.

At the center of the dispute is the meaning of the Citizenship Clause, which has long been interpreted to grant citizenship to nearly all people born in the United States. The Trump administration argues that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” excludes children of undocumented immigrants or those in the country temporarily. Opponents contend this interpretation contradicts over a century of legal precedent, including United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which affirmed birthright citizenship for children of foreign nationals.

The case could have far-reaching consequences, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of births each year and requiring families to prove a child’s eligibility for citizenship. It also reflects broader debates over immigration policy and constitutional interpretation. The Supreme Court’s decision will determine whether the longstanding understanding of birthright citizenship remains intact or is significantly narrowed.

US Supreme Court considers Trump’s effort to limit birthright citizenship | Reuters

A federal judge refused to approve a proposed agreement that would have allowed churches to endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status. Judge J. Campbell Barker ruled that he did not have jurisdiction to sign off on the deal between the Internal Revenue Service and several religious groups. The agreement sought to carve out an exception to the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits nonprofits from supporting political candidates.

The judge based his decision on the Tax Anti-Injunction Act, a law that generally prevents courts from interfering with tax collection. He reasoned that approving the agreement would effectively limit how much tax the government could collect, placing the case outside the court’s authority. The proposed settlement had been designed to resolve a lawsuit brought by religious broadcasters and churches challenging the Johnson Amendment.

Supporters of the ruling argued it preserves the long-standing separation between political campaigning and tax-exempt religious activity. Opponents, including the groups that brought the lawsuit, said they plan to appeal and believe an exception should be allowed for religious speech. The dispute reflects a broader legal and political debate over the balance between free exercise of religion and restrictions tied to nonprofit tax benefits.

US judge rejects IRS pact allowing churches to endorse political candidates | Reuters

On March 31, 1949, the Dominion of Newfoundland officially entered Confederation, becoming Canada’s tenth province under the terms negotiated with the government of Canada. This union followed a series of national referendums in Newfoundland, where voters ultimately chose confederation over alternatives such as responsible government or economic union with the United States. The legal foundation for this transition was established through the British North America Act 1949, which amended Canada’s constitutional framework to admit Newfoundland as a province. These Terms of Union set out the division of powers, financial arrangements, and transitional provisions necessary to integrate Newfoundland into the Canadian federation.

One key legal issue involved the assumption of Newfoundland’s public debt by Canada, which required careful fiscal and statutory planning to ensure a smooth transition. The agreement also guaranteed certain social benefits, including family allowances, aligning Newfoundland residents with federal welfare programs already in place across Canada. Additionally, the Terms addressed transportation links, committing Canada to maintaining ferry services and improving infrastructure between Newfoundland and the mainland. Legal provisions were also made for the continuation of Newfoundland’s existing laws until they could be harmonized with Canadian federal and provincial statutes.

The union raised constitutional questions about federalism, particularly how a previously self-governing dominion would adapt to a provincial role within Canada’s system. It also required coordination between British and Canadian authorities, as Newfoundland had been under direct British administration prior to confederation. The involvement of British Parliament underscored the imperial legal framework still governing such transitions at the time. Over time, Newfoundland’s legal system was gradually aligned with Canadian norms, though some regional distinctions persisted.

This event illustrates the complexity of constitutional amendment and territorial integration within a federal system, particularly when sovereignty is partially transferred. It highlights how legal agreements can structure not only governance but also economic and social policy for newly incorporated regions. The Terms of Union remain a foundational legal document in Newfoundland and Labrador’s relationship with Canada today.

The U.S. Department of Labor has proposed a rule that would expand access to alternative investments in retirement plans, but the shift raises real concerns—especially because it opens the door to assets like cryptocurrency. Framed as a clarification of fiduciary duties under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the proposal creates a “safe harbor” process that makes it easier for plan managers to justify including complex and higher-risk investments.

At its core, the rule emphasizes that fiduciary responsibility is about process, not outcomes. That means as long as plan fiduciaries can show they considered factors like performance, fees, liquidity, valuation, and complexity, their decisions may be presumed prudent—even if the investments themselves are volatile or difficult to value.

The proposal also reinforces that no category of investment is off-limits, explicitly rejecting any per se restrictions. That neutrality is doing a lot of work: in practice, it signals that assets like private equity, and notably digital assets such as crypto, can now be more comfortably included in 401(k)-style plans.

Supporters argue this expands diversification and potential returns, but the tradeoffs are significant. Many of these alternative assets are less transparent, harder to price, and more illiquid than traditional investments—risks that are especially concerning in retirement accounts designed for long-term stability. Crypto, in particular, introduces extreme volatility and regulatory uncertainty, which may sit uneasily with ERISA’s protective purpose.

The rule also appears designed to curb the rise in fiduciary litigation by giving courts a reason to defer to plan managers who follow the outlined process. While that may reduce frivolous lawsuits, it could also make it harder for participants to challenge genuinely risky or poorly performing investment choices.

In effect, the proposal shifts the balance: it gives fiduciaries more flexibility and legal cover, but potentially at the cost of exposing retirement savers to more complex and speculative assets. The big question is whether procedural compliance should be enough when the underlying investments themselves may carry substantial and unfamiliar risks.

BREAKING: DOL Proposes Rule To Expand Alternative Investments In Retirement Plans - Law360

Match Group has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that its OkCupidplatform improperly shared user data. According to regulators, the company allowed a third party, Clarifai, to access sensitive information from millions of users in 2014 without proper disclosure. This data reportedly included photos, demographic details, and location information, despite privacy policies suggesting otherwise.

Under the settlement, Match Group is barred from misrepresenting how it handles user data and must implement compliance measures to ensure its privacy practices align with its public statements. The company did not admit liability as part of the agreement but could face financial penalties if it violates the terms in the future. The settlement still requires court approval.

OkCupid stated that it has since improved its privacy protections and that the conduct at issue does not reflect its current practices.

Match Group settles US FTC claims it illegally shared OkCupid user data | Reuters

In my column for Bloomberg this week, I argue that Georgia’s gas tax holiday is poorly timed, arriving not during a routine price increase but at the onset of a global, war-driven supply shock. While the policy may appear to offer immediate relief at the pump, I explain that higher prices actually play a necessary role in a market economy by signaling scarcity and pushing consumers to reduce demand. By lowering gas prices artificially, the state disrupts that signal, encouraging more consumption when conservation is most needed.

I point out that this kind of intervention weakens the natural coordination between supply and demand, keeping consumption higher than the market can sustain and ultimately prolonging the imbalance. Rather than solving the problem, it risks shifting it into the future in the form of tighter supplies or even shortages. I also note that policies like this are politically attractive because they are visible and easy to implement, but that same visibility effectively subsidizes fuel use at the worst possible moment.

Drawing on the experience of the 1970s energy crisis, I argue that similar efforts to shield consumers from rising prices led to distortions, long lines, and delayed adjustment rather than lasting relief. I describe the gas tax holiday as “affordability theater,” giving the illusion of help while masking the underlying scarcity and potentially leading to higher costs later. At the same time, I highlight how broader policy choices are working against long-term solutions by discouraging alternative energy sources and making substitutes like electric vehicles less accessible.

I acknowledge that rising gas prices create real hardship, especially for lower- and middle-income households, but I argue that relief should be targeted and delivered through mechanisms like refundable tax credits or commuter benefits. This approach would help households manage costs without incentivizing additional fuel consumption. I also emphasize the need for policies that actively reduce demand, such as investing in public transit, encouraging remote work, and promoting conservation.

Finally, I argue that any revenue gains from higher prices should be used to strengthen infrastructure and energy resilience rather than masking current problems. I conclude that while supply shocks inevitably bring economic pain, delaying adjustment through misguided policies will only make the consequences more severe in the long run.

On March 30, 1981, Ronald Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt outside the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. The attack was carried out by John Hinckley Jr., who fired multiple shots as the president exited an event. Reagan was seriously wounded but survived after emergency surgery, while others, including Press Secretary James Brady, were also injured. The incident immediately triggered a high-profile federal criminal case against Hinckley. During trial, Hinckley’s defense team argued that he was legally insane at the time of the shooting. The jury ultimately returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982. This outcome shocked the public and sparked widespread debate about the use and limits of the insanity defense in criminal law.

Critics argued that the standard allowed dangerous individuals to avoid accountability, while supporters emphasized the importance of recognizing severe mental illness in legal responsibility. In response, Congress and many states moved to tighten the rules governing insanity defenses. One major reform was the passage of the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, which made it harder for defendants to succeed with such claims in federal court. The law shifted the burden of proof to defendants and narrowed the definition of legal insanity. The case also influenced how courts evaluate expert psychiatric testimony. Over time, Hinckley remained confined to a psychiatric institution rather than a traditional prison. His gradual release decades later continued to raise legal and ethical questions about mental illness and public safety. This event remains a defining moment in modern criminal law because it reshaped how courts balance mental health and criminal responsibility.

Bank of America has agreed to pay $72.5 million to settle a proposed class action lawsuit alleging it helped facilitate Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities. The agreement, filed for preliminary approval in New York federal court, does not include any admission of wrongdoing by the bank. The plaintiff, identified as Jane Doe, described the settlement as a meaningful recovery for survivors. The proposed class includes women and girls who were abused by Epstein or his associates, including those who received compensation tied to sexual activity. Payments to class members will vary based on factors such as the severity and duration of abuse and any cooperation with investigations.

Doe alleged that Bank of America ignored warning signs and allowed suspicious financial transactions linked to Epstein’s operations, including accounts opened in her name despite red flags. The bank denied facilitating any illegal conduct but stated the settlement allows it to resolve the matter and provide closure. The plaintiff’s attorneys may seek up to 30% of the settlement fund in fees. The court had previously dismissed claims against another defendant, Bank of New York Mellon, and narrowed the case against Bank of America. The judge also rejected an effort by the bank to pause proceedings while related government matters were clarified.

The plaintiff and her legal team weighed the risks of trial, including the possibility of a lengthy appeals process that could delay compensation for survivors. As part of the settlement process, a fund administrator will determine individual awards using specific criteria tied to each claimant’s experience. The case highlights ongoing legal efforts to hold financial institutions accountable for their potential role in enabling trafficking networks.

BofA Will Pay $72.5M In Deal Ending Epstein Ties Allegations - Law360

Four major law firms—Jenner & Block LLP, WilmerHale, Susman Godfrey LLP, and Perkins Coie LLP—have asked the D.C. Circuit to uphold lower court rulings that invalidated executive orders issued by Donald Trump targeting them. The firms argue the orders were unconstitutional, claiming they violated the First Amendment and other protections by restricting their ability to practice law. The measures included suspending security clearances, limiting access to federal buildings, and penalizing the firms for their clients and legal work.

The firms contend the orders were retaliatory, pointing to Trump’s criticism of their pro bono work and connections to investigations involving him. They argue the government cannot punish lawyers for representing certain clients or expressing particular viewpoints. Each firm emphasized that the orders interfere with core legal principles, including the right to counsel, free association, and access to the courts.

The U.S. Department of Justice initially sought to drop its appeal of the lower court decisions but quickly reversed course and is now defending the executive orders. The firms highlighted this reversal as evidence that the orders are legally weak. They also argue that the government has failed to meaningfully dispute claims that the orders were motivated by retaliation.

The dispute is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, with oral arguments scheduled for May. The outcome could have significant implications for executive power and the independence of the legal profession.

Firms Targeted By Trump Urge DC Circ. To Uphold EO Rulings - Law360

Law firms targeted by Trump ask court to uphold rulings blocking executive orders | Reuters

A federal judge reduced the prison sentence of Elizabeth Holmes by one year, lowering her term from just over 11 years after applying updated federal sentencing guidelines. Holmes had requested a two-year reduction, but the court granted only a partial decrease despite opposition from prosecutors. The judge found that although her fraud caused approximately $452 million in investor losses, prosecutors failed to show that any individual victim suffered “substantial financial hardship,” which is required under the revised guidelines.

The court emphasized that financial harm must be evaluated relative to each victim’s wealth, noting that large losses do not automatically qualify as substantial hardship for wealthy investors. Because the government did not provide specific evidence of such harm, Holmes qualified for a reduced sentence as a nonviolent, first-time offender. However, the judge limited the reduction to one year to maintain deterrence and reflect the seriousness of her conduct.

Holmes was convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors in Theranos, the blood-testing startup she led alongside Ramesh Balwani. While her conviction included four counts of investor fraud, she was acquitted or not convicted on other charges. She began serving her sentence in 2023.

Prosecutors argued against reducing her sentence, citing the scale of the losses, her limited restitution payments, and concerns about potential future misconduct. Holmes countered that investors knowingly took risks and were not financially devastated. The judge ultimately agreed that the legal standard for “substantial financial hardship” was not met.

Elizabeth Holmes Gets 11-Year Prison Sentence Cut By A Year - Law360 UK

On March 27, 1876, the U.S. Supreme Court decided United States v. Cruikshank, a ruling that exposed the Court’s deep reluctance to enforce the promises of Reconstruction. The case arose from the Colfax Massacre, where dozens of Black citizens were murdered by white supremacists attempting to overturn a contested election. Federal prosecutors secured convictions under the Enforcement Act, aiming to protect Black citizens’ constitutional rights in the face of organized racial violence. The Supreme Court, however, dismantled those convictions with striking indifference to the underlying atrocities.

The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment constrained only state action, not the conduct of private individuals, effectively shielding perpetrators of racial terror from federal accountability. It further ruled that rights such as assembly and bearing arms were not protected from state interference through the Constitution at that time. This narrow interpretation gutted federal enforcement power at precisely the moment it was most needed. The decision ignored the reality that state authorities in the South were often unwilling—or actively refusing—to protect Black citizens.

Critically, the Court’s reasoning elevated formal legal distinctions over the lived experience of widespread, systematic violence. By insisting on a rigid state-action requirement, the justices created a legal loophole large enough to permit organized terror campaigns to flourish unchecked. The ruling signaled to white supremacist groups that federal intervention would be weak or nonexistent. In doing so, it contributed directly to the collapse of Reconstruction-era protections and the rise of Jim Crow.

The long-term consequences were profound, as Cruikshank became a cornerstone for limiting civil rights enforcement for decades. It delayed meaningful federal protection of individual rights until well into the twentieth century. Modern constitutional law has largely rejected its reasoning through incorporation doctrine, yet its impact remains a stark reminder of how judicial decisions can entrench injustice.

A federal judge in California issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from labeling Anthropica national security supply chain risk, finding the move was likely unconstitutional retaliation. The dispute arose after Anthropic pushed back during contract negotiations with the government, arguing it should be allowed to limit how its AI system Claude is used, particularly for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. Shortly after the company made its position public, the administration directed agencies to stop using its tools and moved to formally designate it as a security risk.

Judge Rita F. Lin concluded that Anthropic is likely to succeed on its claims, emphasizing that the government appeared to be punishing the company for publicly criticizing its contracting stance. She found that the measures were not closely tied to genuine national security concerns and instead resembled retaliation for protected speech. The court stressed that while the government is free to choose its vendors, it cannot take additional punitive steps that violate constitutional protections.

The ruling also found that the designation was likely unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act and potentially violated due process because Anthropic had no opportunity to respond. The judge noted that branding a company as a national security threat for expressing disagreement raises serious constitutional concerns. The injunction blocks enforcement of the directive and prevents further action against the company while the case proceeds.

The decision highlights broader tensions between government control over AI use and private companies’ efforts to impose ethical limits. It also underscores concerns that government retaliation could chill public debate about AI safety. The administration must now report back to the court on its compliance with the order.

Anthropic Blocks Pentagon’s ‘Orwellian’ Security Risk Label - Law360

US judge blocks Pentagon’s Anthropic blacklisting for now | Reuters

A lawyer for Elon Musk has asked a federal judge to review a jury verdict that found him liable for defrauding Twitter investors during his acquisition of the platform, now known as X. The request focuses in part on the jury’s use of the number “$4.20” on the verdict form, which Musk’s attorney argued was an intentional joke that showed bias and suggested the jury was trying to “send a message” rather than decide the case impartially.

Musk’s legal team claims this, along with other alleged trial issues, undermines the integrity of the verdict and warrants further judicial review by Judge Charles Breyer. The verdict, issued on March 20, found Musk liable for certain public statements he made about the prevalence of bots on the platform during the acquisition process, which investors argued harmed the company’s stock price. Potential damages in the case could reach as high as $2.5 billion.

Attorneys for the investors strongly rejected Musk’s arguments, calling them baseless and accusing him of attacking the jury instead of accepting responsibility. They emphasized that the verdict followed substantial evidence presented at trial.

The dispute stems from claims that Musk publicly criticized Twitter to renegotiate or exit the deal, ultimately affecting shareholders who sold at lower prices. While the jury found him liable for some statements, it did not conclude that he engaged in a broader scheme to defraud.

Musk urges judge to review Twitter verdict, accuses jury of ‘mocking’ him | Reuters

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit revived part of an ERISA class action against Wells Fargo and Ocwen Financial Corp., overturning a lower court decision that had dismissed the case before trial. The lawsuit was brought by trustees of a union pension fund, who claim the companies mishandled subprime mortgages tied to the fund’s investments in mortgage-backed securities.

The appellate court found that the trial judge made a key mistake in concluding that none of the underlying mortgages qualified as ERISA plan assets. While the court agreed that some mortgage-backed securities—specifically those structured as notes—are not plan assets, it ruled differently for securities issued as trust certificates. In those instances, the underlying mortgages can count as plan assets because the investment structure gives the pension fund an equity-like interest in the trust.

This distinction matters because ERISA fiduciary duties apply only to plan assets. By recognizing that certain underlying mortgages fall within that definition, the court reopened the possibility that the companies could be held liable for breaching fiduciary duties. The pension fund alleges that the defendants mishandled loans during the 2007–2009 financial crisis, including pushing borrowers into foreclosure, which harmed the fund’s investments.

The court declined to decide whether Ocwen acted as an ERISA fiduciary, noting that the lower court had not addressed that issue. As a result, the case will return to the trial court for further proceedings on the revived claims.

​​2nd Circ. Reopens Mortgage-Backed Securities ERISA Suit - Law360

On March 26, 1979, Egypt and Israel formally signed the Camp David Accords, marking a historic breakthrough in international law and diplomacy. The agreement followed years of conflict between the two nations, including multiple wars that had destabilized the region. Brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the negotiations took place at the presidential retreat in Maryland. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin played central roles in reaching the accord. The resulting treaty established a framework for peace and normalized diplomatic relations between the two countries. It also included provisions for Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, which had been occupied since the Six-Day War. In exchange, Egypt became the first Arab nation to officially recognize Israel. The agreement demonstrated the power of sustained negotiation and third-party mediation in resolving entrenched disputes. It also highlighted the role of international agreements as binding legal instruments between sovereign states. The treaty had lasting implications for Middle Eastern geopolitics and influenced future peace efforts in the region. While controversial at the time, it ultimately reduced the likelihood of further large-scale conflict between the two nations. The accords earned Sadat and Begin the Nobel Peace Prize, underscoring their global significance. The Camp David framework remains a key example of how diplomacy can achieve outcomes that military action cannot.

A California jury in Los Angeles found Meta Platforms and Google liable for harming the mental health of a woman who said she became addicted to their platforms as a child. The jury awarded $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages, effectively doubling the total award. Responsibility was split with Instagram accounting for 70% of the harm and YouTube 30%. Jurors concluded that both companies were negligent in designing their platforms and failed to warn users about potential dangers. They also found that the companies’ conduct involved malice, fraud, or oppression, justifying punitive damages.

This case is the first bellwether trial among thousands of similar lawsuits, making it an important test for future litigation against social media companies. The verdict increases potential legal exposure for these companies, which could face billions in liability nationwide. During trial, the plaintiff’s attorneys argued that platform features like algorithms, autoplay, and infinite scroll were intentionally designed to be addictive. The defense countered that social media addiction is not a recognized condition and pointed to other factors in the plaintiff’s life that could explain her mental health struggles.

Jurors were influenced by a combination of evidence, including internal company materials and testimony from executives and former employees. Some jurors expressed skepticism about testimony from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The relatively modest punitive damages award reflected hesitation about granting a large sum to a single individual. Both companies have stated they disagree with the verdict and plan to appeal. The case could shape how courts evaluate claims about the harmful design of social media platforms.

Jury Doubles Damages Against Meta, Google In LA Bellwether - Law360

US jury verdicts against Meta, Google tee up fight over tech liability shield | Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned a lower court ruling that had held Cox Communications liable for its customers’ music piracy. The justices ruled that simply knowing customers may engage in copyright infringement is not enough to establish liability. Instead, there must be proof that the company intended to promote or encourage the illegal activity. The decision sends the case back to the Fourth Circuit for reconsideration under this clarified standard.

The dispute originated from a 2019 jury verdict that ordered Cox to pay $1 billion to music companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. While the appellate court had upheld part of that ruling, the Supreme Court found that the legal standard for contributory infringement had been applied too broadly. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the Court, emphasized that providing a general service—even with awareness of misuse—does not automatically create liability.

The ruling marks the Court’s first major examination of secondary copyright liability in years and draws on earlier cases like Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios and MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.. A concurring opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed with the outcome but warned that the majority may have limited other ways to hold companies accountable, such as aiding-and-abetting theories.

The decision is seen as a significant win for internet service providers, who argued that broader liability would force them to cut off users based on unproven accusations. At the same time, the music industry expressed concern that the ruling could weaken protections against widespread copyright infringement. The case highlights ongoing tension between protecting intellectual property and maintaining practical limits on intermediary liability.

High Court Reverses Music Piracy Liability Ruling Against Cox - Law360

Ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is facing U.S. criminal charges, including narcoterrorism, in a case that could test a rarely used federal law with a limited track record at trial. Prosecutors allege that Maduro led a conspiracy to traffic cocaine in coordination with groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which the United States has labeled a terrorist organization. Maduro has pleaded not guilty and denies the allegations, claiming they are politically motivated.

The narcoterrorism statute, enacted in 2006, targets drug trafficking tied to terrorism but has produced few successful trial outcomes. Of the small number of convictions obtained, some have later been overturned due to unreliable witness testimony. This history highlights a major challenge for prosecutors: proving that a defendant knowingly connected drug activity to terrorist operations. Legal experts note that this “knowledge” requirement is the most difficult element to establish in court.

Maduro also faces additional charges, including drug trafficking and money laundering, which could still result in severe penalties even if the narcoterrorism count proves difficult. The law carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years, reflecting its seriousness. Prosecutors may rely on testimony from former Venezuelan officials, though the credibility of such cooperating witnesses could be heavily scrutinized.

The case underscores broader tensions in applying U.S. criminal law to international actors and complex geopolitical conduct. It also demonstrates how expansive definitions of terrorism can complicate prosecutions. Ultimately, the outcome may shape how aggressively the U.S. uses narcoterrorism charges in future cases.

Maduro case to test US narcoterrorism law with limited trial success | Reuters

On March 25, 1911, the devastating Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire unfolded in New York City, marking a turning point in American labor law. A fire broke out on the upper floors of a garment factory, trapping workers inside due to locked exit doors and inadequate safety infrastructure. In total, 146 workers lost their lives, many of them young immigrant women who had limited means of escape. The horrifying conditions quickly became public knowledge and sparked widespread outrage. Investigations revealed that existing labor laws were poorly enforced and insufficient to protect workers in rapidly industrializing cities. In response, New York State created the Factory Investigating Commission to examine workplace conditions and recommend reforms. Over the next few years, the commission helped draft more than 30 new laws addressing fire safety, sanitation, and building access. These legal reforms significantly strengthened the regulatory role of the state in protecting workers. The tragedy also energized the labor movement, giving momentum to unions advocating for safer conditions and fair treatment. Courts and lawmakers increasingly recognized that employers had a responsibility to anticipate and prevent workplace hazards. The legacy of the Triangle fire continues to influence occupational safety standards and legal frameworks governing employer liability today.

Baltimore has filed a lawsuit against xAI over its Grok platform, alleging it can create nonconsensual sexualized deepfake images from ordinary photos. The complaint, brought by the city’s mayor and council, claims the technology has been used to generate explicit images of both adults and minors. Officials argue this exposes residents to harassment, emotional harm, and privacy violations. The city also alleges that Grok was marketed as a safe and regulated platform despite lacking meaningful safeguards. According to the filing, users can request the tool to “nudify” images of third parties, including private individuals and children. The complaint estimates that millions of sexualized images were generated shortly after a key feature was launched, including thousands appearing to depict minors. Baltimore claims that even casual users of X may encounter such content without seeking it out.

The lawsuit further argues that users’ personal photos could be altered into explicit deepfakes without their consent or knowledge. Baltimore contends this contradicts the companies’ public claims about preventing harmful and illegal content. The city accuses the defendants, including X and SpaceX, of engaging in deceptive and unfair business practices. It is seeking penalties and a court order requiring changes to the platform. Officials emphasized that deepfakes involving minors can cause long-term psychological harm and are difficult to control once circulated. The case is part of a broader wave of scrutiny, as regulators and private plaintiffs in the U.S. and Europe have also raised concerns about Grok’s capabilities.

Baltimore Takes XAI To Court Over Grok’s Sexual Deepfakes - Law360

A New Mexico jury has ordered Meta Platforms Inc. to pay $375 million after finding the company misled the public about the risks its platforms pose to teenagers. The verdict followed a six-week trial and focused on claims brought by the state’s attorney general. Jurors concluded that Meta engaged in both unfair practices and unconscionable conduct. They calculated damages based on tens of thousands of violations, applying the maximum statutory penalty for each.

The state argued that Meta failed to adequately protect minors from harmful content, including bullying, sexual exploitation, and material related to self-harm. It also claimed the company allowed children under 13 to use its platforms despite official restrictions. According to the plaintiffs, Meta internally recognized these risks but presented a more reassuring picture to the public. Evidence at trial suggested that algorithm-driven content feeds increased compulsive use among teens. The state characterized this design as contributing to addiction and loss of user control.

Meta countered that it has invested heavily in safety measures and employs thousands of people to monitor and remove harmful content. The company maintained that it has been transparent about the challenges of moderating online platforms. Despite these arguments, the jury ruled in favor of the state. Meta has said it will appeal the decision. The case is part of a broader wave of litigation across the country targeting social media companies over alleged harm to young users.

Meta Owes $375M In NM Trial Over Harm To Teens - Law360

Meta ordered to pay $375 million in New Mexico trial over child exploitation, user safety claims | Reuters

A federal judge has expressed skepticism about the Pentagon’s decision to blacklist Anthropic, suggesting it may have been retaliation for the company’s public stance on AI safety. During a hearing in California, the judge indicated the designation appeared intended to “cripple” the company after it raised concerns about military uses of artificial intelligence. Anthropic had refused to allow its AI systems to be used for surveillance or autonomous weapons, citing safety and ethical risks.

The U.S. Department of Defense labeled Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, a designation that can block companies from receiving certain government contracts. Anthropic argues this move exceeded the authority of Pete Hegseth and caused significant financial and reputational harm. The company claims the action was unprecedented and followed a contract dispute with the military. It also alleges it was not given an opportunity to challenge the designation before it was imposed.

In its lawsuit, Anthropic contends the government violated its First Amendment rights by retaliating against its views on AI safety. It also raises a Fifth Amendment due process claim, arguing it was denied fair procedures. Government lawyers responded that the designation was justified because Anthropic’s resistance created potential risks to military systems. They argued the Pentagon must ensure that critical technologies remain secure and reliable.

The judge has not yet issued a final ruling but is considering whether to temporarily block the designation while the case proceeds. The dispute highlights growing tensions between AI companies and the government over military applications of emerging technologies.

US judge says Pentagon’s blacklisting of Anthropic looks like punishment for its views on AI safety | Reuters

Nearly 50 U.S. law firms declined to provide demographic data for a major 2025 diversity survey conducted by the National Association for Law Placement, resulting in a significant drop in reported information. The number of participating firms fell from the previous year, reducing the dataset by about 29% and excluding tens of thousands of lawyers. The organization attributed this shift to growing political and regulatory pressure on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.

Under the current administration, federal agencies have increased scrutiny of law firm hiring and diversity practices. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requested detailed hiring data from major firms, while the Federal Trade Commission warned firms that certain DEI-related practices could raise antitrust concerns. In response, many firms have scaled back public references to DEI or altered their policies. Some have also entered agreements with the administration to avoid penalties tied to their diversity initiatives.

The reduced participation in the survey may limit transparency for law students and others who rely on the data to evaluate employers. It also affects the ability to track diversity trends across the legal profession. While the available data suggests that racial diversity among associates and summer associates declined in 2025, the smaller dataset makes year-to-year comparisons less reliable. Large firms, which typically report higher diversity levels, were disproportionately absent from the data.

Facing DEI pressures, some law firms shield data in latest diversity survey | Reuters

On March 24, 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling millions of gallons of crude oil into the surrounding waters. The disaster quickly became one of the most devastating environmental crises in United States history, contaminating vast stretches of coastline and severely impacting wildlife and local communities. In the immediate aftermath, attention turned not only to cleanup efforts but also to the legal consequences for Exxon. Federal and state authorities pursued claims under environmental statutes, while thousands of private plaintiffs, including fishermen and Alaska Natives, filed civil lawsuits seeking compensation for economic and ecological harm.

The litigation that followed raised complex questions about corporate responsibility and the scope of damages available under maritime law. A central issue was whether punitive damages—intended to punish especially reckless conduct—could be imposed on Exxon for the actions of the ship’s captain. The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, where the Court addressed the proper limits of punitive damages in maritime cases. In a closely watched decision, the Court reduced the punitive damages award, holding that it should be roughly equal to the compensatory damages awarded to plaintiffs.

This ruling had lasting implications for how courts evaluate excessive punitive damages and balance punishment with fairness to defendants. Beyond the courtroom, the spill prompted Congress to pass the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which strengthened federal authority to prevent and respond to oil spills. The Act also expanded liability for companies and created a trust fund to ensure prompt cleanup and compensation. Together, the disaster and its legal aftermath reshaped environmental regulation, corporate accountability, and the development of modern tort law in the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to hear arguments on whether the Trump administration can limit the processing of asylum claims at the U.S.-Mexico border. At the center of the case is a policy known as “metering,” which allowed immigration officials to turn away asylum seekers when border facilities were considered too overwhelmed to handle additional applications. This policy had been used in a more informal way starting in 2016 and was formalized during Trump’s first term, before being rescinded by President Joe Biden in 2021.

The legal dispute focuses on how to interpret federal law requiring that migrants who “arrive in the United States” be allowed to apply for asylum and be inspected by immigration officials. A key question is whether individuals stopped on the Mexican side of the border can be considered to have “arrived” under the statute. A federal appeals court previously ruled that the government must process asylum seekers even if they are waiting at official border crossings, finding that the metering policy violated the law.

The Trump administration disagrees, arguing that “arriving” requires actually entering U.S. territory, not merely approaching it. Officials have indicated they may reinstate the policy if conditions at the border justify doing so. The case, originally brought by an advocacy group, could significantly shape how asylum law is applied at the border.

This dispute highlights a broader pattern of ongoing legal battles over immigration policy before the Supreme Court. The Court has recently sided with Trump in several emergency rulings on related issues, including deportation practices and limits on temporary protected status. Additional cases involving birthright citizenship and protections for certain migrant groups are also scheduled for review.

US Supreme Court to weigh Trump’s power to limit asylum processing | Reuters

The Trump administration has opened two new federal investigations into Harvard University, intensifying its broader scrutiny of elite U.S. schools. The Department of Education’s civil rights office is examining whether Harvard violated federal law by discriminating based on race, color, or national origin. One investigation focuses on whether the university continues to use race in admissions despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision ending affirmative action. The second probe looks into allegations of antisemitism on campus, following reports that both Jewish and Muslim students experienced harassment.

Harvard has denied wrongdoing, stating it complies with the law and is taking steps to address discrimination while defending its institutional independence. These new investigations add to ongoing legal conflict between the federal government and the university. The administration has already filed lawsuits seeking financial penalties and documents related to admissions practices, while negotiations to resolve the disputes have stalled.

The probes are part of a wider campaign by the Trump administration targeting universities over issues such as campus protests, diversity initiatives, and federal funding. Critics argue these actions threaten academic freedom, free speech, and student privacy, while supporters say they are necessary to enforce civil rights laws. Some settlements with other universities, including large financial payments, have raised concerns about setting precedent for costly agreements.

Trump administration launches more probes into Harvard | Reuters

The National Collegiate Athletic Association has filed a lawsuit against DraftKings, accusing the company of improperly using trademarks tied to its college basketball tournament. The dispute centers on well-known phrases such as “March Madness,” “Final Four,” “Elite Eight,” and “Sweet Sixteen,” which the NCAA argues are being used without authorization in DraftKings’ betting promotions. The lawsuit, filed in federal court, seeks to stop DraftKings from using these terms and also requests monetary damages.

The NCAA claims that DraftKings’ marketing falsely suggests a connection or endorsement between the organization and the betting platform, which it says harms its reputation. It also argues that sports betting—especially “prop bets” focused on individual player performance—can threaten the integrity of games and expose student-athletes to harassment or undue pressure. The NCAA has long opposed partnerships with gambling companies for these reasons.

DraftKings disputes the claims, arguing that its use of the terms is descriptive and protected under the Constitution, rather than a violation of trademark law. The company maintains it is simply identifying the events on which users can place bets.

This case comes amid a surge in sports betting, with billions of dollars expected to be wagered on the tournament, and reflects broader tensions between sports organizations and the gambling industry.

NCAA sues to block DraftKings from using ‘March Madness’ trademarks | Reuters

In my Bloomberg column this week, I examine New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to sharply lower the state’s estate tax exemption to $750,000 and the broader issue it raises about how the U.S. tax system treats inherited wealth. I argue that Mamdani is right to highlight a fundamental imbalance: wealth passed down across generations is often taxed more lightly than income earned through work. However, I contend that his current proposal is poorly targeted and risks burdening middle-class households, particularly in a high-cost market like New York, where even modest homes can exceed the proposed threshold.

I explain that estate taxes are one of the few tools available to address intergenerational wealth concentration, but they must be carefully designed to avoid unintended consequences. A major flaw in the proposal is its low exemption level, which could capture asset-rich but cash-poor individuals, forcing difficult financial decisions such as selling homes or small businesses. I also highlight a structural problem in New York’s existing estate tax system—the so-called “cliff”—where slightly exceeding the exemption can trigger taxes on the entire estate, creating sharp and arbitrary increases in liability.

I note that this cliff encourages costly estate planning strategies that do little to benefit the broader economy while allowing those with resources to minimize their tax burden. Expanding the tax without fixing this issue would likely worsen these inefficiencies and inequities. While critics argue that higher estate taxes could drive wealthy residents out of the state, I suggest that the real issue is not whether to tax inherited wealth, but how to do so effectively.

I conclude that a better approach would involve lowering the exemption more moderately, eliminating the estate tax cliff, and focusing higher tax rates on very large estates in the tens of millions. I also suggest policymakers consider special rules for illiquid assets like primary residences and closely held businesses. Overall, I argue that estate taxes can play a meaningful role in reducing dynastic wealth—but only if they are structured in a way that is fair, predictable, and politically sustainable.

Mamdani’s NY Estate Tax Exemption Should Target Dynastic Wealth

On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, marking a transformative moment in American legal and social policy. The statute, widely known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), sought to expand access to health insurance and reduce overall healthcare costs. Central to the law was the individual mandate, which required most Americans to obtain health insurance or face a financial penalty. The ACA also significantly expanded Medicaid eligibility, allowing millions of low-income individuals to gain coverage. Another key provision prohibited insurance companies from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions, reshaping longstanding industry practices.

Almost immediately after its passage, the law faced a wave of legal challenges from states, private parties, and advocacy groups. Critics argued that Congress had exceeded its authority under the Commerce Clause by compelling individuals to engage in commerce. The dispute reached the Supreme Court in the landmark case of NFIB v. Sebelius. In a closely divided decision, the Court held that the individual mandate could not be sustained under the Commerce Clause. However, Chief Justice John Roberts authored the controlling opinion that upheld the mandate as a valid exercise of Congress’s taxing power.

The Court also addressed the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, ruling that Congress could not coerce states into expanding coverage by threatening existing Medicaid funding. This aspect of the decision reinforced limits on federal power under the Spending Clause and preserved a degree of state sovereignty. The ACA continued to generate litigation in subsequent years, including challenges to its subsidy structure and individual mandate enforcement. Despite these legal battles, the law remains a central feature of the U.S. healthcare system. Its passage and judicial review reshaped modern constitutional interpretation, particularly regarding the balance between federal authority and individual liberty.

A California federal jury found that Elon Musk committed securities fraud in connection with his $44 billion attempt to acquire Twitter. After roughly 20 hours of deliberation, the jury concluded that two of Musk’s May 2022 tweets misled investors about the status of the deal and the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on the platform. In particular, his statement that the deal was “temporarily on hold” while awaiting bot data was deemed materially misleading. The jury also found liability for a later tweet suggesting bots made up at least 20% of users and that the deal could not proceed without proof.

However, jurors rejected the broader claim that Musk engaged in an overall scheme to defraud investors. They also declined to find liability for statements he made at a tech conference, determining those remarks were not proven to be fraudulent. The class of affected investors included those who traded Twitter stock or related options between May and October 2022 and claimed they suffered losses due to artificially depressed prices. While the jury did not calculate a final damages figure, plaintiffs’ counsel estimated potential damages at about $2.6 billion.

The verdict form instead required jurors to assess damages across 98 separate trading days, meaning total compensation will depend on individual trading activity. Plaintiffs’ attorneys characterized the decision as a win for market integrity, emphasizing that even high-profile figures must comply with securities laws. Musk’s legal team, by contrast, downplayed the outcome and indicated plans to appeal. The case featured testimony from Twitter executives, deal advisers, and co-founder Jack Dorsey, as well as disputes over whether Twitter accurately reported bot activity.

Jury Says Musk Defrauded Twitter Investors In $44B Buyout - Law360

The White House, under Donald Trump, released a legislative framework urging Congress to override state-level artificial intelligence regulations in favor of a single national standard. The administration argues that a patchwork of state laws creates unnecessary obstacles for innovation and weakens the United States’ ability to compete globally in AI development. At the same time, the proposal preserves certain areas of state authority, including laws addressing fraud, consumer protection, child safety, zoning, and state government use of AI.

The framework also addresses intellectual property concerns, recommending that courts continue to decide whether training AI systems on copyrighted material violates the law. It suggests Congress consider mechanisms that allow creators to collectively negotiate compensation from AI companies without triggering antitrust issues. Additionally, it calls for federal protections against unauthorized AI-generated replicas of individuals’ likeness, voice, or identity, while allowing exceptions for news and satire.

Another key focus is infrastructure, with proposals to prevent rising electricity costs from being passed on to consumers as AI data centers expand. The plan encourages faster federal permitting and supports alternative energy solutions to power AI development. It also includes provisions aimed at preventing government pressure on tech companies to censor speech and ensuring that federal data can be used to train AI systems.

The proposal has drawn mixed reactions. Industry groups and several Republican lawmakers praised the approach as promoting innovation through lighter regulation. In contrast, consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers criticized it as favoring large technology companies while removing important state-level protections. Some Democrats have introduced legislation to block the initiative and preserve states’ authority to regulate AI.

White House Pushes Congress To Override State AI Laws - Law360 UK

The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a case involving Mississippi’s law that allows certain mail-in ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day but arrive up to five business days later. The dispute stems from a challenge brought by Republican groups, including the Republican National Committee, which argue that the law conflicts with federal election statutes. The Trump administration is supporting this challenge, continuing its broader push to restrict mail-in voting.

Mississippi enacted the rule in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with bipartisan support. It applies to limited categories of voters, such as the elderly, disabled individuals, and those temporarily away from home. However, in 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the law likely violates federal law, which it interpreted as requiring ballots to be both cast and received by Election Day. The court concluded that states cannot extend the deadline for receiving ballots beyond that date.

The Supreme Court is now reviewing Mississippi’s appeal of that decision, with potentially broad implications. Roughly 30 states and Washington, D.C. have similar policies that count ballots arriving after Election Day if they were mailed on time. A ruling against Mississippi could therefore force significant changes to voting procedures nationwide and limit the use of mail-in ballots.

The case also reflects ongoing political disputes over election integrity and access to voting. Republicans have raised concerns about the security of mail-in ballots, while critics argue that restrictions could reduce voter participation. The outcome of this case may clarify how federal election law interacts with state authority over voting procedures.

US Supreme Court weighs Republican bid to limit mail-in voting | Reuters

The goal is straightforward: make it easier to see what’s changing, when it’s changing, and why it matters.

If you’re an attorney, journalist, or researcher working in this space, we’d encourage you to take a look. And as always, feedback is not just welcome—it’s essential. The website is FRTracker.app and we look forward to hearing from you or, if all is in order, your finding a way to make use of it in your practice area or work. Thanks so much!

This Day in Legal History: First Official Meeting of the US Republican Party

On March 20, 1854, the newly formed Republican Party held its first official meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin, marking a pivotal moment in American legal and political history. The party emerged in direct response to the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, a controversial law that allowed new territories to decide the legality of slavery through popular sovereignty. This legislative shift effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had previously set geographic limits on slavery’s expansion.

The outrage among anti-slavery activists, lawyers, and former members of existing parties led to a rapid political realignment. Legal debates at the time centered on Congress’s authority over the territories and whether slavery could be restricted as a matter of federal law. These were not abstract questions—they went directly to the structure of the Constitution and the balance of power between federal authority and local control.

The formation of the Republican Party reflected a growing belief that existing legal frameworks had failed to contain the spread of slavery. Within a few years, the party would become a major political force, culminating in the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. By his reelection campaign in 1864, however, Lincoln ran under the banner of the National Union Party, a wartime coalition of Republicans and pro-Union Democrats.

That shift did not necessarily reflect a rejection of the Republican Party itself, but it did signal unease with factionalism and the limits of party identity during a constitutional crisis. The rebranding was a strategic and legal-political move: to broaden support for the Union, stabilize governance, and frame the election as a referendum on national survival rather than partisan ideology.

The legal disputes surrounding slavery, territorial governance, and federal authority would ultimately be resolved not just through legislation or court decisions, but through war and constitutional amendment. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution would later eliminate slavery nationwide, fundamentally reshaping American law.

What began as a meeting in a small Wisconsin town became a turning point in the legal history of the United States, illustrating how statutory change can rapidly destabilize existing legal and political orders.

A federal judge in Oregon ruled that the Department of Health and Human Services cannot enforce a policy aimed at restricting gender-affirming care for minors, siding with 21 states and the District of Columbia. The challenged policy, issued by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., declared such care unsafe and ineffective and warned that providers could lose access to Medicare and Medicaid funding. The states argued the policy was unlawful because it bypassed required rulemaking procedures and interfered with their authority to regulate medical practice.

Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai granted summary judgment to the states and rejected the federal government’s attempt to dismiss the case. While the court has not yet issued a full written opinion, it signaled that the policy will be formally invalidated, with further briefing ordered on the scope of relief. The states emphasized that the policy placed healthcare providers in a difficult position by threatening funding while conflicting with state laws that protect access to gender-affirming care.

The federal government argued the policy was merely advisory and not subject to judicial review, but the court was not persuaded. State attorneys general described the ruling as a rejection of federal overreach and an affirmation that such healthcare remains lawful. The decision preserves access to care for transgender minors in the plaintiff states, at least for now.

This case turns in part on whether the HHS policy qualifies as a “final agency action” that must go through notice-and-comment rulemaking under the APA. The states argued that even if labeled as guidance, the policy had real legal consequences—namely, threatening loss of federal funding—making it effectively binding. Courts often look beyond labels to the practical effect of agency actions, and here the judge appeared to agree that the policy could not avoid APA requirements simply by being framed as a statement rather than a formal rule. This issue, central to the dispute, frequently arises in challenges to modern administrative action.

HHS Can’t Block Trans Care Under Kennedy Edict, Court Says - Law360

A coalition of eight states has sued to block Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna, even after the deal received approval from both the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. The states argue the merger would create excessive concentration in local television markets, giving the combined company control over stations reaching roughly 80% of U.S. households. They contend this market power would allow Nexstar to raise prices for cable and satellite providers and reduce competition for broadcast content.

The lawsuit also raises concerns about the impact on local journalism, with state enforcers warning that consolidation could lead to newsroom cuts and less coverage of local issues. DirecTV filed a parallel challenge, similarly arguing that the deal would increase costs, reduce competition, and lead to more frequent service disruptions.

Despite these objections, the FCC approved the merger with conditions, including the divestiture of several stations and commitments related to pricing and local news. Nexstar defended the deal as necessary to sustain local broadcasting and improve its ability to deliver journalism at scale.

The case highlights a growing divide between federal regulators and state enforcers, with states increasingly willing to challenge mergers even after federal clearance. It also reflects broader concerns about consolidation in media markets and its downstream effects on both pricing and the availability of local news.

States Sue To Block $6.2B Tegna Acquisition Despite Feds’ OK - Law360

In this piece I wrote for Forbes, I look at the Netherlands’ decision to outsource the core infrastructure of its value-added tax (VAT) system to the U.S.-based company FAST Enterprises. This is not just a software contract—FAST is responsible for operating, maintaining, and running key components of the Dutch VAT system remotely. Given that VAT generates roughly €1.5 billion per week in revenue, the arrangement creates a situation where a critical stream of government funding depends, at least in part, on a system controlled outside the country.

I explain that this introduces a new kind of risk: technical dependency can quickly become financial dependency. If VAT collection is disrupted for any reason, the government cannot simply pause operations—it must borrow, and markets may react immediately. That turns what appears to be an IT issue into a fiscal and potentially geopolitical one.

The broader argument is that this reflects a deeper shift in how states operate. What looks like routine modernization is actually a trade-off between efficiency and control. By adopting what I describe as “VAT-as-a-service,” the Netherlands has effectively externalized part of its tax infrastructure, raising questions about who ultimately controls a core sovereign function.

I also place this in a geopolitical context, noting that reliance on foreign-operated infrastructure can create indirect leverage, even without any explicit “off switch.” The concern is less about intentional disruption and more about exposure—legal, regulatory, or systemic—that comes with cross-border dependence.

Finally, I argue that this is not just a Dutch issue but a European trend, as governments increasingly rely on private and often non-domestic vendors for critical systems. The key takeaway is that tax infrastructure decisions should be evaluated not just on cost and efficiency, but on sovereignty, jurisdiction, and contingency planning.

Dutch VAT-As-A-Service And The Quiet Outsourcing Of Tax Sovereignty

Apologies for a double dose of me today – I wrote a piece for Yale’s Journal of Regulation Notice & Comment blog examining how regulatory obligations change during notice-and-comment rulemaking. The core argument is that most analyses look at the wrong unit—entire rules—when the real substance of regulation lies in the individual obligations imposed on regulated parties. By breaking rules down into sentence-level commands, the analysis tracks what actually happens to those obligations from proposal to final rule.

The data shows that only about one-third of proposed obligations survive into final rules in a recognizable form, while most are eliminated altogether. Agencies are far more likely to remove obligations than to revise them, suggesting that rulemaking operates less like incremental editing and more like a filtering process. At the same time, final rules frequently introduce entirely new obligations that were not present in the proposal.

When obligations do carry over, their core legal force—whether something is required, prohibited, or permitted—almost never changes. This indicates that survival tends to preserve substance, even as most proposed provisions disappear. The analysis also finds significant variation across agencies, with some making minimal changes and others heavily restructuring their rules.

The findings challenge the assumption that proposed rules are reliable previews of final regulatory requirements. Instead, they suggest that stakeholders may be commenting on provisions that are unlikely to survive, while final rules may include new obligations that were never clearly proposed. This reframes notice-and-comment as a process that selects and reshapes regulatory commands, rather than simply refining them.

The key legal insight is that the notice-and-comment process may not function primarily as iterative refinement, but as a filtering system that determines which obligations survive into binding law. This matters because administrative law doctrine assumes that public comments help shape final rules through feedback on proposed text. If most obligations are discarded rather than revised, it raises questions about whether the process provides meaningful notice of what will ultimately bind regulated parties. That directly challenges conventional assumptions about how rulemaking works in practice.

Only One-Third of Proposed Regulatory Obligations Survive to the Final Rule, by Andrew Leahey - Yale Journal on Regulation

On March 19, 1962, Congress approved a constitutional amendment to abolish the poll tax in federal elections, a practice that had long been used to suppress voter participation. The poll tax required citizens to pay a fee before casting a ballot, which disproportionately affected low-income individuals, especially African Americans in the South. By removing this financial barrier, Congress took a clear step toward expanding access to the democratic process. The amendment was later ratified as the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, cementing the principle that voting should not depend on one’s ability to pay. This change reflected the growing influence of the civil rights movement, which pushed lawmakers to confront systemic inequality in voting laws. It also signaled a broader shift toward recognizing voting as a fundamental right rather than a conditional privilege.

The legal reasoning behind abolishing the poll tax focused on fairness and equal protection, emphasizing that economic status should not determine political participation. Courts and lawmakers increasingly viewed such barriers as incompatible with democratic ideals. This moment in legal history continues to shape debates about what constitutes an undue burden on voters.

Today, discussions around the SAVE Act, which proposes strict voter identification requirements, have raised similar questions about access and eligibility. Supporters argue that identification rules protect election integrity, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Critics warn that they may disproportionately affect certain groups, including those with limited access to documentation. The comparison to the poll tax debate lies in how both policies raise concerns about whether procedural requirements might exclude eligible voters. While the mechanisms differ—one being a direct financial cost and the other an administrative requirement—the underlying legal tension remains similar. Lawmakers and courts must again weigh the balance between safeguarding elections and ensuring that access to voting remains broad and equitable.

The Third Circuit heard arguments in a high-stakes appeal involving a $1.6 billion False Claims Act (FCA) verdict against Johnson & Johnson and broader challenges to the law’s constitutionality. The FCA is a federal law that allows the government to pursue individuals or companies that defraud federal programs. It also lets private whistleblowers file lawsuits on the government’s behalf and share in any financial recovery.

Judges appeared reluctant to dismantle the FCA’s whistleblower, or qui tam, mechanism, though they engaged seriously with arguments questioning its validity. Much of the discussion focused on whether private individuals wield too much power by bringing fraud claims on behalf of the government. An attorney for business groups argued that this structure improperly grants executive authority to non-government actors, while judges pushed back by pointing to the long historical use of such actions.

A central issue in the case was “materiality,” meaning whether the alleged misconduct actually influenced the government’s decision to pay claims. J&J argued there was no proof that its actions affected payment decisions, but the judges suggested that such determinations are typically left to juries. They also questioned whether J&J had properly preserved certain legal arguments for appeal. The Department of Justice disputed J&J’s interpretation of its position, emphasizing that the evidence could still support liability under the FCA.

The panel also examined the role of evidence and jury instructions, particularly how jurors were told to evaluate whether improper marketing led to false claims. J&J criticized the “substantial factor” standard used at trial, arguing it was unclear and insufficient. In response, the whistleblowers’ counsel maintained that J&J was seeking a stricter standard than the law requires. Judges appeared to wrestle with whether the instructions properly guided the jury without overcomplicating the burden of proof.

Overall, the arguments revealed judicial skepticism toward sweeping constitutional attacks on the FCA, alongside concern about how the specific trial was conducted. The case highlights ongoing legal debates over the balance between encouraging whistleblowers and ensuring fair limits on liability.

Key Details As 3rd Circ. Ponders FCA’s Fate, $1.6B J&J Fine - Law360

Music company BMG has sued AI firm Anthropic, alleging it used copyrighted song lyrics from artists like Bruno Mars, the Rolling Stones, and Ariana Grande to train its Claude chatbot without permission. The lawsuit claims this involved copying hundreds of protected works, possibly sourced from unauthorized platforms, and seeks significant damages under U.S. copyright law.

The case is part of a broader wave of lawsuits against AI companies over training data practices, including a similar ongoing suit by other music publishers and a prior $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic reached with authors. While BMG argues this use is unlawful infringement, AI companies like Anthropic maintain that training models on such material qualifies as fair use because it transforms the content.

BMG sues Anthropic for using Bruno Mars, Rolling Stones lyrics in AI training | Reuters

A Second Circuit judge sharply questioned OpenAI’s position in a copyright dispute with Raw Story, expressing frustration that the company’s lawyer could not explain whether its AI system copied articles or removed copyright management information (CMI). The judge suggested that this lack of clarity weakened OpenAI’s argument, especially at an early stage without full discovery.

OpenAI argued the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs failed to show concrete harm or properly allege infringement, emphasizing that removing CMI alone does not violate a protected property right. The company also claimed the complaint relied too heavily on speculation rather than specific facts about how its systems operate. However, the judges appeared skeptical, noting that factual questions about copying and CMI removal might need further development.

Raw Story countered that copying articles without CMI is itself a recognized legal injury and fits within longstanding copyright protections. The publishers also argued that OpenAI knowingly removed identifying information in a way that could enable infringement, which is prohibited under the DMCA. The panel ultimately took the case under advisement, leaving unresolved key questions about how copyright law applies to AI systems.

2nd Circ. Judge Unimpressed By OpenAI’s IP Suit Stance - Law360

An immigration judge has ended the asylum claims of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his family after their detention during a large immigration operation in Minnesota. Liam and his father were taken into custody in January and held for about 10 days in a Texas facility before being released. Public attention grew after a widely shared image showed the child standing outside his home while federal agents were nearby.

The ruling was issued by U.S. Immigration Judge John Burns, and the family’s attorney has said they will appeal the decision, a process that could take a long time. Community members, including Liam’s school district, expressed sadness and concern over the outcome while acknowledging that the legal process is ongoing.

The case is tied to “Operation Metro Surge,” a large-scale enforcement effort that brought thousands of immigration agents to Minnesota. The operation led to widespread detentions and significant backlash, especially after two U.S. citizens were fatally shot during related protests or observations. The federal government later ended the operation, but local communities continue to deal with its emotional and economic effects.

Advocates and officials have emphasized the broader human impact of the raid, particularly on children and families whose lives were disrupted. Liam’s case has become a focal point in discussions about immigration enforcement and its consequences.

Judge ends asylum claim of Minnesotan boy detained by ICE, report says | Reuters

On March 18, 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in Missouri v. Holland, clarifying the scope of federal treaty power. The case arose when the state of Missouri challenged a federal statute that implemented a treaty between the United States and Great Britain to protect migratory birds. Missouri argued that the regulation of wildlife fell within the state’s reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment. The state maintained that the federal government could not use a treaty to expand its authority into areas traditionally controlled by the states.

The Supreme Court rejected this argument and upheld the federal law. Writing for the Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.emphasized that the Constitution grants the federal government the power to make treaties, and that these treaties can address matters of national and international concern. He reasoned that migratory birds, by their nature, cross state and national boundaries, making them an appropriate subject for international agreement. The Court concluded that when a treaty is validly made, Congress may pass laws necessary to implement it, even if those laws regulate areas otherwise left to the states.

This decision reinforced the supremacy of federal treaties over conflicting state laws under the Supremacy Clause. It also signaled a broader understanding of federal power in foreign affairs, particularly when international cooperation is required. The ruling has had lasting implications for the balance between state and federal authority, especially in cases involving environmental regulation and international commitments.

A California federal jury is weighing whether Elon Musk committed securities fraud through his public statements about Twitter during his 2022 acquisition attempt. Investors claim Musk deliberately made misleading statements about the level of spam and fake accounts to drive down Twitter’s stock price after agreeing to buy the company. According to their lawyers, these statements were part of a calculated plan to gain leverage to renegotiate or exit the $44 billion deal. They argue Musk had no evidence for his claims and point to internal communications suggesting he was already considering a lower price. The investors also emphasize that Musk had waived due diligence rights, making his public claim that the deal was “on hold” misleading.

Musk’s legal team counters that there is no proof of fraud and that expressing concerns about bots does not amount to illegal conduct. They argue Musk genuinely believed Twitter’s spam numbers were inaccurate and was frustrated by the company’s refusal to provide data to verify them. His lawyer also stressed that motive alone is not enough to establish fraudulent intent. Additionally, Musk ultimately declined an opportunity to renegotiate the deal at a lower price, which his attorneys say undermines the claim of a scheme. They also note that Musk reaffirmed his commitment to the deal shortly after his controversial tweet, which they argue is inconsistent with an effort to manipulate the market.

The case centers on whether Musk’s statements were intentionally deceptive or simply careless. Investors allege they suffered losses after Twitter’s stock dropped following Musk’s tweets. The jury must now decide whether his conduct meets the legal standard for securities fraud.

Were Musk’s Tweets ‘Deliberate’ Or ‘Stupid’? Jury To Decide - Law360

The Trump administration is defending the Pentagon’s decision to blacklist Anthropic in a federal court dispute, arguing the move was lawful and tied to national security concerns. The designation, made by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, labeled the company a supply chain risk after it refused to remove safeguards limiting the use of its AI for autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance.

Government lawyers claim Anthropic is unlikely to succeed in its lawsuit, rejecting the company’s argument that the action violated its First Amendment rights. They argue the dispute is about conduct—specifically contract and policy disagreements—not protected speech. According to the administration, no restrictions were placed on Anthropic’s ability to express its views, only on its eligibility for government contracts.

Anthropic has challenged the designation in court, calling it unlawful and harmful to its business, and is seeking to block the decision while the case proceeds. The company maintains that its safety restrictions reflect responsible AI practices and do not threaten national security. It also argues that the government failed to follow proper procedures and violated its due process rights.

The blacklisting, supported by Donald Trump, could limit Anthropic’s access to defense contracts and potentially lead to significant financial losses. The dispute follows failed negotiations between the company and the Pentagon over acceptable uses of its technology. Anthropic is pursuing a separate legal challenge in another court to contest a broader designation that could expand the ban across the federal government.

Trump administration defends Anthropic blacklisting in US court | Reuters

The Lycra Company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Texas as part of a plan to reduce about $1.2 billion in debt and transfer ownership to its senior lenders. A bankruptcy judge granted interim approval for the company to access $50 million in debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing, rejecting objections from a lower-level creditor who argued the lenders had too much control over the restructuring.

The company entered bankruptcy with roughly $1.5 billion in total debt and a prearranged plan supported by most major lenders, who have agreed to vote in favor of the restructuring. The plan gives Lycra 45 days to confirm its reorganization and would convert different layers of debt into equity or warrants in the reorganized company.

One creditor, Castleknight Master Fund, objected, claiming the same lenders were playing multiple roles—DIP financiers, major creditors, and future owners—giving them an unfair advantage. The court, however, found this overlap common in large restructurings and allowed the financing to proceed, noting objections can be raised again later.

Lycra’s financial struggles stem from declining earnings, increased competition, inflation, and prior debt tied to earlier ownership changes. The company has also faced legal risks related to past transactions. Despite these issues, Lycra continues to operate globally, selling its products in more than 80 countries.

Spandex Maker Lycra Files Ch. 11 To Slash $1.2B Debt - Law360

On March 17, 1958, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a landmark decision in NAACP v. Alabama, a case that reshaped constitutional protections for civil rights organizations. The dispute arose when the state of Alabama sought to compel the NAACP to disclose its membership lists as part of a legal proceeding. At the time, the NAACP was deeply involved in challenging segregation laws across the South, making its members vulnerable to retaliation and harassment. Alabama argued that it had the authority to demand these records under its corporate registration laws. The NAACP refused, asserting that disclosure would violate its members’ constitutional rights.

The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, where the central question became whether forced disclosure infringed on the freedom of association. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice John Marshall Harlan II emphasized that privacy in group membership was essential to preserving lawful association. The Court held that Alabama’s demand posed a substantial restraint on the ability of individuals to organize and advocate collectively. It recognized that exposure of members’ identities could lead to economic reprisal, loss of employment, and even physical danger.

Importantly, the Court grounded its reasoning in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, incorporating First Amendment protections against state action. This marked a significant step in expanding constitutional safeguards for civil liberties at the state level. The ruling made clear that states could not use indirect means to suppress lawful advocacy groups. It also strengthened the legal foundation for future civil rights litigation during a critical period in American history.

The decision in NAACP v. Alabama remains a cornerstone of First Amendment jurisprudence. It continues to influence cases involving anonymity, privacy, and the right to organize without undue government interference.

A federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked the federal government’s revised childhood vaccine schedule and paused related policy actions, finding the changes likely unlawful. The court concluded that the Department of Health and Human Services departed from longstanding, science-based procedures when issuing the new recommendations. Central to the ruling was the government’s apparent sidestepping of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a key expert body that has historically guided vaccine policy.

The judge rejected the argument that the health secretary has near-total discretion over vaccine decisions, emphasizing that such authority is still constrained by statutory and procedural requirements. He underscored that courts can review agency actions, particularly when they appear to ignore scientific standards or established processes. The opinion was especially critical of the administration’s position that its vaccine guidance was not subject to judicial review, noting that the recommendations carry real legal and practical consequences.

The revised schedule itself had scaled back universal recommendations for several vaccines, instead limiting them to certain groups or requiring consultation with a doctor. The court found that these changes could significantly affect liability protections for healthcare providers and insurance coverage obligations.

The ruling also raised concerns about potential violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act after the abrupt dismissal and replacement of ACIP members, many of whom reportedly lacked relevant expertise. While the court did not cancel upcoming committee meetings, it halted the appointments of new members and froze future decisions tied to the disputed process.

The decision represents a significant check on the administration’s approach to public health policymaking, reinforcing that agencies must follow established legal frameworks and rely on qualified expertise. An appeal is expected, and related litigation is already pending in other courts.

HHS’ Childhood Vaccine Policy Changes Put On Ice - Law360

US judge upends Kennedy’s overhaul of childhood vaccine policies | Reuters

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., is set to hear arguments over whether to halt construction of a $400 million ballroom project at the White House. The dispute centers on a lawsuit brought by preservationists, who argue that the project—built on the site of the demolished East Wing—was launched without proper legal authorization. They are seeking a preliminary injunction to stop construction while the case proceeds.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation claims that neither the president nor the National Park Service has the authority to approve such a major structural change without explicit approval from Congress. The group argues that past practice shows Congress typically authorizes significant developments on federal land in Washington.

The Trump administration, however, maintains that the project is lawful and does not require specific congressional approval. Government lawyers argue that the ballroom will improve infrastructure, enhance security, and help preserve the main White House building by shifting large events elsewhere. They also contend that the plaintiffs have not met the high legal standard required for an injunction.

A federal judge previously denied an earlier request to stop construction, finding the initial legal arguments insufficient. The new hearing will consider revised claims focused more directly on presidential authority and statutory limits.

At this stage, the case turns on whether the plaintiffs can show both a likelihood of success on the merits and that immediate harm justifies blocking the project before a final decision is reached.

US judge to weigh new bid to halt Trump’s $400 million ballroom project | Reuters

You may have heard about the SAVE America Act, and given the attention it’s received, it’s helpful to clearly lay out what the bill actually does.

The SAVE America Act would make significant changes to federal voter registration and election procedures, primarily by requiring proof of U.S. citizenship. The bill amends the National Voter Registration Act to require applicants to present documentary evidence—such as a passport, birth certificate, or certain government-issued identification—before registering to vote in federal elections. It also requires that this proof generally be provided in person, even when registering by mail, though states may create alternative processes for applicants who cannot readily produce documentation.

The legislation directs states to verify citizenship status during voter registration and to establish systems for identifying and removing non-citizens from voter rolls. It encourages the use of federal and state databases, including systems maintained by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration, to confirm eligibility. Federal agencies are required to respond quickly to state requests for citizenship verification and to share relevant data across agencies.

The bill further mandates that voters present a qualifying photo ID when casting a ballot in federal elections. For in-person voting, the ID must be shown at the polling place, while absentee voters must submit copies of identification with their ballots. Acceptable IDs must generally include both a photograph and an indication of U.S. citizenship, though supplemental documentation may be used in some cases.

The bill would effectively bring all the convenience and ease of a trip to the DMV to the ballot box.

In addition, the legislation expands enforcement mechanisms. It creates potential criminal liability for election officials who knowingly register individuals without proof of citizenship and allows private lawsuits against officials who fail to enforce the requirements. It also requires states to take ongoing steps to ensure that only eligible citizens remain registered, including removing individuals identified as non-citizens.

The bill includes provisions addressing discrepancies in documentation and requires election officials to document the basis for registering individuals who lack standard proof. It also preserves the use of provisional ballots, allowing individuals to vote while their eligibility is later verified. Overall, the measure shifts the federal framework toward stricter documentation, verification, and enforcement standards tied to voter eligibility in federal elections.

What is in Trump’s bill that requires proof of citizenship to vote? | Reuters

Text - H.R.7296 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): SAVE America Act

This week, my Bloomberg Tax column examines California’s recent crackdown on luxury vehicles registered in Montana to avoid sales tax. The enforcement actions reveal a deeper flaw in California’s system: it relies heavily on formal delivery paperwork rather than the actual use of the vehicle. Buyers have been able to exploit this by creating the appearance of out-of-state delivery through inexpensive documentation, even when the cars never leave California. Prosecutors allege that some schemes were remarkably simple, involving little more than fabricated shipping records.

The current rule allows residents to avoid sales tax if a vehicle is delivered and kept out of state for 12 months, a policy originally designed for legitimate interstate purchases. However, it has unintentionally created a market for services that help buyers simulate compliance. Entity formation companies, transporters, and storage providers all play a role in generating paperwork that masks in-state use. This has made tax avoidance both accessible and predictable.

California has responded with audits, criminal prosecutions, and surveillance tools like license plate readers, but these efforts address symptoms rather than the underlying design problem. A system built on easily manipulated documentation invites abuse. Instead, the column argues that California should adopt a “primary-use” rule, taxing vehicles based on where they are actually driven and stored.

Other states already apply similar approaches to aircraft, using objective data like flight logs to determine tax liability. A comparable framework for cars could rely on existing data sources such as toll records, insurance information, and registration patterns. This would allow enforcement to focus on real-world usage rather than paper compliance.

Clear thresholds and penalties could further deter avoidance by making enforcement more predictable. While some buyers might still structure legitimate out-of-state ownership, the system would no longer reward purely formalistic schemes. The broader point is that tax policy should reflect economic reality, not paperwork.

California’s Car Sales Tax Crackdown Calls for Primary-Use Rule

On March 16, 1995, Mississippi took an unusual step in American constitutional history by formally ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime, had already become part of the Constitution in 1865 after the required number of states approved it. Mississippi, however, had originally rejected the amendment during the Reconstruction era. For more than a century afterward, the state never revisited the issue, leaving it as one of the few states that had not formally ratified the amendment.

Although Mississippi’s approval in 1995 had no legal effect on the validity of the amendment, it carried symbolic weight. Lawmakers described the vote as an effort to acknowledge and correct a lingering historical omission. The action highlighted how the constitutional amendment process operates: once three-fourths of the states ratify an amendment, it becomes law for the entire nation, regardless of whether every state agrees. In other words, Mississippi had been bound by the Thirteenth Amendment for 130 years before its legislature finally endorsed it.

The event also reflected a broader trend in which states reconsider and symbolically ratify long-standing constitutional amendments they once opposed. Such actions often serve educational or reconciliatory purposes rather than legal ones. Mississippi’s vote functioned as a public acknowledgment of the amendment’s moral and constitutional importance. The late ratification became a reminder that constitutional history does not always end when an amendment is adopted. Instead, the meaning and recognition of constitutional change can continue to evolve long after the law itself is settled.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to strengthen enforcement of “Made in America” labeling, particularly for products sold online. The order instructs the FTC to prioritize cases against companies that falsely claim their goods are made in the United States. According to the administration, many online sellers market products as American-made even when significant parts or manufacturing occur overseas. The order emphasizes that consumers should be able to rely on clear and accurate country-of-origin claims when shopping.

To address the issue, the FTC has been directed to consider new regulations requiring online retailers to verify that products advertised as “Made in the USA” actually meet legal standards. If sellers fail to confirm those claims, the order states the conduct could violate the Federal Trade Commission Act. Federal agencies responsible for country-of-origin labeling are also instructed to coordinate with the FTC to ensure consistent guidance for businesses. In addition, agencies involved in federal procurement must review origin claims for goods purchased through government contracts. Vendors that misrepresent product origins could be referred to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The order comes amid growing litigation over allegedly misleading “Made in America” marketing. Several companies have faced lawsuits claiming their branding implies domestic production even when manufacturing occurs abroad. Examples include disputes involving a coffee company accused of implying its products were American-made and lawsuits challenging origin claims for household products like aluminum foil and kitchenware. These cases highlight the legal risks companies face when marketing goods as domestically produced without meeting regulatory standards.

Trump Executive Order Targets ‘Made In America’ Labeling - Law360

U.S. prosecutors are defending a decision to block Venezuelan government funds from being used to pay for the legal defense of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in his U.S. criminal case. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are facing federal charges in New York related to drug trafficking and have pleaded not guilty while awaiting trial in custody.

Maduro’s lawyer asked a federal judge to dismiss the indictment, arguing that the U.S. Treasury Department improperly revoked an earlier sanctions exemption that would have allowed the Venezuelan government to cover his legal fees. According to the defense, Venezuelan law and tradition require the state to pay for the president’s legal expenses, and blocking those funds interferes with Maduro’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

Federal prosecutors responded that the exemption allowing government funds was granted by mistake and later corrected. They argued that Maduro should not benefit from Venezuelan state money because the United States has not recognized him as the legitimate leader of Venezuela for years. Prosecutors also emphasized that he and Flores remain free to use their personal funds to hire lawyers.

The dispute highlights how U.S. sanctions and foreign policy can intersect with criminal proceedings in American courts. A federal judge in Manhattan is expected to address the legal funding issue during an upcoming court hearing.

US prosecutors defend block on Venezuelan state funds for Maduro’s defense | Reuters

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., blocked two grand jury subpoenas connected to a Justice Department investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The subpoenas sought records about a costly renovation of the Federal Reserve’s headquarters and Powell’s testimony to Congress about the project. Prosecutors had opened the investigation to examine whether Powell misled lawmakers regarding the renovation’s rising price tag.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg granted the Federal Reserve Board’s request to quash the subpoenas, concluding that prosecutors issued them for an improper purpose. The judge determined there was strong evidence the investigation was intended to pressure or harass Powell rather than uncover a legitimate crime. In his ruling, Boasberg noted repeated public attacks on Powell by President Donald Trump and other officials over the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate policies. The court found no meaningful evidence that Powell had committed fraud or lied to Congress. The judge also pointed out that construction projects often exceed budgets and that the Fed’s inspector general had already reviewed the renovation without identifying wrongdoing.

The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia criticized the decision and announced plans to appeal, arguing that the ruling undermines the grand jury’s ability to investigate potential crimes. Meanwhile, the decision has intensified political debate over the independence of the Federal Reserve. Some lawmakers argue the investigation threatens that independence, while others say the probe should continue. The dispute also complicates efforts to confirm a potential successor to Powell as Federal Reserve chair, whose term is set to expire soon.

DC Judge Blocks Subpoenas Targeting Fed’s Powell - Law360

The Trump administration is opposing the federal judiciary’s effort to gain independent control over its courthouse buildings, arguing that the judicial branch lacks the expertise to manage large real estate operations. The dispute centers on whether responsibility for courthouse construction, maintenance, and leasing should remain with the General Services Administration (GSA), which has long managed federal buildings for the government.

In a letter to the judiciary, GSA Administrator Edward Forst criticized the proposal and warned that giving the courts full authority over their facilities could lead to increased spending and reduced oversight of taxpayer funds. He cited data showing that while the judiciary accounts for a significant share of rent paid to the GSA, courthouse facilities represent an even larger share of federal spending on major building repairs and alterations. Forst said the agency will review courthouse repair and maintenance requests to ensure funds are used appropriately.

Judicial officials, however, argue that the current system has left courthouses in poor condition. The Judicial Conference recently asked Congress to allow the judiciary to take over management of certain courthouse properties, citing an estimated $8.3 billion backlog in needed repairs. Court officials say the proposal would begin with a limited transition involving only a small number of districts and major courthouse buildings.

The disagreement comes amid broader tensions between the judiciary and the Trump administration. Court leaders have also raised concerns that recent government reorganization and staffing cuts at the GSA have slowed security improvements and building maintenance at courthouses nationwide.

Trump administration calls judiciary ‘ill-equipped’ to manage its courthouses | Reuters

On March 13, 1925, the Tennessee General Assembly approved the Butler Act, a statute that made it unlawful for public school teachers to present any theory that denied the biblical account of human creation. The law specifically prohibited teaching that humans evolved from lower forms of life, reflecting growing tensions between scientific ideas and religious beliefs in early twentieth-century America. Tennessee lawmakers framed the statute as a way to protect traditional moral values in public education. Critics, however, immediately argued that the law restricted academic freedom and undermined the teaching of modern science.

The controversy quickly escalated when a young teacher, John T. Scopes, agreed to challenge the statute. Scopes was charged with violating the Butler Act after he allowed evolution to be discussed in his classroom. His prosecution led to the famous 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. The trial drew national attention and featured two of the era’s most prominent legal figures: Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution. Their courtroom clash turned the case into a dramatic public debate over science, religion, and the role of government in shaping school curricula.

Although Scopes was ultimately convicted and fined $100, the trial exposed deep cultural divisions within the United States. Media coverage portrayed the proceedings as a symbolic struggle between modern scientific thinking and religious fundamentalism. Over time, the Butler Act came to be seen by many as an example of government overreach into education and intellectual inquiry. Tennessee formally repealed the statute in 1967, decades after the trial had become a lasting symbol of the conflict between science and law.

Federal Circuit Judge Pauline Newman has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review her ongoing challenge to a suspension imposed by her fellow judges. In a petition filed Thursday, the 98-year-old judge argues that the D.C. Circuit wrongly ruled that courts cannot review many challenges to judicial suspension orders under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act. Newman contends that the statute should allow review when suspension decisions violate the law or the Constitution. Her petition claims the lower court misinterpreted the law by blocking challenges to actions that exceed the authority granted under the statute. Newman argues that her suspension effectively removes her from the bench without impeachment, which she says undermines constitutional protections for judicial independence and lifetime tenure.

The Federal Circuit’s judicial council first suspended Newman in 2023 after concerns that potential mental or physical health issues made her unable to perform judicial duties. The suspension followed her refusal to undergo medical evaluations requested by her colleagues and was characterized as serious misconduct. Although the suspension was initially set for one year, it has been renewed twice. Newman appealed through the internal judicial review process, but a national committee of judges upheld the suspension in 2024. She also challenged the suspension in federal court, arguing that parts of the judicial discipline law are unconstitutional. Both a district court and the D.C. Circuit dismissed the case, relying on a statutory provision stating that disciplinary orders under the act are final and not subject to judicial review. Newman now asks the Supreme Court to clarify whether courts may still review suspension orders that allegedly exceed legal or constitutional limits.

Judge Newman Takes Suspension Battle To Supreme Court - Law360

98-year-old judge asks US Supreme Court to hear case over her suspension | Reuters

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has begun the process of developing regulations for prediction markets, issuing an advance notice of proposed rulemaking and asking the public for input on how the industry should be governed. The agency said the move is intended to support innovation while ensuring prediction markets operate within the framework of the Commodity Exchange Act. Interest in regulation has grown as more companies apply to register as designated contract markets, with many applications coming from prediction market platforms. These platforms allow users to trade on the outcomes of events such as sports games, elections, and entertainment awards.

The CFTC is seeking feedback on several issues, including whether margin trading should be allowed, what types of event contracts might be harmful to the public interest, and whether individuals with insider knowledge should be restricted from trading on certain outcomes. At the same time, the agency released staff guidance reminding platforms to avoid contracts that could be easily manipulated, such as those tied to specific player injuries or actions by a single referee. The guidance also explains that platforms can list new contracts through a self-certification process, although the CFTC can intervene if it believes a contract violates the law.

The regulatory effort comes amid ongoing legal disputes about who has authority over prediction markets. The CFTC maintains that it has exclusive jurisdiction, while several states have attempted to regulate or restrict these platforms under gambling laws. Meanwhile, members of Congress have introduced legislation that would ban certain types of event contracts, including those related to violence or death, and strengthen rules against insider trading on prediction markets.

CFTC Proposes Prediction Markets Rule - Law360

CFTC Seeks Public Comment on Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Relating to Prediction Markets

The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit against California seeking to block the state’s Advanced Clean Cars I (ACC I) regulations, arguing that the rules unlawfully interfere with federal authority over vehicle fuel economy standards. The lawsuit, brought by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Transportation, targets California rules adopted in 2012 that require automakers to sell increasing numbers of low-emission and zero-emission vehicles. Federal officials claim the regulations effectively force manufacturers to meet stricter nationwide standards and function as a quota system for electric vehicles.

According to the complaint, California cannot impose its own limits on vehicle emissions because the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act gives the federal government authority to set fuel-economy standards through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The administration argues that California’s requirements could increase vehicle prices, reduce consumer choice, and disrupt the national auto market. Federal officials also say Congress revoked certain Clean Air Act waivers in 2025 that previously allowed California to enforce some emissions rules.

California leaders strongly dispute the lawsuit and say the state is defending policies designed to reduce pollution and expand access to cleaner vehicles. State officials argue the federal government is attempting to undermine California’s environmental regulations and its efforts to lead the transition to cleaner transportation. The lawsuit is part of a broader series of legal disputes between the federal government and California over vehicle emissions standards and electric-vehicle mandates.

Feds Sue To Stop California’s ‘Illegal’ EV Regulations - Law360

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) told a federal court that it is making progress on a system to refund about $166 billion in tariffs that were ruled unlawful. According to a court filing, the agency’s four-part refund system is between 40% and 80% complete, with the review portion the most developed and the mass-processing component the least finished. The system will include an online portal where importers and brokers can submit claims for reimbursement.

The filing was submitted to the U.S. Court of International Trade in response to an order from a judge directing the government to begin refunding tariffs after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down most of the tariffs in February. The Court’s decision invalidated tariffs collected since February 2024 but did not explain how refunds should be handled. CBP previously suggested building a new system to process claims rather than using its existing process, and officials say the new portal could begin accepting applications as soon as mid-April.

More than 330,000 importers paid the tariffs on roughly 53 million shipments, though only about 21,000 importers are currently registered to receive refunds. Refunds will go only to the companies that originally paid the tariffs, and there is no legal requirement that businesses pass the money on to consumers. Some companies, including FedEx, have said they will reimburse customers, while Costco indicated it may lower prices using the refunded funds. Meanwhile, new legal disputes are emerging as businesses and states challenge additional tariffs imposed after the Supreme Court ruling.

US customs agency says building system for tariff refunds is 40% to 80% complete | Reuters

On March 11, 1861, delegates of the newly formed Confederate States adopted the Constitution of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama. The document closely resembled the United States Constitution in structure, language, and institutional design, reflecting the Confederacy’s claim that it was preserving the original constitutional order rather than rebelling against it. But the similarities masked a fundamental and disturbing difference: the Confederate Constitution explicitly protected and entrenched slavery. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, which used indirect language around the institution, the Confederate document openly required that slavery be recognized and protected in Confederate territories. It also prohibited any law impairing the right of property in enslaved people, making the protection of slavery a central constitutional commitment rather than a political compromise.

The constitution also attempted to limit certain federal powers, reflecting long-standing Southern arguments about states’ rights and suspicion of centralized authority. For example, it restricted tariffs and internal improvements, policies many Southern leaders believed favored Northern industrial interests. The document also changed the structure of the executive branch by providing for a single six-year presidential term instead of allowing reelection. These provisions were intended to prevent what Confederate leaders viewed as excessive federal power or political manipulation. Despite these structural adjustments, the document largely replicated the American constitutional framework while placing slavery at its legal core.

The legal significance of the Confederate Constitution lies in how clearly it reveals the central constitutional dispute of the Civil War era. While defenders of the Confederacy often framed secession as a fight over federalism or states’ rights, the constitutional text itself makes clear that preserving slavery was a primary objective. By embedding the protection of slavery directly into its governing charter, the Confederacy transformed the defense of human bondage into a foundational legal principle. The document therefore stands as a stark example of how constitutional law can be used not only to secure liberty, but also to entrench injustice.

Federal judicial officials announced plans to speed up development of a new electronic case management system after a major cyber breach exposed weaknesses in the courts’ existing technology. The decision was discussed during a closed meeting of the Judicial Conference, the federal judiciary’s main policymaking body, held at the U.S. Supreme Court building. Judge Michael Scudder, who leads the conference’s information technology committee, said recent cyber intrusions made it clear that modernization can no longer proceed at its previous pace. The breach, disclosed in July 2025, raised concerns that foreign actors may have accessed sensitive materials, including sealed files and information about confidential informants. The incident followed an earlier cybersecurity breach involving the federal courts in 2020.

In response, the judiciary plans to begin testing components of the upgraded system in six courts during 2026. Officials hope to begin rolling out parts of the new system to federal district courts nationwide next year. Appellate and bankruptcy courts would receive updates afterward. Judiciary leaders now expect that most of the modernization work could be completed within two to three years, a faster timeline than originally planned. The project also aims to improve the search tools used in PACER, the public database that allows users to access federal court filings. Despite long-standing criticism from lawmakers and transparency advocates, the judiciary does not currently plan to eliminate PACER’s user fees. Court officials say those fees provide roughly 85 percent of the funding for the modernization effort.

US judiciary to fast-track court records system upgrade after hacking | Reuters

Federal and state lawmakers are considering measures that could reshape lawsuits involving the weedkiller Roundup as Bayer continues to face large-scale litigation over the product. In Kansas, legislators debated a bill supported by Bayer that would prevent individuals from suing pesticide manufacturers for failing to warn that their products might cause cancer or other illnesses. The proposal is part of a broader legislative strategy by the company, which has supported similar bills in roughly a dozen states. These efforts come as Bayer prepares a proposed $7.25 billion settlement aimed at resolving most of the roughly 65,000 remaining lawsuits alleging that Roundup caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Bayer inherited the litigation when it purchased Monsanto for $63 billion in 2018. Since then, the company has faced extensive legal costs and large verdicts, contributing to significant financial losses. Supporters of the Kansas bill argue that without such protections, pesticide manufacturers might remove widely used products from the market or raise prices, which could affect farmers and agricultural businesses. Critics, however, question the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that glyphosate—the main ingredient in Roundup—is unlikely to cause cancer and argue the legislation would shield companies from accountability.

The debate is occurring alongside other legal developments. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in April about whether federal pesticide law requires Bayer to warn consumers about potential cancer risks. Meanwhile, members of Congress are considering a farm bill provision that would require uniform pesticide labels nationwide, preventing states or local governments from mandating warnings different from those approved by the EPA. A Missouri judge has also given preliminary approval to Bayer’s proposed $7.25 billion class-action settlement, with a final decision expected later this year.

Bayer takes its multi-front battle on pesticide liability to Kansas | Reuters

A federal judge in Manhattan is set to review a proposed agreement that would end the U.S. government’s criminal prosecution of Turkey’s state-owned Halkbank. The case accused the bank of helping Iran bypass U.S. economic sanctions through financial transactions. Prosecutors and the bank reached a deferred prosecution agreement, which would pause the case while the bank demonstrates compliance with new restrictions. Under the proposal, Halkbank must avoid transactions benefiting Iran and hire an independent monitor to review its sanctions and anti-money-laundering controls.

The agreement does not require the bank to pay a fine or admit wrongdoing. If Halkbank complies with the conditions, the criminal charges would likely be dismissed after the monitoring period. Prosecutors have asked the judge to pause the proceedings for 90 days so the bank can begin demonstrating compliance. Although judges generally have limited authority to reject deferred prosecution agreements, the court may still review the deal to ensure it follows established legal precedent.

The resolution could ease tensions between the United States and Turkey, which had been strained by the case. U.S. officials indicated that resolving the prosecution also carried diplomatic importance during negotiations related to Turkey’s role in securing a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in 2025. The announcement of the deal caused Halkbank’s share price to rise sharply. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had previously criticized the case as politically motivated.

Judge to weigh Halkbank, US prosecutors’ resolution to criminal case | Reuters

This Day in Legal History: SCOTUS Impeachment

On March 12, 1804, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. Chase, a Federalist appointed to the Court in 1796, had become a controversial figure during a period of intense political division between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. Members of Congress accused him of allowing his political views to influence his conduct on the bench. Much of the criticism focused on Chase’s behavior during trials brought under the Alien and Sedition Acts, where he was alleged to have treated defendants and their lawyers unfairly. The House approved several articles of impeachment claiming that Chase’s courtroom conduct showed bias and undermined the impartial administration of justice.

The impeachment moved to the Senate for trial in early 1805, with Vice President Aaron Burr presiding over the proceedings. After weeks of arguments and testimony, the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds majority required for conviction on any article. As a result, Chase was acquitted and remained on the Supreme Court until his death in 1811. The outcome established an important precedent about the limits of impeachment as a tool against federal judges. Although Congress has the constitutional authority to impeach judges, the Chase trial suggested that impeachment should not be used simply because legislators disagree with a judge’s legal or political views.

In the years that followed, the case came to symbolize a commitment to judicial independence within the federal system. By declining to remove Chase from office, the Senate reinforced the idea that judges should be protected from political retaliation for their rulings. The episode remains the only time a sitting Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached by the House of Representatives. Today, the Chase impeachment is often cited in discussions about the balance between judicial accountability and the need for an independent judiciary.

A federal antitrust case against Live Nation Entertainment has stalled as negotiations over a proposed settlement continue and several states resist the deal. The lawsuit, brought by the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and numerous state attorneys general, alleges that Live Nation used monopolistic practices to dominate the live concert industry after acquiring Ticketmaster in 2010. During a recent court hearing, Arun Subramanian criticized both sides for failing to notify him earlier that settlement discussions were underway. He said the parties waited until just before trial to reveal that negotiations were close to completion, which he suggested was improper conduct.

The proposed settlement would require Live Nation to allow competitors to sell tickets at some of its venues, limit certain ticket service fees to 15%, sell control of at least 13 amphitheaters, and loosen exclusivity arrangements. The company would also create a settlement fund exceeding $280 million to resolve state claims. However, attorneys general from many of the states involved have objected because the agreement does not require Live Nation to divest Ticketmaster. More than two dozen states have asked the court to declare a mistrial and restart proceedings later, though others support or are still evaluating the settlement.

Judge Subramanian has not yet ruled on the mistrial request and instead urged the parties to continue negotiations immediately at the courthouse. He indicated that if a broader agreement cannot be reached soon, the court will determine the next procedural step. Live Nation maintains that the industry remains competitive and argues that the plaintiffs have selectively used data to support their allegations. The dispute highlights the complexity of resolving large antitrust cases involving both federal and state enforcement authorities.

Judge Fumes As Live Nation Antitrust Trial Remains In Limbo - Law360

ExxonMobil has announced plans to move its legal incorporation from New Jersey to Texas, citing the state’s increasingly business-friendly legal environment. In a proxy statement to shareholders, the company explained that most of its senior leadership and corporate functions have already been located in Texas for decades, making the change largely formal rather than operational. Executives said Texas offers a more predictable, statute-based framework for corporate governance and regulation.

A major factor behind the move is the creation of the Texas Business Court in 2024. Exxon also pointed to recent updates to the Texas Business Organizations Code that clarify standards for corporate decision-making and director conduct. Company leadership believes these reforms create a legal climate that supports economic growth and shareholder value.

Exxon joins other companies that have relocated their corporate domicile to Texas, including Tesla and Coinbase. State officials have promoted these moves as evidence that Texas is becoming a strong alternative to traditional corporate hubs such as Delaware. Recent reforms include legislation codifying the Business Judgment Rule, which limits liability for corporate directors unless misconduct like fraud is proven.

Texas has also launched broader initiatives to attract corporations, including approval for the upcoming Texas Stock Exchange, expected to begin operations in 2026. Supporters argue these efforts strengthen the state’s reputation as a center for corporate formation and governance. Exxon’s relocation reflects this broader trend of companies seeking jurisdictions with legal systems designed to favor corporate decision-making and reduce litigation risk.

ExxonMobil Plans Move To Texas, Citing Biz-Friendly Milieu - Law360

ExxonMobil Board unanimously recommends redomiciling the company from New Jersey to Texas

Millions of PlayStation users have begun a major antitrust class action in the United Kingdom against Sony Interactive Entertainment, seeking about £5 billion in damages. The case is being heard before the Competition Appeal Tribunal and is expected to last around ten weeks. The lawsuit is led by consumer advocate Alex Neill, who represents millions of PlayStation customers.

The claim alleges that Sony unlawfully controls the digital PlayStation ecosystem, limiting competition and forcing users to buy games and add-ons only through the company’s online store. According to the plaintiffs, Sony pre-installs the PlayStation Store on its consoles and prevents users from installing alternative software or accessing other digital marketplaces. As a result, consumers allegedly become locked into Sony’s platform and cannot shop for cheaper options. Lawyers for the consumers argue that these restrictions allow Sony to charge higher prices and maintain strong profit margins.

A major issue in the case is how the relevant market should be defined. Sony plans to argue that its consoles and digital services operate as part of a single “systems market,” where hardware and software function as one integrated product. The plaintiffs disagree, claiming the console is only the initial purchase and that digital games and add-ons form separate “aftermarkets” where Sony exercises additional control. They argue consumers often cannot predict future costs for games or downloadable content when they buy the console, making them vulnerable to higher prices later.

Sony is expected to argue that it simply created a platform that enables game publishers to sell products efficiently and that it is entitled to control access to its own storefront and intellectual property. The company maintains that these practices are legitimate business decisions rather than anticompetitive conduct. The tribunal will ultimately decide whether Sony’s control of its platform amounts to unlawful market dominance under U.K. competition law.

PlayStation Users Say Sony Made Them ‘Captives’ In £5B Trial - Law360 UK

PlayStation Officially Facing $2.7bn Lawsuit That Could Change It Forever

On March 10, 1911, Kansas enacted the first “blue sky law” in the United States, marking a significant development in the regulation of securities markets. The statute was designed to protect investors from fraudulent investment schemes that had become increasingly common in the early twentieth century. At the time, promoters frequently sold speculative securities with little oversight and few consequences if the ventures failed. Kansas lawmakers responded by creating a system that required securities offerings to be reviewed before they could be sold to the public. State officials were given authority to examine proposed investments and determine whether they were legitimate.

The name “blue sky law” reflected the legislature’s concern that many promoters were selling investments backed by nothing more than empty promises. Lawmakers wanted to prevent the sale of securities that had no real value or financial foundation. Kansas banking commissioner Joseph Norman Dolley played a central role in advocating for the law and persuading the legislature to adopt stronger investor protections. His efforts reflected growing public concern about financial fraud and the need for government oversight of securities markets.

The Kansas statute quickly became a model for other states. Within a few years, many states adopted their own versions of blue sky laws, creating a patchwork system of state-level securities regulation. These laws helped establish the principle that governments could require disclosure and review before securities were sold to the public. The idea later influenced the development of federal securities regulation during the New Deal era. In particular, the framework helped shape the Securities Act of 1933, which created nationwide disclosure requirements for securities offerings.

Live Nation Entertainment has reached a proposed settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in a major antitrust case challenging the company’s dominance in concert promotion and ticketing. The agreement was disclosed during a court hearing and could resolve part of a lawsuit brought by federal regulators and more than two dozen states. Live Nation is also negotiating separately with state attorneys general in an effort to reach a broader nationwide resolution of related claims.

Under the proposed deal, the company would pay roughly $200 million in damages to participating states and accept structural reforms aimed at reducing its market power. Regulators had argued that Live Nation’s control of venues, artist promotion, and ticketing—particularly through Ticketmaster—allowed the company to inflate prices and limit competition. The lawsuit was filed in 2024 and initially sought to break up the company by forcing a sale of Ticketmaster.

The settlement instead focuses on changing how the ticketing market operates. Ticketmaster would be required to open parts of its technology platform to competing ticket sellers, allowing third-party companies to list tickets directly through its system. The deal would also limit the length of Live Nation’s exclusive contracts with venues to four years and permit venues to allocate some ticket inventory to rival platforms.

The case gained political attention after widespread complaints about long online queues and high prices during the 2022 Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket sales. A federal judge had allowed the antitrust case to proceed to trial after rejecting Live Nation’s attempt to dismiss it earlier this year. If finalized, the settlement would impose oversight and competition requirements on the company rather than break it up.

Live Nation reaches settlement with DOJ in antitrust case | Reuters

Democratic U.S. senators plan to introduce legislation that would extend the time prosecutors have to bring foreign bribery cases from five years to ten. The proposal, called the FCPA Reinforcement Act, is led by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin along with several other Democratic lawmakers. It responds to recent Justice Department decisions to scale back enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), a 1977 law that prohibits companies operating in the United States from bribing foreign officials.

Supporters of the bill argue that international corruption investigations are complex and often take years to uncover, making the current five-year statute of limitations too short. The proposed law would temporarily extend the deadline for bringing anti-bribery charges to ten years for an eight-year period. Lawmakers say the change is meant to ensure companies can still be held accountable for misconduct even if enforcement priorities shift.

The proposal also signals to corporations that compliance obligations remain important despite the current enforcement slowdown. Some legal experts worry that reduced federal enforcement could lead companies to scale back anti-corruption compliance programs or stop voluntarily reporting violations. Although the bill may face difficulty passing in the current Congress, it indicates that some lawmakers want to preserve strong anti-bribery enforcement and may pursue stricter oversight in the future.

US lawmakers plan bill allowing 10 years to bring bribery cases | Reuters

A divided federal appeals court has refused to allow the Trump administration to end immigration protections for more than 350,000 Haitians living in the United States. In a 2–1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to pause a lower court ruling that blocked the Department of Homeland Security from terminating Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The ruling means the protections will remain in place while the administration continues its appeal.

TPS is a humanitarian program that allows people from certain countries facing crises—such as armed conflict, natural disasters, or political instability—to remain in the United States temporarily and obtain work authorization. Haitians first received TPS after the devastating 2010 earthquake, and the designation has been repeatedly renewed because of ongoing instability in the country.

The Trump administration sought to end Haiti’s TPS designation as part of a broader effort to scale back the program, arguing that it was never intended to function as long-term legal status. But a federal district judge previously ruled that the government’s attempt to terminate the protection likely violated both TPS procedures and constitutional equal-protection principles. The appeals court majority agreed that sending Haitian migrants back now could expose them to severe violence and humanitarian risks due to Haiti’s deteriorating conditions.

One judge dissented, arguing the case was legally similar to disputes where courts allowed the administration to end TPS protections for Venezuelans. The Department of Homeland Security said it plans to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. For now, the decision preserves legal status and work authorization for hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants while the litigation continues.

Trump cannot end protections for 350,000 Haitians, US appeals court rules | Reuters

My column for Bloomberg this week examines the surprising milestone that renewable energy generated 26% of U.S. electricity in 2025—even as federal clean-energy incentives were being rolled back. At first glance, that record share might suggest the transition to renewables is unstoppable. In reality, much of the current growth reflects investment decisions made years earlier, when generous subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act and related policies were still in place. Large wind and solar projects often take three to seven years to move from financing and permitting to full operation. That means many facilities coming online today were funded under a very different policy environment than the one developers face now.

Recent changes to federal tax policy have scaled back or eliminated several incentives that previously supported renewable development and electric vehicle adoption. These changes do not immediately halt construction, but they alter the financial calculations for the next generation of projects. Renewable energy projects rely heavily on financing structures that incorporate tax credits, equity partnerships, and long-term debt. When incentives shrink or become uncertain, developers must either accept greater risk or secure more expensive capital. At the same time, unresolved federal rulemaking and regulatory uncertainty are adding another layer of caution for investors. Although wind and solar technology costs have declined and can remain competitive with fossil fuels, policy instability can still erode project margins.

The key point is that energy statistics describe what is already built, while investment decisions determine what the energy system will look like years from now. Current renewable growth may therefore reflect past policy rather than present conditions. Financing data already shows signs of slowing investment in green energy. To maintain steady development, policymakers should avoid abrupt tax-credit expirations and instead adopt predictable, multi-year phaseouts that allow markets to adjust. Agencies could also reduce uncertainty by finalizing or withdrawing proposed energy regulations within clear timelines. Stable rules make it easier for investors to commit capital to projects designed to operate for decades. The next investment cycle will reveal whether today’s policy environment supports continued energy expansion or discourages it.

On March 9, 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court decided United States v. The Amistad, ruling that a group of Africans who had seized control of the Spanish ship La Amistad were free individuals who had been illegally enslaved. The case began after the captives, led by Sengbe Pieh—often called Cinqué—revolted against the ship’s crew while being transported from Cuba in 1839. They had originally been kidnapped in West Africa and sold into slavery in violation of international agreements banning the transatlantic slave trade. After the revolt, the ship was intercepted near Long Island and the Africans were taken into U.S. custody. Spanish officials demanded that the United States return both the ship and the captives to Cuba. The U.S. government supported Spain’s request, arguing that the captives were property under Spanish law.

Abolitionists rallied to the Africans’ defense and secured legal representation for them in American courts. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, where former President John Quincy Adams joined the legal team arguing for the captives’ freedom. Adams delivered a lengthy and passionate argument emphasizing natural rights and the illegality of the slave trade that had brought the Africans to Cuba. Writing for the majority, Justice Joseph Story concluded that the captives had been unlawfully enslaved and were therefore not property. Because they were free individuals, the Court held that they had the legal right to resist their captivity and fight for their liberty. The Court ordered that the Africans be released rather than returned to Spanish authorities.

The ruling was celebrated by abolitionists as an important moral and legal victory in the fight against slavery. Although it did not end slavery in the United States, the decision demonstrated that courts could recognize limits on the slave trade and acknowledge the legal claims of enslaved people.

Thirteen major U.S. book publishers have filed a copyright lawsuit against Anna’s Archive, a website they describe as one of the largest “shadow libraries” distributing pirated books and academic papers. The publishers—including HarperCollins, Wiley, McGraw Hill, and Cengage—filed the complaint in federal court in New York, alleging that the site hosts more than 63 million books and 95 million research papers without authorization. According to the lawsuit, Anna’s Archive allows users to download these materials directly or through torrent networks, making copyrighted works widely available for free. The publishers claim the site openly presents itself as a pirate platform and intentionally violates copyright law.

The complaint also alleges that Anna’s Archive was created in 2022 after copying entire collections from other illegal book repositories and has continued expanding its database. The publishers say the site operates anonymously and frequently changes domain names across different countries to avoid enforcement efforts. They further claim the platform targets artificial intelligence developers by offering large datasets of books and papers. While free users can access files slowly, the complaint states that faster downloads are available to users who make donations through untraceable methods like cryptocurrency or gift cards. The publishers allege that these donations can reach roughly $200,000 for high-speed bulk access. In response, the plaintiffs are asking the court to shut down the site and award statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work.

The lawsuit follows a separate case brought by Atlantic Recording Corp., which earlier obtained a preliminary injunction preventing Anna’s Archive from distributing millions of music files allegedly copied from Spotify. That case resulted in a default after the site failed to respond to the complaint. However, the publishers argue that the earlier injunction does not cover books, allowing the alleged book piracy to continue. The Association of American Publishers has publicly supported the lawsuit, describing the scale of digital piracy as extremely large and urging legal action to stop the operation.

Publishers Sue ‘Shadow Library’ For ‘Staggering’ Book Piracy - Law360

Companies that operate in California are facing uncertainty as the state moves forward with major climate disclosure laws while a federal appeals court considers whether the rules should be blocked. The laws—California Senate Bills 253 and 261—require large companies doing business in the state to disclose information about greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risks. In late February, the California Air Resources Board approved initial regulations explaining how the reporting system will be administered and how companies will pay implementation fees. At the same time, the Ninth Circuit has temporarily blocked enforcement of S.B. 261 and is reviewing a request from business groups to halt both laws entirely.

Because of this parallel regulatory and legal process, many companies are unsure whether they should invest heavily in compliance or wait for the courts to rule. S.B. 253 applies to companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and requires reporting of Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions, which include direct emissions, energy-related emissions, and emissions from supply chains. S.B. 261 applies to companies with more than $500 million in revenue and requires disclosure of climate-related financial risks and mitigation strategies. Attorneys say collecting this data could be difficult, especially for companies that only have limited operations in California or that must gather information from suppliers and partners in other regions.

The reporting requirements could also affect businesses outside California because companies subject to the law may need emissions data from their partners and vendors. Regulators have begun setting deadlines for initial reporting, including an August deadline for certain emissions data, but many details about how the system will function remain unresolved. Meanwhile, business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argue the laws violate the First Amendment by forcing companies to speak on controversial issues related to climate change. With rulemaking still underway and litigation ongoing, companies are left trying to prepare for possible compliance while waiting to see whether the courts ultimately uphold or invalidate the laws.

Companies In Limbo Over Calif. Climate Disclosure Laws’ Fate - Law360

In a major California bellwether trial over claims that social media harms children’s mental health, the plaintiff has finished presenting her case against Instagram and YouTube. The plaintiff, a 20-year-old referred to as Kaley G.M. to protect her identity, alleges that features on the platforms contributed to anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia she experienced as a minor. Her attorney, Mark Lanier, chose not to call Kaley’s mother to testify live, instead presenting a brief portion of her deposition to the jury. The decision appeared partly influenced by strict time limits imposed by the judge during the trial. In the deposition testimony, the mother acknowledged she had little knowledge of her daughter’s social media use and did not monitor her phone because she viewed it similarly to a household landline.

Defense attorneys have argued that Kaley’s mental health problems were caused by difficulties at home rather than the platforms themselves. Evidence introduced at trial suggested the plaintiff had conflicts with her mother, including allegations of neglect, verbal abuse, and limited supervision of internet use. The defense also pointed to bullying and other personal issues as alternative explanations for the plaintiff’s struggles. Meanwhile, a former Meta employee testified that internal company information suggested Instagram could be addictive and harmful to young users, although defense lawyers challenged his credibility and the extent of his involvement with safety issues.

The plaintiff’s final expert witness discussed ways social media companies could design safer platforms for children. After the plaintiff rested, Meta began presenting its defense with testimony from school administrators connected to the plaintiff. The case is the first bellwether trial among thousands of similar lawsuits consolidated in California, with outcomes potentially shaping settlement negotiations and future trials. TikTok and Snap previously settled with this plaintiff, but the broader litigation against social media companies continues.

Meta, Google Begin Defense As Mental Harm Plaintiff Rests - Law360 UK

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency told a federal trade court that it expects to create a system within about 45 days to process refunds for tariffs that were previously imposed under President Donald Trump and later ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. The tariffs generated roughly $166 billion in payments from about 330,000 importers, and the Court’s decision did not specify how those funds should be returned. As a result, government lawyers and a judge from the U.S. Court of International Trade are working to establish a practical process for issuing refunds.

Under the proposed plan, importers would submit a declaration through CBP’s electronic system detailing the tariffs they paid. The agency would verify the information and then issue a single payment from the Treasury Department to each importer, including interest. Officials say this approach would avoid forcing businesses to file individual lawsuits to recover their money. The judge overseeing the matter recently modified an earlier order that required immediate refunds, acknowledging that the agency needs time to build a workable system.

CBP explained that its current administrative system cannot automatically process refunds on the massive scale required. Importers paid tariffs on more than 53 million shipments, and manually reviewing each transaction could require millions of hours of labor. Several large companies, including affiliates of Nintendo and CVS, have already filed lawsuits seeking repayment, though the government hopes a broader refund system will resolve claims more efficiently.

Business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have supported the proposal, saying it could simplify the process for smaller companies. However, officials noted that relatively few importers have registered for the electronic refund system created earlier this year. The court continues to oversee the development of the refund process through a test case that could guide how payments are returned to all affected businesses.

US customs agency expects tariff refund system to be ready in 45 days | Reuters

On March 6, 1933, just two days after taking office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a nationwide bank holiday in response to the escalating financial panic of the Great Depression. At the time, banks across the country were collapsing as frightened depositors rushed to withdraw their savings. The closures threatened to completely destabilize the American financial system. Roosevelt used emergency executive authority to temporarily shut down the nation’s banks in order to stop the flood of withdrawals. The pause allowed federal officials to inspect financial institutions and determine which were stable enough to reopen.

Although the order began as an executive action, Congress quickly moved to support the president’s efforts. On March 9, lawmakers passed the Emergency Banking Act, which retroactively approved Roosevelt’s bank holiday and expanded federal oversight of banks. The law allowed only financially sound banks to resume operations and provided additional confidence to depositors. In the days that followed, many banks reopened under stricter supervision, and public trust gradually returned to the banking system. Roosevelt reinforced this confidence through his first “fireside chat,” explaining the reforms directly to the American public.

Legal challenges later tested the government’s authority to take such sweeping action during a crisis. Courts ultimately upheld many emergency financial measures adopted during the early New Deal period. These rulings helped establish the principle that the federal government has broader power to respond to national economic emergencies. The bank holiday of March 6, 1933, therefore became an important early example of how executive initiative and congressional support can combine to address a national crisis.

An insurer has filed a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of engaging in the unauthorized practice of law after its AI chatbot allegedly provided faulty legal assistance to a disability benefits recipient. According to the complaint, Nippon Life Insurance Co. of America had settled a long-term disability dispute with Graciela Dela Torre in January 2024. About a year later, she questioned the agreement and asked her attorney about reopening the case due to alleged documentation problems. When her lawyer explained that the settlement was final, Dela Torre consulted ChatGPT, asking whether her attorney had dismissed her concerns.

The insurer claims the chatbot suggested that her attorney had invalidated her feelings and deflected responsibility. After receiving that response, Dela Torre fired her lawyer and attempted to reopen the case on her own. The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT generated legal arguments asserting that her former counsel had pressured her into signing a blank signature page. She filed a motion based on those arguments, which Nippon says violated the settlement agreement releasing the company from future claims.

According to the complaint, Dela Torre then submitted numerous additional filings drafted with the chatbot’s help, including more than twenty motions and other court documents. The court rejected her attempt to reopen the case and upheld the settlement as valid. Despite that ruling, she allegedly used ChatGPT again to prepare a new lawsuit asserting claims such as fraudulent misrepresentation and interference with disability benefits. Nippon says she has filed dozens of motions that serve no legitimate legal purpose, forcing the company to spend significant time responding. The insurer is now seeking damages and an injunction preventing OpenAI from providing legal assistance to Dela Torre, while OpenAI has dismissed the claims as meritless.

OpenAI Practices Law Without A License, Insurer Alleges - Law360

A coalition of 24 states has filed a lawsuit challenging new global tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump. The case was brought in the U.S. Court of International Trade and seeks to block tariffs introduced on February 20 under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. The states argue the administration rushed to impose the tariffs only hours after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated an earlier set of trade measures that had been issued under a different statute. According to the complaint, the new tariffs were an attempt to revive similar trade restrictions using a separate legal authority.

The policy first imposed a 10% tariff on imports worldwide and was raised to the statute’s maximum 15% the following day. The administration justified the move by claiming it was necessary to address serious U.S. balance-of-payments deficits. However, the states argue that such deficits do not actually exist and that the government selectively relied on negative data while ignoring overall positive financial inflows. They claim this misuse of the statute mirrors the earlier tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down.

The lawsuit also argues that the tariffs violate the Constitution because the authority to impose taxes and duties belongs to Congress. The Supreme Court recently emphasized this principle when it ruled against the administration’s earlier tariff policy. According to the states, Section 122 was originally enacted to address problems tied to an outdated international currency system that no longer exists today. Because the statutory conditions cannot be met, the coalition argues the president’s tariffs are unlawful. The states are asking the court to invalidate the measures before they remain in effect through the summer.

Two Dozen States Sue Trump to Halt New Global Tariffs - Law360

Twenty-four US states file lawsuit to stop Trump’s latest global tariffs | Reuters

A federal trade judge is meeting privately with government lawyers to determine how the United States will refund billions of dollars in tariffs that courts recently ruled unconstitutional. Judge Richard Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade scheduled the closed-door meeting as a settlement conference to discuss a practical process for returning money to importers. The tariffs at issue were a major part of President Donald Trump’s trade policy but were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in February for exceeding presidential authority. Because the Court did not provide guidance on how refunds should be handled, lower courts are now working to establish a workable procedure.

The scale of the refunds could be enormous, potentially reaching $175 billion and affecting more than 300,000 importers. Government attorneys have warned that processing the reimbursements will be unusually complex because it may involve manual review of tens of millions of tariff payments. Many of the affected importers are small businesses concerned about the cost and administrative burden of seeking repayment. Judge Eaton has indicated that he wants a system that avoids forcing companies to file individual lawsuits.

The issue arose in a case filed by Atmus Filtration Inc., which claims it paid $11 million in unlawful tariffs. Eaton recently ordered U.S. Customs and Border Protection to begin using its internal processes to refund tariffs not only to Atmus but potentially to all affected importers. The upcoming conference is expected to focus on how the agency can efficiently review roughly 79 million shipments and distribute refunds. Attorneys involved in related cases believe the meeting could lead to a standardized process that allows most businesses to receive reimbursements without extended litigation.

Exclusive: US judge to meet parties on Trump-tariff refunds in closed-door ‘settlement conference’ | Reuters

A federal appeals court has ruled that President Donald Trump has the authority to suspend refugee admissions to the United States, reversing most of a lower court decision that had blocked the policy. The ruling came from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The judges concluded that federal law gives the president broad power to restrict the entry of foreign nationals when he believes it serves national interests. As a result, the panel allowed Trump’s halt of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program to remain in place.

The policy was introduced shortly after Trump took office in 2025 and paused the admission of refugees while the administration reviewed whether the program ensured proper assimilation. Refugees, their family members, and several resettlement organizations filed a class action lawsuit challenging the move. A federal judge in Seattle had previously issued injunctions blocking the suspension and related actions. However, the Ninth Circuit determined that most of those rulings exceeded the district court’s authority.

Writing for the panel, Judge Jay Bybee acknowledged that the decision could have serious real-world consequences for thousands of refugees who had already completed years of vetting and were awaiting resettlement. Despite those concerns, the court emphasized that Congress granted the president sweeping authority over immigration entry decisions. The judges said policy judgments about refugee admissions belong to the executive branch rather than the courts.

The panel did leave some portions of the lower court’s order in place. It upheld injunctions that prevent the government from cutting services to refugees who have already been admitted to the United States and from terminating certain agreements with refugee support organizations. One judge dissented in part, arguing that the district court’s injunctions should have been entirely overturned.

Trump can suspend refugee admissions, US appeals court rules | Reuters

On March 5, 1770, a confrontation between British soldiers and American colonists in Boston turned deadly in what became known as the Boston Massacre. Tensions had been rising for months as British troops occupied the city to enforce parliamentary taxes that many colonists believed were unjust. On that evening, a crowd gathered near the Boston Custom House and began taunting a British sentry, shouting insults and throwing snowballs and debris. As the situation escalated, additional soldiers arrived to support the guard, but the crowd continued to press in. In the confusion and fear of the moment, the soldiers fired into the crowd. Five colonists were killed and several others were wounded, including Crispus Attucks, who is often remembered as the first casualty of the American Revolution.

The incident quickly became a flashpoint in colonial politics, with patriot leaders using it as evidence of British tyranny. Yet the legal response that followed was notable for its commitment to due process despite intense public anger. British Captain Thomas Preston and eight soldiers were arrested and charged with murder. Future president John Adams agreed to defend the soldiers, arguing that the rule of law required even deeply unpopular defendants to receive a fair trial. During the proceedings, Adams emphasized the evidence suggesting the soldiers had been surrounded and threatened by a hostile crowd. The jury ultimately acquitted six soldiers and convicted two of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

The trials demonstrated an early American commitment to the principle that legal judgments should be guided by evidence rather than public pressure, even during moments of political upheaval.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that New Jersey cannot use sovereign immunity to protect New Jersey Transit from personal injury lawsuits filed by riders injured outside the state. The unanimous opinion, written by Sonia Sotomayor, resolved a conflict between the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the New York Court of Appeals over whether the transit agency qualifies as an “arm of the state.” The dispute arose from two lawsuits filed by passengers injured in NJ Transit bus crashes that occurred outside New Jersey.

The justices focused heavily on how the agency was structured. During oral argument, several members of the Court questioned why New Jersey created NJ Transit as a corporation with the ability to sue and be sued while also disclaiming responsibility for its debts. Some justices suggested those design choices undermined the state’s argument that the agency should receive sovereign immunity protections.

New Jersey’s lawyers argued that the agency’s independence is largely formal and that the governor maintains significant control over the system. They also warned that allowing such lawsuits could subject the state to litigation in other states’ courts. However, the Court appeared unconvinced by those arguments and emphasized that the plaintiffs were private individuals seeking compensation rather than other states trying to regulate New Jersey.

The ruling ultimately sided with the New York court’s earlier decision and overturned the Pennsylvania ruling, allowing the personal injury lawsuits to proceed.

Supreme Court Rejects NJ Immunity Defense In NY, Pa. Suits

Regulators are increasingly focusing on dynamic or algorithmic pricing, a practice that uses personal data—such as location, browsing history, and purchasing behavior—to set individualized prices for consumers. The approach has raised concerns among privacy and consumer protection regulators because it relies on large amounts of personal data and may affect price transparency. Although grocery pricing has drawn the most attention, the practice is also used in industries like travel, financial services, and online retail.

The Federal Trade Commission has been studying the issue but has not clearly stated whether dynamic pricing violates any specific federal law. In 2024, the agency issued subpoenas to companies that develop pricing algorithms to learn how they collect consumer data, train their systems, and influence the prices consumers see. A preliminary research summary released in 2025 confirmed that these tools rely heavily on consumer data and can adjust prices in real time, but it did not identify specific legal violations.

While the federal approach remains uncertain, state regulators are taking more direct action. The office of Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, launched an investigative sweep in January 2026 to examine how companies use consumer data to personalize prices. Investigators sent letters to retailers, grocery stores, and hotels requesting information about pricing algorithms, data sources, and disclosures to consumers.

Meanwhile, the New York Attorney General’s Office is investigating companies’ compliance with the state’s new Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act. The law requires businesses to clearly inform consumers when prices are generated using algorithms that rely on their personal data. Regulators have warned that disclosures hidden behind hyperlinks may not satisfy the law’s requirement that notices be clear and conspicuous.

Other states are considering similar legislation, including proposals targeting surveillance-based pricing or banning dynamic pricing in certain industries. As scrutiny increases, companies that use personalized pricing tools are being urged to review their data practices, pricing disclosures, and compliance with emerging state privacy laws.

Amidst uncertainty from FTC, states zero in on dynamic and algorithmic pricing | Reuters

The U.S. civilian federal workforce decreased by about 12% between September 2024 and January 2026, according to newly released government data. The reductions reflect efforts by Donald Trump’s administration to shrink federal agencies, a policy he promoted as a way to reduce government size and increase efficiency.

Several major departments experienced significant staffing losses. The U.S. Department of the Treasury saw its workforce drop by roughly 24%, while the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lost about 20% of its employees during the same period. These reductions represent some of the largest declines across federal agencies.

One notable exception was the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which slightly increased its workforce by less than 1%. The agency’s growth reflects the administration’s continued focus on immigration enforcement and deportation efforts.

Overall, the data indicates that the administration’s push to cut federal staffing has had a broad impact across much of the government, significantly reducing the number of civilian employees in many departments.

US government workforce shrunk by 12% since September 2024 | Reuters

On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address as he began his second term as President of the United States. The speech came during the final weeks of the Civil War, when Union victory was increasingly likely but the country remained deeply divided. Instead of celebrating the nearing end of the war, Lincoln used the moment to reflect on the deeper causes of the conflict. He identified slavery as the central issue that had brought the nation into war, describing it as both a legal institution and a moral injustice embedded in American law for generations. Lincoln noted that both the North and South had participated in a system that allowed slavery to endure within the nation’s constitutional framework.

In one of the address’s most striking passages, Lincoln suggested that the war itself might be understood as divine judgment for the nation’s long tolerance of slavery. He observed that slavery had existed in the Americas for centuries and reflected on the possibility that the immense suffering of the war was a form of punishment for that history. Lincoln famously stated that if divine providence willed that the war continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” then such judgment might still be just. This reflection framed the war not simply as a political conflict but as a reckoning with a deeply rooted legal and moral wrong.

Lincoln’s remarks also pointed toward the constitutional transformation already underway through the pending Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Congress had passed the amendment earlier in 1865, and it awaited ratification by the states. If adopted, it would permanently abolish slavery across the United States and fundamentally alter the constitutional order. Lincoln’s speech emphasized that the war’s conclusion would also mark a legal turning point, ending a constitutional system that had protected slavery. At the same time, he called for reconciliation in rebuilding the nation, urging the country to move forward “with malice toward none.” Only months later, the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865, permanently outlawing slavery in the United States.

The House Oversight Committee has asked several high-profile figures to testify about their connections to Jeffrey Epstein as part of a broader investigation into how the federal government handled the case. Those requested to appear include departing Goldman Sachs Chief Legal Officer Kathryn Ruemmler, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black.

The request to Ruemmler comes shortly after she announced plans to step down from Goldman Sachs and after Justice Department records brought renewed attention to her past communications with Epstein. Emails show that she sought career advice from him while exploring a move from Latham & Watkins to Facebook in 2018 and referred to him in messages as “Uncle Jeffrey.” The correspondence also mentioned gifts she received from him. Reports previously revealed that the two had numerous meetings during the 2010s, years after Epstein had served a prison sentence related to prostitution offenses involving minors.

The committee’s inquiry focuses on whether Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell used relationships with influential individuals to gain protection or influence while operating their sex-trafficking scheme. Lawmakers are also examining the federal government’s handling of the investigation and the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death in a Manhattan federal jail in 2019.

Along with Ruemmler, Gates and Black received similar requests for testimony. Gates has indicated he is willing to cooperate and answer questions from the committee. Black, meanwhile, is also facing a proposed class action accusing Apollo and its leadership of misleading investors about their connections to Epstein, allegations the firm has publicly denied.

Other individuals asked to appear include Epstein’s former assistants, political adviser Doug Band, and Gateway co-founder Ted Waitt. The committee has already interviewed several prominent figures, including former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as it continues reviewing the scope of Epstein’s network and the government’s response to his crimes.

Goldman’s Departing CLO, Gates Asked To Testify On Epstein - Law360 UK

The Justice Department quickly reversed course in an ongoing legal fight over executive orders issued by President Donald Trump targeting several prominent law firms. Late Monday, government lawyers told a federal appeals court they planned to drop their appeal after multiple federal judges ruled the orders unconstitutional. But the next day the department asked the court for permission to withdraw that dismissal request and continue defending the orders.

The executive orders targeted firms including Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Susman Godfrey, and Jenner & Block. The measures sought to restrict the firms’ security clearances, government contracts, and access to federal buildings, citing concerns about their clients and hiring practices. The firms challenged the orders in court, arguing they were unconstitutional retaliation against legal advocates.

Federal judges consistently sided with the firms, with one ruling describing the order against Perkins Coie as an unprecedented attack on the legal system. After those rulings, the Justice Department initially appeared ready to abandon the appeal. Its sudden reversal, however, would allow the administration to continue fighting the cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

The law firms criticized the shift, saying the government offered no explanation for changing its position so quickly. They reiterated their commitment to challenging what they view as an unconstitutional attempt to punish law firms for representing disfavored clients. Civil liberties advocates echoed that criticism, arguing the orders represent a misuse of presidential power.

The litigation highlights a broader dispute over the limits of executive authority and the independence of the legal profession. As the appeals process continues, the courts will ultimately decide whether the executive orders can survive constitutional scrutiny.

BREAKING: DOJ Nixes Plan To Drop Law Firm EO Appeals In About-Face - Law360

In quick reversal, DOJ seeks to continue Trump’s battle with law firms

A trial beginning in Chicago will examine claims that baby formula made by Abbott Laboratories caused premature infants to develop a serious and potentially deadly intestinal condition known as necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). The case consolidates lawsuits from four families whose premature children were born in Chicago-area hospitals between 2012 and 2019 and later developed the disease. Although the infants survived, the lawsuits say several required surgery and continue to face long-term health complications.

The case is part of a much larger wave of litigation against Abbott and Mead Johnson, the manufacturer of Enfamil. Nearly 1,000 lawsuits have been filed across the country alleging that the companies failed to warn doctors that cow’s milk-based formulas used in hospitals may increase the risk of NEC in premature infants. Many of those cases are consolidated in federal court in Illinois, while others are pending in state courts.

Abbott denies that its formulas cause the disease and maintains that the products are medically necessary when mothers cannot produce enough breast milk. The company and other researchers point to evidence suggesting that the higher risk of NEC is linked to the absence of breast milk rather than exposure to formula itself.

Previous trials involving similar claims have produced mixed results. Some juries have awarded large verdicts to families, including multimillion-dollar judgments against both Abbott and Mead Johnson, though those decisions are currently under appeal. Other cases have resulted in defense wins or retrials, and several potential bellwether cases in federal court have been dismissed.

The Chicago trial, which begins with jury selection, is expected to last several weeks and could influence how the remaining lawsuits move forward. With hundreds of similar claims still pending, the outcome may play an important role in shaping the broader litigation over infant formula and NEC.

Abbott set to face trial over claims premature infant formula caused deadly disease | Reuters

In this week’s column, I look at a new California proposal that attempts to sidestep the federal cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions by reclassifying vehicle sales taxes as licensing fees. The idea is simple: if the charge is treated as a property-style fee instead of a sales tax, it could fall into a category that allows taxpayers to make greater use of their federal SALT deduction. Supporters frame the proposal as middle-class tax relief and a way to reduce the amount of federal revenue flowing out of California. But while the policy is clever, its practical benefits would be limited and uneven.

The proposal follows a familiar strategy used since the 2017 tax law capped SALT deductions: when one type of tax becomes less deductible, lawmakers try to redesign the tax structure so the revenue flows through a category that remains deductible. California’s approach focuses on vehicle purchases, where sales taxes are currently difficult to deduct for many residents. By redefining those charges as licensing fees, lawmakers hope taxpayers could claim them alongside property taxes under the federal deduction cap.

In practice, though, most lower-income taxpayers wouldn’t benefit at all. Many households take the standard deduction rather than itemizing, especially after recent tax reforms increased its size. For those taxpayers, changing the label on a vehicle tax doesn’t meaningfully change their federal tax bill. Even for many itemizers, the savings would likely be small.

The proposal mainly helps a narrow band of higher-earning taxpayers—people with substantial state and property taxes who are still just below the federal SALT cap. For them, a vehicle purchase could generate a deductible amount that meaningfully lowers their federal tax liability. But that advantage grows with the price of the car and the taxpayer’s marginal tax rate, which means the largest benefits flow to relatively affluent households.

If the goal is truly middle-class relief, a more direct approach would likely work better. For example, a refundable state tax credit tied to vehicle purchases could help working families without depending on federal deduction rules or itemization. Another long-term option would be shifting some of California’s tax burden from individuals to businesses, since certain business-level taxes remain deductible federally.

California’s proposal shows the creativity that the SALT deduction cap has sparked among state policymakers. The real question, however, is whether clever tax reclassification is the right tool—or whether more straightforward policies aimed directly at middle-income taxpayers would produce fairer and more predictable results.

California SALT Deduction Proposal Is More Clever Than Helpful

On March 3, 1863, Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1863, quietly reshaping the structure of the United States Supreme Court in the middle of the Civil War. The Act increased the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to ten. This expansion created an additional seat that President Abraham Lincoln could fill at a critical moment in the nation’s history. Lincoln soon appointed Justice Stephen J. Field to occupy the new position.

The timing of the law was not accidental. The country was deeply divided, and major constitutional questions about executive power, wartime authority, and civil liberties were moving through the courts. By enlarging the Court, Congress ensured that Lincoln would have greater influence over the judiciary’s direction. Although altering the size of the Court was constitutional, it carried clear political implications.

The Constitution does not fix the number of Supreme Court justices. Instead, Congress has authority to determine the Court’s size through legislation. This structural flexibility has allowed lawmakers to adjust the Court in response to political and practical concerns. The Judiciary Act of 1863 stands as one example of how institutional design can intersect with national crisis.

The legal element worth highlighting is Congress’s constitutional power to set the size of the Supreme Court. Article III establishes the Court but leaves its structure largely to Congress. This separation of powers detail is significant because it shows that the judiciary’s composition is not self-defining. I chose this element because it explains how a simple statute, passed during wartime, could alter the balance of influence within the highest court in the country without amending the Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments over whether a federal law prohibiting illegal drug users from possessing firearms violates the Second Amendment. The case arose after federal prosecutors charged Ali Hemani, a Texas resident who admitted to regular marijuana use, with unlawful gun possession under the Gun Control Act. A lower court dismissed the charge, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision, concluding there was no historical basis for disarming a sober person who was not under the influence at the time of possession.

The Justice Department, under President Donald Trump, appealed to the Supreme Court. The administration argued that the restriction is comparable to 19th-century laws that allowed authorities to disarm habitual drunkards. Hemani, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, countered that regular marijuana users are not historically analogous to those groups and that the statute is too vague because it does not clearly define who qualifies as an “unlawful user.”

The dispute comes as the Court continues to apply the history-focused test it announced in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which requires modern gun regulations to align with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The case also echoes the 2024 conviction of Hunter Biden under the same statute, though he was later pardoned. With a 6–3 conservative majority, the Court has recently taken an expansive view of gun rights and is weighing multiple challenges to firearm regulations.

US Supreme Court scrutinizes gun ownership ban for illegal drug users | Reuters

A recent policy shift by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has given public companies greater control over which shareholder proposals appear on annual meeting ballots. In November, the agency stopped its long-standing practice of having staff formally review and approve companies’ decisions to exclude certain proposals. Instead, corporate executives now have more discretion to determine what goes into proxy statements.

Investor advocates say the change has created confusion and weakened shareholder rights, especially in disputes involving environmental, social, and governance issues. The new approach has already led to lawsuits against companies including PepsiCo, AT&T, and Axon Enterprise. In several instances, companies initially declined to include shareholder proposals but reversed course after being sued. For example, PepsiCo agreed to allow a vote on an animal-welfare proposal shortly after litigation was filed. AT&T similarly settled a lawsuit brought by New York City pension funds by permitting a vote on workforce diversity disclosures.

Other disputes remain pending, including a case against Axon over a proposal related to political contributions. Activists argue that without clearer guidance from regulators, shareholders must turn to the courts to protect their ability to file resolutions. Despite concerns that the rule change would dramatically increase exclusions, early data suggests companies have blocked proposals at roughly the same rate as in prior years.

Trump’s SEC gave companies more power over investors. Lawsuits pushed them back | Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from computer scientist Stephen Thaler, leaving intact a lower court ruling that works created solely by artificial intelligence are not eligible for copyright protection. The decision lets stand a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that agreed with the U.S. Copyright Office that only human authors can register copyrighted works.

Thaler sought protection for a two-dimensional image titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” which was generated by his AI system known as the Creativity Machine. He argued that the Copyright Act does not explicitly require human authorship and that the agency improperly read that limitation into the statute. The D.C. Circuit rejected that claim, reasoning that multiple provisions of the law assume an author is a human being, particularly sections dealing with lifespan and inheritance rights.

Thaler also contended that, as the system’s owner and programmer, he should qualify for copyright under work-for-hire principles or property law concepts. The government responded that a valid work-for-hire arrangement requires a written agreement and cannot apply to a nonhuman creator. This dispute echoes Thaler’s earlier, unsuccessful effort to secure patent rights for an AI-generated invention, which the Supreme Court also declined to review in 2023.

Justices Reject Appeal Over Copyright For AI-Created Art - Law360

On March 2, 1920, Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, better known as the Jones Act. Enacted in the aftermath of World War I, the statute reflected a national effort to strengthen the United States’ merchant marine fleet. Lawmakers believed that a robust domestic shipping industry was essential to both economic growth and national defense. The Act required that goods transported between U.S. ports be carried on vessels that are built in the United States, owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed primarily by Americans. Senator Wesley L. Jones sponsored the measure, arguing that reliance on foreign ships posed strategic risks.

The law reshaped American maritime commerce for decades. By limiting coastwise trade to qualifying vessels, Congress sought to ensure a steady demand for American shipyards and maritime labor. Supporters have long maintained that the Act protects domestic jobs and guarantees a ready fleet in times of war or national emergency. Critics, however, argue that the restrictions reduce competition and raise shipping costs. Those higher costs are often felt most sharply in non-contiguous states and territories such as Puerto Rico and Hawaii, which depend heavily on maritime transport.

Over time, the Jones Act has generated extensive litigation and recurring legislative proposals for reform or repeal. Courts have been called upon to interpret its scope, exemptions, and application to modern shipping practices. More than a century after its passage, the statute remains a focal point in debates over free trade, federal power, and national security.

President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using artificial intelligence products from Anthropic after the company declined to support certain military applications. The dispute arose when Anthropic said it would not provide its technology for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons systems. Trump accused the company of trying to impose its own political views on the Department of Defense and claimed its stance threatened national security. Shortly after the president’s directive, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that military contractors and partners could no longer conduct business with Anthropic. The Defense Department said it would phase out the company’s technology within six months while transitioning to another provider.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had stated that while AI can support lawful foreign intelligence efforts, mass surveillance of Americans raises serious civil liberties concerns. He also argued that fully autonomous weapons lack the reliability and oversight needed to ensure responsible use. According to Anthropic, the Defense Department required contractors to agree to “any lawful use” of AI systems, including applications the company views as risky. The government also threatened to label Anthropic a national security “supply chain risk,” a designation the company says is usually reserved for foreign adversaries. Anthropic maintains that such a move would be legally questionable and has pledged to challenge it in court. The company further argues that any formal designation would likely apply only to government contract work, not to all commercial activity.

Trump Tells Federal Agencies To Drop ‘Woke’ Anthropic Tech - Law360

Trump admin blacklists Anthropic; AI firm refuses Pentagon demands

OpenAI has completed a massive $110 billion funding round that values the company at $730 billion. The investment was led by Amazon with a $50 billion contribution, while Nvidia and SoftBank each committed $30 billion. The deal was advised by Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz on behalf of OpenAI.

As part of the transaction, OpenAI also entered into a strategic cloud partnership with Amazon and secured access to Nvidia’s next-generation graphics processing units to expand its AI capabilities. The company said additional investors may join the round as it continues. OpenAI highlighted that more than 9 million paying business customers use ChatGPT, alongside roughly 900 million weekly active users.

The funding reflects the accelerating competition among major technology companies to build AI infrastructure, including cloud systems, chips, and data centers. Amazon has already announced plans to invest about $200 billion in AI-related capital spending next year. Across the tech sector, companies such as Meta Platforms and Alphabet Inc. are also committing hundreds of billions of dollars to AI development. OpenAI described the moment as an infrastructure race, emphasizing that scaling capacity quickly will determine leadership in the industry.

Wachtell Lipton Steers OpenAI On $110B Amazon-Led Funding - Law360

A Los Angeles trial judge warned members of the press that she may impose a gag order in the high-profile social media bellwether case involving claims that major platforms harmed a young user’s mental health. Carolyn B. Kuhl said a news report appeared to reference juror conversations overheard in a courthouse hallway, which she viewed as a violation of her directive to keep distance from jurors. She emphasized that preserving the integrity of the proceedings is critical and stated she would hold a hearing on a gag order if necessary.

The case, pending in Los Angeles County Superior Court, is the first bellwether trial among more than 1,000 consolidated lawsuits. The plaintiff, identified as Kaley G.M., alleges that platforms such as Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram and Google LLC’s YouTube used addictive design features that contributed to her mental health struggles. The judge has repeatedly instructed jurors not to discuss the case or consume media coverage, and she has taken steps to physically separate them from reporters and the public. She also restricted any physical descriptions of the plaintiff because her claims relate to harm suffered as a minor.

Tensions over courtroom conduct have surfaced before. The judge previously warned attendees about unauthorized recordings and removed a plaintiffs’ attorney from a leadership role for filming inside the courthouse. Meanwhile, the trial has included testimony from the plaintiff and expert witnesses who argue that social media addiction is real and harmful. The defendants maintain that other factors, including family dynamics, contributed to her condition. With additional trials planned, the outcome of this bellwether proceeding could influence settlement discussions and expose the companies to significant financial liability.

Social Media Trial Judge Threatens Media With Gag Order - Law360

Improper juror access in social media case, judge warns media

A juror in the recent trial of Thomas Goldstein said the defendant’s own testimony was a turning point in the case that led to his conviction on multiple tax and mortgage fraud charges. The juror described Goldstein’s time on the stand as polished but theatrical, suggesting it felt more like a performance than a candid explanation. Goldstein had argued that errors in his tax filings stemmed from bookkeeping mistakes and reliance on outside accountants, and he claimed he overstated certain gambling winnings. Prosecutors, however, alleged that he intentionally failed to report millions in income, improperly deducted personal expenses, and misrepresented debts on mortgage applications.

The jury convicted him on 12 of 16 counts, including tax evasion and mortgage fraud, while acquitting him on several charges tied to later tax years. He has been ordered to remain under home confinement pending sentencing. According to the juror, the government’s extensive documentary evidence — including bank records, emails, and text messages — ultimately carried significant weight. Testimony about Goldstein’s spending habits and lifestyle was also presented, though the juror said personal matters such as alleged affairs were not decisive.

The defense emphasized accounting errors and challenged the venue for certain mortgage counts. Still, the juror said responsibility rested with Goldstein because he signed the tax returns. Prosecutors have praised the verdict, while the defense has not publicly commented. The case was tried in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

Goldstein Testimony ‘Solidified’ Case, Juror Says - Law360

District of Maryland | Prominent Lawyer Thomas Goldstein Convicted of Tax Evasion and Mortgage Fraud | United States Department of Justice

On February 27, 1933, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was set ablaze in Berlin, an event that would alter the course of constitutional government in Germany. The fire broke out just weeks after Adolf Hitler had been appointed Chancellor. Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested at the scene, and Nazi officials quickly blamed a broader communist conspiracy. The next day, President Paul von Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree at Hitler’s urging.

The decree suspended key civil liberties guaranteed under the Weimar Constitution, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right of assembly, and protections against unlawful searches and detention. It also allowed the central government to override state authorities. In practical terms, the measure authorized indefinite detention without trial. Police power expanded dramatically, and political opponents were arrested in large numbers.

Although framed as a temporary emergency response, the decree had no meaningful expiration. It became the legal foundation for dismantling democratic institutions in Germany. Courts largely failed to check the expanding authority of the executive branch. The event demonstrates how emergency powers, once normalized, can erode constitutional safeguards from within. The Reichstag Fire and its legal aftermath remain a lasting example of how constitutional systems can collapse through formally lawful measures rather than open revolution.

Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to give private testimony to the House Oversight Committee regarding his past association with Jeffrey Epstein. The closed-door session follows testimony from Hillary Clinton, who said she does not recall meeting Epstein and denied having information about his crimes. Bill Clinton previously flew on Epstein’s plane multiple times after leaving office, and recently released Justice Department documents include photos of him with unidentified women. He has denied any misconduct and has expressed regret over his past association.

Committee Chairman James Comer stated that neither Clinton is accused of wrongdoing but said they must address questions about Epstein’s possible connections to their charitable foundation. The Clintons agreed to testify near their home in New York after lawmakers threatened contempt proceedings. Some Democrats supported compelling their testimony, while others criticized the inquiry as politically motivated.

Democrats argue that Republicans are using the investigation to shield Donald Trump from scrutiny. They have called for Trump to be subpoenaed, noting that his name appears frequently in Epstein-related records and that he had social ties with Epstein before Epstein’s 2008 conviction. Democrats also claim the Justice Department is withholding records involving allegations against Trump. The department has said it is reviewing the materials and has emphasized that released files contain unverified claims. Authorities have not charged Trump with any crimes related to Epstein. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, and his death was ruled a suicide.

Bill Clinton to give private testimony to Congress about Epstein | Reuters

A federal judge has allowed construction of President Donald Trump’s planned $400 million White House ballroom to continue, at least for now. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon denied a request from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to temporarily halt the project while its lawsuit moves forward. The group had sought a preliminary injunction to stop work, arguing that the administration failed to comply with federal laws, including obtaining congressional approval and conducting proper environmental review.

Leon ruled that the preservationists had not met the legal standard required for such an emergency order. However, he indicated they may revise their complaint to better challenge the president’s claimed statutory authority to proceed without Congress. The lawsuit contends that demolishing the historic East Wing and beginning construction violated federal restrictions on altering federal property in Washington, D.C. It also argues that the National Park Service should have completed a more detailed environmental impact statement before work began.

The Trump administration maintains that the renovation fits within longstanding presidential authority over White House changes and serves public functions. Trump praised the ruling publicly and said the ballroom would symbolize national strength. The National Trust expressed disappointment but said it plans to amend its legal claims.

The East Wing, originally built in 1902 and expanded in 1942, was demolished in October. The ballroom is part of broader renovations Trump has made since returning to office in 2025. Although construction is underway, no firm completion date has been announced.

Trump’s White House ballroom can move ahead for now, judge rules | Reuters

Prediction-market company Kalshi has hired prominent Supreme Court advocate Neal Katyal to represent it in a series of disputes with state regulators. Katyal, a former acting U.S. solicitor general, appeared this week in a lawsuit Kalshi filed against Utah officials and is also handling similar cases in several other states. The company argues that its event-based trading contracts fall under the authority of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not state gambling regulators.

States contend that platforms like Kalshi are effectively operating unlicensed sports-betting businesses. Other prediction-market operators, including Polymarket and Coinbase, are also fighting regulatory battles and have assembled experienced legal teams. The industry has grown rapidly, with tens of billions of dollars in trading volume last year, increasing scrutiny from state authorities.

Kalshi bets on Neal Katyal in prediction market cases | Reuters

Netflix has withdrawn its bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery after WBD’s board determined that a competing offer from Paramount Skydance was superior. Netflix’s co-CEOs said their proposed merger would have delivered value and likely cleared regulatory review, but matching Paramount’s higher price no longer made financial sense. They described the deal as desirable at the right valuation, but not essential at any cost.

Paramount’s leadership welcomed WBD’s decision, saying its proposal offers greater value and a clearer path to closing. To finalize the Paramount deal, a short match period must expire, Netflix’s existing merger agreement must be terminated, and a definitive agreement between Paramount and WBD must be signed.

Paramount recently raised its offer to $31 per share in cash, along with a quarterly ticking fee if the deal is not completed by a specified date. The proposal also includes a $7 billion regulatory termination fee if the transaction fails because of regulatory issues, as well as reimbursement of the $2.8 billion breakup fee WBD would owe Netflix upon ending their agreement. With Netflix stepping aside, Paramount is now positioned to complete the acquisition.

Netflix Drops WBD Bid, Paving Way For Paramount Deal - Law360

This week’s closing theme is by Frédéric Chopin.

This week’s closing theme takes us to Chopin and his Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, a work that helped launch his international career. Although numbered second, it was actually the first of his two piano concertos to be written, composed in 1829 when he was just twenty. The concerto reflects Chopin’s deep roots in the Polish Romantic tradition, while also revealing the poetic lyricism that would define his later solo piano works. Its sweeping first movement balances youthful brilliance with emotional intensity. The second movement, marked Larghetto, is intimate and expressive, often described as a musical love letter. The finale brings rhythmic energy and subtle references to Polish dance forms.

The piece gained wider recognition when Chopin performed it during his Paris debut on February 27, 1832. That appearance introduced him to the influential musical circles of Paris and marked a turning point in his career. The concerto showcased not only his technical skill, but also his distinctive touch and refined musical voice. While later critics sometimes focused on the orchestration, the piano writing remains among the most elegant of the Romantic era. The work captures a young composer standing at the threshold of fame, blending vulnerability with confidence. As our closing theme this week, it reflects both artistic ambition and a historic February 27 connection that helped shape Chopin’s legacy.

Without further ado, Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, enjoy!

On February 26, 1929, Congress officially established Grand Teton National Park, preserving one of the most striking mountain landscapes in the American West. While today the park is known for its natural beauty and wildlife, its creation was rooted in significant legal and political conflict. The legislation reflected a growing national commitment to conservation during the early twentieth century. At the same time, it sparked fierce opposition from local ranchers and residents who feared federal control over land they had long used for grazing and settlement. Many critics argued that expanding federal ownership infringed upon traditional property rights and state authority.

The controversy centered on Congress’s constitutional power to regulate and manage federal lands under the Property Clause. Supporters of the park maintained that the federal government had clear authority to preserve land for public use and environmental protection. Opponents viewed the move as an overreach that disrupted local economies and private land expectations. The debate highlighted tensions between national conservation goals and regional economic interests. It also illustrated how public land policy can serve as a testing ground for broader constitutional principles.

Ultimately, the establishment of the park signaled an expanding federal role in environmental stewardship. It marked a shift toward long-term preservation over short-term private development. The legal battles surrounding the park foreshadowed future disputes over land use, resource management, and federal regulatory power. February 26, 1929, thus stands as a reminder that conservation law has often advanced through conflict as much as consensus.

The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit against the University of California system, alleging that Jewish and Israeli employees at UCLA were subjected to an antisemitic hostile work environment. The complaint, brought by the Justice Department in Los Angeles, claims UCLA failed to respond adequately to discrimination complaints following the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel. Federal officials argue that the university ignored or even enabled antisemitic conduct during a period marked by intense campus protests over the war in Gaza. The lawsuit seeks a court order requiring UCLA to investigate the allegations, improve anti-discrimination training, and pay unspecified damages to two professors who say they experienced antisemitism.

This legal action is part of a broader effort by President Trump to challenge universities over pro-Palestinian protests, diversity programs, and other policies. The administration previously attempted to freeze significant federal funding for UCLA, though a judge ordered that funding restored. UCLA has responded by pointing to institutional reforms, including restructuring its civil rights office and launching initiatives aimed at combating antisemitism. Large demonstrations took place on campus in 2024, with protesters calling for divestment from companies linked to Israel and an end to U.S. support for the war in Gaza. Some demonstrators, including Jewish groups, have argued that criticism of Israeli policy is being wrongly labeled as antisemitism.

The University of California system receives more than $17 billion annually in federal funding, heightening the stakes of the dispute. The administration has reached financial settlements in similar investigations involving other universities, prompting concerns among academic experts about the impact on academic freedom. Notably, the administration has not pursued comparable investigations into allegations of Islamophobia or anti-Palestinian discrimination.

Trump administration alleges antisemitic work environment at UCLA | Reuters

Attorneys general from 11 Republican-led states have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to closely examine Netflix’s proposed $82.7 billion acquisition of studio and streaming assets from Warner Bros. The state officials argue that the deal could harm competition and weaken the United States’ leadership in the film industry. In a letter to federal regulators, they urged careful scrutiny of how the merger might affect streaming subscribers and the theatrical movie market.

Warner Bros. has accepted Netflix’s offer, but its board is also weighing a competing proposal from Paramount Skydance, which has suggested that Netflix’s bid may face greater antitrust challenges. The state attorneys general contend that combining the companies’ assets could lead to excessive market concentration. They warn that reduced competition might result in higher prices, diminished service quality, and fewer innovative offerings for consumers.

The officials emphasize that the entertainment industry is a significant part of the American economy and cultural influence, making regulatory oversight especially important. Their request signals potential legal and political resistance to the transaction as federal antitrust authorities evaluate the proposed merger.

11 US States urge DOJ to thoroughly probe Netflix-Warner Bros. deal | Reuters

Spain’s competition regulator has determined that Apple and Amazon failed to promptly remove anti-competitive clauses from their distribution agreements, despite being ordered to do so. The watchdog, known as the CNMC, had fined the companies 194 million euros in 2023 and instructed them to immediately eliminate contract terms that limited the number of Apple resellers on Amazon’s Spanish platform. Regulators said those provisions unfairly restricted competition and affected how rival products were promoted on the site.

According to the CNMC, the companies did not fully comply with the cease-and-desist order until May 2025, well after the directive was issued. This delay could expose them to additional penalties. The regulator had also alleged that the agreements reduced advertising space for competing brands and blocked marketing efforts targeting Apple customers with alternative products.

Both companies dispute the findings. Apple stated that it respects the regulator but disagrees with the ruling and maintains it has followed official instructions, emphasizing efforts to protect customers from counterfeit goods. Amazon likewise rejected the regulator’s conclusions and said it plans to appeal, arguing that its business model depends on supporting third-party sellers, many of whom are small and medium-sized businesses. The original 2023 fine remains suspended while the case is under review by Spain’s High Court.

Apple and Amazon took too long to remove anti-competitive clauses, Spanish watchdog says | Reuters

On February 25, 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels was sworn in as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate. His election came during the turbulent Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War, a period defined by constitutional change and political uncertainty. Revels represented Mississippi, a former Confederate state that had only recently been readmitted to the Union. In a moment heavy with symbolism, he filled the Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy. The contrast between the two men reflected the profound transformation taking place in American law and government.

Revels’ swearing-in came after the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection, and protected voting rights regardless of race. His presence in the Senate gave tangible meaning to those constitutional promises. Yet his path to office was not without challenge. Some senators argued that he did not meet the Constitution’s nine-year citizenship requirement, claiming that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford had denied Black Americans citizenship before the Civil War. Supporters countered that the 14th Amendment had settled the question of citizenship, making Revels eligible to serve. The Senate ultimately voted to seat him, affirming the legal force of the Reconstruction Amendments.

Revels served only a brief term, but his impact was lasting. His election marked a rare window in American history when federal power was actively used to expand civil and political rights in the South. Although Reconstruction would eventually give way to decades of segregation and disenfranchisement, February 25, 1870 stands as a reminder of a constitutional moment when the nation attempted to redefine equality under the law.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released its first major update to its enforcement manual in eight years, outlining a new vision focused on fairness and transparency. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins described the revisions as overdue and said the agency will now review the manual annually. The updated 115-page guide provides clearer direction on how enforcement investigations will proceed and what options are available to individuals and companies under scrutiny.

One key change involves the Wells process, which notifies potential defendants that SEC staff intend to recommend enforcement action. Under the revised policy, recipients of a Wells notice will have four weeks to submit a written response. After filing that response, they may request a meeting with senior leadership in the Division of Enforcement to argue against pursuing charges or to present their perspective on the case.

Atkins has previously indicated that reforming the Wells process is a priority, emphasizing the need for accurate and carefully considered enforcement actions. Enforcement Division Director Meg Ryan also noted that a persuasive Wells response can influence whether commissioners ultimately approve a case. The manual further reinstates the ability of settling parties to request waivers from automatic industry bars that can follow enforcement actions. In addition, it introduces clearer guidance on how cooperation may reduce penalties and explains how the SEC may coordinate with criminal authorities. Overall, the agency says the revisions aim to clarify how it enforces federal securities laws and strengthen public confidence in the process.

SEC Lays Out New Enforcement Vision In Revised Guidelines - Law360

Paramount Skydance has submitted a revised proposal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, as a bidding battle with Netflix continues. The new offer follows the expiration of a seven-day waiver period under WBD’s existing merger agreement with Netflix. For Paramount’s deal to move forward, WBD’s board must first determine that the revised bid qualifies as a “Company Superior Proposal” under the Netflix agreement. After that, a four-business-day match period would need to pass, the Netflix agreement would have to be terminated, and a new definitive agreement would need to be signed with Paramount.

While the board reviews the updated proposal, Paramount said it will keep its tender offer in place and continue urging shareholders to reject what it calls the less favorable Netflix transaction. The rivalry between the bidders has spilled into public statements, with Paramount criticizing the structure of the Netflix deal as potentially reducing shareholder value. Netflix has pushed back, accusing Paramount of mischaracterizing regulatory issues and focusing on appearances rather than results.

WBD confirmed it received the revised bid but reiterated that its current merger agreement with Netflix remains active and that the board still recommends the Netflix deal. Specific terms of Paramount’s updated offer were not disclosed, though it recently added financial safeguards, regulatory commitments, and an offer to cover the breakup fee if WBD exits the Netflix agreement. Netflix’s agreement to acquire WBD’s studio and streaming operations is valued at about $82.7 billion, while Paramount’s competing proposal to purchase the entire company is valued at roughly $108.4 billion.

Paramount Revises WBD Offer As Netflix Bid War Goes On - Law360

​​A federal judge has temporarily barred prosecutors from freely searching devices seized from a Washington Post reporter during a national security leak investigation. The FBI searched reporter Hannah Natanson’s home in January and took electronic devices as part of a probe into the alleged disclosure of government secrets. Natanson, who has reported on President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismiss large numbers of federal employees, has not been charged with any crime.

U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter ruled that the government may not conduct an unrestricted review of the seized materials. Instead, he said the court will oversee the examination of the devices to ensure that journalistic protections are respected while still allowing investigators to seek relevant evidence. Porter rejected the Justice Department’s request to let prosecutors carry out a broad, unsupervised search.

Justice Department attorneys had argued that reviewing the materials was essential to a criminal investigation involving national security concerns. They proposed using a separate FBI “filter team” to screen the data and remove irrelevant content before investigators accessed it. The judge’s order reflects an effort to balance press freedom with the government’s authority to pursue evidence in sensitive cases.

US judge blocks search of Washington Post reporter’s devices | Reuters

A California woman is set to testify in Los Angeles that her early use of Instagram and YouTube harmed her mental health, in a closely watched trial against Meta and Google. The plaintiff, identified as Kaley G.M., says she began using YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine, and later struggled with depression and body dysmorphia. Her attorneys argue the companies deliberately designed their platforms to attract and retain young users despite being aware of potential psychological risks.

The case is part of a broader international push to address the impact of social media on children, with some countries already imposing restrictions. Earlier phases of the trial focused on what the companies knew about the effects of their platforms on young users and how they targeted that demographic. Now the proceedings are turning to Kaley’s personal experiences and whether the platforms substantially contributed to her mental health challenges.

To succeed, her legal team must prove that the design or operation of the platforms was a significant factor in causing or worsening her condition. Meta has pointed to her history of family instability and alleged abuse as alternative explanations for her struggles. Her lawyer, however, referenced internal company research suggesting that teens facing difficult circumstances were more likely to use Instagram compulsively.

The lawsuit also challenges features such as autoplay videos, endless scrolling, “like” buttons, and beauty filters, which the plaintiff claims encouraged prolonged use and distorted self-image. YouTube’s defense argues that she did not fully use available safety tools and presented data indicating her recent average viewing time was relatively limited.

Woman suing Meta, YouTube over social media addiction takes the stand at trial | Reuters

On February 24, 1803, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Marbury v. Madison, a case that permanently reshaped American constitutional law. The dispute arose after President John Adams appointed several “midnight judges” in the final hours of his administration. One of those appointees, William Marbury, never received his commission because it was not delivered before Thomas Jefferson took office. Jefferson instructed his Secretary of State, James Madison, not to deliver the commission, prompting Marbury to seek relief directly from the Supreme Court.

Presiding over the case was Chief Justice John Marshall, whose involvement added a striking layer of irony. Before becoming Chief Justice, Marshall had served as Secretary of State under Adams and had been responsible for sealing the very commissions at issue. In other words, Marshall was now reviewing the legal consequences of actions taken by his former office. Rather than recuse himself, he authored the opinion that would define the Court’s authority.

Marshall concluded that Marbury had a legal right to his commission but held that the statute granting the Supreme Court power to issue writs of mandamus conflicted with Article III of the Constitution. Because the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, Marshall reasoned, any conflicting statute must be void. In declaring part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 unconstitutional, the Court asserted the power of judicial review for the first time.

The decision simultaneously denied Marbury his remedy while expanding the Court’s institutional authority. It avoided a direct political confrontation with Jefferson while firmly establishing the judiciary as a co-equal branch of government. What began as a minor political dispute over an undelivered commission became the foundation for the Supreme Court’s power to strike down unconstitutional laws.

A federal judge has permanently blocked the Justice Department from releasing a prosecutor’s report concerning the classified documents case against President Donald Trump. The ruling was issued by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who concluded that making the report public would amount to a “manifest injustice” because the case never went to trial. She reasoned that publishing detailed allegations of criminal conduct without a jury verdict would undermine basic fairness principles.

The case had been brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith and accused Trump of unlawfully retaining sensitive national defense materials at his Mar-a-Lago property and obstructing government efforts to recover them. Trump and his co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira, pleaded not guilty and described the prosecution as politically motivated. In 2024, Cannon dismissed the charges, finding that Smith had not been lawfully appointed.

After Trump returned to office, the Justice Department supported efforts to keep the report confidential. Although special counsels are typically required to submit reports explaining their charging decisions, Cannon held that releasing this one would conflict with her earlier rulings, including her determination that Smith’s appointment was invalid. She also cited concerns about exposing grand jury material.

The decision prevents public disclosure of substantial details about one of the four criminal cases Trump faced after leaving office. It follows the Supreme Court’s recent decision limiting Trump’s tariff authority and marks another significant legal development in the ongoing disputes surrounding his post-presidency investigations.

US judge permanently blocks release of report on Trump documents case | Reuters

The chief judges of two major federal appeals courts have announced plans to step back from active service later this year, creating new vacancies for President Donald Trump to fill. Debra Ann Livingston of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Jeffrey Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit both notified the president that they intend to take senior status. Livingston plans to assume senior status on July 1, while Sutton will do so on October 1.

Their decisions come ahead of the November midterm elections, when control of the U.S. Senate could shift, potentially complicating confirmation of successors. Because judicial vacancies have been relatively scarce during Trump’s second term, the openings present an opportunity to expand his appellate appointments. During his first term, Trump appointed 54 appellate judges, significantly influencing the judiciary’s ideological direction.

Both judges were originally appointed by President George W. Bush. Livingston, who has served on the Second Circuit since 2007 and became chief judge in 2020, has at times issued notable dissents, including in cases involving LGBTQ workplace protections and congressional subpoenas tied to Trump’s business records. Sutton, on the Sixth Circuit since 2003 and chief judge since 2021, has been an influential conservative jurist. He authored a 2014 opinion upholding same-sex marriage bans that the Supreme Court later overturned in Obergefell v. Hodges.

Senior status allows eligible judges to continue hearing cases on a reduced basis while enabling the president to nominate full-time replacements. Their departures will hand Trump two high-profile appellate vacancies at a time when few others are available.

Two chief US appellate judges to leave active service, handing Trump vacancies | Reuters

In my weekly column for Bloomberg Tax, I examine the Trump administration’s proposed 0.125% “land port maintenance tax” and question whether it is truly infrastructure policy or contingency planning after the Supreme Court curtailed its tariff authority. The proposal is framed as a parity measure to mirror the Harbor Maintenance Fee, but I argue the timing is hard to ignore. Just this week, the Court in Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs, reaffirming that Congress controls taxing power absent clear delegation. In my view, that ruling narrows executive trade authority and invites efforts to find alternative mechanisms embedded elsewhere in the customs code.

I suggest the land port tax looks like one such alternative. Although labeled a “maintenance” fee, it would be imposed at the border and function economically like a tariff, with costs passed to US importers and consumers. Because most land-based trade flows through Canada and Mexico, I note that the charge would operate in practice as a North American supply chain tax. Calling it infrastructure policy does not change its price effects.

I also argue that the Harbor Maintenance Fee analogy falls apart on inspection. Whatever its flaws, the HMF at least carries a user-fee logic tied to dredging and port upkeep. By contrast, the new proposal appears loosely connected to land-border infrastructure and bundled within a broader maritime industrial policy agenda. If shipbuilding is a national security priority, I contend Congress should fund it transparently through the Defense Department and regular appropriations. If the HMF distorts shipping routes, it should be reformed directly rather than replicated inland.

Ultimately, I maintain that after Learning Resources, any border charge that operates like a tariff will face legal skepticism. If policymakers intend to subsidize maritime industry, they should say so clearly, define measurable goals, and subject the costs to democratic accountability.

On this day in legal history, enforcement of Executive Order 9066 began in earnest following its signing by Franklin D. Roosevelt earlier in February 1942. The order authorized the military to designate exclusion zones and remove individuals deemed security risks from certain areas of the country. In practice, it led to the forced relocation and incarceration of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens. Families were removed from their homes, businesses were lost, and entire communities were dismantled. The government justified the policy as a matter of national security during World War II. Critics argued it was rooted in racial prejudice rather than military necessity.

The constitutionality of the policy reached the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States. Fred Korematsu, a U.S. citizen, had refused to comply with the exclusion order and was convicted. In a 6–3 decision, the Court upheld his conviction, accepting the government’s claim that the exclusion was justified by wartime necessity. The majority deferred heavily to the executive branch, emphasizing the perceived threat on the West Coast. In dissent, several justices warned that the decision validated racial discrimination under the guise of military urgency.

Decades later, the ruling came to be widely regarded as a grave error. In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, formally apologizing and providing reparations to surviving internees. In 2018, the Supreme Court explicitly stated that Korematsu was wrongly decided, rejecting its reasoning even though it was not formally overturned in the technical sense. The episode remains a cautionary example of how constitutional protections can erode in times of crisis.

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear two cases concerning the scope of the Helms-Burton Act, a 1996 law that allows American companies to sue over property confiscated by Cuba after the 1959 revolution. One case involves ExxonMobil’s effort to recover more than $1 billion for oil and gas assets seized by Cuba in 1960. Exxon sued a Cuban state-owned company in 2019, alleging it continues to profit from the confiscated property. A lower court ruled that the Cuban entities could claim foreign sovereign immunity, which generally protects foreign governments from being sued in U.S. courts. Exxon has asked the Supreme Court to reverse that decision.

The second case involves four cruise operators—Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian Cruise Line, and MSC Cruises—accused of unlawfully benefiting from docks in Havana that were originally built and operated by a U.S. company before being seized by Cuba. The docks were used between 2016 and 2019, after travel restrictions were eased under President Obama. A trial judge initially ruled against the cruise lines and awarded more than $100 million in damages, but an appeals court later dismissed the case, finding that the original concession had expired before the cruise lines used the property. The Supreme Court’s decisions could clarify how broadly Congress intended the Helms-Burton Act to apply and whether claimants face significant legal barriers when seeking compensation.

US Supreme Court to hear Exxon bid for compensation from Cuba | Reuters

U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced that it will stop collecting tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) beginning just after midnight on Tuesday. The decision comes several days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that those tariffs were unlawful. The agency said it would deactivate the tariff codes tied to President Donald Trump’s IEEPA-related orders but did not explain why collections continued for days after the ruling. It also did not address whether importers who paid the duties would receive refunds.

The suspension of the IEEPA tariffs coincides with the implementation of a new 15% global tariff introduced under a different statutory authority. Customs clarified that the halt applies only to the IEEPA-based tariffs and does not affect other trade measures, including those enacted under Section 232 for national security reasons or Section 301 for unfair trade practices. Economists have estimated that the now-invalidated IEEPA tariffs generated more than $175 billion in revenue and were bringing in over $500 million per day. As a result, the ruling potentially exposes the government to significant refund claims from importers.

US to stop collecting tariffs deemed illegal by Supreme Court on Tuesday | Reuters

JPMorgan Chase informed President Donald Trump and his hospitality company in February 2021 that it was closing their bank accounts, according to newly released documents tied to Trump’s $5 billion lawsuit against the bank and its CEO, Jamie Dimon. The letters were sent about a month after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. At the time, several businesses and organizations distanced themselves from Trump, including law firms and the PGA of America.

In its February 19, 2021 letters, JPMorgan did not provide a detailed explanation for ending the relationship. The bank stated generally that it may determine a client’s interests are no longer served by continuing with J.P. Morgan Private Bank. JPMorgan has previously argued that Trump’s lawsuit lacks merit. Trump’s legal team, however, claims the letters amount to an admission that the bank intentionally “de-banked” him and his businesses, allegedly causing major financial harm.

Trump contends that JPMorgan violated its own policies and unfairly targeted him for political reasons. The newly disclosed letters were submitted as part of the bank’s effort to transfer the case from federal court in Miami to New York, where JPMorgan argues the dispute is more closely connected.

JPMorgan says it closed Trump’s bank accounts a month after Jan. 6 attack | Reuters

A federal judge in Florida declined to overturn a $243 million jury verdict against Tesla stemming from a fatal 2019 crash involving the company’s Autopilot system. The court found that the evidence presented at trial sufficiently supported the jury’s conclusion that Autopilot played a role in the collision, which killed 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon in Key Largo. The jury determined that both the driver and Tesla shared responsibility for the crash.

Jurors originally awarded $59 million to Benavides’ parents and $70 million to her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, who was injured in the incident. After accounting for comparative fault, the compensatory damages were reduced to about $42.6 million, with the driver found 67% responsible and Tesla 33% responsible. The jury also imposed $200 million in punitive damages against the company.

Tesla asked the court to set aside the verdict or grant a new trial, arguing that the damages were excessive and that its conduct did not meet Florida’s legal threshold for punitive damages. The company also contended that state law limits punitive damages to three times the compensatory award. The judge rejected these arguments, stating that Tesla was largely repeating points already considered and dismissed during trial.

At trial, plaintiffs argued that Autopilot was defective because it could be activated on roads it was not designed for and did not adequately ensure driver attention. They also claimed Tesla overstated the system’s capabilities. The driver admitted he had looked away from the road moments before the crash.

Tesla Can’t Escape $243M Autopilot Crash Verdict - Law360

On this day in legal history, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), a case that defined the balance between individual liberty and public health. The dispute arose during a smallpox outbreak when Massachusetts authorized local governments to require vaccinations. Henning Jacobson refused the vaccine, arguing that the mandate violated his personal liberty under the Constitution. The case presented a fundamental question: how far can the state go in protecting the health of its citizens?

In a 7–2 decision, the Court upheld the compulsory vaccination law. The justices reasoned that individual freedoms are not absolute. Writing for the majority, the Court explained that the Constitution permits reasonable regulations to protect public health and safety. This authority stems from the state’s “police power,” a broad power to enact laws for the welfare of the community. The Court emphasized that liberty does not include the right to act in a way that harms others. During an epidemic, the government may impose measures necessary to prevent disease from spreading.

The decision established an enduring precedent for public health regulation. It has been cited in later cases involving quarantine laws, vaccine mandates, and emergency health orders. More than a century later, Jacobson remains central to debates about the limits of government authority in times of crisis.

A federal judge in California sharply reduced a jury pool in a class action securities trial against Elon Musk after many potential jurors said they could not be impartial. Out of 92 candidates, 38 were dismissed after admitting they could not fairly judge the case, prompting Musk’s attorney to argue that strong personal hostility toward his client was affecting the process. The lawsuit, brought by former Twitter investors, alleges that Musk made misleading statements in 2022 to depress the company’s stock price while negotiating its purchase. Musk denies the allegations.

Judge Charles R. Breyer reminded jurors that their verdict must be based only on evidence presented at trial, not personal opinions about Musk. Several prospective jurors expressed strong views, both positive and negative, and some were removed for cause. One man who said he believed Musk should be in prison but could be fair in a civil case was not selected. Others who openly supported Musk or dismissed class actions as frivolous were also excluded. By the end of the day, a nine-member jury was seated.

The case centers on claims that Musk’s tweets about the deal being “on hold” and about the percentage of fake accounts misled investors. The judge previously ruled that investors plausibly alleged securities law violations and certified a class of affected shareholders. He also denied early summary judgment motions, allowing the case to proceed to trial. The upcoming trial will determine whether Musk’s public statements violated federal securities laws during the 2022 acquisition process.

‘Hate’ For Musk Quickly Narrows Jury Pool In Twitter Deal Trial - Law360

Jeffrey Epstein’s estate has agreed to pay up to $35 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging that two of his longtime advisers helped facilitate his sex trafficking scheme. The proposed agreement was disclosed in a federal court filing in Manhattan and must still be approved by a judge. The lawsuit, filed in 2024, targeted Darren Indyke, Epstein’s former personal lawyer, and Richard Kahn, his longtime accountant, who serve as co-executors of the estate.

Attorneys for the victims claimed the two men assisted Epstein by managing a network of corporations and financial accounts that concealed his activities and enabled payments to victims and recruiters. As part of the settlement, neither Indyke nor Kahn admitted wrongdoing. Their attorney stated they were prepared to contest the claims at trial but chose to settle to bring closure and resolve remaining potential claims against the estate.

The estate has already distributed substantial sums to victims. A compensation program previously paid out $121 million, and an additional $49 million has been resolved through other settlements. According to defense counsel, the new agreement will offer a confidential path to compensation for individuals who have not yet settled claims.

Epstein died in a New York jail in 2019, and his death was ruled a suicide.

Epstein estate agrees to $35 million settlement in victim class action | Reuters

The Trump administration announced plans to scale back federal limits on mercury and other hazardous air pollutants emitted by coal-fired power plants. Officials said easing these standards would help utilities manage costs and maintain reliable baseload electricity as power demand rises, particularly from artificial intelligence data centers. The move targets updates made during the Biden administration to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which built on regulations first adopted in 2012.

The Biden-era revisions would have significantly reduced allowable mercury emissions and cut releases of toxic metals such as arsenic, nickel, and lead. Supporters of those rules argued they would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in public health savings by lowering exposure to harmful pollutants. The Supreme Court previously declined to pause the updated standards while legal challenges proceeded.

Environmental and public health advocates warn that weakening the rule could increase health risks, especially for children and other vulnerable populations, since mercury exposure can impair neurological development. The EPA, however, stated that the original 2012 rule already provides sufficient public health protection and that the newer requirements impose costs exceeding their benefits.

The rollback aligns with broader administration efforts to support coal power, including declaring an energy emergency, granting temporary exemptions to dozens of coal plants, and revisiting prior climate-related regulatory findings. Coal plants currently produce less than one-fifth of U.S. electricity but remain significant sources of hazardous air pollution.

Trump EPA to weaken rule limiting harmful mercury, air toxics from coal plants | Reuters

A federal judge in California ruled that PepsiCo and its Frito-Lay division can block a proposed class action brought by convenience store owners alleging unfair pricing practices. The stores claimed the company favored large national retailers by offering them better wholesale prices, in violation of the Robinson-Patman Act, which prohibits certain forms of price discrimination. The lawsuit sought to represent thousands of independently owned California stores that said they lost significant sales as a result of the alleged practices.

U.S. District Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani determined that the plaintiffs failed to show that all proposed class members suffered the same type of injury, a key requirement for class certification under federal law. She explained that price discrimination claims typically require detailed, transaction-specific evidence, making broad class treatment difficult. The court agreed with the defendants’ argument that resolving the claims would require individualized inquiries into each store’s circumstances.

Although the judge rejected the class action request, she did not dismiss the underlying lawsuit. Instead, she allowed the plaintiffs to revise and refile their class allegations. Attorneys for the convenience stores said they plan to amend the complaint to provide additional detail about how Frito-Lay allegedly disadvantaged smaller retailers.

PepsiCo, Frito-Lay win US court order barring class action in snack pricing lawsuit | Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize President Donald Trump to impose broad tariffs under a declared national emergency. In a majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court emphasized that the Constitution assigns the power to levy taxes and duties exclusively to Congress, not the executive branch. The case arose after President Trump declared national emergencies related to drug trafficking and trade deficits and then imposed sweeping tariffs on imports from numerous countries, including Canada, Mexico, and China.

Small businesses and several states challenged the tariffs, arguing that IEEPA permits the president to “regulate” importation but does not explicitly authorize the imposition of duties. Lower courts agreed, and the Federal Circuit largely affirmed those rulings before the cases reached the Supreme Court. The majority concluded that the statutory term “regulate . . . importation” cannot be read to include the power to impose taxes, especially given Congress’s consistent practice of clearly and specifically granting tariff authority in other statutes. The Court also relied on the “major questions” doctrine, reasoning that such sweeping economic authority requires clear congressional authorization, which IEEPA does not provide.

The justices rejected arguments that emergency powers or foreign affairs concerns justified a broader interpretation. They noted that no prior president had used IEEPA to impose tariffs in its nearly 50-year history. As a result, the Court affirmed the Federal Circuit’s decision invalidating the tariffs and directed dismissal of a related case for lack of jurisdiction.

Justices Strike Down Trump’s Emergency Tariffs

This week’s closing theme is by Louis Spohr.

This week’s closing theme features music by Spohr, a composer who stood at the crossroads between the Classical and early Romantic eras. Born in 1784, Spohr was a celebrated violinist, conductor, and teacher whose reputation in his lifetime rivaled many of his contemporaries. Though his name is less familiar today, he played an important role in shaping early nineteenth-century orchestral and chamber music. His style combines Classical clarity with the expressive warmth that would define the Romantic movement.

Spohr wrote four clarinet concertos, each showcasing the instrument’s growing technical and expressive range. The Clarinet Concerto in F minor reflects both virtuosity and lyricism, qualities that made the clarinet increasingly popular in concert halls of the time. The first movement, Allegro assai, opens with dramatic orchestral energy before introducing the soloist in sweeping, agile lines. The music balances precision with expressive phrasing, demanding both technical control and emotional depth from the performer.

Throughout the movement, Spohr allows the clarinet to sing as much as it dazzles. Rapid passages are paired with moments of lyrical calm, highlighting the instrument’s wide tonal palette. The dialogue between soloist and orchestra feels conversational rather than combative, giving the concerto an elegant cohesion. As our closing theme, this Allegro assai offers drive, color, and a glimpse into a composer once central to Europe’s musical life.

Without further ado, Louis Spohr’s Clarinet Concerto in F minor, the first movement, the Allegro assai – enjoy!

On February 19, 1878, Thomas Edison received a patent for one of his most transformative inventions: the phonograph. The device could record and reproduce sound, a breakthrough that stunned the public and reshaped the relationship between technology and creativity. Until that point, copyright law primarily protected written works such as books, maps, and sheet music. The phonograph introduced an entirely new category of expression—recorded sound—that did not fit neatly into existing statutes. Lawmakers and courts were soon confronted with a difficult question: who owns a performance once it is captured on a machine?

Early copyright frameworks did not clearly account for performers’ rights in recorded works. As the recording industry grew, pressure mounted to recognize both composers and performers as legal stakeholders. Congress responded incrementally, expanding federal copyright protections to cover sound recordings in the twentieth century. These changes reflected a broader shift toward adapting intellectual property law to technological innovation. Courts also played a role by interpreting statutes in ways that acknowledged the economic realities of recorded music. The phonograph’s legacy thus extends far beyond its mechanical design. It forced the legal system to confront how creative labor should be valued in an age of reproduction. In doing so, Edison’s invention helped lay the foundation for modern intellectual property law governing sound recording and broadcasting.

A coalition of environmental and public health organizations has filed suit against the Trump administration over its decision to revoke the scientific “endangerment finding” that underpins federal climate regulations. The case was brought in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and also challenges the Environmental Protection Agency’s move to repeal vehicle tailpipe emissions limits. The administration recently announced it would eliminate the 17-year-old finding and end greenhouse gas standards for model years 2012 through 2027.

The endangerment finding, first adopted in 2009, concluded that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare, triggering regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act. Its repeal would remove requirements for measuring and complying with federal vehicle emissions standards, though immediate effects on stationary sources like power plants remain uncertain. The administration characterized the rollback as a major cost-saving measure, estimating $1.3 trillion in taxpayer savings.

By contrast, the Biden administration had previously argued the vehicle standards would produce net consumer benefits, including lower fuel and maintenance costs averaging thousands of dollars over a vehicle’s lifetime. The lawsuit marks one of the most significant legal challenges yet to President Trump’s broader effort to scale back climate policy, promote fossil fuel development, withdraw from the Paris Agreement, and dismantle clean energy incentives. Transportation and power generation each account for roughly a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, underscoring the stakes of the regulatory reversal.

Environmental groups challenge Trump decision to revoke basis of US climate regulations | Reuters

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify in a Los Angeles jury trial examining whether Instagram harms young users’ mental health. The case centers on allegations that Meta designed its platform to keep children engaged despite knowing about potential psychological risks. A California woman who began using Instagram and YouTube as a child claims the platforms contributed to her depression and suicidal thoughts. She is seeking damages, arguing the companies prioritized profit over user well-being.

Meta and Google deny the accusations and point to safety features they have implemented. Meta has also cited research suggesting that evidence does not conclusively show social media directly changes children’s mental health. Defense attorneys argue the plaintiff’s struggles stem from personal and family issues rather than her social media use.

The lawsuit is part of a broader wave of litigation in the United States, where families, schools, and states have filed thousands of similar claims against major tech companies. Internationally, governments such as Australia have imposed age-based restrictions, and other countries are considering similar measures. The trial could test the tech industry’s longstanding legal protections against liability for user harm. If the plaintiff prevails, the verdict may weaken those defenses and open the door to additional claims. Zuckerberg is expected to face questions about internal company research concerning Instagram’s effects on teens.

Meta’s Zuckerberg faces questioning at youth addiction trial | Reuters

A federal judge in San Francisco has ordered a lawyer representing passengers in sexual assault litigation against Uber to pay sanctions for violating a protective order. The ruling requires attorney Bret Stanley to pay $30,000 in legal fees to Uber after he disclosed confidential company information obtained during discovery. The case is part of consolidated litigation accusing Uber of failing to implement adequate safety measures and background checks for drivers, claims the company denies.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Cisneros found that Stanley improperly shared the names of internal Uber policies in unrelated lawsuits and with other plaintiffs’ attorneys. Uber argued that he used the confidential material as a roadmap to pursue evidence in other cases. The judge concluded that Stanley acted unreasonably by unilaterally deciding to disclose protected information. However, she rejected Uber’s request for more than $168,000 in fees, finding that the company had not demonstrated significant harm from the disclosures.

Stanley defended his actions, stating he intended to streamline discovery in related cases and accused Uber of delaying document production nationwide. The judge also indicated Stanley will owe additional fees tied to a separate sanctions request, after finding he searched case documents to assist another lawsuit. The decision comes shortly after a federal jury awarded $8.5 million to a woman who alleged she was sexually assaulted by an Uber driver.

Uber wins sanctions against lawyer for sexual assault plaintiffs | Reuters

On February 18, 1807, former Vice President Aaron Burr was arrested in the Mississippi Territory on charges of treason against the United States. Once one of the most powerful men in the young republic, Burr had fallen from political grace after killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel and drifting to the margins of national life. Federal authorities accused him of plotting to carve out an independent nation in the western territories, possibly including lands belonging to Spain. The allegations sparked fear that the fragile Union could splinter only decades after independence.

Later that year, Burr stood trial in Richmond, Virginia, before Chief Justice John Marshall, who was riding circuit. The case quickly became a constitutional showdown between executive power and judicial restraint. President Thomas Jefferson strongly supported the prosecution, but Marshall insisted that the Constitution’s Treason Clause be applied strictly. The Constitution requires proof of an “overt act” of levying war against the United States, not merely evidence of intent or conspiracy.

Marshall ruled that prosecutors had failed to present sufficient proof that Burr had committed such an overt act. As a result, the jury acquitted him. The decision established an enduring precedent that treason must be narrowly defined and carefully proven. By demanding clear evidence of action rather than suspicion or political hostility, the court reinforced limits on the government’s power to punish alleged disloyalty. Burr’s trial remains one of the earliest and most significant tests of constitutional safeguards in American legal history.

Bayer AG and its Monsanto subsidiary have proposed a $7.25 billion nationwide class settlement to resolve current and future claims that Roundup exposure caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Filed in Missouri state court, the agreement would run for up to 21 years and provide capped, declining annual payments. People diagnosed before or within 16 years after final court approval could seek compensation through the program. The settlement must still receive judicial approval.

The proposal is part of a broader strategy tied to the U.S. Supreme Court’s pending review of Durnell v. Monsanto, which could determine whether federal pesticide labeling law blocks certain state failure-to-warn claims. Bayer has indicated that a favorable ruling could significantly limit future lawsuits, while the class program is designed to address claims regardless of the Court’s decision. Plaintiffs’ attorneys say the deal would cover both occupational and residential exposure and protect the rights of future claimants, while allowing individuals to opt out and pursue separate suits.

Roundup litigation has generated tens of thousands of cases, with more than 40,000 already pending or subject to tolling agreements. Bayer inherited the legal challenges after acquiring Monsanto in 2018, and the ongoing litigation has weighed heavily on the company financially and reputationally. Previous jury verdicts have resulted in multibillion-dollar awards, some later reduced on appeal or by judges. The new proposal would replace an earlier settlement effort that collapsed in 2020 and aims to create a longer-term, more predictable compensation system.

Bayer AG Unveils $7.3B Deal For Roundup Users - Law360

Bayer proposes $7.25 billion plan to settle Roundup cancer cases | Reuters

A Seattle federal jury found inventor Leigh Rothschild, several of his patent-holding companies, and his former attorney liable for violating Washington’s anti-patent trolling law after asserting patent infringement claims against Valve Corp. Jurors concluded the defendants acted in bad faith under the Washington Patent Troll Prevention Act and also violated the state’s consumer protection statute. Valve was awarded $22,092 in statutory damages.

The jury also determined that Rothschild and his companies breached a 2016 global settlement and licensing agreement with Valve. Under that agreement, Valve paid $130,000 for rights to certain patents in exchange for a promise not to sue over them. Despite that covenant, Rothschild’s entities later filed a 2022 infringement lawsuit and sent a 2023 letter threatening additional litigation. The jury awarded Valve $130,000 for the first breach and $1 for the second, finding no valid justification for repudiating the agreement.

In addition, jurors ruled that one asserted patent claim was invalid because it would have been obvious to a skilled professional at the time of filing. The dispute stemmed from Valve’s 2023 lawsuit accusing Rothschild of repeatedly pursuing claims covered by the prior settlement. The defense argued any mistakes were unintentional and not profit-driven, but the jury sided with Valve after a four-day trial.

The case also involved procedural controversies, including sanctions over delayed financial disclosures and allegations that a defense filing contained fabricated quotations and citations generated by artificial intelligence. Post-trial motions are expected as the defense challenges aspects of the verdict.

Valve Jury Says Rothschild, Atty Broke Anti-Patent Troll Law - Law360

Beginning July 1, 2026, new federal limits will cap loans for professional degree students at $50,000 per year and $200,000 total, significantly changing how aspiring lawyers finance law school. Administrators and financial aid experts warn that the cap may push students to rely on private loans, which often carry higher interest rates and fewer protections. Unlike federal loans, private loans are generally not eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, making them riskier for students planning lower-paying public interest careers.

Some admitted students are already reconsidering their options, choosing less expensive schools or withdrawing altogether after calculating potential debt burdens. Law schools may need to increase scholarships or other aid to support students who cannot secure private loans. Private lending has been minimal in legal education since 2006, when federal policy allowed graduate students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance, so there is uncertainty about how lenders will respond to renewed demand.

Data show that about one-quarter of ABA-accredited law schools currently have average annual federal borrowing above the new $50,000 cap. At some elite institutions, graduates tend to earn high salaries, which may reassure private lenders. However, other schools with high borrowing levels report much lower median earnings, raising concerns about repayment risks. Experts warn that students at lower-ranked schools or from disadvantaged backgrounds could be hit hardest.

In response, some schools are creating new financial strategies. The University of Kansas School of Law has launched an in-house loan program with a fixed 5% interest rate for borrowing above the cap. Santa Clara University School of Law is offering guaranteed scholarships to reduce tuition below the federal limit, and applications there have surged. Overall, the loan cap introduces financial uncertainty that could reshape enrollment decisions, access to legal education, and the long-term cost of becoming a lawyer.

US law schools, students fear rising costs from new federal loan cap | Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court has introduced new software designed to help identify potential conflicts of interest involving the justices. The tool will compare information about parties and attorneys in pending cases with financial and other disclosures maintained by each justice’s chambers. These automated checks are intended to supplement, not replace, the justices’ existing internal review process when deciding whether to step aside from a case.

Under current practice, each of the nine justices independently determines whether recusal is necessary. The move comes after the Court adopted its first formal code of conduct in 2023, which states that a justice should withdraw when their impartiality could reasonably be questioned. Critics have pointed out that the code lacks an enforcement mechanism and leaves recusal decisions solely in the hands of the justices themselves.

To support the new system, the Court is also strengthening filing requirements. Parties will need to provide more detailed disclosures, including fuller lists of involved entities and relevant stock ticker symbols. These updated requirements will take effect on March 16. Advocacy groups welcomed the technological upgrade as a step toward better ethics oversight, noting that similar conflict-checking systems have long been standard in lower federal courts.

US Supreme Court adopts new technology to help identify conflicts of interest | Reuters

On February 17, 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Wesberry v. Sanders, one of the most consequential voting rights cases in American history. The dispute arose from Georgia’s congressional districts, where vast population disparities meant that some districts had two or even three times as many residents as others. In practical terms, this imbalance diluted the voting power of citizens in more populated, often urban, districts. James P. Wesberry challenged the system, arguing that it violated Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, which provides that members of the House of Representatives are chosen “by the People.”

In a 6–3 decision, the Court agreed. Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black concluded that the Constitution requires congressional districts to be drawn so that “as nearly as practicable one man’s vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another’s.” The ruling established the principle of “one person, one vote” for federal elections. It rejected longstanding districting schemes that favored rural regions at the expense of growing urban populations. The decision forced states to redraw congressional maps to ensure substantially equal populations across districts.

Wesberry was part of the broader reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, alongside cases addressing state legislative districts. Together, these decisions reshaped American democracy by making representation more closely tied to population equality. By insisting that each vote carry roughly equal weight, the Court strengthened the constitutional promise of representative government. February 17, 1964, marks a turning point in election law and the modern understanding of political equality.

A federal judge in New York has ruled that discrimination claims brought by a group of NFL coaches will proceed in court rather than in arbitration. U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni denied the league’s request to compel arbitration, finding that the NFL’s arbitration system was not fair or neutral. The lawsuit was filed by former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores, later joined by Steve Wilks and Ray Horton, who allege racial discrimination and retaliation in hiring practices. The case has been stalled for several years while the parties disputed whether it belonged in federal court or before an arbitrator.

Judge Caproni relied heavily on a 2025 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which concluded that the NFL’s arbitration structure was fundamentally flawed. The appellate court criticized the system because the NFL commissioner served as the default arbitrator and controlled the procedures, raising concerns about neutrality. It held that such an arrangement did not allow Flores to effectively vindicate his statutory rights. Based on that reasoning, Judge Caproni determined that the arbitration clause could not be enforced for the remaining claims. She also declined to delay the case further while the NFL considers seeking review from the U.S. Supreme Court.

The coaches argue that requiring them to arbitrate before the league’s own commissioner would deprive them of a fair forum. Their attorneys praised the ruling, saying it affirms that employees cannot be forced into a process controlled by the opposing party’s chief executive. The NFL has not publicly responded to the latest order. The case will now move forward in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

NFL Found To Fumble Arbitration Over Bias, Must Go To Court - Law360

Ruling says Brian Flores lawsuit vs. NFL, teams can go to court - ESPN

A Stanford psychiatry professor testified in a California bellwether trial that research supports the existence of social media addiction and its harmful effects on young people. Dr. Anna Lembke told jurors that peer-reviewed studies show heavy use of platforms such as Instagram and YouTube can contribute to depression, anxiety, insomnia, and suicidal thoughts. She cited a National Institutes of Health study tracking more than 11,000 minors, which found that children who were not initially depressed were more likely to develop depression after significant social media use. According to Lembke, the study undermines the argument that already-depressed teens simply gravitate toward social media.

Her testimony contrasts with statements from Instagram’s CEO, who told the jury he does not believe social media addiction is real. The case is the first of several bellwether trials arising from thousands of consolidated lawsuits claiming platforms intentionally designed addictive features. The companies are accused of using tools such as autoplay, notifications, and infinite scrolling to encourage compulsive use. The claims focus on whether these design features are addictive, rather than on third-party content posted by users. Plaintiffs assert negligence, failure to warn, and concealment.

During cross-examination, defense attorneys questioned Lembke about passages in her book describing her own compulsive reading of romance novels, attempting to challenge her views on addiction. She responded that her examples were meant to show how modern systems increase vulnerability to compulsive behavior, not to trivialize serious substance addictions. Defense counsel also argued that platform features are easy to disable, but Lembke maintained her analysis centered on their addictive qualities, not on user settings. Outside the courthouse, families held a rally memorializing children whose deaths they attribute to social media harms. The trial will continue next week.

Stanford Prof Tells Jury Studies Confirm Social Media Addiction - Law360

In a piece I wrote for Forbes this week, I argue that the IRS’s decision to expand tax relief for Americans held hostage abroad is both correct and incomplete. The agency currently freezes collections, halts enforcement notices, and abates penalties when taxpayers are physically incapable of complying due to foreign captivity. I contend that this relief is grounded not in diplomacy, but in a simple principle: incapacity makes compliance impossible. If that principle justifies relief abroad, it should apply equally when the U.S. government wrongfully detains someone at home.

I explain that the IRS already has administrative authority to provide this type of relief, as confirmed in a recent Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report. When notified by the State Department or FBI, the IRS places a “hostage indicator” on an account, pausing automated enforcement and suspending penalties during captivity and for six months after release. Although TIGTA identified some administrative flaws in how the system operates, the broader framework demonstrates that the agency can act without new legislation.

By contrast, taxpayers subjected to wrongful domestic detention—particularly in immigration contexts—receive no comparable safeguard. The compliance system continues to generate notices, penalties, and interest even when individuals are cut off from mail, income, and legal assistance. I argue that this disparity undermines fairness and weakens the legitimacy that voluntary tax compliance depends on. Congress may move to formalize relief for foreign hostages, but the IRS does not need to wait to address domestic cases.

I propose that the agency adopt a parallel framework for wrongful domestic detention, triggered by certification from a federal authority or court. Such a system would temporarily suspend collection activity and abate penalties during detention and a reasonable transition period after release. The goal is consistency: a tax system should not distinguish between foreign and domestic incapacity when the result is the same inability to comply.

IRS Suspends Tax Obligations For Hostages Abroad—Do The Same At Home

In my column for Bloomberg this week, I argue that Massachusetts’ proposed regulation on taxing standardized software creates a rigid and impractical apportionment system for multistate businesses. Under the draft rule, any company seeking to allocate tax based on actual in-state use must register through MassTaxConnect and obtain a software apportionment certificate. At the time of purchase, the buyer must also submit a transaction-specific statement explaining its allocation percentage and supporting rationale. I contend that this framework imposes significant administrative burdens on businesses that operate across multiple states.

Even companies willing to overpay rather than calculate precise usage would not have an easy option. If they decline to complete the required documentation, they must pay tax on 100% of the purchase price, regardless of how little of the software is actually used in Massachusetts. I argue that this approach effectively turns multistate buyers into compliance agents who must track usage, justify percentages, and retain records for possible audits. At the same time, the Department of Revenue would assume the role of reviewing and policing each allocation.

I point out that enterprise software usage is often fluid and difficult to track, especially when licenses are pooled, accessed remotely, or bundled into broader contracts. Proving precise state-by-state use may be costly or even unworkable. Instead of forcing every buyer into this detailed regime, I propose a safe harbor option. Businesses could elect a fixed in-state percentage, such as 25%, and accept taxation on that amount without additional paperwork or registration.

I explain that this alternative would not eliminate full apportionment for those seeking precision or refunds, but would provide a simpler path for others. The safe harbor could even operate on a transitional basis while the state evaluates how the broader certification system functions. Ultimately, I argue that modernization should not mean added complexity, and that a fixed-percentage election would promote voluntary compliance, reduce administrative strain, and provide greater certainty for both taxpayers and the state.

On February 16, 1932, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Powell v. Alabama, a case that would become a cornerstone of modern criminal procedure. The appeal arose from the notorious Scottsboro Boys prosecutions in Alabama, where nine young Black men were accused of raping two white women aboard a train. The trials moved with alarming speed, and the defendants were sentenced to death after proceedings that offered little meaningful access to legal counsel. In some instances, lawyers were appointed on the day of trial, leaving virtually no time to prepare a defense.

The case forced the Court to confront whether such rushed representation satisfied the requirements of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. When the decision was issued later that year, the Court held that in capital cases, state courts must provide defendants with effective assistance of counsel. The justices emphasized that the right to be heard would mean little without the guiding hand of an attorney. The ruling did not yet create a broad right to counsel in all felony cases, but it marked a significant expansion of constitutional protections in state criminal proceedings.

Powell signaled that fundamental fairness in state trials was subject to federal constitutional scrutiny. It also laid important groundwork for later decisions that would extend the right to counsel beyond capital cases. The case remains a defining example of how procedural safeguards can shape the legitimacy of the criminal justice system.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit revived part of Google’s challenge to a Wildseed Mobile LLC patent covering the creation and transmission of “hot links” through text messages. A three-judge panel vacated a decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that had upheld one remaining claim of the patent, while invalidating the others. The appellate court found that the board failed to properly analyze Google’s argument that the claim was invalid in light of prior art.

The disputed claim involved generating a hot link using either an SMS message or an instant message. Although Google addressed both aspects in its petition, the board focused only on the SMS portion and did not meaningfully address the instant messaging limitation. The Federal Circuit said the board neither evaluated whether prior art covered the instant messaging element nor explained why it declined to do so. Because of that omission, the panel sent the case back to the board for further review.

Wildseed had accused Google of infringing the patent based on how advertisements function on YouTube. The lawsuit was initially filed in Texas in 2022 but later moved to federal court in California, where proceedings were paused pending the outcome of the PTAB review. In 2024, the board had already invalidated claims in two related Wildseed patents involving video ads and smartphone notifications.

Google’s Hot Link Patent Claim Challenge Revived At Fed. Circ. - Law360

Federal prosecutors have unveiled additional details in a criminal case accusing Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz of participating in a pitch-fixing scheme tied to sports betting. A superseding indictment filed in New York alleges that Clase exchanged coded text messages with associates and bettors before games to signal when he would throw specific pitches. The messages reportedly used poultry-themed language such as “rooster” and “chicken” to disguise the scheme. In one example, an associate allegedly texted Clase about throwing a “rock at the first rooster,” to which Clase responded affirmatively.

Prosecutors claim that bettors used this advance information to place successful proposition bets on pitch speed, winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. According to the indictment, bettors earned at least $400,000 on wagers involving Clase and about $60,000 on wagers involving Ortiz. The players allegedly agreed to accept bribes of at least $12,000 each. Authorities also allege that some coordination occurred in person, including meetings at Clase’s home, and that payments were routed through intermediaries.

The updated indictment adds Robinson Vasquez Germosen, who prosecutors say acted as a middleman and later lied to FBI agents about his knowledge of the scheme. He is charged with making false statements. Clase and Ortiz previously pleaded not guilty, and their attorneys maintain that the allegations are unproven and will be challenged at trial.

MLB Pitcher Sent ‘Coded’ Texts For Rigged Pitches, Feds Say - Law360 UK

A long-running dispute over ownership of a goldendoodle named Tucker has concluded with a private sealed-bid auction ordered by the Delaware Court of Chancery. The case, Callahan v. Nelson, involved former partners Karen Callahan and Joseph Nelson, who had jointly acquired the dog while dating but could not agree on ownership after their 2022 breakup. Because the couple was never married, they could not rely on Delaware’s family law statute that allows courts to consider a pet’s well-being when dividing marital property.

After conflicting rulings in lower courts, the matter reached the state’s premier business court, where Vice Chancellor Bonnie W. David applied a property “partition” remedy. Rather than ordering shared custody or considering the dog’s best interests, the court required a single blind bidding process between the parties. The higher bidder would keep Tucker, and the other would receive the payment. The exact amount of the winning bid was not disclosed. Nelson ultimately submitted the top bid and retained the dog.

The court explained that, absent statutory authority to weigh the animal’s welfare, traditional property principles favored an auction as the cleanest solution. A neutral attorney oversaw the process and noted that the dog’s value was subjective and personal, not easily tied to market measures. Callahan’s attorney said she was disappointed but would not seek to block the result, adding that the case sets helpful precedent for resolving similar pet ownership disputes.

A key legal element in the case is the use of partition, an equitable remedy typically applied when co-owners of property cannot agree on how to divide it. Instead of physically splitting the property or forcing continued joint ownership, the court may order a sale and distribute the proceeds.

Ex-Boyfriend Wins Tucker the Goldendoodle in Sealed Bid Auction

On February 13, 1935, a New Jersey jury convicted Bruno Hauptmann of kidnapping and murdering the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. The crime had transfixed the nation for nearly three years and was widely labeled the “Crime of the Century.” The child was taken from the Lindbergh home in 1932, and despite a ransom payment, was later found dead. Public outrage was immediate and intense, with newspapers covering nearly every development in the investigation and trial.

Hauptmann’s prosecution relied heavily on circumstantial evidence, including ransom notes and expert testimony linking his handwriting to those notes. The government also introduced evidence tying marked ransom bills to Hauptmann’s possession. The trial raised early concerns about the reliability of forensic handwriting analysis and the influence of media attention on jury impartiality. Critics then and now have questioned whether the intense publicity compromised due process protections.

The case also reshaped federal criminal law. In response to the kidnapping, Congress enacted the Lindbergh Law, formally known as the Federal Kidnapping Act. The statute made it a federal offense to transport a kidnapping victim across state lines, expanding federal jurisdiction over what had traditionally been a state crime. That shift reflected a broader trend during the early twentieth century toward increased federal involvement in criminal enforcement.

Today, the Hauptmann conviction remains a staple in criminal law courses, not only for its tragic facts but also for its lasting procedural and constitutional implications.

Goldman Sachs’ chief legal officer, Kathy Ruemmler, resigned after newly released Justice Department documents detailed her past communications with Jeffrey Epstein. CEO David Solomon announced that he accepted her resignation, which will take effect on June 30. Ruemmler said the media attention surrounding her prior legal work had become a distraction. The disclosures showed she exchanged numerous emails with Epstein between 2014 and 2019 and received gifts from him, including luxury items. Some emails revealed that she advised Epstein on how to respond to press inquiries about his treatment by prosecutors.

The documents also noted that Epstein attempted to contact her by phone on the night of his 2019 arrest on sex trafficking charges. Ruemmler stated that she knew Epstein only in her capacity as a defense attorney and denied any knowledge of ongoing criminal conduct. Before joining Goldman, she led the white-collar defense practice at Latham & Watkins and previously served as White House counsel during the Obama administration.

The broader document release has drawn attention to Epstein’s connections within major financial institutions, including UBS and JPMorgan. Ruemmler’s departure marks one of the most prominent banking exits linked to the renewed scrutiny of Epstein’s network.

Top Goldman Sachs lawyer Ruemmler resigns after Epstein disclosures | Reuters

A federal judge in Minnesota ruled that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement improperly interfered with detainees’ access to their attorneys during a recent enforcement operation. U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel found that ICE’s practices during “Operation Metro Surge” effectively denied thousands of people meaningful legal access. The order requires ICE to stop quickly transferring detainees out of Minnesota and to permit attorney visits and confidential phone calls. The ruling will remain in effect for 14 days while the case proceeds.

The class action lawsuit was filed on January 27 on behalf of noncitizen detainees. According to the court, many individuals were moved out of state without notice, making it difficult or impossible for lawyers to locate them. In some instances, detainees were transferred so often that ICE itself lost track of their whereabouts. Judge Brasel concluded that while ICE did not formally deny the right to counsel, its actions in practice severely limited that right.

The court also cited evidence that detainees were given limited phone access, sometimes sharing a small number of phones among dozens of people, with calls occurring in nonprivate settings. One asylum seeker with a valid work permit was held for 18 days despite a court order requiring his earlier release and was transferred across multiple states without explanation. The judge rejected ICE’s claim that it lacked sufficient resources, noting that the agency had committed substantial personnel and funding to the enforcement effort.

ICE blocked detainees’ access to lawyers in Minnesota, judge finds | Reuters

President Donald Trump announced four new judicial nominations, including a White House attorney selected for a seat on the U.S. Court of International Trade. The nominee, Kara Westercamp, currently serves as associate counsel in the White House and previously worked at the Justice Department. If confirmed, she would join a nine-member court that handles disputes involving U.S. trade laws, including challenges to tariffs. Her nomination comes as numerous companies contest Trump’s sweeping global tariffs and seek refunds on duties already paid.

Retailers and manufacturers such as Costco, Goodyear, and Revlon have filed lawsuits arguing that the tariffs exceed presidential authority. Earlier rulings from the trade court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit blocked most of the tariffs, and the U.S. Supreme Court is now reviewing the matter. Trump has publicly criticized the earlier decisions.

In addition to Westercamp, Trump nominated Katie Lane to a federal district court in Montana, Sheria Clarke to a district court seat in South Carolina, and federal prosecutor Evan Rikhye to a 10-year term on the District Court of the Virgin Islands. All nominees must be confirmed by the Senate.

Trump nominates White House lawyer to court hearing tariff cases | Reuters

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon is scheduled to appear in federal court in Minnesota to enter a plea related to charges stemming from his coverage of a protest at a St. Paul church. The protest targeted President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement surge in the state. Lemon, now an independent journalist, livestreamed the January 18 demonstration, which disrupted a worship service at Cities Church.

Federal prosecutors charged him with conspiring to violate civil rights and with obstructing access to a house of worship under a statute also used in cases involving abortion clinic protests. His attorney argues that the prosecution infringes on Lemon’s First Amendment rights and characterizes the case as an attack on press freedom. Trump publicly supported the charges, while Attorney General Pam Bondi stated that authorities would protect the right to worship without interference.

The protest occurred during broader demonstrations against federal immigration actions in Minnesota, where thousands had gathered to oppose the crackdown. Lemon was seen on video speaking with activists before and during the disruption and interviewing participants and congregants inside the church. Another journalist, Georgia Fort, faces similar charges and has denied wrongdoing, stating she was reporting rather than participating.

Journalist Don Lemon to enter plea in Minnesota ICE protest case | Reuters

This week’s closing theme is by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach stands as one of the central figures of the Baroque era, revered for the structural clarity and spiritual depth of his music. Born in 1685 into a long line of musicians, Bach spent much of his career serving as a church organist and cantor in German cities such as Arnstadt, Weimar, and Leipzig. Though not widely celebrated outside musical circles during his lifetime, his reputation has since grown to near-mythic status. His compositions balance intellectual precision with emotional resonance, blending intricate counterpoint with lyrical expression.

This week’s closing theme is his Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007, likely composed around 1720 during his tenure in Köthen. The suite opens with one of the most recognizable preludes in all of classical music, built from flowing arpeggios that unfold with quiet inevitability. Written for unaccompanied cello, the piece demonstrates Bach’s ability to imply harmony and depth through a single melodic line. The suite follows the traditional Baroque dance structure, moving from Prelude through Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Menuets, and Gigue.

For many listeners, the Prelude evokes clarity, order, and calm—qualities that make it a fitting close to the week. Its simplicity is deceptive; beneath the surface lies careful architecture and subtle harmonic movement. The work fell into relative obscurity until the twentieth century, when cellist Pablo Casals famously revived it and brought it to concert stages worldwide. Today, it remains a cornerstone of the cello repertoire and a touchstone of Baroque artistry. As a closing theme, it offers both reflection and renewal, ending not with flourish but with quiet confidence.

Without further ado, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007–enjoy!

On February 12, 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in New York City. Sparked by ongoing racial violence, including the 1908 Springfield Race Riot in Illinois, a group of Black and white activists came together to launch an interracial effort to combat racial injustice. The NAACP would become the most influential civil rights organization in the United States, pursuing its goals through strategic litigation, public education, and advocacy.

In its early years, the NAACP focused heavily on using the courts to challenge discriminatory laws and practices, particularly in education and voting. It played a pivotal role in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the landmark Supreme Court case that declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Through its Legal Defense Fund—established in 1940 and headed for a time by Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice—the organization spearheaded a range of major civil rights cases.

Beyond litigation, the NAACP was instrumental in pushing for anti-lynching laws, though federal anti-lynching legislation would take over a century to pass. The group’s efforts laid the legal and political foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Its influence continues today as it monitors civil rights violations and advocates for racial justice nationwide.

Tom Goldstein, a prominent U.S. Supreme Court advocate and co-founder of SCOTUSblog, testified in his own defense during his federal criminal tax trial in Maryland. Goldstein, accused of failing to report millions in poker winnings and misrepresenting debts on mortgage applications, told jurors he never intended to violate the law. He admitted omitting gambling debts to keep them hidden from his wife, and claimed he relied on accountants and firm managers for financial reporting. The trial, overseen by Judge Lydia Griggsby, has drawn attention for its mix of high-stakes legal and poker worlds. Goldstein is alleged to have reported only $27 million of $50 million in poker winnings to the IRS in 2016. He also faces allegations of channeling improper payments through his former law firm and requesting a $500,000 payment from actor Tobey Maguire be sent to a third party to cover personal debts. Maguire, a witness in the trial, is not accused of any misconduct. The defense has called more than a dozen witnesses, including IRS agents, poker players, and law firm executives. Goldstein retired from Supreme Court advocacy in 2023 after arguing over 40 cases. The trial continues with prosecutors set to cross-examine him following his testimony.

Supreme Court lawyer Tom Goldstein takes stand at his criminal tax trial | Reuters

Attorney General Pam Bondi faced sharp criticism from lawmakers during a House Judiciary Committee hearing over the Justice Department’s handling of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Representative Thomas Massie accused Bondi of deliberately concealing the names of powerful individuals connected to Epstein, including billionaire Leslie Wexner, whose name was initially redacted in an FBI document. Bondi countered that Wexner’s name had already been made public in other documents and was quickly unredacted once flagged. Lawmakers across the aisle expressed frustration over what they called excessive and unjustified redactions, despite a federal law passed in November mandating broad disclosure of the Epstein files.

Bondi defended the department’s efforts, highlighting the work of over 500 lawyers on a tight timeline, and insisted any release of victims’ identities was accidental. She repeatedly praised President Donald Trump during the hearing and criticized Democratic members, accusing them of political theatrics. Her confrontational style sparked further tension, especially when she refused to apologize to Epstein’s victims seated in the gallery, deflecting the request by referencing past administrations. The hearing reflects the ongoing controversy surrounding the Justice Department’s approach to transparency, its alignment with Trump-era politics, and the public’s demand for accountability in the Epstein investigation.

US lawmakers accuse Bondi of hiding names of Epstein associates | Reuters

The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) announced that beginning August 2026, the LSAT will no longer be available online, citing rising concerns over cheating. The move comes after a period of hybrid testing, introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed examinees to choose between in-person and remote formats. While remote testing will still be permitted in limited cases involving medical or geographic hardships, the default will now be in-person testing at designated centers. LSAC emphasized that the shift is meant to enhance test integrity and deter misconduct, which has become a growing concern—particularly after the organization suspended online testing in China due to reports of systemic cheating.

Industry professionals, including LSAT prep company leaders, supported the decision, noting that online platforms made it easier for cheating rings to exploit the system through tactics like using cameras to capture test content or remotely accessing test takers’ computers. Some cheating services reportedly charged thousands of dollars to help candidates gain an unfair advantage. LSAC added that technical difficulties also played a role in the change, with most scoring delays stemming from remote testing issues. On the January 2026 exam, 61% of test takers opted for in-person testing, suggesting a trend back toward traditional methods.

US law school admissions test ends online option over cheating concerns | Reuters

On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison in South Africa after 27 years of incarceration, marking a seismic shift in the country’s legal and political landscape. Mandela’s release followed a period of secret negotiations between the apartheid government and the African National Congress (ANC), and it signaled the beginning of the end of apartheid—a system of institutionalized racial segregation and oppression upheld by law. His imprisonment had become a global symbol of the fight against racial injustice and was frequently challenged by international human rights organizations and legal scholars as a violation of fundamental human rights.

Mandela had been convicted in 1964 of sabotage and other charges under South Africa’s Suppression of Communism Act, following the infamous Rivonia Trial. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, spending much of his sentence on Robben Island under harsh conditions. Over the decades, growing international sanctions and internal unrest made apartheid increasingly untenable.

Then-President F.W. de Klerk’s government began rolling back apartheid legislation in the late 1980s, and on February 2, 1990, de Klerk announced the unbanning of the ANC and his intention to release Mandela. Just nine days later, Mandela walked free, delivering a speech in Cape Town that emphasized reconciliation, peace, and the continuation of the struggle for full democratic rights.

Mandela’s release was not just a political milestone—it was a legal one, too. It reflected a move away from laws based on racial supremacy and toward a constitutional order grounded in human rights. This transformation would culminate in South Africa’s 1996 Constitution, often lauded for its rights-based framework and independent judiciary.

The Trump administration’s plan to repeal the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding—the scientific basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act—could reignite legal efforts to hold polluters accountable through public nuisance lawsuits. That finding enabled the EPA to regulate emissions from vehicles and power plants, but its reversal removes the legal framework that had previously shielded companies from such claims under a 2011 Supreme Court ruling. In that decision, the Court held that the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act displaced common-law nuisance suits against emitters. Without that EPA oversight, legal scholars believe plaintiffs may now argue that the courts are once again an appropriate venue for these claims.

Public nuisance lawsuits, typically filed by states or municipalities, seek to hold companies accountable for harms caused to community health and safety. These cases have been historically difficult to win due to challenges in proving direct causation, but experts say the new regulatory gap could encourage a wave of litigation. Industry groups like the Edison Electric Institute have warned that repealing the endangerment finding could expose utilities to costly legal battles. While federal courts had largely blocked such claims, state courts have shown more openness, and the shift in federal policy may strengthen these legal efforts. Environmental advocates may now have renewed leverage to push power companies and other emitters into court.

Trump’s repeal of climate rule opens a ‘new front’ for litigation | Reuters

Attorney General Pam Bondi is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee this week amid intensifying legal scrutiny over the Justice Department’s management of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Lawmakers are expected to question Bondi about what they view as excessive redactions and the DOJ’s withholding of key documents, actions that may conflict with a bipartisan federal law passed in 2025 mandating the broad release of Epstein-related materials. Legal analysts suggest the DOJ’s reliance on legal privileges—such as investigatory and deliberative process exemptions—to justify redactions could face stiff challenges in court or through congressional oversight powers.

The situation raises constitutional tensions between legislative oversight and executive privilege, particularly as the House panel, now under Republican control, examines whether the DOJ is shielding politically sensitive information. Some members of Congress have accused the Department of undermining transparency and potentially violating the statutory intent of the Epstein Disclosure Act, which narrowed the DOJ’s discretion in withholding records tied to convicted sex offenders or deceased suspects like Epstein.

Bondi’s DOJ has been accused of prioritizing partisan enforcement over institutional neutrality, illustrated by failed prosecutions of Trump critics and an aggressive posture on immigration and protest-related cases. The sidelining of the DOJ’s civil rights division and the refusal to investigate federal shootings has further fueled concerns over selective enforcement and erosion of prosecutorial independence. Bondi’s testimony will serve as a key moment to defend the Department’s use of legal redactions and its broader approach to politically charged prosecutions.

Bondi to face questions on Epstein files in House testimony | Reuters

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri is set to testify in a Los Angeles courtroom this week in a groundbreaking lawsuit that could reshape how U.S. law approaches the intersection of product design and youth mental health. The case centers on a 20-year-old plaintiff who alleges she became addicted to Instagram as a child due to its deliberately addictive interface—particularly the “endless scroll” feature that loads content continuously to hold user attention. Her lawyers argue that Instagram’s design choices amount to a form of negligent product engineering that failed to account for known risks to children.

This case raises novel legal questions: Can user interface (UI) design be treated as a defective product under tort law? Can tech companies be held liable not just for content but for the architecture of the platforms themselves? If the court accepts these arguments, it could establish precedent for treating addictive design as a public health harm similar to tobacco or opioid marketing practices.

Mosseri is expected to face questioning over internal documents that, according to the plaintiff, show Meta was aware of the app’s mental health impact on vulnerable teens. Meta counters that these documents reflect efforts to mitigate harm, not evidence of negligence. Still, the case may test the limits of Section 230 immunity, as it focuses not on third-party content, but the platform’s own design—potentially sidestepping the traditional legal shield for tech companies.

Hundreds of similar cases are pending, and this trial may serve as a bellwether for litigation nationwide. International developments, including Australia’s ban on social media for children under 16, suggest this is a growing legal frontier.

Instagram’s leader to testify in court on app design, youth mental health | Reuters

Novo Nordisk’s recent patent infringement lawsuit against Hims & Hers marks a pivotal legal development in the pharmaceutical industry’s battle with telehealth providers distributing compounded drugs. The suit, filed in Delaware federal court, targets Hims’ sales of compounded semaglutide—the active ingredient in Wegovy and Ozempic—claiming these formulations infringe Novo’s patents. While compounding is allowed under certain FDA exemptions, those exemptions do not shield pharmacies or telehealth platforms from patent liability. This case challenges the assumption that FDA compliance protects against infringement claims, exposing a gray area where regulatory and intellectual property regimes collide.

Historically, brand-name drugmakers focused on trademark challenges over how compounded drugs were marketed. Novo’s move into patent litigation signals a strategic escalation: it’s not about branding anymore—it’s about the act of making and selling the compound itself. Experts highlight that this is likely the first time a brand drug company has pursued patent claims directly against a compounding pharmacy or telehealth distributor, suggesting the industry now sees these entities as substantial commercial threats.

The case also underscores a novel enforcement strategy: suing the telehealth platform facilitating sales rather than the dispersed network of compounding pharmacies, streamlining legal action and potentially setting precedent for centralized liability. Hims, already under regulatory scrutiny, had just halted plans to sell compounded semaglutide pills but remains a target due to its involvement in injectable forms.

The outcome of this case may clarify how FDA-sanctioned compounding intersects with patent protections and could define the boundaries for how far telehealth companies can go in offering customized versions of patented drugs.

Novo’s GLP-1 Patent Suit Against Hims Takes Aim at Compounding

On February 10, 1967, the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, formally addressing presidential succession and disability for the first time in constitutional text. The need for such clarity had become urgent after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s repeated illnesses during his terms. Prior to this amendment, there was no definitive constitutional mechanism for filling a vacancy in the vice presidency or for managing presidential incapacity. The 25th Amendment established four key sections, each designed to ensure governmental stability during times of crisis.

Section 1 confirmed that if a president dies, resigns, or is removed, the vice president becomes president—not just acting president. Section 2 allowed for the appointment of a new vice president, with confirmation by both the House and Senate, in the event of a vacancy. This provision was put to use shortly after its ratification when Gerald Ford was appointed vice president in 1973 following Spiro Agnew’s resignation. Section 3 allowed a president to voluntarily transfer power to the vice president by submitting a written declaration to Congress—used during temporary medical procedures like surgeries.

Most controversial and significant is Section 4, which allows the vice president and a majority of the cabinet (or another body designated by Congress) to declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” This provision has never been fully invoked but has been a topic of discussion during times of perceived presidential instability. It establishes a legal mechanism for removing a president against their will, albeit temporarily, with congressional oversight. The amendment reflects a post-World War II concern for continuity of leadership in a nuclear age. Its ratification marks a critical evolution in constitutional law, ensuring the executive branch remains functional even under extraordinary circumstances.

A federal lawsuit filed in Texas alleges that an 18‑month‑old girl detained by U.S. immigration authorities was sent back into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody after being hospitalized for a life‑threatening respiratory illness and then denied the medications doctors prescribed.

According to the filing, Amalia and her parents were held at the family detention center in Dilley, Texas after a routine immigration check‑in in December. The toddler became severely ill in January with extremely high fever and breathing problems, and a hospital diagnosed her with multiple serious infections including COVID‑19, pneumonia and RSV. After about 10 days in the hospital, she was discharged with a nebulizer, respiratory medication and nutritional supplements—but those were confiscated when she was returned to the detention facility.

The lawsuit says her parents repeatedly tried to obtain prescribed treatment from detention staff but were forced to wait in long lines and often were denied, contributing to the child’s health deterioration. Legal advocacy led to the family’s release after the emergency court filing; attorneys contend the case reflects broader problems with medical care, conditions and protections for children and families in immigration custody.

Toddler was returned to ICE custody and denied medication after hospitalization, lawsuit says | Reuters

The Trump administration is proposing a significant change to federal employment law that would restrict fired federal workers from appealing their terminations to the independent Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). Under the plan, workers would instead have to appeal to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—a shift critics say would compromise impartiality, as the OPM director reports directly to the president.

The MSPB, historically tasked with mediating disputes between federal employees and agencies, experienced a 266% spike in appeals cases during Trump’s second term, likely due to a surge in federal job cuts. In 2025, the federal workforce shrank by 317,000 employees, though OPM claims most departures were voluntary through buyouts rather than firings—an assertion not independently verified.

This latest proposal would further President Trump’s second-term agenda to reduce the size of the federal workforce while also narrowing employees’ legal options for challenging dismissals. Trump has also weakened job protection enforcement by removing officials from agencies that safeguard civil service rights. Critics argue the proposal consolidates power over personnel disputes within the executive branch, potentially eroding longstanding civil service protections.

Trump seeks to limit legal options for fired federal workers | Reuters

My column for Bloomberg Tax this week is about tax holidays for data centers–or the folly in offering them. India’s bold new play to become the backbone of global digital infrastructure isn’t just about its headline-grabbing 20-year tax holiday for data centers. The real shift is happening in the fine print—a 15% safe harbor for transfer pricing that removes much of the risk multinationals face when operating across borders. If a company like Microsoft India applies a simple 15% markup on services sold to its U.S. parent, the Indian government agrees not to challenge the pricing. That’s not just a tax break—it’s operational certainty, and it makes India’s offer much more attractive than anything U.S. states currently have on the table.

In contrast, American states are still offering scattered subsidies—property tax breaks, zoning perks, utility discounts—without any unified vision or reliable regulatory structure. There’s no equivalent to India’s safe harbor. No clarity on transfer pricing. No coordination across state lines. The result is what I see as economic development policy by improv, where officials hand out incentives like they’re bidding on a sports arena rather than negotiating infrastructure strategy.

And what do U.S. taxpayers get in return? A burst of construction, a few permanent jobs, and a long-term commitment to expensive infrastructure upgrades for data centers that don’t meaningfully plug into the local economy. Meanwhile, India is making an offer that fits squarely onto a multinational’s balance sheet—pre-agreed pricing, national alignment, and a clear path to long-term cost savings.

I don’t think the solution is to try to beat India at its own game. But if states are going to offer incentives, they need to extract something real in return: energy infrastructure, broadband expansion, or compute resources that benefit the public. Otherwise, they’re just footing the bill for someone else’s global expansion.

On February 9, 1909, the United States took its first significant federal step toward regulating narcotics when Congress passed a law banning the importation of opium for non-medical purposes. The act, officially titled “An Act to Prohibit the Importation and Use of Opium for Other Than Medicinal Purposes,” marked the beginning of a century-long evolution in American drug policy. While opium had long been associated with addiction and social issues—particularly in Chinese immigrant communities—prior regulation had occurred mostly at the state and local levels. This federal statute aimed to curb both domestic consumption and the growing international trade in opium, which had become a concern for moral reformers, physicians, and public officials.

The 1909 law was as much a product of racialized anxieties and diplomatic concerns as it was a health policy. U.S. officials were influenced by the growing global temperance movement and international agreements like those discussed at the International Opium Commission in Shanghai that same year. Domestically, the law paved the way for a broader federal role in drug control, leading to later landmark legislation such as the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. It also helped define narcotics as a matter of federal concern rather than simply a moral or local issue.

While the 1909 statute was limited in scope—it did not criminalize possession or use, only importation—it established the principle that Congress could regulate substances in the interest of public health and welfare. That principle would be expanded in later decades as the War on Drugs developed. The opium ban illustrates how early 20th-century American legal policy began to intertwine with international diplomacy, race, and evolving conceptions of public health.

A landmark trial began this week in a California state court to determine whether Instagram and YouTube can be held liable for allegedly harming a young woman’s mental health through addictive platform design. The plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman identified as K.G.M., claims that Meta (parent company of Instagram and Facebook) and Google (which owns YouTube) designed their platforms in a way that fostered addiction from a young age, contributing to her depression and suicidal ideation. Her legal team argues the companies were negligent, failed to provide warnings, and that the platforms substantially contributed to her psychological harm.

A verdict in her favor could open the door for thousands of similar lawsuits currently pending against major tech firms like Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok. Notably, Snap and TikTok settled with the plaintiff before trial, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify. The defense plans to emphasize external influences in K.G.M.’s life and highlight efforts they’ve made around youth safety.

The case challenges longstanding U.S. legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally shields internet companies from liability for user-generated content. However, if the jury accepts the argument that the harm stems from platform design rather than content, it could weaken those defenses. Parallel legal battles are underway, including over 2,300 federal lawsuits and a separate trial in New Mexico where Meta is accused of enabling child sexual exploitation.

Instagram, YouTube addiction trial kicks off in Los Angeles | Reuters

The Trump administration has appealed a federal court ruling that requires the U.S. Department of Transportation to release frozen funding for the $16 billion Hudson Tunnel Project, which aims to upgrade vital rail infrastructure connecting New York and New Jersey. Judge Jeannette Vargas issued a preliminary injunction ordering the unfreezing of the funds after officials from both states warned that construction would cease due to lack of financing. The administration filed a notice of appeal two days later.

The funding had been halted in September pending a review of the project’s adherence to new federal restrictions on race- and sex-based criteria in contracting. According to a source, Trump recently proposed unfreezing the money if Democrats agreed to rename Washington Dulles Airport and New York’s Penn Station after him—an offer that was widely condemned.

The Hudson Tunnel, which was damaged during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, remains a critical piece of rail infrastructure, handling over 200,000 passengers and 425 trains each day. The Gateway Development Commission, which oversees the project, expressed readiness to resume work once funding is reinstated. Approximately $2 billion of the $15 billion federal allocation—approved under the Biden administration—has already been spent.

Trump administration appeals ruling on releasing New York City tunnel funds | Reuters

A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the Trump administration’s policy of mandating detention without bond for individuals arrested during immigration enforcement operations. The 2-1 decision is the first appellate ruling to affirm the policy, despite widespread opposition from hundreds of lower-court judges across the country who have deemed it unlawful. The ruling applies to Texas and Louisiana, states that hold the largest populations of immigration detainees.

The policy relies on an expanded interpretation of the term “applicants for admission” under federal immigration law. Traditionally applied to individuals arriving at the border, the Department of Homeland Security argued in 2025 that it also applies to undocumented individuals already residing in the U.S. This interpretation was adopted by the Board of Immigration Appeals and made mandatory by immigration judges nationwide.

The case before the court involved two Mexican nationals, Victor Buenrostro-Mendez and Jose Padron Covarrubias, who had previously persuaded lower courts they were wrongly denied bond hearings. The appeals court reversed those rulings, with Judge Edith Jones writing that the statute’s plain text supported the administration’s view. Judge Dana Douglas dissented, arguing that the interpretation stretched beyond what Congress intended in the 1996 immigration law.

Other circuit courts are expected to weigh in on similar challenges, and the issue may ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

US appeals court upholds Trump’s immigration detention policy | Reuters

A federal appeals court has denied the Trump administration’s request to delay proceedings in its appeal to reinstate executive orders targeting four major U.S. law firms. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the cases—challenging orders against Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey—will move forward and be combined with a related appeal involving attorney Mark Zaid’s revoked government security clearance.

The Justice Department had sought to postpone the law firm appeals until after the Zaid case was decided, a move that could have delayed resolution for months. But the court rejected that approach, siding with the law firms, which argued they deserved a timely judgment on whether the government unlawfully targeted them.

Trump’s executive orders accused the firms of using the legal system against him and criticized their diversity policies, directing the government to strip them of security access and limit their interactions with federal agencies. Four federal judges previously struck down the orders as unconstitutional, finding they violated free speech and due process rights. The administration is now appealing both those rulings and the one involving Zaid.

Trump administration loses bid to delay appeals over law firm executive orders | Reuters

On February 6, 1933, the 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution officially went into effect, reshaping the timeline of federal political power transitions in the United States. Commonly known as the “Lame Duck Amendment,” it was ratified just weeks earlier, on January 23, 1933, but became operative on this day. The amendment moved the inauguration dates of the president and vice president from March 4 to January 20 and newly elected members of Congress from March 4 to January 3.

This was a significant reform. Previously, there had been a long delay—about four months—between election and inauguration. The result was a period where outgoing officials retained power despite potentially losing their mandates, often leading to inaction and political stagnation. This was particularly problematic during times of crisis. For example, after Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 election, he had to wait until March to take office while the nation was deep in the throes of the Great Depression, and President Hoover remained largely inactive.

The 20th Amendment also clarified procedures for what should happen if the president-elect dies before taking office, a scenario not fully accounted for in earlier constitutional provisions. Section 3 addresses this contingency, while Section 4 gives Congress the authority to legislate procedures for succession and emergencies.

By speeding up the transfer of power, the amendment reduced the influence of “lame duck” sessions, promoting a more responsive and democratic governance structure. It also underscored a constitutional shift toward greater efficiency in the federal system.

The Trump administration has appointed 33 new immigration judges, 27 of whom are temporary, following the dismissal or departure of over 100 judges since Trump’s return to office in January 2025. This reshaping of the immigration court system is part of a broader push to increase deportations and speed up case processing. The newly sworn-in judges will serve in courts across 15 states, including Texas, California, and New York.

A significant number of the appointees have military experience—half of the permanent judges and all of the temporary ones—reflecting a Pentagon-supported effort to deploy Defense Department lawyers into immigration roles. Critics, including the American Immigration Lawyers Association, argue that the mass firings have severely depleted judicial capacity, especially amid a record backlog of 3.2 million pending immigration cases.

The administration is also set to introduce a regulation reducing the time migrants have to appeal deportation rulings from 30 to 10 days. This fast-track process would give the Board of Immigration Appeals greater authority to summarily dismiss appeals, a move likely to draw legal challenges given prior rulings against similar reinterpretations of immigration law.

Trump administration names 33 new immigration judges, most with military backgrounds | Reuters

Brad Karp has stepped down as chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP following revelations of his extensive correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein. The emails, released by the Department of Justice, revealed years of personal and professional interaction between Karp and Epstein, including Karp’s praise of legal arguments dismissing victims’ claims and discussions about sensitive financial matters involving Epstein’s associates. Though Karp has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing, the disclosures created internal and public pressure leading to his resignation.

Karp will remain at the firm in a non-leadership role, while corporate department head Scott Barshay has assumed the chairmanship. Barshay is known for high-profile mergers, including deals involving Chevron and Anheuser-Busch. Karp had led the firm since 2008, building its revenue significantly and taking on both corporate defense and progressive political causes.

The fallout also reignited criticism over Paul Weiss’ controversial 2025 deal with the Trump administration. In that arrangement, Karp brokered pro bono legal commitments in exchange for the rescission of an executive order that limited the firm’s federal work—an effort that involved direct lobbying by Robert Kraft and a meeting with Donald Trump.

Epstein emails lead Brad Karp to resign as Paul Weiss law firm chairman | Reuters

A federal jury in Phoenix has ordered Uber to pay $8.5 million to Jaylynn Dean, who said she was assaulted by a driver at age 19. The trial, the first of over 3,000 consolidated cases, served as a bellwether to assess the legal strength and settlement value of similar claims. The jury found the driver acted as an agent of Uber, making the company liable, but declined to award punitive damages.

Dean’s lawyers argued Uber knowingly failed to implement safety improvements despite rising reports of assaults. The case highlighted Uber’s marketing to women as a safe option, which attorneys said misled passengers about real risks. Dean was intoxicated when she ordered a ride in Arizona in 2023 and was allegedly attacked after the driver stopped the vehicle.

Uber denied liability, stating the driver had no criminal record and that the incident was unforeseeable. The company emphasized that it passed background checks and claimed the jury’s decision supported its broader safety efforts, though it plans to appeal.

The trial has implications for both Uber and Lyft, whose shares dipped following the verdict. Analysts believe the case may lead to enhanced background screening across the ride-hailing industry.

Uber ordered to pay $8.5 million in trial over driver sex assault claims | Reuters

A legal fight has emerged between a group of U.S. states and pharmacist T.J. Novak, a whistleblower seeking a portion of the $4.7 billion opioid settlement the states reached with Walgreens. Novak previously filed a federal False Claims Act case accusing Walgreens of unlawfully filling opioid prescriptions and billing government health programs. The U.S. government settled with Walgreens for $300 million, including $150 million tied to Novak’s claims—earning him a whistleblower payout of over $25 million.

Novak now argues that the states’ massive 2022 settlement with Walgreens also resolved his state-level claims under their respective false claims statutes, entitling him to additional compensation. The states dispute this, saying their deal addressed public nuisance concerns, not false claims violations. They warn that granting Novak a cut would force courts into a complex and inconsistent analysis across 28 different state laws and could open the door to broad whistleblower entitlements in future state actions.

Key states like Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Virginia filed briefs opposing Novak’s claim, stressing the differences in statutory frameworks and the nature of the claims resolved. The outcome could impact future whistleblower litigation involving parallel state and federal claims tied to nationwide corporate settlements.

States square off with opioids whistleblower over payout from $4.7 billion Walgreens settlement | Reuters

This week’s closing theme is by Felix Mendelssohn.

This week’s closing theme is Lied ohne Worte, Op. 109, by Mendelssohn, a composer whose refined lyricism shaped the early Romantic era. Born in 1809, Mendelssohn was a prodigy who bridged Classical form and Romantic expression with grace and clarity. His Lieder ohne Worte—or “Songs Without Words”—are brief piano pieces that aim to convey the emotional depth of a song, but without lyrics. Op. 109, one of the last in the series, is especially introspective and serene, a quiet farewell rendered in music alone.

Today, February 6, holds subtle resonance in Mendelssohn’s legacy. Though his death is commonly dated to November 4, 1847, some historical sources using the Julian calendar recorded it as February 6, making this date a quiet point of remembrance in certain circles. In that light, Lied ohne Worte, Op. 109, feels like a particularly appropriate selection—a final musical gesture from a composer who believed some feelings transcend words.

It’s also a fitting close to a week of heavy stories—legal struggles, political reshuffling, and institutional reckonings. Mendelssohn offers no commentary, just clarity and calm. In the hush of his music, we’re reminded that reflection doesn’t always need a headline.

Without further ado, Lied ohne Worte, Op. 109, by Felix Mendelssohn – enjoy!

On February 5, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, better known as the “court-packing plan.” This controversial legislation aimed to expand the number of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court from nine to as many as fifteen. Roosevelt’s justification was to improve the efficiency of the judiciary, but the underlying motive was widely understood to be frustration with the Court’s consistent invalidation of New Deal legislation. The plan would have allowed the president to appoint an additional justice for every sitting justice over the age of 70½ who refused to retire.

At the time, the Supreme Court had struck down several key components of Roosevelt’s New Deal, including the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Although Roosevelt had just won re-election in a landslide in 1936, the proposal met immediate and bipartisan resistance in Congress and the press. Critics argued it threatened the separation of powers and judicial independence. Even members of Roosevelt’s own party viewed the move as a dangerous overreach.

Ultimately, the bill failed in the Senate. However, the controversy arguably pressured the Court to adopt a more favorable view of New Deal legislation. Justice Owen Roberts’s shift in support of certain New Deal programs came to be dubbed “the switch in time that saved nine.” While Roosevelt did not get to add new justices through his plan, he eventually appointed eight Supreme Court justices over his long presidency, reshaping the Court over time.

Georgia’s Fulton County has filed a legal challenge over an FBI seizure of 2020 election records, arguing the search was overly broad and requesting the return of the documents. The motion, filed in federal court, also seeks to unseal the affidavit behind the warrant. The FBI searched the Fulton County Election Hub in Union City on January 28 as part of its investigation into President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in Georgia during the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden. According to the warrant, agents were authorized to confiscate all physical ballots, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls from multiple voting methods. County Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. criticized the process, noting the absence of an inventory or orderly transition of records, which raises concerns about potential document loss or tampering. He expressed skepticism about the value of any returned materials under such circumstances. The raid, perceived by local officials as politically motivated, has sparked fears of federal overreach and interference ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Georgia’s Fulton County challenges seizure of election records | Reuters

Jones Day, a major international law firm, has filed a lawsuit in New York state court against private equity firm Centre Lane Partners and multiple affiliated companies, alleging over $9.6 million in unpaid legal fees. The firm claims it served as Centre Lane’s outside counsel since 2018, providing legal services across litigation, financing, acquisitions, and regulatory matters. Though Centre Lane reportedly had a consistent payment history, Jones Day alleges payments ceased in 2024 despite continued promises. Relying on assurances that payments were forthcoming, Jones Day says it rendered millions more in services, which it now claims were based on false representations.

Notably, more than half of the unpaid fees stem from Jones Day’s defense work in an ongoing antitrust case involving a Pennsylvania glass plant closure and an FTC investigation. As of last month, Jones Day began formally withdrawing from representing Centre Lane in active cases, and the law firm Greenberg Traurig has taken over in the antitrust matter. Among the defendants named are Centre Lane portfolio companies, including Anchor Hocking and Corelle Brands. The case remains unassigned in New York’s Supreme Court, with no counsel yet listed for the defendants.

Law firm Jones Day sues private equity firm, alleging $9.6 million in unpaid fees | Reuters

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has classified Abbott’s recall of certain glucose monitoring devices as a Class I recall—the most serious level—after the products were linked to seven deaths and 860 serious injuries. The affected devices include specific lots of the FreeStyle Libre 3 and FreeStyle Libre 3 Plus sensors, which have been found to display inaccurately low blood sugar readings. Such faulty readings can lead users to make harmful treatment decisions, such as consuming too many carbohydrates or incorrectly adjusting insulin doses.

Abbott disclosed that the devices may provide incorrect readings over extended periods, increasing the risk of serious medical complications for users who rely on continuous glucose data. The recall and its classification signal heightened concern from federal health regulators due to the potential for severe harm or death. As of early January, these issues had already caused significant patient harm. Abbott has not publicly detailed the total number of units affected or the geographic scope of the recall.

Abbott recalls glucose sensors after seven deaths linked to faulty readings | Reuters

In an exclusive obtained by Bloomberg Law, the U.S. Department of Justice has directed all 93 U.S. attorney’s offices to designate prosecutors for newly formed “emergency jump teams” by February 6. These teams are intended to provide short-term support in jurisdictions experiencing critical events—particularly those involving alleged assaults on or obstruction of law enforcement. The internal memo from DOJ Executive Office Director Francey Hakes outlines the initiative as a rapid-response measure to bolster prosecutorial presence in areas facing urgent demands.

The move follows a wave of resignations in the Minneapolis U.S. attorney’s office amid growing discontent over political targeting and controversial assignments, such as a disputed investigation into the widow of a protester killed by an ICE officer. While the memo does not directly mention Minneapolis, it aligns with Trump administration efforts to maintain aggressive law enforcement in left-leaning jurisdictions facing staff shortages.

Offices previously affected by similar surges, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and D.C., have also suffered attrition, partly due to repeated grand jury refusals to indict protestors. The memo frames the jump teams not as litigators but as support staff to assist in command operations—handling triage, reviewing legal filings, and managing logistics.

The order coincides with overt recruitment of ideologically aligned attorneys, including a public social media call for applicants who support Trump’s anti-crime platform. Additionally, the jump teams will help implement Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December directive to prioritize investigations into leftist groups like antifa.

DOJ Orders Emergency Surge Prosecutors From All US Attorneys (2)

On February 4, 1932, the United States Supreme Court decided Blockburger v. United States, 284 U.S. 299 (1932), a case that established an enduring rule in American criminal law known as the Blockburger test. This test is used to determine whether two offenses are sufficiently distinct to permit multiple punishments or prosecutions under the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

In the case, the defendant was charged with multiple violations of the Harrison Narcotics Act for selling morphine on different occasions. The legal question was whether he could be prosecuted separately for each sale and for selling without proper prescription and for selling not in the original stamped package, even if these occurred during the same transaction.

The Court held that each offense requires proof of a fact the other does not. If that’s the case, then they are distinct for double jeopardy purposes. This became the “same elements” test, sometimes called the Blockburger test, and it remains a key tool for analyzing double jeopardy claims today.

Notably, the test doesn’t focus on whether the charges arise from the same conduct or transaction, but on whether each statutory provision requires proof of a fact which the other does not.

This legal principle has been cited in thousands of cases, and it continues to shape how prosecutors and courts evaluate overlapping criminal charges.

Ryan W. Routh, convicted of attempting to assassinate Donald Trump weeks before the 2024 presidential election, is scheduled for sentencing on Wednesday. Prosecutors are seeking a life sentence, citing months of planning, the use of disguises and multiple cellphones, and Routh’s readiness to kill others to carry out the plot. He was arrested near Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course in September 2024 after fleeing the scene and leaving behind a rifle and gear resembling body armor. At trial, Routh represented himself, making erratic statements and offering little in the way of a legal defense. He was convicted of five charges, including attempted assassination and illegal firearm possession. Routh claims he did not intend to kill Trump and has requested a 27-year sentence along with psychological treatment. The incident was the second assassination attempt on Trump during the campaign season. Prosecutors emphasized that Routh’s actions could have succeeded had it not been for Secret Service intervention. Following the verdict, Routh attempted to stab himself with a pen in court and had to be restrained. Trump praised the conviction, calling Routh “an evil man with an evil intention.”

Man convicted of attempting to assassinate Trump to be sentenced | Reuters

Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos faced sharp questioning from U.S. senators over the company’s proposed $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, a deal that could reshape the streaming and entertainment landscape. At a Senate antitrust hearing led by Republican Mike Lee, lawmakers from both parties expressed concern that the merger could reduce competition, limit job opportunities for entertainment workers, and reduce content diversity. Lee warned the deal might let Netflix dominate streaming and steer major Warner Bros franchises away from theaters or rivals. Sarandos defended Netflix’s position, citing competition from platforms like YouTube, though senators noted YouTube’s ad-based model differs from subscription services.

The Department of Justice is currently reviewing the merger alongside a competing bid from Paramount Skydance. Paramount’s proposal faces financing challenges, and its CEO, David Ellison, has ties to Donald Trump, raising political questions. Democratic Senator Cory Booker questioned Sarandos on whether Trump would influence the deal’s approval, a notion Sarandos said he couldn’t confirm. Sarandos argued that all viewing time on television is in direct competition, but senators remained skeptical of Netflix’s claims that its competition includes ad-supported platforms. The hearing reflects broader unease about consolidation in streaming, and the DOJ’s decision will ultimately shape the industry’s direction.

Netflix co-CEO faces grilling by US Senate panel over Warner Bros deal | Reuters

The U.S. Department of Justice and a majority of state attorneys general are appealing a major antitrust ruling in the case against Google over its dominance in the online search market. Although a federal judge previously determined that Google held a monopoly, he declined to impose significant structural remedies, such as requiring Google to sell its Chrome browser or stop paying Apple to make Google the default search engine on Apple devices. The government’s appeal is expected to target this leniency.

Google is also appealing the ruling and has requested a delay in compliance with the judge’s order to share certain data with competitors while the appeals process is ongoing. The case, originally filed in 2020, marks one of the most significant antitrust challenges against a tech company in decades. The court noted that newer players like OpenAI have recently emerged, potentially altering the competitive landscape.

The ruling was widely viewed as a partial win for Google, frustrating regulators who had hoped for broader changes to curb the company’s influence in digital advertising and search. The appeal signals continued government efforts to pursue more aggressive antitrust enforcement in the tech sector.

US files appeal in Google search antitrust case | Reuters

On February 3, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, marking a pivotal moment in American legal history. The amendment prohibits federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Its ratification was the third and final of the Reconstruction Amendments, following the Thirteenth (abolishing slavery) and Fourteenth (guaranteeing equal protection and due process) Amendments.

The Fifteenth Amendment was a direct response to the systemic disenfranchisement of Black Americans in the post-Civil War South. While it granted a legal foundation for Black men’s suffrage, implementation faced immediate resistance. Southern states adopted literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and other discriminatory practices to circumvent the amendment and suppress Black political participation.

Despite its passage, the amendment’s guarantees would not be meaningfully enforced until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, nearly a century later. The legal battles stemming from the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise have shaped much of the country’s voting rights jurisprudence and continue to echo in current debates about voter ID laws, redistricting, and access to the ballot box.

A U.S. federal judge is set to hear arguments on February 5 regarding Danish company Ørsted’s request to lift the Trump administration’s pause on its offshore Sunrise Wind project near Long Island, New York. Ørsted has asked for a preliminary injunction, warning that without a decision by February 6, it could lose access to a specialized vessel crucial for cable installation, putting the project’s timeline, financial viability, and even survival at risk. The Interior Department halted five offshore wind projects in December, citing newly obtained, classified national security concerns, particularly radar interference. Ørsted’s filing states the company has already committed over $7 billion to the Sunrise Wind project, which is about 45% complete and projected to power nearly 600,000 homes by October.

Judge Royce Lamberth, who previously granted an injunction for Ørsted’s Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island, will preside over the case. Four similar wind developments have already won legal relief allowing construction to continue during litigation. The ongoing delays reflect broader tensions between offshore wind expansion and the Trump administration’s skepticism of the technology, as well as evolving security concerns.

US judge to consider last project challenge to Trump offshore wind pause | Reuters

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a civil rights investigation into the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. Pretti was killed during an enforcement operation that has since drawn national outrage and led the Trump administration to alter its tactics in Minnesota. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the FBI is conducting a preliminary review, with potential involvement from the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, though he emphasized that the investigation is still in early stages.

Video footage verified by Reuters shows Pretti being tackled by agents while holding a phone, and an officer retrieving a firearm from his body just before shots were fired. The Justice Department said a formal criminal civil rights probe would only proceed if the evidence supports it. Local officials have voiced distrust of the federal response and are conducting their own inquiry. Pretti is the second protester killed by federal agents in Minneapolis this month, and his family, represented by attorney Steve Schleicher, is demanding a transparent and impartial investigation. So far, no similar federal probe has been opened into the earlier shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer.

US Justice Dept opens civil rights probe into Alex Pretti shooting, official says | Reuters

In this week’s column for Bloomberg Tax, I argue that Volkswagen’s decision to cancel plans for a new Audi plant in the U.S. highlights the limitations of using tariffs as a cornerstone of industrial policy. The assumption underpinning tariff-heavy strategies is that the U.S. market is irresistible enough to force global firms to onshore production, even as tariffs erode that market’s size and appeal. Tariffs have come to function like sin taxes—meant to discourage consumption—but unlike cigarettes or soda, the goal with trade policy is not abstention, but investment and economic engagement. Instead, firms like VW are responding by pulling back, as higher costs reduce consumer demand and make U.S. market share too small to justify large-scale investment. The belief that global manufacturers can swiftly build U.S. capacity ignores the time, cost, and uncertainty involved, especially in capital-intensive sectors. VW’s exit is rational: it doesn’t make financial sense to break ground on a multibillion-dollar plant when the target market is shrinking and returns are questionable.

Policymakers need to move beyond blunt tools and design trade incentives based on real market data, such as U.S. demand and potential return on investment. That means requiring ROI modeling before tariffs are imposed, and asking whether the targeted company has enough exposure to be moved by them. If the answer is no, we risk losing access to competitive products, jobs, and consumer choice—not gaining them. Trade policy should be surgical, not punitive, and should acknowledge that capital follows incentives, not threats.

In a piece I wrote for Forbes late last week, and with apologies for a double dose of me today: I examined California’s long-running flirtation with a mileage-based tax to replace its declining gas tax revenues—and how what began as a test program has quietly become a form of policymaking through delay. In 2014, the state authorized a pilot program to study a “road usage charge,” a per-mile fee designed to keep transportation funding solvent as gas consumption drops. That pilot wrapped up in 2017 and showed the system works: vehicles can be tracked, billing can be simulated, and the technical challenges are manageable. But nearly a decade later, no mileage tax has been implemented, and new legislation—AB 1421—would extend the advisory committee until 2035.

The real issue now isn’t feasibility but political avoidance. The state has drifted into a passive strategy where permanent pilots and advisory boards take the place of real decisions. This kind of inertia has a name: policy drift—when the law remains formally unchanged, but materially obsolete. California’s ongoing study phase has become a way to defer a difficult conversation about revenue and equity in a post-gasoline economy. The technology exists, and other states have already tested it. What’s missing is political will and public engagement.

AB 1421 doesn’t collect revenue or educate voters—it simply extends the status quo under the guise of preparation. From the outside, it looks like planning. In practice, it’s a weather balloon designed to measure political tolerance, not policy readiness.

California Mileage Tax—Pilot Programs And Permanent Policy Inertia

On February 2, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, officially ending the Mexican-American War and significantly altering the legal and territorial landscape of the United States. The treaty ceded vast swaths of land to the U.S., including present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of several other western states—about half of Mexico’s territory at the time. In exchange, the U.S. paid Mexico $15 million and assumed $3.25 million in claims by American citizens against Mexico. Legally, the treaty promised to protect the property rights and civil liberties of Mexican nationals living in the newly acquired territories, but these promises were inconsistently honored in practice.

The treaty’s ratification triggered significant legal and constitutional debates about the extension of slavery into new territories, setting the stage for the intensifying sectional conflicts that led to the Civil War. It also marked the beginning of long-standing disputes over land grants and water rights that would shape western property law. Moreover, the treaty’s vague wording left many issues—such as tribal sovereignty and citizenship—unresolved, leading to future litigation and policy struggles.

The treaty was signed in the town of Guadalupe Hidalgo, near Mexico City, and ratified by the U.S. Senate in March 1848. It remains a foundational document in U.S. legal history, frequently cited in discussions of land rights, citizenship, and the limits of treaty enforcement.

Our first story today is a bit off topic.

In today’s digital world, every click, swipe, and login happens under a legal regime you didn’t negotiate—Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, and community guidelines that quietly shape your rights and obligations online. These documents form a system of private lawmaking, where companies act as legislators, drafting rules users must follow, often with little recourse or transparency. You don’t sign them, but courts often treat them as binding contracts. Clauses about arbitration, content ownership, surveillance, and data sharing carry real legal weight. Yet these terms can change overnight, unilaterally, and without notice.

TOSTracker was created to bring transparency to this ecosystem. It’s a non-commercial research tool that tracks and archives the evolution of digital contracts over time. With over 150 companies and nearly 250 historical versions of key documents thus far, TOSTracker offers timestamped, hash-verified, and citable records of how these texts change. It provides full version histories, detects redlines at the word and section level, and supports programmatic access through an API. Whether you’re studying arbitration creep, GDPR compliance, or how moderation rules evolve, TOSTracker gives you the empirical backbone to do it.

All content is normalized and archived via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, with cryptographic hashes ensuring document integrity. Importantly, it doesn’t interpret the law—it captures the text and structure so you can. For legal researchers, privacy advocates, and anyone concerned with digital governance, this is a window into how private law is made, revised, and enforced online. It’s not a product; it’s a dataset, an archive, and a call to look more closely at the legal architecture of everyday tech.

We’re also actively seeking contributors to help expand the archive. If you come across a consumer-facing legal document—like a Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, community guidelines, or EULA—that isn’t already tracked, you can submit it directly through the site. This includes documents behind logins, from smaller platforms, or covering underrepresented industries and regions. Submissions help close coverage gaps, diversify the dataset, and improve the foundation for legal research into how digital rights are defined and redefined over time. Your input directly supports transparency in an area where the law is often invisible.

Check it out at tostracker.app if your research overlaps with digital contracts, user rights, or the evolving boundary between public law and platform governance.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sent warning letters to 42 major law firms over concerns that their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring practices may be anticompetitive. The FTC emphasized that firm-wide agreements to meet diversity benchmarks—particularly those tied to programs like Diversity Lab’s certification—could unlawfully restrict competition in the legal labor market by influencing hiring, compensation, or promotions. These letters arrive amid a broader rollback of DEI initiatives under President Donald Trump’s administration, which has eliminated related programs in government and targeted private sector efforts.

Firms such as Paul Weiss, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, Skadden Arps, and Latham & Watkins—some of which had previously been challenged by Trump-era executive orders—are among those named. Some reached compromises with the White House, offering pro bono legal work in exchange for eased scrutiny, while others fought and won legal challenges against the orders. The FTC’s scrutiny centers on participation in Diversity Lab’s voluntary DEI certification, which encourages firms to ensure at least 30% of leadership candidates are from underrepresented groups. Though previously upheld in court as non-discriminatory, the FTC now frames such collective DEI practices as potentially violating competition law.

US Federal Trade Commission warns law firms about DEI hiring | Reuters

Immigrant rights groups filed a federal lawsuit in Boston challenging a new U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policy that allows agents to enter homes without judicial warrants. The suit, brought by the Greater Boston Latino Network and the Brazilian Worker Center, targets a May 2025 memo—recently revealed via a whistleblower complaint—that permits ICE officers to use administrative warrants instead of warrants signed by a federal judge. These administrative forms, issued internally by the Department of Homeland Security, were previously insufficient for home entries under longstanding practice.

The plaintiffs argue that using such warrants for home arrests violates the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. Legal advocates claim the policy removes a crucial constitutional safeguard just as ICE ramps up enforcement tactics in states like Minnesota, where multiple recent actions have already been deemed unlawful by judges. The lawsuit comes after fatal incidents in Minneapolis during anti-ICE protests, intensifying scrutiny of federal immigration operations.

ICE officials defend the policy, asserting that individuals subject to removal have already received due process. However, the lawsuit challenges that rationale, pointing out that due process does not override constitutional protections against warrantless home intrusions.

Lawsuit challenges ICE ability to enter homes without warrants from US judges | Reuters

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon is facing federal charges over his role in covering a protest at a Minnesota church opposing President Trump’s immigration crackdown. The protest, which disrupted a church service in St. Paul on January 18, was livestreamed by Lemon and targeted the church because one pastor was allegedly also an ICE official. Lemon was arrested by the FBI, spent a night in custody, and appeared in court where he confirmed he plans to plead not guilty. He and six others, including independent journalist Georgia Fort, were indicted under laws prohibiting obstruction of access to houses of worship—a legal framework typically used against abortion clinic protests.

Free press advocates and constitutional lawyers are raising concerns about the charges, framing them as part of a broader pattern of the Trump administration targeting critics, including journalists. Lemon’s attorneys argue this is a political prosecution meant to suppress press freedom and distract from ongoing crises. In the archived livestream, Lemon is seen documenting the protest rather than leading it, further fueling First Amendment concerns. The DOJ’s case hinges on a controversial interpretation of laws rarely, if ever, used to prosecute journalists for protest coverage after the fact. Legal experts say there is no clear precedent for the charges, and press freedom groups are warning of escalating threats to constitutional protections.

Ex-CNN journalist Don Lemon faces Minnesota protest charges | Reuters

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, a moment that marked the beginning of one of the darkest legal and political transformations in modern history. Contrary to popular belief, Hitler did not seize power in a coup; his rise was accomplished through entirely legal means under the Weimar Constitution. Once in office, the Nazi regime moved swiftly to erode civil liberties, beginning with the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended constitutional protections like freedom of speech, assembly, and due process. This decree, signed by President Hindenburg, gave the government extraordinary powers under the guise of national emergency.

Shortly thereafter, the Enabling Act of March 1933 granted Hitler the authority to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag, including laws that violated the constitution itself. The judiciary, instead of serving as a check on executive overreach, largely complied or cooperated, enabling legal persecution of Jews, political dissidents, and other marginalized groups. Laws were passed systematically to isolate, disenfranchise, and ultimately exterminate entire populations, all with the appearance of legality and bureaucratic order.

What happened in Germany is a stark reminder that authoritarianism often arrives wrapped in the language of law and order. The rule of law is not inherently just—it depends on who writes the laws, how they are enforced, and whether constitutional checks are robust enough to resist consolidation of power. Today, as various democracies grapple with executive overreach, politicized judiciaries, and emergency powers, the legal path taken in 1933 offers a chilling historical parallel. The slow erosion of legal norms, once set in motion, can be devastatingly hard to reverse.

A federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration unlawfully ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for roughly 600,000 Venezuelans living and working in the United States. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem exceeded her authority by terminating protections that had been extended under the Biden administration. The court emphasized that, since Congress created TPS 35 years ago, no administration had claimed the power to cancel a country’s designation while it remained in effect. Judges found that the statute’s language clearly limits executive authority and does not permit unilateral termination mid-designation.

Despite the ruling, the decision will not immediately restore protections because the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed the policy to remain in effect while the case continues on appeal. The court noted that the termination has left hundreds of thousands of migrants in fear of detention, deportation, and family separation, often to countries where they previously faced violence. The ruling also upheld a finding that TPS protections for Haitians were unlawfully ended, though the administration has pursued separate efforts to terminate those protections. One judge wrote separately to argue that the policy was influenced by racist stereotyping, citing public statements by senior officials about Venezuelan and Haitian migrants. Advocacy groups welcomed the ruling but stressed that, because of the Supreme Court’s order, affected migrants remain vulnerable in the meantime.

Trump administration unlawfully ended Venezuelans’ legal status, US court rules | Reuters

A significant wave of attorneys has left the U.S. federal government since Donald Trump returned to office, fueling a major shift in the legal workforce. Between January and November 2025, over 8,500 licensed attorneys exited federal service, leading to a net loss of 6,524—one of the sharpest declines in decades. The Department of Justice (DOJ) was especially affected, with notable departures from its Civil Rights Division and Federal Programs Branch, and the closure of its Tax Division. Some resignations were linked to policy disagreements, while others were the result of force reductions or shifting departmental priorities.

This exodus has dramatically reshaped the hiring market for large law firms. In 2025, top-grossing firms hired over 1,100 lawyers directly from government positions, more than doubling the rate seen in prior years. Recruiters report a flood of interest from government attorneys, many of whom began reaching out even before Trump’s inauguration. However, while high-ranking officials and prosecutors remain in demand, lower-level attorneys without niche skills are facing a tougher private market.

The overall federal workforce, not just lawyers, has contracted significantly under Trump’s renewed efforts to reduce government size. The DOJ alone has seen a net loss of nearly 9,000 employees. While the number of federal lawyers remains close to 2017 levels, the recent surge in departures marks a striking reversal of long-standing hiring trends.

Lawyers leaving US government drive workforce shift | Reuters

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey has proposed legislation that would block other states from deploying their National Guard troops into Massachusetts without her approval. The move comes in response to President Donald Trump’s controversial use of the National Guard in 2025, when troops from various states were sent to cities like Chicago and Los Angeles without consent from local governments—breaking with long-standing norms regarding domestic military deployment.

Several states already have similar laws, designed to prevent out-of-state Guard deployments unless coordinated through mutual agreement or in federally controlled situations. However, legal gray areas remain when the federal government asserts control over state troops. Last year, the Trump administration attempted to deploy federalized National Guard units from California and Texas to assist immigration enforcement in Portland, Oregon. That effort was met with lawsuits from state officials, who claimed no valid emergency justified the action; the troops were withdrawn before the legal battle concluded.

Healey’s bill aims to reinforce state sovereignty over such deployments and to guard against federal overreach in the absence of local consent. The National Guard is typically used across state lines only in emergency situations like natural disasters, and even then, usually with approval from affected states.

Massachusetts bill aims to block National Guard deployment from other states | Reuters

This week’s closing theme is by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

This week’s closing theme is the Lacrymosa from Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, a work shrouded in both mystery and mourning. Mozart began composing the Requiem in 1791, the final year of his life, and died before completing it—adding an eerie depth to a piece already suffused with sorrow and transcendence. The Lacrymosa movement in particular is a haunting meditation on grief, built around the Latin text “Lacrimosa dies illa” (“That tearful day”), which describes the final judgment and the weeping of the soul.

The music swells with mourning, yet carries within it an unmistakable dignity—grief not as chaos, but as reckoning. Today, as we reflect on events that echo the legal and moral breakdowns of the past—and resound in the present—the Lacrymosa feels like a fitting elegy. It reminds us that great tragedy often begins under the guise of order, and that mourning is not only for the dead, but for the living systems and values that can perish when unchecked power takes root.

Mozart, though apolitical and far removed from the 20th century, composed music that reaches across time to articulate the emotional weight of collective loss. The unfinished nature of the Requiem also mirrors the historical unfinished business of justice—how societies reckon with their past, or fail to. This piece, suspended between the sacred and the human, between hope and despair, offers a solemn moment of reflection as the week closes.

Without further ado, the Lacrymosa from Mozart’s Requiem in D minor – enjoy.

On January 29, 2002, President George W. Bush delivered his first State of the Union address after the September 11 attacks, a speech that would shape U.S. legal and foreign policy for years to come. During the address, Bush coined the term “Axis of Evil” to describe Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, alleging these nations were actively pursuing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorism. The speech marked a significant rhetorical shift in the U.S. posture toward preemptive military action and helped solidify a legal framework for broad executive authority in the name of national security. Citing the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the Bush administration would go on to justify military interventions without new Congressional declarations of war.

The “Axis of Evil” framing played a critical role in building public and political support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Though the legal justification centered on Iraq’s supposed weapons programs and ties to terrorism, both claims were later discredited, leading to intense scrutiny of the legal rationale behind the war. Domestically, the period following the speech saw rapid expansion of executive power, new surveillance authorities, and detention practices that raised constitutional concerns. Internationally, the speech signaled a departure from multilateral norms and toward unilateral action under the banner of American security interests.

The legal legacy of the address continues to reverberate in debates over presidential war powers and the limits of the AUMF. Critics argue the speech set a precedent for indefinite military engagement without sufficient Congressional oversight. Supporters contend it met the urgency of a new kind of threat in the post-9/11 world. Regardless of viewpoint, the 2002 State of the Union redefined the intersection of law, war, and foreign policy in the 21st century.

A preliminary review by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) into the murder of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis did not state that Pretti brandished a firearm, contradicting earlier claims by Trump officials. Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot after reportedly refusing to move from the street when ordered by a customs officer. Initial official statements described Pretti as an armed threat, with the Department of Homeland Security noting he had a handgun—though it was holstered—and Trump aide Stephen Miller labeling him a “domestic terrorist” without evidence. However, video footage from the scene challenged these claims, showing an agent removing a holstered weapon from Pretti’s waist before the shooting.

The CBP review, based on body camera footage and internal documents, said officers attempted to move Pretti and a woman from the street and used pepper spray when they didn’t comply. A struggle followed, during which a Border Patrol agent shouted “He’s got a gun!” before both agents opened fire. The review, which is standard protocol, was shared with lawmakers but emphasized it contained no final conclusions. The identities and experience levels of the involved officers, particularly regarding urban crowd control, remain undisclosed. The incident has sparked national controversy and prompted a more restrained response from Trump in its aftermath.

U.S. review of Alex Pretti killing does not mention him brandishing firearm | Reuters

The U.S. federal judiciary may only be able to continue full paid operations through February 4 if Congress does not pass funding legislation in time to avert a partial government shutdown. Judge Robert Conrad, who oversees the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, issued a memo warning of the looming shortfall, stating that while courts will remain open on February 2, they would quickly exhaust available funds by February 4. The uncertainty comes amid a broader funding standoff in Congress, where a six-bill package—including money for defense, housing, transportation, and a $9.2 billion judiciary allocation—is stalled.

A key point of contention is the funding of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), especially following the fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Alex Pretti by immigration officers. Senate Democrats are now refusing to approve DHS funding without reforms, throwing into doubt whether the broader package can pass. Although the bills had passed the Republican-controlled House and previously seemed poised for Senate approval, the Pretti incident has triggered renewed partisan gridlock.

If no agreement is reached, this shutdown could affect the judiciary much sooner than the previous lapse in 2025, when courts operated for over two weeks before curtailing services. The current funding crisis threatens court staffing, case management, and broader access to justice. The memo underscores the fragile position of the courts in a prolonged budget standoff, with potential furloughs and suspended operations looming if a deal isn’t struck.

US judiciary may not be able to fully maintain operations past Feb. 4 in government shutdown | Reuters

Google has agreed to pay $135 million to settle a proposed class action lawsuit accusing it of collecting Android users’ cellular data without their consent. The settlement, filed in federal court in San Jose, California, still needs judicial approval. The lawsuit claimed that even when users closed Google apps, disabled location sharing, or locked their devices, Google continued to gather mobile data, which users had paid for through their carriers. Plaintiffs alleged this behavior amounted to “conversion,” a legal term referring to the unauthorized taking of someone’s property for one’s own use.

Though Google denied any wrongdoing, it agreed to stop transferring data without user consent during Android device setup. The company will also update its Google Play terms to clearly disclose data transfers and give users simpler options to disable them. The case covers Android users dating back to November 12, 2017. If approved, users could receive up to $100 each from the settlement fund.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys described the agreement as the largest known payout in a conversion case, and they may seek nearly $40 million in legal fees. A trial had been set for August 2026 before the settlement was reached. Google has not commented on the resolution.

Google to pay $135 million to settle Android data transfer lawsuit | Reuters

Google to Pay $135 Million to Settle Android Phone-Data Suit

A Christian substitute teacher, Kimberly Ann Polk, has lost her attempt to revive First Amendment claims against Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) after refusing to use transgender students’ pronouns. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision, finding Polk unlikely to succeed on claims that the district’s pronoun policy violated her free speech and religious freedom rights. The court ruled she failed to show any evidence of religious hostility from the school board and did not meet the legal threshold to proceed with her constitutional claims.

Polk argued that MCPS’s policy, which requires staff to use names and pronouns aligned with students’ gender identities and bars disclosing those identities to unsupportive parents, conflicted with her belief that gender is fixed at birth. While the court dismissed her constitutional claims, it allowed her separate Title VII claim for religious accommodation to proceed. This claim argues that MCPS violated federal civil rights law by not making space for her religious beliefs in its employment practices.

The decision was split, with Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson dissenting. He called the school policy a “gross assault upon the First Amendment” and argued Polk had a valid free speech claim. The case reflects ongoing national legal tensions between employee religious rights and school policies supporting LGBTQ+ students. Notably, another federal appeals court had previously sided with a teacher in a similar dispute, signaling a potential circuit split.

Christian Teacher Can’t Undo Pronoun Case First Amendment Loss

On January 28, 2016, a federal judge in California dismissed a highly publicized copyright lawsuit that sought to establish whether a monkey could own intellectual property rights. The case stemmed from a 2011 incident in which a crested macaque named Naruto allegedly took a series of selfies using wildlife photographer David Slater’s unattended camera in Indonesia. The resulting images, particularly a striking self-portrait of the grinning primate, went viral and sparked widespread debate over authorship and ownership. In 2015, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit against Slater on Naruto’s behalf, asserting that the monkey was the true author and copyright holder of the images under the Copyright Act.

The case presented novel legal questions about the boundaries of authorship and whether non-human animals have standing to sue in federal court. U.S. District Judge William Orrick ruled that animals do not have statutory standing under the Copyright Act, which applies only to human authors. In his opinion, Orrick emphasized that Congress had not intended to grant copyright rights to animals, and that extending such rights would require legislative action rather than judicial interpretation.

The ruling did not settle the matter completely, as PETA appealed the decision. However, in 2018, PETA and Slater reached a settlement in which Slater agreed to donate a portion of any future revenue from the photos to organizations protecting macaques and their habitats. The case sparked lasting discussion about animal rights, legal personhood, and the reach of copyright law in the digital age. It also underscored how existing legal frameworks may be ill-equipped to address emerging questions posed by technology and non-human agency.

Several Democratic-led U.S. states are advancing legislation to allow individuals to sue federal immigration agents in state courts for alleged civil rights violations. This movement gained momentum after two fatal ICE encounters in Minneapolis and broader concerns over enforcement tactics under President Trump’s immigration policies. Illinois recently became the first state to pass such a law, but the Trump administration quickly filed a legal challenge, citing the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which gives federal law precedence over state law. Other states, including California, New York, and Virginia, are considering similar measures.

Supporters argue these laws would close an accountability gap, as federal agents—unlike state or local officials—are largely shielded from individual civil rights lawsuits. While Section 1983 of the U.S. Code allows such suits against state actors in federal court, no equivalent exists for federal officers. The Federal Tort Claims Act permits some claims against the U.S. government but not against agents personally, and it involves complex procedures. Legal experts say these state efforts could spark a major shift in the legal landscape, potentially giving courts a framework to hold federal agents accountable for constitutional violations.

The Department of Homeland Security has defended ICE’s actions and criticized the state proposals. Critics, including legal scholars, warn that parts of the Illinois law—such as those allowing punitive damages—may be unconstitutional. However, others maintain that the core idea of state-level accountability for federal misconduct is both lawful and necessary.

US state lawmakers push to allow lawsuits against ICE agents | Reuters

A Virginia judge blocked an attempt by state Democrats to advance a constitutional amendment that would have allowed them to redraw the state’s congressional map in their favor. Judge Jack Hurley, Jr. ruled that the process used to introduce the amendment was procedurally invalid and came too close to the state’s 2025 election. The decision halts a strategy that could have given Democrats control of up to 10 of Virginia’s 11 U.S. House seats, up from the six they currently hold.

Democratic leaders, including House Speaker Don Scott, have pledged to appeal the ruling. The blocked amendment was intended to be put before voters in a special election this spring, with a new electoral map released ahead of time for public consideration. With control of the narrowly divided U.S. House of Representatives at stake in the upcoming midterms, the decision is a significant setback for Democrats, who need only flip three seats to gain a majority.

The dispute is part of a broader national struggle over redistricting, with both parties pursuing aggressive map-drawing strategies in various states. Last year, Donald Trump encouraged Texas Republicans to redraw maps targeting Democratic incumbents, prompting Democratic-led states like California to follow suit in kind.

Judge blocks Virginia lawmakers’ bid for pro-Democratic voting map | Reuters

Top lawyers at U.S. litigation firm Susman Godfrey are now billing up to $4,000 per hour, setting a new high for hourly legal fees in 2026. The rate applies to prominent partners Neal Manne and Bill Carmody, whose hourly fees were already $3,000 last year. While most of their work is done on contingency or flat-fee arrangements, this hourly benchmark reflects growing price trends across elite law firms. Manne joked that their rate-setting process is as secretive as a papal conclave, and the firm has not disclosed how the figures were determined.

Susman Godfrey, based in Houston, is known for high-end litigation on both the plaintiff and defense side and offers above-average compensation, especially to associates. The rise in billing rates is part of a broader trend—major law firms raised their hourly rates by an average of 7% in 2025, according to a report by the Thomson Reuters Institute and Georgetown Law.

Other top firms are also pushing rate ceilings. Latham & Watkins reached $3,050 per hour for some partners in federal bankruptcy filings, while leading appellate lawyer Neal Katyal billed $3,250 at Milbank. Quinn Emanuel partners were billing at $3,000 an hour last year, according to court records.

As lawyer rates surge, US firm charges $4,000 an hour for top partners | Reuters

On January 27, 1973, the United States signed the Paris Peace Accords, effectively marking the end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Though primarily a geopolitical and military agreement, the Paris Peace Accords had significant legal dimensions. Negotiated between the U.S., South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the Viet Cong (under the banner of the Provisional Revolutionary Government), the accords represented a complex international legal settlement aimed at restoring peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

The agreement included provisions for a cease-fire, the withdrawal of U.S. troops, the release of prisoners of war, and the recognition of South Vietnamese sovereignty. Legally, the accords posed a challenge to domestic and international law frameworks, particularly in the way the U.S. executive branch negotiated and signed the agreement without formal Congressional approval. This would later contribute to the debate around the War Powers Resolution, passed in 1973, which sought to limit the president’s ability to commit U.S. forces without legislative oversight.

Though hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough, the accords failed to bring lasting peace. North Vietnam eventually overran the South in 1975, raising legal questions about treaty enforcement and the durability of international peace agreements brokered without strong enforcement mechanisms.

A U.S. District Court judge in Minnesota is weighing whether to temporarily halt the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement operation in the state, which has come under intense scrutiny following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and nurse. Local officials from Minnesota, Minneapolis, and St. Paul argue the federal crackdown involves unlawful tactics, including warrantless home raids and racial profiling, carried out by over 2,800 heavily armed agents—more than the total local police force. The Biden-appointed judge, Katherine Menendez, acknowledged the unprecedented nature of the case.

The administration, defending the operation, dismissed the lawsuit as baseless. However, video evidence contradicts the official account of Pretti’s death, showing he was unarmed and holding a phone when agents shot him, despite claims he posed a threat with a firearm. The incident has fueled widespread protests and demands for federal de-escalation from both state leaders and major Minnesota-based companies like Target and 3M.

President Trump has sent border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, though it’s unclear whether this signals an expansion or reassessment of federal actions. Trump says his administration is “reviewing everything” and that immigration agents will eventually withdraw. Tensions have also spilled into Washington, with Senate Democrats vowing to block DHS funding, risking a partial government shutdown. Meanwhile, even some Republicans are questioning the administration’s approach.

US judge to consider pause to Minnesota crackdown as Trump dispatches border czar | Reuters

A federal judge in Boston has blocked the Trump administration from ending legal status for over 8,400 migrants from seven Latin American countries who had been allowed to live in the U.S. under family reunification parole programs. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction, preventing the Department of Homeland Security from terminating the programs, which benefited migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

These programs, created or expanded under President Biden, allowed U.S. citizens and green card holders to sponsor relatives while they awaited visa approval. The Trump administration moved to end the programs, claiming they were inconsistent with current enforcement priorities and enabled people to bypass traditional immigration processes.

Talwani found that the administration failed to justify its decision, noting the government neither provided evidence of fraud nor assessed the real-life consequences for affected migrants. Many had already sold homes or left jobs in their home countries. She ruled that DHS’s policy shift lacked a reasoned explanation and was therefore arbitrary and capricious under administrative law.

The ruling is part of a broader class action brought by immigrant rights advocates challenging Trump’s rollback of temporary protections. Talwani had previously tried to block similar efforts affecting hundreds of thousands of migrants, but those earlier rulings were overturned on appeal or by the Supreme Court.

US judge blocks Trump administration’s push to end legal status of 8,400 migrants | Reuters

My column for Bloomberg this week takes a look at the Empire State’s budget. New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed no-tax-hike budget may appear fiscally cautious, but critics (includin me) argue it lacks the stable, long-term revenue needed to support key social programs like universal childcare. While the state currently enjoys relative revenue stability, the budget relies on temporary fixes, such as decoupling from parts of the federal tax code to generate $1.6 billion, instead of pursuing more durable sources of funding.

My critique centers on Hochul’s refusal to raise the top marginal corporate tax rate—currently 7.25% for large companies—which is lower than neighboring states like New Jersey (11.5%) and Connecticut (8.25%). I suggest raising the rate to at least 8.5% and making the existing corporate tax surcharge permanent. I argue that companies benefiting from New York’s infrastructure and market can afford modest increases, and are unlikely to relocate given regional and national tax landscapes.

Without securing permanent funding, the state risks repeating a familiar pattern: expanding programs in good times and cutting them during downturns. I warn that relying on temporary revenue maneuvers delays tough decisions and increases the likelihood of painful tax hikes or service cuts when the economy falters. In short, now is the time to align recurring revenues with long-term commitments, while conditions are favorable.

On January 26, 1922, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, a landmark but ultimately thwarted attempt to make lynching a federal crime. Introduced by Missouri Republican Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer, the bill was drafted in response to the widespread and brutal practice of lynching—acts of racial terror largely aimed at Black Americans, often carried out with impunity. The measure sought to impose fines and prison terms on local officials who failed to protect individuals from mob violence, directly challenging the systemic neglect of justice in the Jim Crow South.

Though the House approved the bill by a wide margin, it met a coordinated and racist blockade in the Senate, where Southern Democrats employed the filibuster to prevent a vote. The bill’s failure underscored both the power of white supremacist interests in Congress and the federal government’s unwillingness to confront racial violence. It would take a full century—100 years—for the U.S. to finally enact a federal anti-lynching law.

That moment came in March 2022, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was signed into law, making lynching a federal hate crime. The staggering gap between the Dyer Bill’s passage in the House and the eventual success of anti-lynching legislation—exactly 100 years and two months later—is a sobering reminder of how recent, and how halting, legal progress on racial justice has been. From a historical perspective, 1922 is not ancient history; many living Americans had parents or grandparents who witnessed the Dyer Bill’s failure.

The Dyer Bill remains a powerful example of how legal change, even when urgent and necessary, can be obstructed for generations. It also reveals how the law, far from being a neutral instrument, often bends to the political will of those in power. The slow arc toward justice in this case wasn’t just theoretical—it was measured in innocent lives lost and justice denied.

The murder of Minnesota nurse Alex Pretti by ICE agents has sent shockwaves through Congress and thrown federal budget negotiations into chaos just days before a January 30 funding deadline. What had been a carefully arranged plan to pass remaining appropriations bills now faces collapse, raising the real possibility of a partial government shutdown. Senate Democrats, already uneasy about funding the Department of Homeland Security, have hardened their opposition in response to the killing and are demanding investigations and new limits on ICE. Several Democrats who previously helped avert a shutdown now say they will not support any bill that includes ICE funding under these circumstances.

Even lawmakers known for deal‑making, including Sen. Patty Murray, have withdrawn support, arguing that federal agents cannot commit murder without accountability. Republicans warn that blocking DHS funding risks undermining national security, but cracks are appearing within their ranks as well. Sen. Bill Cassidy called the killing “disturbing” and urged a joint federal‑state investigation, a rare public break with the administration. Meanwhile, logistical hurdles—including winter storms and congressional recesses—are shrinking the window for compromise. With both parties dug in and tensions escalating nationwide, the shutdown threat has grown sharper by the day.

Minnesota Shooting Inflames Tensions in Congress, Risks Shutdown

Meta, TikTok, and YouTube are set to face trial this week in Los Angeles County over claims that their platforms contributed to a youth mental health crisis by fostering social media addiction. The case centers on a 19-year-old plaintiff, K.G.M., who alleges she became addicted to the apps at a young age, leading to depression and suicidal thoughts. It marks the first time these major tech companies will have to defend their platforms in court, rather than in congressional hearings. The jury will be asked to determine whether the companies were negligent and whether their products were a substantial factor in harming K.G.M.’s mental health.

This trial is seen as a bellwether for dozens of similar cases expected to follow. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Snap CEO Evan Spiegel were both expected to testify, though Snap recently settled with the plaintiff. YouTube plans to argue that its platform is fundamentally different from other social media services, distancing itself from TikTok and Instagram. Meanwhile, these companies have been aggressively promoting parental control features and safety programs in schools and youth organizations to shift public perception.

Despite these efforts, critics argue the tech giants are leveraging their influence—legal, financial, and cultural—to avoid accountability. Attorneys representing the companies have experience in other high-profile addiction-related litigation, including the opioid crisis and video game cases. As the trial unfolds, the question of corporate responsibility for digital harm to minors will be tested in court for the first time.

Meta, TikTok, YouTube to stand trial on youth addiction claims | Reuters

The Supreme Court appears unlikely to grant President Trump’s request to immediately remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook but also seems disinclined to issue a sweeping ruling on the broader constitutional or statutory questions at play. Legal analysts suggest the justices are leaning toward a narrow, procedural decision—one that would preserve a lower court’s injunction against Cook’s removal while sending the case back to trial court for further fact-finding. This approach would allow the Court to sidestep defining what constitutes “cause” for firing a Fed governor or how far presidential removal powers extend, particularly in relation to the Federal Reserve’s legal independence.

The justices expressed concern about the rushed pace of the case and the thin evidentiary record, with Justice Alito questioning whether key documents were even part of the case file. Trump argues that Cook committed mortgage fraud, but Cook and her legal team contend the firing attempt is a pretext for punishing her resistance to his demands for aggressive rate cuts. Several justices highlighted the potential economic fallout of removing a Fed official, with economists warning of recession risks if the court acts hastily.

This case underscores that the Court is never obligated to resolve constitutional issues in broad strokes—it may always choose a minimalist path that focuses on the facts before it. Legal scholars note that even if the Court rules for Cook, it could do so narrowly by emphasizing procedural due process rather than affirming a general principle of Fed independence. The outcome is expected by June but may arrive sooner.

Supreme Court may leave big questions unresolved on Trump bid to fire Fed’s Lisa Cook | Reuters

LSAT Logic Applied is a new short-form podcast hosted by me, Andrew Leahey, the steady (?) voice at the helm of Minimum Competence. Twice a week, we’ll take the tools used in LSAT Logical Reasoning — assumptions, flaws, causation, strengthen/weaken — and apply them to the real world: news stories, political talking points, and ad claims.

You don’t need to be prepping for the LSAT to follow along. The goal is to make better sense of the arguments that flood your feed and shape public opinion — and to see where they break.

In the debut episode, included here just this once as an introduction to the show, we take on a recurring claim from Donald Trump: that tariffs made the United States the richest nation in the world. Fact checkers have pushed back on the economic accuracy, but for LSAT purposes, we’re more interested in the structure of the argument than its fiscal bottom line.

And structurally, there’s a lot to talk about. Causation flaws, hidden assumptions, and post hoc reasoning — it’s a logical mess with political consequences.

Find it wherever you get your finely crafted podcasts.

On January 23, 1920, the League of Nations held its first official meeting, marking a major experiment in international law and collective governance. The League was created in the aftermath of World War I as part of the Treaty of Versailles. Its core mission was to prevent future wars through diplomacy, arbitration, and collective security. For the first time, nations committed themselves to resolving disputes through legal mechanisms rather than unilateral force. The League also helped develop early norms of international accountability and treaty enforcement. It established permanent institutions to oversee mandates, labor standards, and minority protections. Although the United States never joined, the League influenced how international law was discussed and practiced. Its failures, particularly its inability to prevent aggression in the 1930s, exposed the limits of voluntary compliance without enforcement power. Those weaknesses became lessons for later international institutions. Many of the League’s structures and legal concepts were later incorporated into the United Nations. The League’s first meeting thus represents a foundational moment in the modern law of international cooperation.

U.S. President Donald Trump filed a $5 billion lawsuit in Florida state court against JPMorgan Chase and its CEO Jamie Dimon, alleging that the bank improperly closed his accounts for political reasons. Trump claims JPMorgan violated its own internal policies by singling him out as part of a broader political agenda. The bank denied the allegations, stating it does not close accounts based on political or religious views and that the lawsuit lacks merit. Trump also accused Dimon of orchestrating a “blacklist” intended to discourage other financial institutions from doing business with him, his family, and the Trump Organization. He said the account closures caused reputational harm and forced him to seek alternative banking relationships. JPMorgan countered that account closures are sometimes required to manage legal or regulatory risk. The lawsuit comes amid broader political scrutiny of banks over alleged “debanking” practices. Conservative critics have accused lenders of restricting services to certain individuals and industries. A recent report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency found that major banks limited services to some industries between 2020 and 2023, though it did not identify specific wrongdoing. Regulators have since moved away from using vague “reputational risk” standards in bank supervision.

Trump sues JPMorgan, CEO Jamie Dimon for $5 billion over alleged debanking | Reuters

Former U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith told the House Judiciary Committee that Donald Trump willfully violated the law in his efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Smith testified that Trump was not seeking truthful information about election fraud claims but instead was searching for ways to block certification of the results. The hearing marked Smith’s first extensive public testimony about the two criminal cases he brought against Trump, both of which were dropped after Trump won reelection in 2024. Republicans on the committee accused Smith of political bias and argued his investigation improperly targeted Trump and his allies. They focused on Smith’s use of subpoenas for phone records of Republican lawmakers, portraying the actions as overreach. Smith defended those measures as necessary to investigate potential obstruction of justice. He said Republican witnesses who contradicted Trump’s fraud claims would have been central to the election interference case. Trump responded by renewing calls for Smith to be prosecuted and accusing him of harming innocent people. Democrats on the panel defended Smith as a career prosecutor guided by evidence rather than politics.

Former US prosecutor Smith says Trump ‘willfully broke’ laws in bid to keep power | Reuters

A federal judge expressed skepticism about whether the Trump administration has the legal authority to build a $400 million ballroom at the White House without congressional approval. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon questioned the administration’s justification for demolishing the historic East Wing and replacing it with a large new structure. The lawsuit was brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which argues the project violates federal laws governing construction on parkland in Washington, D.C. The group contends that Congress must expressly authorize such construction and that required environmental reviews were bypassed or improperly handled. Judge Leon sharply rejected comparisons between the ballroom and past minor renovations, signaling concern about the scale of the project. He is considering whether to issue a preliminary injunction that would halt construction while the case proceeds. The administration maintains the ballroom is necessary for state functions and part of a long tradition of presidential renovations. Government lawyers also argue that stopping construction now would serve no public benefit, especially since above-ground work is months away. Leon said he expects to rule on the injunction request in the coming weeks.

White House faces skeptical judge in lawsuit over Trump ballroom | Reuters

This week’s closing theme is by Édouard Lalo.

This week’s closing theme features music by Lalo, a composer who spent much of his career just outside the spotlight of 19th-century French music. Born in 1823, Lalo came to composition relatively late and struggled for recognition in a musical world dominated by opera and established conservatory figures. He is best remembered today for works that combine classical structure with vivid color and rhythmic vitality. The Concerto in F Major, Op. 20 reflects those strengths, balancing elegance with expressive intensity. The opening Andante – Allegro begins with a reflective, almost searching character before unfolding into a more energetic and assertive main section. Lalo uses the solo instrument to sing rather than dominate, emphasizing lyrical phrasing over virtuosic display. The movement’s shifting moods showcase his gift for contrast and dramatic pacing. There is a clear sense of forward motion, but never at the expense of clarity. Lalo’s orchestration remains transparent, allowing themes to breathe and develop naturally. The music feels poised between Romantic warmth and classical restraint. As a closing theme, it offers both momentum and reflection. It is a reminder of Lalo’s understated influence and the enduring appeal of his finely crafted musical voice.

Without further ado, Édouard Lalo’s Concerto in F Major, Op. 20, the opening Andante, enjoy!

On January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, fundamentally reshaping American constitutional law and reproductive rights. In a 7–2 ruling, the Court held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects a person’s right to privacy, which includes the right to choose to have an abortion. The case arose after a Texas woman, known under the pseudonym “Jane Roe,” challenged state laws that criminalized abortion except to save the life of the mother. Writing for the majority, Justice Harry Blackmun articulated a constitutional framework that balanced the state’s interest in regulating abortions with an individual’s right to privacy.

The Court introduced a trimester system, giving states greater regulatory power as pregnancy progressed but prohibiting outright bans on abortion in the first trimester. This decision effectively invalidated abortion restrictions in dozens of states and became one of the most politically and legally contentious rulings in American history. Roe expanded the constitutional interpretation of the right to privacy, which had been previously recognized in cases like Griswold v. Connecticut, but its grounding in substantive due process quickly became a lightning rod for critics.

Opponents of the ruling argued that the Constitution did not explicitly guarantee a right to abortion, while supporters saw it as a critical protection of bodily autonomy and gender equality. Over the next five decades, Roe faced continual challenges and legislative efforts aimed at narrowing its scope. Ultimately, in 2022, the Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, returning authority to regulate abortion back to individual states and ending federal constitutional protection for abortion rights. The legacy of Roe v. Wade continues to shape legal discourse, political identity, and reproductive healthcare policy in the United States.

A federal appeals court has lifted a temporary order that had limited immigration agents from using tear gas and force against peaceful protesters in Minneapolis, a city currently at the center of a legal and political clash over immigration enforcement. The lower court’s injunction—issued by U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez—had aimed to protect demonstrators as they protested President Trump’s mass deployment of ICE and Border Patrol agents throughout the area. The Biden-era precedent of restrained enforcement has been upended by Trump’s aggressive tactics, which now include militarized agents patrolling streets and confronting U.S. citizens, particularly people of color, demanding identification and sometimes using force.

The protests intensified after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, an American citizen monitoring ICE activities. In response to mounting legal challenges, including a suit from the Minnesota state government and its largest cities, the Trump administration has doubled down. Not only did the Department of Homeland Security appeal the injunction, but the Justice Department has also launched a criminal investigation into Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats, accusing them of obstructing federal law enforcement.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals granted a temporary stay of the injunction while it considers a longer-term ruling, effectively allowing ICE to resume more aggressive tactics in the meantime. Critics, including Walz and Frey, warn that the Trump administration is intentionally provoking unrest to justify escalated federal intervention. The administration defends its actions as necessary to combat fraud, particularly among Minnesota’s Somali community, which Trump has disparaged in stark terms. The legal and political standoff continues, with lawsuits and investigations adding to the tension.

US appeals court lifts order curbing immigration agents’ tactics against Minnesota protesters | Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court appeared reluctant to endorse President Trump’s unprecedented attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, signaling concern over the potential threat to the central bank’s independence. During oral arguments, justices from across the ideological spectrum questioned whether Trump had the authority to remove Cook without due process, especially given the lack of precedent and the vague legal standard for removing Fed officials “for cause.”

The administration cited unproven mortgage fraud allegations—claims Cook denies—as grounds for dismissal. However, several justices, including conservatives like Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, expressed concern that firing a Fed governor without a hearing or judicial review could set a dangerous precedent and politicize the central bank. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether minor or disputed past conduct could justify removal without any formal process.

Cook argued the allegations were merely a pretext for her removal over policy disagreements, particularly her resistance to Trump’s pressure to cut interest rates. The Court’s skepticism reflects unease about weakening safeguards designed to insulate the Fed from political interference. District Judge Jia Cobb previously blocked Cook’s removal, citing due process concerns and insufficient legal cause.

A decision from the Court is expected by June. If the justices rule in Cook’s favor or remand the case for further proceedings, it could reinforce limits on presidential power over independent agencies.

US Supreme Court appears reluctant to let Trump fire Fed’s Lisa Cook | Reuters

The Trump administration has launched a new immigration enforcement campaign in Maine, dubbed “Operation Catch of the Day,” with a focus on targeting criminal offenders—though internal sources indicate the true emphasis is on refugee populations, especially Somalis. Over 100 federal immigration agents have been deployed to the state, intensifying fears in immigrant communities and sparking political backlash.

Maine Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat currently running for a U.S. Senate seat, criticized the operation as unwelcome and politically motivated. This mirrors broader national trends, with Trump having already surged thousands of agents into other Democratic-led areas, such as Minnesota, where tensions recently escalated after ICE officers fatally shot a U.S. citizen. In Lewiston, Maine’s second-largest city and home to a longstanding Somali refugee community, the mayor condemned ICE’s tactics as inhumane and fear-driven.

Despite Trump’s framing of the effort as a crackdown on criminality, many targeted individuals have no criminal records. Critics argue the campaign serves more as political theater than public safety. Meanwhile, public support for such operations has eroded, especially as aggressive enforcement methods—including tear gas and raids—become more visible. DHS has defended its actions and criticized local leaders like Mills for not fully cooperating with federal immigration enforcement.

Trump administration starts immigration operation in Maine | Reuters

In my latest piece for Forbes, I examine the absurdity of President Trump’s renewed push to acquire Greenland—this time by threatening tariffs on countries that don’t support the plan. Far from making foreign governments pay, these tariffs would, once again, function as a consumption tax on Americans. Drawing from the Kiel Institute’s data, I show that during the 2025 “Liberation Day” tariff campaign, 96% of the costs fell on U.S. importers and consumers, not foreign exporters. This new Greenland-linked tariff threat follows the same script, only now it’s not even pretending to protect American industry—it’s economic coercion for a geopolitical fantasy.

I describe how tariffs, sold as leverage, collapse trade volumes without lowering foreign prices. Countries like Brazil and India didn’t budge on pricing; they just shipped elsewhere. Meanwhile, Americans paid more for less. I also highlight how small businesses and low-income households feel the pain first, as import costs ripple through the economy, raising prices on both foreign and domestic goods. Despite the $200 billion in customs revenue collected, it amounts to a regressive tax—not a clever policy move.

The deeper issue, as I argue, is the unchecked executive power to unilaterally impose tariffs. Current law enables the president to take sweeping trade actions with little oversight, and we’re now seeing that power used not for national defense or economic stability, but to punish allies for not acquiescing to a real estate deal. I call on Congress to reclaim its constitutional role in trade policy and set clear limits on executive authority in this arena. Otherwise, we’re left with a precedent where tariffs become tools of vanity projects—not national strategy.

Tariffs For Greenland—Or, ‘I’ll Hold My Breath Until You Turn Blue’

On January 21, 1975, three of Richard Nixon’s closest aides—H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and former Attorney General John Mitchell—were convicted for their roles in the Watergate cover-up. The charges? Conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. These convictions weren’t just about punishing political wrongdoing; they were the direct legal aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Nixon six months earlier. That decision famously held that executive privilege—long seen as a near-impenetrable shield—does not extend to cover-ups and criminal conduct. The message was as clear as it was historic: even the most powerful figures in government are not beyond the reach of the law.

The Watergate trials became a masterclass in the tension between power and accountability. These weren’t fringe operatives—they were the President’s top men, brought down not by partisan maneuvering but by due process. In convicting them, the courts affirmed a fundamental principle: constitutional protections are not carte blanche for corruption. That principle has since been tested repeatedly, often invoked but rarely with the same clarity.

While Nixon himself was pardoned by Gerald Ford, his aides faced real legal consequences. And in doing so, they served as a sobering example of what happens when loyalty to power eclipses loyalty to the law.

On January 24, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a high-stakes case involving President Donald Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook—an unprecedented move that could reshape the legal boundaries of central bank independence. Trump is challenging a lower court ruling that barred him from removing Cook while her legal challenge continues. At issue is whether a president can dismiss a Fed governor without due process, despite the Federal Reserve Act’s “for cause” removal standard, which lacks clear definition.

Cook, the first Black woman appointed to the Fed’s board (by President Biden in 2022), argues Trump’s push is politically motivated, tied to disagreements over monetary policy. Trump cited past mortgage fraud allegations—which Cook denies—as grounds for her removal, but a district court found those likely insufficient and in violation of her Fifth Amendment rights. The D.C. Circuit declined to stay that ruling.

The case has major implications: no president has ever tried to fire a Fed governor, and the Court’s decision could determine how insulated the central bank remains from political interference. It also arrives amid broader questions about the scope of presidential control over independent agencies—and a criminal probe into Fed Chair Jerome Powell, which many see as part of the same pressure campaign.

By way of brief background, a Federal Reserve governor is a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the central banking authority of the United States. The Board is composed of seven governors, each appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate to serve staggered 14-year terms. These governors play a critical role in shaping U.S. monetary policy, overseeing the operations of the Federal Reserve Banks, and regulating certain financial institutions. Their primary responsibilities include setting the discount rate, influencing the federal funds rate (the interest rate banks charge each other for overnight loans), and voting on key decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC)—the body that manages the nation’s money supply and interest rate targets.

Importantly, Fed governors are designed to be insulated from political pressure to preserve the central bank’s independence. That’s why they can only be removed by the president “for cause”—a vague legal standard that has rarely, if ever, been tested. This structural independence is meant to prevent short-term political interests from influencing decisions that have long-term economic consequences, such as controlling inflation, stabilizing employment, or responding to financial crises. While their work often operates behind the scenes, the policies they help shape impact virtually every corner of the U.S. economy—from mortgage rates to job growth to the value of the dollar.

US Supreme Court considers Trump’s bid to fire Fed’s Lisa Cook | Reuters

A court-appointed special master has recommended that women suing Johnson & Johnson over claims its talc-based products caused ovarian cancer should be allowed to present expert testimony supporting that link in upcoming trials. Retired Judge Freda Wolfson found that the plaintiffs’ experts used reliable methods and cited statistically significant studies connecting genital talc use to ovarian cancer. The recommendation—part of a sprawling litigation involving over 67,500 cases—moves the lawsuits closer to federal trial, possibly later this year.

Wolfson also allowed J&J’s experts to present rebuttal testimony, but excluded certain plaintiff theories, such as talc migration via inhalation or links to fragrance chemicals and heavy metals. J&J criticized the ruling and plans to challenge it, arguing that the scientific evidence wasn’t rigorously vetted.

The litigation has dragged on for years, complicated by failed bankruptcy attempts by J&J to shield itself from liability. While the company denies its talc contains asbestos or causes cancer, prior jury verdicts have yielded multi-billion-dollar awards for plaintiffs, though some have been overturned. The case could become a major bellwether for corporate liability and the legal standard for expert scientific evidence in mass torts.

Experts can testify about suspected J&J talc products’ cancer link, special master recommends | Reuters

Lindsey Halligan, a Trump-aligned prosecutor and former personal attorney to the president, is leaving her post at the U.S. Justice Department after a federal judge sharply rebuked her for continuing to act as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia beyond her legally allowed interim term. Appointed without Senate confirmation, Halligan’s authority expired after 120 days, yet she continued using the title—prompting Judge David Novak to call her conduct a “charade” and warn of potential disciplinary action.

Halligan had led politically charged investigations targeting Trump adversaries like former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, though those cases were dismissed due to questions over her legitimacy. The Justice Department is appealing those rulings, but the controversy has sparked internal tension, with Novak criticizing the DOJ’s recent filings as inflammatory and unprofessional.

Her departure follows Senate Democrats’ refusal to advance her formal nomination, citing the “blue slip” tradition that allows home-state senators to block nominees. Attorney General Pam Bondi blamed Democrats for obstructing Halligan’s tenure, while Trump allies hinted at retaliation if the court names a replacement. The episode underscores ongoing friction between the judiciary, the Justice Department, and Trump’s efforts to assert political control over federal prosecutions.

After judge’s rebuke, Trump ally Halligan to leave US Justice Department | Reuters

A Massachusetts judge has ruled that Kalshi, a New York-based prediction market platform, cannot offer sports betting services in the state without a proper gambling license. The decision comes after Attorney General Andrea Campbell sued Kalshi, arguing that it was illegally offering unlicensed sports wagers to residents, including users as young as 18. Judge Christopher Barry-Smith agreed, stating that state oversight of sports betting protects public health and financial interests.

Kalshi, which allows users to bet on outcomes of events like sports, politics, and the economy, claimed that its operations fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), due to its status as a registered contract market. The judge rejected that argument, ruling that federal oversight of financial instruments does not override state authority to regulate gambling.

Kalshi plans to appeal the injunction, which could be finalized following a hearing. This marks the first court-ordered halt of Kalshi’s operations in a state, though it faces similar legal challenges elsewhere. The case underscores growing friction between emerging event-based financial markets and traditional gambling laws.

Kalshi cannot operate sports-prediction market in Massachusetts, judge rules | Reuters

On January 20, 1803, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Marbury v. Madison, a case that began as a minor dispute over an undelivered judicial commission and ended by redefining American constitutional law. The story traces back to the final days of the Adams administration, when outgoing President John Adams rushed to appoint Federalist judges before Thomas Jefferson took office. John Marshall, then serving simultaneously as Secretary of State and incoming Chief Justice, sealed the commissions but failed to deliver several of them. One of the would-be judges, William Marbury, petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus to force Jefferson’s Secretary of State, James Madison, to hand over the commission.

The case placed Marshall in a precarious position, as he was being asked to rule on a problem he had helped create. Marshall first held that Marbury had a legal right to his commission and that the law ordinarily provided a remedy when such rights were violated. He then turned to the Judiciary Act of 1789, which appeared to grant the Supreme Court original jurisdiction to issue writs of mandamus. Marshall concluded that this provision conflicted with Article III of the Constitution, which strictly limits the Court’s original jurisdiction. Rather than ordering Madison to act, Marshall declared that the statute itself was unconstitutional.

By denying Marbury his commission while simultaneously asserting the power to strike down an act of Congress, Marshall executed a strategic legal maneuver that avoided a direct confrontation with the executive branch. The Court emerged stronger despite losing the immediate case. In explaining why the Constitution must prevail over conflicting statutes, Marshall articulated the principle of judicial review. That reasoning transformed the Supreme Court from a relatively weak institution into the ultimate interpreter of constitutional meaning.

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a challenge to a Hawaii law that restricts carrying handguns on private property open to the public without the owner’s explicit permission. The case was brought by three licensed concealed-carry holders and a local gun rights group after Hawaii enacted the law in 2023. Under the statute, individuals must have clear verbal or written authorization, including posted signage, before bringing a handgun onto most business premises. A lower federal court initially blocked the law, but the Ninth Circuit later ruled that the measure likely complies with the Second Amendment.

Hawaii has argued that the law appropriately balances gun rights with property owners’ authority to control access to their premises. The challengers contend that the rule effectively prevents lawful gun owners from engaging in everyday activities such as shopping, dining, or buying gas. The challengers are supported by the Trump administration, which claims the law severely burdens the practical exercise of Second Amendment rights. The Supreme Court declined to review other portions of the law involving bans in sensitive places like beaches and bars.

The dispute unfolds against the backdrop of the Court’s recent expansion of gun rights, particularly its 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which recognized a right to carry handguns outside the home for self-defense. That decision also reshaped how courts evaluate gun regulations by focusing on historical analogues rather than modern policy goals.

US Supreme Court to hear challenge to Hawaii handgun limits | Reuters

A federal judge has allowed Dominion Energy to resume construction on its $11.2 billion offshore wind project off the coast of Virginia, marking another courtroom loss for President Donald Trump’s efforts to curb offshore wind development. Judge Jamar Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that Dominion could restart work while it continues to challenge a stop-work order issued by the Interior Department. That order had halted several offshore wind projects based on newly cited, classified national security concerns related to radar interference.

Walker found that the government’s suspension was overly sweeping as applied to Dominion’s project and emphasized that the cited security risks related to turbine operations, not ongoing construction. Earlier in the week, other offshore wind developers had secured similar rulings, allowing their projects to move forward despite the administration’s objections. Dominion has already invested close to $9 billion in the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, which is expected to supply electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes. The company said it would focus on safely resuming construction while continuing to pursue a long-term resolution with federal regulators.

The decision underscores the legal and financial stakes for the offshore wind industry, as project delays can threaten multi-billion-dollar investments. At the same time, lawsuits challenging federal actions and the administration’s opposition to offshore wind continue to create uncertainty for the sector. Several states, particularly along the East Coast, view offshore wind as critical to meeting growing energy demand and reducing emissions as electricity use increases.

US judge allows Dominion offshore wind project to restart, another legal setback for Trump | Reuters

Florida has joined Texas in scaling back the American Bar Association’s role in determining which law school graduates may sit for the state bar exam. In a 5–1 decision, the Supreme Court of Florida ruled that the ABA will no longer serve as the sole accrediting body for Florida bar eligibility, though graduates of ABA-accredited schools will remain eligible. The court said it plans to allow graduates of law schools approved by other federally recognized accrediting agencies to take the bar, even though no such agencies currently specialize in law school accreditation.

The court framed its decision as an effort to expand access to affordable legal education while protecting academic freedom and nondiscrimination. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis praised the move, criticizing the ABA as overly partisan and arguing it should not control entry into the legal profession. The ABA responded that the ruling reaffirms state authority over licensing and said it would continue to promote the value of national accreditation standards.

Florida’s decision follows a similar move by the Supreme Court of Texas, which recently announced plans to develop its own criteria for approving non-ABA law schools. Other states, including Ohio and Tennessee, are also reviewing their accreditation rules. These developments come amid escalating conflict between the ABA and President Donald Trump’s administration, which has taken steps to reduce the organization’s influence across multiple areas, including judicial nominations and legal education.

Within the ABA, the controversy has prompted internal reforms aimed at reinforcing the independence of its law school accreditation arm. One Florida justice dissented, warning that abandoning exclusive reliance on the ABA was an unnecessary and risky departure from a system that had functioned well for decades.

Florida joins Texas in limiting ABA’s law school oversight role | Reuters

In my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I argue that the Internal Revenue Service’s partnership audit program has effectively been dismantled under the second Trump administration, with specialized auditors fired, pushed out, or leaving altogether. These weren’t ordinary revenue agents but highly trained experts who understood the most complex partnership structures and could spot abuse hidden deep inside tiered entities. Once that kind of institutional knowledge walks out the door, it can’t simply be rebuilt by restoring funding later. There is no meaningful private-sector substitute for this expertise, and when these specialists leave government, they often stop doing enforcement work entirely.

I explain that this collapse isn’t just a federal tax problem—it’s a looming state budget issue. High-income states that rely heavily on progressive income taxes are especially vulnerable when wealthy taxpayers shift income through opaque pass-through structures. For decades, states have relied on federal audits and enforcement as a backstop, but that dependency has now become a serious liability. I suggest that states step into the vacuum by hiring former IRS partnership specialists and building dedicated partnership audit units within their own revenue departments.

With relatively modest investment, states could recover revenue that would otherwise vanish into complex and lightly monitored structures. I also propose a multistate enforcement compact that would allow states to share audit resources, staff, and findings, creating a decentralized alternative to federal enforcement. The core message is that while federal capacity has been allowed to wither, the expertise still exists—and states may be the last institutions capable of preserving it.

IRS Partnership Audit Brain Drain Is an Opportunity for States

On January 16, 1919, the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, marking a pivotal moment in American legal history by establishing the prohibition of alcoholic beverages. The amendment prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” for consumption in the United States and its territories. It was the culmination of decades of temperance activism, led by organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, which argued that alcohol was responsible for societal problems including crime, poverty, and domestic violence.

The amendment passed Congress in December 1917, but ratification by the states was required for it to take effect. That threshold was reached on January 16, 1919, when Nebraska became the 36th state to ratify it. One year later, on January 17, 1920, the Volstead Act—the federal statute enforcing the amendment—went into effect, ushering in the Prohibition era.

However, the law led to unintended consequences. Rather than curbing alcohol consumption, it fueled the rise of organized crime, as bootleggers and speakeasies flourished across the country. Enforcement proved difficult and inconsistent, and public support for prohibition waned through the 1920s.

Ultimately, the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment on December 5, 1933, making it the only constitutional amendment ever to be entirely repealed. The legacy of the 18th Amendment remains significant as a historical experiment in moral legislation and the limits of constitutional power.

A federal judge in Virginia will soon decide whether Dominion Energy can resume construction on its $11.2 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, which was halted by the Trump administration last month. The Interior Department paused five offshore wind projects on December 22, citing classified concerns about radar interference and national security. Dominion is now challenging that pause in court, arguing that it violated procedural and due process laws and is causing the company significant financial harm—around $5 million in daily losses. Dominion has already invested nearly $9 billion in the project, which began construction in 2023 and is planned to power 600,000 homes.

Similar legal challenges from other developers, including Orsted and Equinor, have already succeeded in federal courts in Washington, allowing their Northeast offshore wind projects to proceed. Those decisions raise the stakes for Dominion’s case, which could influence the broader offshore wind industry amid continued hostility from the Trump administration toward the sector. Trump has long criticized wind energy as costly and inefficient. While the outcomes of these lawsuits may let projects move forward, industry uncertainty remains due to ongoing legal battles and political opposition.

US judge to weigh Dominion request to restart Virginia offshore wind project stopped by Trump | Reuters

A federal judge in Boston, William Young, said he will issue an order to protect non-citizen academics involved in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s deportation of pro-Palestinian student activists. The upcoming order would block the government from altering the immigration status of the scholars who are parties to the case, absent court approval. Young emphasized that any such action would be presumed retaliatory and would require the administration to prove it had a legitimate basis.

The lawsuit stems from Trump’s executive orders in early 2025 directing agencies to crack down on antisemitism, which led to arrests and visa cancellations for several students, including Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk. These moves targeted those expressing pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views on campus. Young previously ruled that these actions violated the First Amendment by chilling free speech rights of non-citizen academics.

In his comments, Young described Trump as “authoritarian” and sharply criticized what he called the administration’s “fearful approach to freedom.” He limited his forthcoming order to members of academic groups like the AAUP and Middle East Studies Association, rejecting a broader nationwide block as too expansive. Meanwhile, the administration, which plans to appeal Young’s earlier ruling, accused the judge of political bias.

US judge to shield scholars who challenged deporting of pro-Palestinian campus activists | Reuters

A federal judge in California has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Justice Department seeking access to the state’s full, unredacted voter registration list. Judge David Carter ruled that the department’s claims were not strong enough under existing civil rights and voting laws, and that turning over detailed voter data—such as names, birth dates, driver’s license numbers, and parts of Social Security numbers—would violate privacy protections.

Carter emphasized that centralizing such sensitive information at the federal level could intimidate voters and suppress turnout by making people fear misuse of their personal data. The lawsuit, filed in September by the Trump administration, targeted California and other Democrat-led states for allegedly failing to properly maintain voter rolls, citing federal law as justification for demanding the data.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber welcomed the decision, stating her commitment to defending voting rights and opposing the administration’s actions. The DOJ had reportedly been in discussions with the Department of Homeland Security to use voter data in criminal and immigration probes. Critics argue the push was driven by baseless claims from Trump and his allies that non-citizens are voting in large numbers.

US judge dismisses Justice Department lawsuit seeking California voter details | Reuters

Why can’t people harmed by ICE just sue the agents themselves?

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a federal agency under the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2003. It enforces immigration laws and investigates criminal activities involving border control, customs, and immigration. ICE derives its authority from various federal statutes, including the Immigration and Nationality Act, and its agents operate with broad discretion during enforcement actions.

Suing ICE agents or the agency itself is legally difficult. Individuals cannot usually sue federal agents directly because of sovereign immunity, a legal doctrine that protects the government and its employees from lawsuits unless explicitly allowed by law. One such exception is the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) of 1946, which permits lawsuits against the federal government when its employees cause injury or damage while acting within the scope of their employment. Under the FTCA, victims can bring wrongful death or negligence claims, as Renee Good’s family is now considering.

However, FTCA claims are limited. Plaintiffs cannot seek punitive damages or a jury trial, and compensation is capped based on state law where the incident occurred. The government is also shielded from liability for discretionary decisions made by its employees—meaning if the ICE agent used judgment during the incident and it’s deemed reasonable, the claim can be dismissed. In Good’s case, the government will likely argue self-defense.

Suing ICE agents personally is even harder. The Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents case in 1971 created a narrow legal path for suing federal officials for constitutional violations, but courts have since restricted its use. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that Bivens does not apply to border agents conducting immigration enforcement, further insulating ICE officers from personal liability.

Criminal prosecution of federal agents is also rare. State prosecutors may bring charges, but only if they can prove the agent acted clearly outside the scope of their duties and in an objectively unlawful way—a high bar that is seldom met.

This week’s closing theme is by Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven, one of the most influential composers in Western music history, revolutionized the classical tradition with works that bridged the Classical and Romantic eras.

This week’s theme is Franz Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 — specifically, the first movement, Allegro con brio, catalogued as S.464/5. As one of the most iconic works in classical music, Beethoven’s Fifth needs little introduction, but hearing it through Liszt’s fingers offers a fresh perspective on its brilliance. In this solo piano version, Liszt doesn’t simply condense Beethoven’s orchestral power—he reimagines it, capturing the storm, structure, and spirit of the original with astonishing fidelity and virtuosity.

The movement begins with the unforgettable four-note “fate” motif, its rhythmic insistence rendered on the piano with punch and precision. From there, Liszt unfolds Beethoven’s dramatic argument, demanding the pianist conjure the textures of a full orchestra with nothing but ten fingers and a well-calibrated pedal. Every surging crescendo, sudden silence, and harmonic twist remains intact, though filtered through Liszt’s Romantic sensibility and pianistic imagination.

It’s a piece that asks as much of the performer as it does of the listener—requiring clarity, power, and emotional depth. As a transcription, it’s both a tribute and a transformation, placing Beethoven’s revolutionary energy in the hands of a single interpreter. We chose this movement not just for its fame, but for how it exemplifies two musical giants in dialogue—Beethoven, the architect of modern symphonic form, and Liszt, the artist who made the orchestra speak through the piano.

Without further ado, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 — the first movement, Allegro con brio. Enjoy!

On January 15, 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Williams v. Florida, a significant case interpreting the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a trial by jury. The petitioner, Johnny Paul Williams, was convicted in a Florida court by a six-member jury and argued on appeal that his constitutional rights had been violated because the jury did not consist of twelve members. The Court, in a 6-2 decision authored by Justice Byron White, rejected this argument and held that the Constitution does not require a twelve-person jury in criminal cases.

The ruling marked a turning point in how procedural aspects of jury trials were viewed under the Constitution. Drawing on historical analysis and functional reasoning, the Court concluded that the number twelve was a “historical accident” rather than a constitutional mandate. It emphasized that what mattered was whether the jury could fulfill its essential purpose: promoting group deliberation, guarding against government overreach, and representing a fair cross-section of the community.

The Court’s opinion opened the door for states to use smaller juries in certain criminal trials, leading to greater procedural flexibility. However, the ruling was not without its critics, including dissenting justices who warned that reducing jury size could dilute the quality of deliberation and increase the risk of wrongful convictions. The Court later clarified in Ballew v. Georgia (1978) that juries smaller than six members were unconstitutional, setting a lower boundary on size.

Williams v. Florida continues to shape discussions around the structure and fairness of criminal jury trials. It reflects a broader judicial approach that balances historical tradition with evolving interpretations of fairness and efficiency in the criminal justice system. The decision also illustrates how constitutional protections, while deeply rooted, are not frozen in time but subject to ongoing judicial scrutiny.

On January 17, 2026, a U.S. District Court will hear a request from Norwegian energy company Equinor to resume construction on its Empire Wind offshore project off the coast of New York. The company is suing the Trump administration after it suspended offshore wind development in federal waters, citing national security concerns related to radar interference. Equinor argues that the $4 billion project, now 60% complete, faces cancellation if construction doesn’t continue by January 16. The case follows a recent decision allowing Danish company Ørsted to resume work on its own halted project off Rhode Island.

The legal challenge is one of several confronting the Trump administration’s broader effort to stall offshore wind development. Trump officials have paused work on five federal wind leases, citing a classified Defense Department assessment. Offshore wind companies say these actions threaten billions in investment and the viability of long-term energy goals. Empire Wind is projected to power about 500,000 homes once completed.

US court to weigh New York project challenge to Trump offshore wind halt | Reuters

The Trump administration has reversed its decision to lay off nearly all employees of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service (CRS), an agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to mediate racial and ethnic conflicts. In a recent federal court filing in Boston, the DOJ stated that it rescinded the September layoff notices issued to 13 CRS staff members, citing “administrative discretion.” Civil rights groups, including two NAACP chapters and the Ethical Society of Police, had sued to block the terminations, arguing they were part of an unlawful attempt to dismantle the agency.

Though the employees have been reinstated, it remains unclear if they will resume work on CRS functions. The plaintiffs have asked the court to hold a hearing to determine the practical impact of the reversal and whether CRS operations will truly continue. Under the Trump administration, the CRS reportedly stopped accepting new service requests and faced budget cuts, with the current White House proposal offering no funding for it. However, a bipartisan appropriations bill in Congress would allocate $20 million to support the agency.

Previously, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani denied a temporary restraining order to stop the layoffs but said the plaintiffs had shown a strong likelihood of success. She is still considering whether to issue a permanent injunction to prevent dismantling the CRS.

Trump administration reinstates fired employees of DOJ race-relations agency | Reuters

Tesla has agreed to enter mediation with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to try to resolve a federal lawsuit alleging widespread racial harassment at its Fremont, California factory. The EEOC claims Tesla allowed a hostile work environment where Black employees were subjected to slurs, racist graffiti—including swastikas and nooses—and other forms of discrimination, some of which appeared on vehicles coming off the assembly line. Tesla has denied the allegations, arguing it was unaware of the conduct and accusing the EEOC of seeking publicity.

U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley approved a pause on some discovery deadlines to prioritize mediation efforts. The EEOC and Tesla are currently selecting a mediator, with talks potentially beginning in March or April. Both sides must report to the judge by June 17 if mediation fails. The lawsuit, filed during the Biden administration in September 2023, is part of a series of legal challenges Tesla has faced over workplace issues at its Fremont facility.

In a separate case, Tesla recently avoided a class-action lawsuit when a California judge ruled that over 6,000 Black workers at the plant could not proceed as a group, citing a lack of willing witnesses.

Tesla agrees to mediation that could resolve US agency’s racism lawsuit | Reuters

Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on January 13, 2026, in a move that may disrupt the Justice Department’s intensified efforts to crack down on public benefits fraud. Among those stepping down are Joe Thompson, the former acting U.S. attorney for the district, and Harry Jacobs, a key figure in cases involving misused child nutrition program funds. Both were central to the high-profile Feeding Our Future investigation, which scrutinized alleged fraud in federal nutrition programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sources say the resignations were linked to political pressure from the Trump administration, including demands to investigate the widow of Renée Nicole Good, who was killed by a U.S. immigration officer earlier this month. The DOJ reportedly declined to pursue charges against the officer, leading to internal dissent.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz condemned the resignations as evidence of the Trump administration’s politicization of the DOJ, accusing it of forcing out experienced, nonpartisan staff. The departures come amid a broader exodus from the department, including five senior lawyers from the Civil Rights Division, which had worked closely with Minnesota prosecutors after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

Attorney General Pam Bondi recently announced a new DOJ fraud division and plans to deploy prosecutors from other regions to Minneapolis. The White House has also ramped up enforcement in other liberal-leaning districts, which has led to more prosecutions related to immigration protests and officer assaults—and in some cases, grand jury rejections of those prosecutions.

Six US Prosecutors Resign in Minnesota as Crackdown Builds (1)

On January 14, 1898, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its landmark decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, firmly establishing the doctrine of birthright citizenship under the Constitution.

The case arose after Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who were not U.S. citizens, was denied reentry to the country following a trip abroad. Federal officials argued that because his parents were subjects of the Emperor of China and barred from naturalization, Wong Kim Ark was not a U.S. citizen.

The Court rejected that position, holding that citizenship is determined by place of birth, not by the nationality or immigration status of one’s parents. In a 6–2 decision, the Court relied heavily on the text and history of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The majority emphasized that the Amendment codified the common-law rule that nearly all persons born on U.S. soil are citizens. This interpretation directly limited the government’s ability to deny citizenship based on race or ancestry.

The decision came at a time of intense anti-Chinese sentiment and restrictive immigration laws, including the Chinese Exclusion Act. By ruling in Wong Kim Ark’s favor, the Court drew a clear constitutional boundary around congressional power over citizenship.

The case has since served as the cornerstone for modern citizenship law in the United States. It remains one of the most frequently cited precedents in debates over immigration, nationality, and constitutional identity.

The Supreme Court of the United States is expected to release one or more decisions as it resumes issuing opinions, while several major cases remain unresolved. Among the most closely watched is a challenge to sweeping tariffs imposed by President Trump. The justices typically do not announce in advance which cases they will decide, adding uncertainty to each decision day. The tariffs case, argued in November, raises significant questions about the scope of presidential authority and its economic consequences worldwide.

Trump relied on a 1977 emergency powers statute to justify tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners, framing trade deficits and drug trafficking as national emergencies. During oral arguments, both conservative and liberal justices appeared skeptical that the statute authorized such broad trade measures. Lower courts have already ruled that Trump exceeded his authority, and his administration is now seeking reversal. The lawsuits were brought by affected businesses and a coalition of states, most led by Democrats. Other pending cases involve voting rights, religious liberty, campaign finance limits, the firing of a Federal Trade Commission official, and the legality of conversion therapy bans. Together, these disputes reflect a Court grappling with the limits of executive power and regulatory authority.

Supreme Court set to issue rulings, with Trump tariffs case still pending | Reuters

Conservative justices on the Supreme Court appeared inclined to uphold state laws that bar transgender athletes from competing on female sports teams. The Court heard lengthy arguments in cases from Idaho and West Virginia, where lower courts had ruled in favor of transgender students challenging the bans. A majority of the justices expressed concern about adopting a nationwide rule amid ongoing debate over whether medical treatments can eliminate sex-based athletic advantages. Conservative members of the Court emphasized fairness and safety in women’s sports, while liberal justices largely signaled support for the transgender challengers. The states argued that their laws lawfully classify athletes by biological sex and are necessary to preserve equal athletic opportunities for women and girls. Lawyers for the challengers contended that the bans discriminate based on sex or transgender status in violation of constitutional equal protection and federal education law. The Trump administration defended the state laws, urging the Court to leave policy decisions to legislatures rather than judges. The outcome could have far-reaching effects beyond sports, influencing other restrictions on transgender people in public life. A decision is expected by the end of June.

US Supreme Court conservatives lean toward allowing transgender sports bans | Reuters

A federal judge has ruled that Cornell University, Georgetown University, and the University of Pennsylvania must continue defending against a lawsuit alleging collusion in financial aid practices. The case claims that elite universities worked together to limit competition and give preferential treatment to wealthier applicants. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly rejected the schools’ efforts to dismiss the lawsuit, finding enough evidence for the claims to proceed to trial. The plaintiffs argue that the universities violated federal antitrust law over two decades by breaching promises not to consider applicants’ financial circumstances. Several other prominent universities previously settled similar claims for a combined total of nearly $320 million, though the remaining defendants deny any wrongdoing. The lawsuit represents more than 200,000 current and former students seeking substantial damages. The judge pointed to evidence suggesting the schools coordinated financial aid policies to avoid competing against one another. He also concluded that the plaintiffs properly defined a nationwide market for elite private universities and filed their claims within the allowable time frame. The decision clears the way for a jury to determine whether the schools unlawfully inflated the cost of attendance.

Cornell, Georgetown, UPenn must face lawsuit over financial aid | Reuters

The British Broadcasting Corporation has moved to dismiss Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit stemming from its editing of a January 6, 2021 speech. The broadcaster argues that a Florida court lacks authority over the case because the program was not broadcast in that state. It also contends Trump cannot show he suffered harm, noting that he was re-elected after the documentary aired. Trump alleges the BBC misleadingly combined excerpts of his speech in a way that implied he encouraged supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, while excluding remarks calling for peaceful protest. The lawsuit asserts violations of Florida’s deceptive and unfair trade practices law and seeks billions of dollars in damages across two claims. The BBC has acknowledged the editing error and apologized but maintains the lawsuit is legally flawed. In court filings, the broadcaster argues Trump failed to plausibly allege “actual malice,” a requirement for defamation claims brought by public officials. The BBC also disputes Trump’s claim that the documentary was available to U.S. audiences via streaming platforms. It has asked the court to pause discovery while the dismissal motion is pending, citing unnecessary expense if the case is thrown out.

BBC seeks to have Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit dismissed | Reuters

On January 13, 1913, Judge Robert W. Archbald of the U.S. Commerce Court was convicted by the U.S. Senate on articles of impeachment and removed from office, becoming one of the earliest federal judges ousted through this constitutional process. The House had impeached him the prior July on thirteen charges of corruption and misconduct, five of which the Senate upheld. Archbald had used his judicial position to secure favorable deals from railroads and coal companies—entities that regularly appeared before his court. These secretive contracts, executed through intermediaries to obscure his involvement, allowed him to purchase valuable coal lands below market value.

One of the more egregious acts involved advising a railroad representative on how to amend legal pleadings to improve their chances of winning in court—a direct violation of judicial ethics. After a twenty-eight-year judicial career, Archbald’s fall was swift. His defense largely relied on claims of pure motives, rather than denial of the facts. A senator observed afterward that Archbald was “convicted, not so much of being corrupt, as of lack of plain common sense,” noting his failure to grasp the ethical boundaries expected of judges.

The Senate vote was overwhelming, with only five senators dissenting. Every former judge in the Senate, save one, voted to convict. Archbald’s conviction marked the first successful impeachment for judicial corruption in U.S. history; earlier impeachments, like that of Judge Pickering in 1804, were rooted in issues like insanity, not unethical conduct. The case prompted calls for reform of the impeachment process itself, with suggestions to create a special judicial conduct court or authorize Senate committees to streamline trials. More broadly, the case had a chilling effect throughout public service, reinforcing ethical standards across all levels of government.

Uber is facing a high-stakes sexual assault trial in Phoenix that could have sweeping implications for thousands of similar lawsuits. The case, brought by Oklahoma resident Jaylynn Dean, alleges that Uber failed to protect her from an assault by a driver in 2023. Dean claims Uber has long been aware of sexual assaults committed by drivers but has not taken adequate steps to improve rider safety. This trial marks the first federal bellwether case in a massive consolidation of over 3,000 lawsuits involving similar allegations.

Uber maintains that it should not be held liable for criminal actions of independent contractors, arguing its safety features, background checks, and transparency are sufficient. Still, the company faces additional lawsuits in California state court and has been criticized for its historic lack of oversight and a culture focused more on growth than safety.

A jury in a previous California case found Uber negligent but ruled that negligence wasn’t a direct cause of harm. Uber tried to delay Dean’s trial, claiming her attorneys influenced the jury pool with misleading advertisements, but the judge allowed proceedings to continue. The outcome could influence settlement talks, regulatory scrutiny, and investor confidence as Uber continues to defend its safety record.

Uber faces sexual assault trial in Arizona that puts its safety record under scrutiny | Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in two high-profile cases challenging state laws in Idaho and West Virginia that bar transgender students from participating in female sports teams. While the court previously upheld a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in Tennessee, that ruling was seen as narrow. The decision to now consider sports-related bans has heightened concerns among transgender rights advocates about broader implications for legal protections.

At the heart of these cases is whether such bans violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause or Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in education. Legal scholars warn that the court’s ruling could shape future policies affecting transgender people beyond athletics—such as bathroom access, military service, and healthcare. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has previously supported limits on transgender rights, including allowing restrictions on gender markers for passports and banning transgender people from military service.

Idaho’s law is being challenged by Lindsay Hecox, a transgender college student who has since stopped playing sports, while West Virginia’s ban is being challenged by 15-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson, who has been allowed to compete under lower court rulings. The states argue the laws protect fairness in women’s sports by preventing perceived competitive advantages. Lower courts have reached opposing conclusions on the legality of the bans, setting the stage for the Supreme Court to clarify whether restrictions based on biological sex or transgender status require heightened scrutiny.

The Court may also have to decide whether its 2020 decision protecting transgender workers under Title VII extends to school settings under Title IX. Legal observers say this case could reshape how courts approach not just transgender rights but broader equal protection claims.

US Supreme Court’s next transgender rights battle could affect more than sports | Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear Citigroup’s appeal in a lawsuit accusing the bank of enabling a major fraud at Mexican oil services company Oceanografía, effectively allowing the case to proceed. More than 30 plaintiffs—including bondholders, shipping firms, and Rabobank—allege that Citigroup’s Banamex unit knowingly financed Oceanografía to the tune of $3.3 billion between 2008 and 2014, despite the company’s mounting debt and fraudulent practices, including forged Pemex signatures.

Oceanografía, which serviced Mexico’s state-owned oil giant Pemex, collapsed in 2014 and was later declared bankrupt. Citigroup uncovered $430 million in fraudulent advances and was fined $4.75 million by the SEC in 2018 for inadequate internal controls. Plaintiffs argue Citigroup hid critical information while profiting from interest on the advances.

At the center of the legal battle is whether bondholders can sue Citigroup under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which allows for triple damages. Citigroup contended their claims were standard securities fraud allegations not suited for RICO and pointed to conflicting rulings in other federal appeals courts. However, the 11th Circuit found the plaintiffs’ claims plausible, noting it defied belief that a sophisticated bank like Citigroup was unaware of the fraud. By refusing to hear the appeal, the Supreme Court leaves that ruling intact and allows the lawsuit to move forward.

US Supreme Court rebuffs Citigroup appeal in lawsuit over Mexican oil company fraud | Reuters

This week, my column for Bloomberg looks at an obscure but telling tax provision: the so-called NASCAR tax break.

Dozens of tax provisions expired at the end of 2025, and Congress will soon debate whether to revive them. Among these is the motorsports entertainment complex depreciation break, which allows racetrack owners to write off their facilities over just seven years—a timeline far shorter than that allowed for buildings like housing or wastewater plants. Initially enacted in 2004 as part of the American Jobs Creation Act, the break was a reaction to a Treasury reclassification effort that would have extended depreciation timelines for motorsports. Rather than accepting the change, Congress locked in the favorable treatment to preserve the status quo.

Since then, the provision has been extended repeatedly, despite no clear policy rationale or economic justification. Unlike other tax incentives that at least attempt to stimulate broader economic development, the NASCAR break benefits a narrow group of wealthy owners in a lucrative, sponsor-heavy industry. The economic spillover is minimal, and unlike subsidies for sports stadiums—which are themselves of dubious value—this break doesn’t even offer the illusion of local benefit.

Its survival has more to do with inertia and lobbying than public interest. Letting it remain expired would save money and demonstrate that the tax code isn’t permanently rigged in favor of politically connected sectors. More broadly, the column argues for a disciplined framework to evaluate all expiring provisions based on economic efficiency, equity, administrability, and demonstrated value.

On January 12, 1932, Hattie Wyatt Caraway of Arkansas became the first woman elected to the United States Senate in her own right, marking a milestone in American legal and political history. Initially appointed to her late husband Thaddeus Caraway’s Senate seat, she was widely expected to serve only as a placeholder until a male successor could be elected. Instead, Caraway defied expectations by entering the special election and winning, quietly but firmly asserting her independence. Her victory came just over a decade after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote and laid the groundwork for their broader participation in political life.

Caraway’s campaign was bolstered by the support of Louisiana Senator Huey Long, whose populist style and energetic barnstorming helped draw attention to her candidacy. Despite being soft-spoken and reserved on the Senate floor, Caraway developed a reputation for diligence and loyalty to her constituents. She went on to win a full term later that year, becoming the first woman to do so and serving in the Senate until 1945.

Her election symbolized a shift in legal and cultural attitudes toward women in government roles. While women had begun entering state legislatures and the House of Representatives, the Senate had remained all-male until Caraway’s election. Her success challenged deeply rooted assumptions about women’s capacity for leadership and helped open the door for future female senators. She focused much of her legislative work on issues affecting veterans, farmers, and rural communities.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani announced she would block the Trump administration’s attempt to terminate temporary legal status for 10,000 to 12,000 migrants from seven Latin American countries. These individuals had entered the U.S. under family reunification parole programs that allowed them to live legally with relatives while waiting for visa approval. The Department of Homeland Security had moved to cancel the programs, which were launched or updated during the Biden administration, arguing they were being misused to bypass regular immigration protocols.

Judge Talwani criticized the government for failing to provide proper legal notice to the affected migrants, many of whom are children, and emphasized that the U.S. must also follow the law. The plaintiffs’ attorney called the government’s move harmful and disruptive, especially to families and school-aged children. A Justice Department lawyer argued that the administration had the legal authority to revoke parole.

The case is part of a broader legal battle over Trump’s efforts to dismantle humanitarian parole programs initiated under President Biden, which had provided temporary protection to hundreds of thousands of migrants. Talwani had previously issued rulings blocking similar rollbacks, but higher courts overturned them. Her upcoming order is expected to offer temporary relief to thousands facing imminent deportation.

US judge to block Trump move to end thousands of Latin American migrants’ legal status | Reuters

On January 10, Indonesia became the first country to temporarily block access to Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot, citing concerns over the platform’s ability to generate AI-produced pornographic content, including disturbing depictions of minors. The country’s Communications and Digital Minister condemned non-consensual sexual deepfakes as serious human rights violations and emphasized the need to protect dignity and digital safety. This action follows growing international criticism of Grok’s content safeguards, with some governments in Europe and Asia launching investigations.

xAI, the company behind Grok, responded by limiting image generation features to paying users while working to address security flaws that had allowed the creation of sexualized images. However, its public response to Reuters included a dismissive automatic message: “Legacy Media Lies.” Musk, posting on X, insisted users generating illegal content would be held accountable as if they had uploaded it directly.

Indonesia’s firm stance highlights the absence of similar decisive action from the United States, where Grok and xAI are based—raising questions about America’s professed commitment to protecting victims of online abuse. The U.S.’s failure to lead on this issue stands in stark contrast to its claimed leadership in defending digital rights and vulnerable populations.

Indonesia temporarily blocks access to Grok over sexualised images | Reuters

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the government has more than enough funds—nearly $774 billion in cash on hand—to handle any tariff refunds that may result from a potential Supreme Court ruling against President Trump’s emergency tariffs. However, Bessent noted that any repayments would be distributed gradually over weeks or even up to a year. He expressed skepticism that the Court would rule against the tariffs, and criticized potential refunds as corporate windfalls, questioning whether companies like Costco, which sued the government, would pass any refunded money back to consumers.

While many importers argue that they should be reimbursed if the Court finds Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) unlawful, Bessent claimed the actual number of refundable tariffs is lower than the estimated $150 billion cited by some trade analysts. He declined to offer a precise figure. He also disputed the idea that Trump’s tariffs significantly contributed to inflation, asserting that there was little evidence of cost pass-through to consumers.

Bessent warned that if the Supreme Court does rule against the tariffs, the decision could be complex rather than a simple reversal, which might complicate refund logistics. He added that a delay in the ruling increases the odds of a decision favoring Trump. Treasury’s projected end-of-quarter balance of $850 billion and an expected reduction in the 2025 calendar-year deficit are seen as bolstering its ability to manage any financial impact.

Bessent says US Treasury can easily cover any tariff refunds | Reuters

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell revealed that the Fed had been served with grand jury subpoenas by the U.S. Department of Justice, escalating tensions between the central bank and the Trump administration. The subpoenas reportedly relate to Powell’s June 2025 congressional testimony about renovations to the Fed’s headquarters, but Powell described the move as part of a broader campaign of political intimidation aimed at undermining the Fed’s independence. He stated unequivocally that the threat of criminal charges was tied to the Fed’s refusal to set interest rates according to presidential preferences.

President Trump denied involvement in the DOJ probe, but his administration has long clashed with Powell over interest rate policy and spending. Trump has publicly floated removing Powell and Fed Governor Lisa Cook, whose case is pending before the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, markets reacted to the news with falling stock futures and a surge in gold prices, reflecting investor unease over the attack on central bank autonomy.

Republican Senator Thom Tillis condemned the subpoenas, pledging to block any future Fed nominee until the legal matter is resolved. The DOJ’s inquiry is reportedly focused on whether Powell misled Congress about ballooning renovation costs, which reached $2.5 billion. Though the administration alleges possible misconduct, critics see the legal threat as part of a pressure campaign to force Powell out ahead of his term’s expiration in May.

Fed Served With DOJ Subpoenas, Powell Vows to Stand Firm (5)

On January 9, 1919, the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments in Schenck v. United States, a foundational case in American free speech law. Charles Schenck, the general secretary of the Socialist Party, had been convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for distributing leaflets urging resistance to the military draft during World War I. The case raised critical constitutional questions about the boundaries of the First Amendment in times of national crisis. Schenck’s defense argued that his actions were protected political speech. However, the government maintained that his words posed a threat to wartime recruitment and national security.

The Court would go on to unanimously uphold Schenck’s conviction in a decision authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Although the ruling came in March 1919, the arguments heard on January 9 and 10 set the stage for what became a pivotal moment in legal history. In his opinion, Holmes introduced the “clear and present danger” test, writing that the First Amendment does not protect speech that creates a clear and present danger of causing substantive evils Congress has a right to prevent. He famously noted that the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater.

This standard marked the beginning of a more nuanced approach to free speech jurisprudence, where context and consequences mattered. It reflected the tensions between civil liberties and national security during wartime. Although later cases would refine or move away from the “clear and present danger” test, Schenck remains a foundational precedent in American constitutional law. The case also marked the rise of Holmes as a central figure in shaping First Amendment doctrine.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue at least one opinion this Friday, potentially including a highly anticipated decision on the legality of tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump. The case represents a significant test of presidential authority, especially in the context of Trump’s use of emergency powers under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Trump imposed these tariffs after returning to office in 2025, targeting nearly all U.S. trading partners and citing national emergencies such as trade deficits and drug trafficking, including fentanyl, as justification.

During oral arguments in November, justices from both ideological sides expressed skepticism about the legal basis for the tariffs. Lower courts previously ruled that Trump had exceeded his authority, prompting his administration to appeal. Trump has defended the tariffs as strengthening the U.S. economy and warned that a ruling against them would severely harm the country.

The case was brought by affected businesses and a coalition of 12 states—mostly led by Democrats—arguing that the tariffs were unlawfully broad. The outcome could have major implications for global trade and executive power. The Supreme Court, which currently holds a 6-3 conservative majority, is also considering other significant cases, including a challenge to part of the Voting Rights Act and a First Amendment dispute over a Colorado ban on “conversion therapy” for LGBT minors.

Supreme Court set to issue rulings as Trump awaits fate of tariffs | Reuters

A federal appeals court has ruled in favor of New York Yankees star Aaron Judge and the Major League Baseball Players Association, rejecting a Long Island man’s attempt to trademark the phrases “All Rise” and “Here Comes The Judge.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s decision that Michael Chisena’s filings infringed on Judge’s common law trademark rights.

Chisena filed for the trademarks in 2017 during Judge’s breakout rookie season, claiming he planned to use them on clothing. He denied any connection to professional sports and insisted he had never seen Judge play. However, the USPTO’s appeals board cast doubt on his good faith, noting the suspicious timing of the filings and their close link to Judge’s rising fame.

Judge and the MLBPA opposed the applications in 2018, arguing they would likely confuse consumers by associating the phrases with Judge’s well-known public persona. They emphasized that the baseball star’s last name, with its clear legal overtones, naturally lent itself to those phrases, which had become synonymous with him early in his career.

The appeals court affirmed that Judge had built strong common law trademark rights through commercial use, and that Chisena’s applications lacked merit. Chisena, who represented himself in court, also lost a related claim involving an image of a gavel and scales over a baseball diamond.

Yankees’ Judge clinches win in ‘All Rise,’ ‘Here Comes The Judge’ trademark case | Reuters

Luigi Mangione, accused of killing UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson in a high-profile Manhattan shooting in December 2024, is set to appear in federal court Friday to challenge the possibility of facing the death penalty. Mangione, 27, has pleaded not guilty to federal charges including murder, stalking, and firearms offenses, and remains in custody while awaiting trial.

His attorneys will argue before U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett that prosecutors failed to meet legal standards for the firearm-related murder charge—the only count that could result in a death sentence. They are also seeking to dismiss the entire indictment, claiming Mangione’s constitutional rights were violated, which they argue should disqualify the government from pursuing capital punishment.

While New York outlawed the death penalty in 2004, the ban applies only to state prosecutions. Because Mangione is being tried in federal court, the death penalty remains a legal possibility. He also faces separate charges at the state level, where a conviction could carry a life sentence.

Judge Garnett has yet to decide on either the motion to dismiss the death-eligible charge or the broader request to throw out the indictment. No trial date has been set for the federal or state proceedings.

Mangione, suspect in health insurance CEO murder, fights death penalty charge in court | Reuters

Vice President JD Vance announced the creation of a new assistant attorney general role focused on fighting fraud involving taxpayer money. The position will have nationwide jurisdiction and is intended to strengthen federal oversight and enforcement against misuse of public funds. Vance stated that a nominee for the role will be named in the coming days, signaling the administration’s commitment to addressing financial misconduct within programs funded by taxpayers. The announcement was made during a White House press briefing, reflecting a broader effort to enhance government accountability—at least, ostensibly.

Vance announces new assistant attorney general role to combat taxpayer fraud | Reuters

This week’s closing theme is by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

This week’s closing theme features one of the most charming and instantly recognizable pieces in the classical repertoire: the first movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K. 331 – “Andante grazioso.” Composed around 1783, likely in Vienna or Salzburg, this sonata showcases Mozart’s extraordinary ability to blend elegance, wit, and emotional nuance with apparent ease. The opening movement is not a fast-paced sonata-allegro form, as one might expect, but rather a gentle theme and variations, a structure that allows Mozart to explore the same musical idea through shifting textures, moods, and embellishments.

“Andante grazioso” lives up to its title—graceful and moderately paced, it opens with a lilting, almost courtly theme that feels both poised and playful. As the variations unfold, Mozart’s genius becomes more apparent: he adds rhythmic complexity, dynamic contrasts, and increasingly virtuosic flourishes, while always keeping the original melody in sight. The movement is accessible but never simplistic, classical in form yet deeply expressive.

K. 331 is the same sonata that ends with the famous “Rondo alla Turca,” but it is in this opening Andante that we see Mozart at his most refined and imaginative. He draws the listener in not through drama, but through balance, warmth, and an almost conversational intimacy between performer and listener. This piece has been beloved for centuries, not only by pianists but also by those new to classical music.

As we close the week, the delicate ornamentation and unhurried beauty of “Andante grazioso” offers a kind of musical exhale—a moment of elegance and clarity in contrast to the noise of modern life. It’s a quiet reminder of why Mozart remains one of the most enduring voices in Western music.

Without further ado, Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K. 331 – “Andante grazioso” – enjoy!

On January 8, 1790, President George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in New York City, the temporary capital of the United States. This moment marked the formal inauguration of a constitutional duty outlined in Article II, Section 3, which requires the president to periodically give Congress information on the “State of the Union.” Washington’s address was brief—just over 1,000 words—but carried significant weight, as it was the first time a sitting president had spoken to the legislature under the newly ratified Constitution.

In his remarks, Washington emphasized the need to build public credit, maintain national defense, and promote science and literature. He called on Congress to consider a system of uniform weights and measures and to establish a national post office. Notably, he stressed the importance of establishing laws that would encourage “a due respect for property” and “the security of liberty.” His recommendations helped shape the early legislative agenda and solidify the constitutional structure of government roles.

The address was delivered in person, following British parliamentary tradition, but Thomas Jefferson would later abandon this practice in favor of written messages, considering in-person speeches too monarchical in tone. Washington’s speech helped define the president’s role not merely as an executive but as a constitutional communicator, responsible for setting national priorities in collaboration with Congress.

The legal legacy of this event lies in the precedent it established: that the president would serve not only as head of state and government, but also as an active participant in shaping legislative goals through regular, formal communication. Over time, this annual message evolved into a major political and legal event, shaping policy narratives and underscoring the balance of powers between the branches of government.

Tysen Duva, a long-serving federal prosecutor from Florida, was recently sworn in as head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Criminal Division, a powerful role now seen as vulnerable to political pressure under President Trump’s second term. Duva replaces acting chief Matthew Galeotti, who, despite not being a permanent appointee, had earned respect for shielding the division from direct political interference and maintaining operational independence, particularly in white-collar and public corruption cases. Duva, who has no prior managerial experience at this scale, will now oversee over 1,000 prosecutors amid ongoing departmental turmoil, internal resignations, and controversial Trump-driven interventions.

His appointment follows internal conflict, including a recent case where Duva clashed with a Trump-aligned U.S. attorney who tried to fast-track charges against a Democratic congresswoman. While the charges ultimately proceeded, the case highlights the complex political dynamics Duva must now navigate. Though Duva has pledged impartiality and praised Galeotti’s example, his lack of a close working relationship with Deputy AG Todd Blanche—unlike Galeotti—may limit his autonomy.

Observers note that the Criminal Division has largely avoided the most contentious political directives of the Trump administration so far, including investigations into Trump’s critics and cultural flashpoints like gender-affirming care. However, experts warn that Duva may face tighter constraints going forward, with limits placed on certain enforcement areas like overseas bribery and tariff violations. DOJ veterans emphasize that how Duva manages pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi, Blanche, and the White House will determine the future direction of the department’s criminal enforcement strategy.

Political Tension Awaits DOJ’s Unproven Criminal Division Chief

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has contacted Elon Musk’s platform X and his AI company xAI, seeking clarification on how they are complying with UK data protection laws. The inquiry follows reports raising concerns about Grok, X’s built-in AI chatbot, and its ability to generate images that may involve the use of personal data. The ICO emphasized that individuals have the right to expect lawful and respectful handling of their personal information on social media platforms. The regulator is requesting details on the safeguards X and xAI have in place to protect user privacy and uphold legal standards under UK data law.

Reports have intensified regulatory concern by alleging that Grok has generated explicit images involving underage individuals. The claims raise serious legal and ethical questions under UK data protection and child‑safety laws. Such allegations heighten scrutiny of how training data is sourced, what safeguards are in place to prevent harmful outputs, and how quickly platforms respond when prohibited content is identified. The ICO’s outreach suggests regulators are assessing whether existing controls are adequate to prevent the creation or dissemination (clearly not) of unlawful material and to protect minors’ rights.

UK data watchdog contacts Musk’s X over Grok AI images | Reuters

Ford Motor Company has refiled a lawsuit accusing three California attorneys of orchestrating a fraudulent overbilling scheme to collect more than $100 million in legal fees under the state’s Lemon Law. The amended complaint, allowed after a judge dismissed the original case in November, drops law firms as defendants and instead targets individual lawyers Steve Mikhov, Roger Kirnos, and Amy Morse, formerly of Knight Law Group. Ford alleges the attorneys operated a “Fee Motion Department” that submitted fake time entries, including implausible claims such as multiple 24-hour workdays and even a single day billed at 57.5 hours.

The lawsuit claims these practices defrauded courts and automakers by inflating legal fees in warranty cases involving defective vehicles. California’s Lemon Law allows recovery of attorney fees for reasonable legal work, but Ford argues the defendants manipulated this provision for profit. Ford’s legal team says the amended filing includes new details drawn from testimony, reinforcing their claim that the lawyers exploited the court system. The accused attorneys have denied wrongdoing and previously argued the case is a retaliatory move by Ford meant to intimidate lawyers representing consumers. The case continues in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Ford takes fresh aim at lawyers in lawsuit claiming overbilling scheme | Reuters

On January 7, 1972, President Richard Nixon announced the formation of a special unit within the White House to investigate and prevent leaks of classified information, which would eventually evolve into the so-called “Plumbers” unit. This decision followed the publication of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, which deeply embarrassed the Nixon administration. Although the formal establishment of the Plumbers occurred in July 1971, Nixon’s January 7 remarks to his aides marked a turning point in the administration’s shift toward covert activity to manage political threats.

The Plumbers were tasked with stopping or punishing perceived enemies of the administration. This group would go on to commit the break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, and many of its members were later involved in the June 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex—an event that ultimately unraveled Nixon’s presidency. The actions undertaken by the Plumbers and their associates triggered investigations into abuse of executive power, illegal surveillance, and obstruction of justice.

This date is significant in legal history because it underscores the dangers of unchecked executive authority and the use of government resources for political ends. The legal fallout from these events led to reforms in campaign finance, surveillance, and oversight of executive conduct, including the passage of the Ethics in Government Act and the strengthening of the Freedom of Information Act.

Nicolás Maduro’s arraignment in a U.S. federal court marks a rare and complex legal confrontation over the prosecution of a sitting foreign leader. Charged with narco-terrorism and drug trafficking, Maduro pleaded not guilty and asserted he remains Venezuela’s legitimate president. His defense hinges on two main arguments: a claim of head-of-state immunity under international law and an allegation that he was unlawfully abducted by the U.S. military. The U.S. government counters that Maduro lost legitimacy after a disputed 2018 election and is not entitled to immunity.

Legal scholars suggest that immunity claims in criminal cases are uncommon but not unprecedented. Former Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega attempted a similar defense, which failed, though he never held the official title of president. U.S. courts have dismissed civil suits against sitting leaders based on State Department recognition, but criminal immunity has a narrower scope. The court will also examine whether Maduro’s alleged actions were part of his official duties—a critical factor in determining immunity.

Even if immunity is denied, prosecutors may still face challenges proving Maduro’s direct involvement in the conspiracy. Analysts note the indictment lacks strong ties between Maduro and specific terrorist or trafficking acts, though the Justice Department may be withholding key evidence. The defense is expected to argue aggressively that Maduro’s arrest violated international law, echoing arguments rejected in the Noriega case.

Maduro’s immunity claim tests US power to prosecute foreign leaders | Reuters

Nick Reiner, the 32-year-old son of slain filmmaker Rob Reiner, is scheduled to enter a plea this Wednesday to two counts of first-degree murder in the fatal stabbings of his parents. His initial court appearance in December was postponed at his defense attorney’s request, citing complex legal issues. Rob Reiner, 78, and Michele Reiner, 70, were found dead in their Los Angeles home on December 14, both having suffered multiple stab wounds. The killings, which occurred just hours before a planned event with the Obamas, shocked both Hollywood and political communities where Rob Reiner had long been influential.

Prosecutors have not yet announced whether they will seek the death penalty, though capital punishment is currently under a moratorium in California. The case has drawn intense public scrutiny, especially after reports that Nick argued with his parents at a holiday party the night before their deaths. He was later found and arrested near a downtown park.

Nick Reiner, who lived in a guest house on the property, has a well-documented history of drug addiction and homelessness. His struggles formed the basis of the 2015 film Being Charlie, which he co-wrote with his father. Rob Reiner, known for his role as “Meathead” in All in the Family and for directing beloved films like The Princess Bride and A Few Good Men, was a towering figure in both entertainment and Democratic politics. Michele Reiner was a producer and former photographer known for her 1980s portrait of Donald Trump. The motive behind the killings remains unclear.

Son of slain Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner due back in court | Reuters

A panel of judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals appeared doubtful of Meta Platforms’ effort to dismiss over 2,200 lawsuits alleging that its platforms—along with those of Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok—were intentionally designed to be addictive to young users. At the heart of the appeal is whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields these companies from liability for harm allegedly caused by their platform designs, not just user content.

The judges questioned whether it was premature to consider the companies’ immunity claims at this stage, given that the underlying cases are still in early litigation. They noted that most appeals occur only after a final judgment has been issued. Meta’s attorney argued that defending such massive litigation now, without immunity protection, would be an undue burden. However, the panel suggested the district judge—Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers—had left the door open to revisiting Section 230 defenses later in the process.

The lawsuits, brought by states, municipalities, school districts, and individuals, claim the platforms contributed to rising youth mental health issues like depression and body image disorders. The plaintiffs argue these are not content-related claims but rather focus on harmful platform features that fall outside Section 230 protections.

Judge Jacqueline Nguyen pointed out that the language of Section 230 doesn’t clearly grant the sweeping immunity Meta is claiming. Other judges on the panel, appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents, also showed skepticism toward the broad interpretation of immunity being asserted by the companies.

US appeals court appears skeptical of Meta, social media companies’ bid to cut off addiction lawsuits | Reuters

Several major class action lawsuits with billions of dollars at stake are set for key appellate decisions in 2026, targeting high-profile companies across tech, entertainment, sports, and real estate. In one case, Live Nation is appealing a ruling that certified a nationwide class action accusing it of inflating ticket prices over 15 years for events at major venues, involving over 400 million ticket sales.

Apple is also facing renewed scrutiny as consumers seek to reinstate a class action alleging its App Store rules created a monopoly, leading to $20 billion in overcharges. A lower court had decertified the class of nearly 200 million customers, but the 9th Circuit has agreed to review that decision.

Meanwhile, the NCAA is defending a historic $2.8 billion settlement compensating college athletes for past use of their name, image, and likeness. Although the deal received widespread support, appeals have temporarily delayed payments to affected athletes.

The NFL is facing a critical appeal after a $4.7 billion jury verdict over its “Sunday Ticket” broadcast package was thrown out last year. Consumers and businesses want that verdict reinstated, arguing the NFL monopolized out-of-market game access.

In the hotel sector, the 3rd Circuit will decide whether to revive claims that Atlantic City resorts, including Caesars and MGM, colluded on room prices using algorithmic pricing software—similar to claims already dismissed in a Las Vegas case now potentially heading to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Finally, the 8th Circuit will examine objections to settlements totaling over $668 million in a class action accusing real estate firms, including Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway-owned HomeServices, of fixing commission rates nationwide. Plaintiffs say the deals are fair; critics argue they don’t go far enough.

Billions in balance for US companies fighting class action appeals in 2026 | Reuters

On January 6, 2021, a significant and unprecedented legal and constitutional crisis unfolded in the United States. As a joint session of Congress convened to certify the Electoral College results of the 2020 presidential election, a mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol. The attack followed weeks of false claims about election fraud and a rally earlier that day in which Trump urged his supporters to “fight like hell.” The violent breach forced lawmakers to evacuate, delayed the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, and resulted in deaths, injuries, and extensive property damage.

Legally, the event triggered a cascade of consequences. Hundreds of participants were arrested and charged with offenses ranging from unlawful entry and assaulting federal officers to seditious conspiracy. High-profile members of far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were prosecuted, with some leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy, a Civil War-era charge rarely used in modern times. The attack also led to Trump’s second impeachment, the first time in U.S. history a president was impeached twice. He was charged with incitement of insurrection, although the Senate ultimately acquitted him.

In the broader legal aftermath, January 6 prompted legislative and judicial scrutiny of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, with Congress passing reforms in 2022 to clarify the vice president’s limited role in certifying election results. The attack also raised questions about the limits of First Amendment protections when political speech turns into violent action, and about the potential disqualification from office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits insurrectionists from holding public office.

Barry Pollack, the U.S. attorney best known for securing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s release deal, is now representing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in a high-profile U.S. narcotics case. Maduro, who was captured in a U.S. military operation along with his wife, pleaded not guilty this week in a Manhattan federal court to charges of leading a cocaine trafficking conspiracy involving guerrilla groups and drug cartels. Pollack plans to challenge the legality of Maduro’s capture—calling it a “military abduction”—and is also expected to raise arguments about foreign leader immunity.

These arguments face steep legal obstacles. The U.S. no longer recognizes Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate president, having rejected the results of his 2018 re-election. Furthermore, U.S. courts have historically been reluctant to dismiss cases based on how a defendant was brought to U.S. soil. Still, Pollack’s involvement signals a serious defense strategy grounded in international legal questions and executive immunity claims.

Pollack’s experience with politically charged and internationally sensitive cases is extensive. He recently helped negotiate Assange’s release from a British prison through a plea deal that allowed the WikiLeaks founder to avoid U.S. imprisonment and return to Australia. His track record also includes work on behalf of a former CIA officer and an acquitted Enron executive.

Assange’s lawyer Barry Pollack to fight Maduro’s US narcotics charges | Reuters

With a new Republican majority appointed by President Donald Trump, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is expected to shift sharply away from pro-union policies that defined its recent Democratic era. After nearly a year of paralysis caused by Trump’s unprecedented firing of Democrat Gwynne Wilcox—leaving the board without the quorum needed to issue decisions—the Senate confirmed two Republican nominees in December 2025, restoring its ability to act and giving conservatives control of the five-member board for the first time since 2021.

Key Biden-era decisions are now vulnerable to rollback. These include expanded union rights such as representation without secret-ballot elections, bans on mandatory anti-union employer meetings, and broader remedies for fired workers. Critics say these moves strayed from precedent; federal courts are reviewing them, but outcomes will vary by jurisdiction unless the Supreme Court weighs in.

Union election rules are also likely to change. Under Biden, the NLRB accelerated the election process and made it harder for decertification efforts to proceed—moves unions supported to counter employer delays. Republicans are expected to reverse these rules, potentially making it easier to dissolve existing unions.

The board’s political independence is also under scrutiny. A court recently upheld Trump’s removal of Wilcox, challenging legal protections meant to shield NLRB members from dismissal without cause. If the Supreme Court supports similar arguments in upcoming cases, the NLRB’s structural independence could be weakened, raising concerns about politicization and fairness in labor adjudications.

Meanwhile, lawsuits by major companies like Amazon and SpaceX are targeting the board’s role as both prosecutor and judge in its own cases, claiming constitutional violations. If courts side with these challengers, it could force Congress to restructure the agency—perhaps by limiting its powers or shifting cases to federal courts.

NLRB poised for major policy shifts in 2026 with new Trump-appointed majority | Reuters

Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan resigned following her conviction for obstructing the arrest of a migrant in her courtroom, a case that became entangled in broader national tensions over immigration enforcement. Dugan, elected to the Milwaukee County Circuit Court in 2016, was found guilty in December 2025 of helping Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican national facing domestic violence charges, evade U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who were present at the courthouse. She had denied wrongdoing, claiming she followed a courthouse policy requiring staff to notify supervisors of ICE’s presence.

Her conviction drew sharp criticism from Republican lawmakers, with some calling for impeachment, especially as the Trump administration intensifies efforts to crack down on local interference with federal immigration policy. Dugan had been suspended from her judicial duties during the legal proceedings. Prosecutors framed the case as a warning that public officials are not above the law, highlighting the Justice Department’s willingness to pursue charges against judges who obstruct federal enforcement actions.

Before serving as a judge, Dugan led a local Catholic Charities chapter that provided refugee resettlement services. Her background and the nature of the charges underscored the ongoing conflict between local protections for immigrants and federal efforts to expand deportations.

Wisconsin judge resigns after being convicted of obstructing migrant arrest | Reuters

My column this week is on a novel cruise tax. Hawaii’s attempt to expand its transient accommodations tax to include cruise ship passengers hit a temporary roadblock when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a New Year’s Eve stay, pausing enforcement of the new “green fee.” The law, which took effect January 1, aims to place cruise cabins on equal tax footing with hotels by imposing an 11% tax on the portion of a cruise fare linked to overnight stays while docked in Hawaiian ports. Hawaii argues this is a general, nondiscriminatory tax on short-term lodging rather than a fee tied to the ship itself. To bolster its legal case, the state is framing cruise cabins as equivalent to hotel rooms, and emphasizing that the tax is based on services consumed on land, not the ship’s movement or port access.

The cruise industry, however, contends the tax violates the Constitution’s Tonnage Clause, which prohibits states from levying duties on ships for merely entering or staying in port. They’ve also invoked the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1884, which restricts port-related charges not linked to specific services. But Hawaii’s defense is that the tax is not about access or vessel status—it is a consumption tax on guests staying overnight, regardless of whether the bed is on land or in a moored ship. The policy avoids targeting ships and instead captures revenue from tourism, aligning maritime and land-based lodging under a consistent legal framework.

The Department of Justice has joined the cruise industry’s challenge, suggesting the issue’s seriousness. If litigation continues, the U.S. Supreme Court may ultimately decide whether this tax model is constitutionally sound. Still, Hawaii’s approach—drafting a neutral, consumption-based tax rather than a maritime-specific charge—may serve as a blueprint for other coastal states looking to tap into cruise tourism revenue without triggering constitutional violations.

On January 5, 1982, a federal district court in Arkansas issued a landmark ruling in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, striking down a state law that required public schools to give “balanced treatment” to both evolution and creation science. The law, known as Act 590, had been passed in 1981 and mandated that schools teach creationism—defined in the statute as a scientific model based on a literal interpretation of the Bible—alongside evolution. The law was immediately challenged by a coalition of clergy, educators, and scientists who argued that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Judge William Overton ruled that Act 590 was unconstitutional because it advanced a particular religious viewpoint under the guise of science. In his decision, Overton provided a clear and influential definition of what constitutes science, stating that scientific theories must be guided by natural law, testable, and subject to falsification. He found that “creation science” failed all of these criteria and was therefore religious in nature, not scientific. The court also concluded that requiring its teaching in public schools constituted state endorsement of religion.

The ruling marked one of the first major judicial rejections of efforts to include religious doctrine in public school science curricula following the U.S. Supreme Court’s earlier decision in Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), which struck down laws banning the teaching of evolution altogether. McLean v. Arkansas would go on to shape the legal and educational landscape in future church-state separation cases, including the pivotal 1987 Supreme Court decision Edwards v. Aguillard, which similarly invalidated a Louisiana law promoting creationism in schools.

Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro appeared in a New York court after a surprise U.S. military operation captured him in Caracas. The high-stakes raid, likened to the 1989 Panama invasion, involved U.S. Special Forces breaching Maduro’s security and flying him to Manhattan, where he faces drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges. His wife, Cilia Flores, was also captured. Maduro is accused of running a cocaine network in collaboration with major criminal groups like Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel and Colombia’s FARC.

The capture sparked international outrage. Russia, China, Cuba, and other allies condemned the raid, while U.S. allies cautiously emphasized legality and diplomacy. The U.N. Security Council is set to review the operation’s legality. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, shifted from initial outrage to signaling willingness for cooperation with the U.S., a notable pivot considering her past as a fiery Chavista loyalist.

President Trump justified the move as a counter to drug smuggling, illegal immigration, and the past nationalization of U.S. oil assets. He also made clear his aim to reopen Venezuela’s oil sector to U.S. companies. However, he has sidelined Venezuela’s opposition leaders, disappointing figures like María Corina Machado. Despite Maduro’s removal, his political allies remain in power, and the military’s loyalty appears unchanged. Venezuelans at home are wary, bracing for possible unrest.

Venezuela’s Maduro due in court, loyalists send message to Trump | Reuters

Trump’s efforts to further reshape the federal judiciary in 2026 are facing a slowdown due to a shortage of vacancies. After returning to office in 2025, Trump secured the confirmation of 26 judicial nominees—more than in the first year of his initial term. However, only 30 new judicial seats have opened since then, compared to the 108 vacancies available when he first took office in 2017. This is largely due to aggressive judicial appointments by both Trump and former President Biden over the past decade, which filled many potential retirements with younger judges.

Some judges eligible for senior status—a form of semi-retirement—have opted to remain active. Experts suggest this could be due to either personal preference or distrust among conservative judges about Trump’s choices for replacements. The appellate court nominations have particularly slowed, with only three judges announcing retirements in 2025. Still, Trump managed to flip the balance of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals and strengthen conservative influence in district courts across states like Missouri, Florida, and Mississippi.

Despite the low number of available seats—currently 49—Trump still has opportunities to make appointments, especially in Republican-led states. However, 13 of those vacancies are in states with at least one Democratic senator, triggering the “blue slip” custom, which allows senators to block judicial nominees from their states. While this tradition doesn’t apply to appellate courts, it still limits district court nominations. Senate Republicans remain divided on whether to uphold the blue slip norm.

Trump’s ability to further reshape judiciary in 2026 hindered by few vacancies | Reuters

In 2026, U.S. law schools are facing a mix of rising interest in legal education and mounting regulatory and financial pressures. A major shift comes from President Trump’s 2025 budget, which capped federal loans for professional degrees at $50,000 annually and $200,000 total. With many law schools charging over $50,000 per year (excluding living costs), incoming students may need to seek private loans, which often come with higher interest rates and stricter credit requirements. In response, some schools—like Santa Clara University—are offering across-the-board scholarships to help bridge the gap.

Law school accreditation is also in flux. The American Bar Association (ABA), traditionally the primary accreditor, is facing political attacks over its diversity standards and regulatory burden. Texas is planning to develop its own law school approval system for bar eligibility, and other states like Florida and Ohio are exploring similar options. The ABA is now working to streamline its standards amid this pressure.

July 2026 will also see the debut of the “NextGen UBE,” a shorter, skills-focused national bar exam that replaces some memorization with practical assessment. Some states, however, are opting out or creating their own licensing alternatives.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is gaining traction in legal education. A growing number of law schools are integrating AI training into their curricula, and platforms like Harvey are being adopted by faculty and students alike.

Despite the looming challenges, interest in law school remains strong. Applicant numbers rose 20% over the previous year, building on an 18% increase in 2024, and first-year enrollment is also trending upward.

US law schools face loan limits, oversight pressures in 2026 | Reuters

U.S. courts are poised to play a decisive role in shaping how copyright law applies to generative AI this year, as lawsuits from major publishers, creators, and tech companies come to a head. At issue is whether AI developers like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others can invoke the legal doctrine of fair use when training models on copyrighted materials, or whether they must pay license fees—potentially amounting to billions.

The legal landscape shifted dramatically in 2025. A class action by authors against Anthropic resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement, the largest of its kind, while The New York Times, Disney, and other major rights holders filed fresh lawsuits. Judges began issuing preliminary rulings on whether AI training qualifies as transformative fair use, with conflicting outcomes. One judge called AI training “quintessentially transformative,” supporting tech companies’ claims, while another warned that generative AI could harm creators by saturating the market with competing content.

Several high-profile cases remain active in 2026, including those involving AI-generated music and visual art. Meanwhile, some copyright holders are choosing collaboration over litigation. Disney, for example, invested $1 billion in OpenAI and granted use of its characters, while Warner Music dropped lawsuits against AI firms to co-develop music tools. These deals hint at possible industry-wide licensing frameworks, though ongoing litigation could still dramatically reshape the economic and legal norms governing AI.

AI copyright battles enter pivotal year as US courts weigh fair use | Reuters

On December 30, 1905, Tsar Nicholas II signed the “Fundamental Laws of 1906,” marking a pivotal moment in the Russian Empire’s struggle between autocracy and constitutionalism. This act came in response to the Revolution of 1905, a period of mass unrest fueled by political repression, economic hardship, and a humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. The October Manifesto, issued two months earlier, had promised the establishment of a legislative Duma and the expansion of civil liberties. However, the Fundamental Laws, signed in December, revealed the Tsar’s intention to retain ultimate authority despite these concessions.

The document laid out a framework for governance, establishing a bicameral legislature with the Duma as its lower house, but Article 4 made clear that “the All-Russian Emperor possesses the supreme autocratic power.” This meant that, legally, any legislative progress remained subordinate to the Tsar’s will. The laws also granted the Tsar control over the military, foreign policy, and the ability to dissolve the Duma at his discretion.

While the Fundamental Laws introduced formal legal structures and acknowledged the existence of limited civil rights, they were largely symbolic gestures rather than meaningful reforms. Instead of curbing autocratic rule, the laws codified it, cloaking absolute monarchy in the appearance of legality. This duality deepened public dissatisfaction and political fragmentation.

Rather than stabilizing the empire, the signing of the Fundamental Laws sowed further distrust in the regime and highlighted the Tsar’s unwillingness to relinquish power. These contradictions contributed to the failure of the Duma system and fueled revolutionary momentum that would ultimately culminate in the revolutions of 1917.

The Trump administration reached an agreement to review certain NIH grant applications that had been stalled or rejected amid a broader legal challenge over cuts to diversity-related research funding. The agreement followed a federal court ruling in Boston that found the NIH acted unlawfully when it canceled grants based on their perceived ties to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Though the Supreme Court later paused part of that ruling and shifted some aspects of the litigation to a court specializing in monetary claims, the review process for future NIH funding remained in legal limbo.

Under the new agreement, the NIH will re-evaluate previously frozen or withdrawn grant applications, though it is not required to fund any specific proposals. Plaintiffs in the case, including researchers and several Democratic-led states, argued that the impacted studies—focusing on topics like HIV prevention, LGBTQ health, Alzheimer’s, and sexual violence—serve vital public health needs.

One of the plaintiffs, University of New Mexico postdoctoral researcher Nikki Maphis, said the agreement allows important scientific work to resume after what she described as an “arbitrary and destructive freeze.” The underlying NIH policy change, which cut funding for projects deemed to reflect ideological rather than scientific priorities, remains contested. A prior ruling blocking the policy is still under appeal by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Trump administration agrees to review stalled NIH research grants after lawsuit | Reuters

The Trump administration’s aggressive defunding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has pushed the agency to the brink of collapse, jeopardizing one of the few federal institutions explicitly designed to protect everyday Americans from financial harm. Created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB has long served as a crucial recourse for people facing predatory lending, credit reporting errors, identity theft, and financial discrimination. The agency has helped return more than $21 billion to consumers since its founding. And yet, under President Trump’s second term, it’s being systematically dismantled—through funding cuts, legal challenges, and staffing reductions—with the administration openly declaring its intent to shut the agency down.

In the absence of the CFPB, those wronged by financial institutions—like Bianca Jones, who battled a credit reporting error that nearly cost her a home, or Morgan Smith, who turned to the agency after being targeted by identity theft—may find themselves with nowhere to turn. The administration claims the CFPB promotes a political agenda, but the result is fewer protections for those already vulnerable. Rules around medical debt, overdraft fees, credit card terms, and mortgage lending have been gutted. Investigations have been shelved. Enforcement is evaporating.

Critics argue that other regulators can fill the gap, but the CFPB was created because no one else was doing the job. Without it, financial institutions are more likely to abuse their power with impunity.

You should ask yourself: who benefits when a consumer watchdog is taken offline? Because it certainly isn’t the teachers, the single parents, the sick, or the struggling borrowers trying to make sense of a system stacked against them. It’s the companies who’d rather not answer for what they do in the dark.

Trump’s funding cuts put America’s consumer watchdog on the brink of collapse | Reuters

A federal appeals court ruled that it cannot hear Amazon’s constitutional challenge to the structure of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), deepening a circuit split on the issue and increasing the likelihood of U.S. Supreme Court review. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Amazon’s case stemmed from a labor dispute and was therefore barred by the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which prohibits courts from intervening in active labor disputes. Amazon had filed the lawsuit to halt an NLRB case claiming it was a joint employer of unionized drivers working for a subcontractor and therefore obligated to bargain with their union.

Amazon’s broader claim—that the NLRB’s structure is unconstitutional because its board members and judges are protected from at-will removal—has gained traction elsewhere. The 5th Circuit, in a recent case involving Elon Musk’s SpaceX, ruled that such protections are unlawful and allowed a similar challenge to proceed. But the 9th Circuit firmly disagreed, emphasizing that courts should not interfere with labor board proceedings, regardless of the constitutional claims involved.

This ruling aligns with a 3rd Circuit decision and stands in direct conflict with the 5th Circuit, setting the stage for a high-stakes resolution by the Supreme Court. Importantly, the 9th Circuit’s ruling doesn’t completely shut the door on such challenges—employers can still raise constitutional objections in NLRB proceedings and appeal after the fact. But for now, Amazon and other companies must make their case through the channels Congress established for resolving labor disputes.

US court says it can’t hear Amazon’s NLRB challenge, deepening circuit split | Reuters

A Utah judge has granted the release of most of the transcript and audio from a closed hearing in the high-profile case involving the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The hearing, held in October, addressed courtroom safety measures for the accused, Tyler Robinson, who is charged with aggravated murder and other serious offenses. Prosecutors allege Robinson fired a single fatal shot from a rooftop during a university event where Kirk was speaking, and they intend to seek the death penalty.

Judge Tony Graf ruled that only about one page of the 80-page transcript would remain redacted, primarily for safety and security reasons. He also clarified that media organizations do not need special legal status to cover the proceedings, rejecting a request that would have guaranteed them advance notice of any future attempts to close hearings.

Graf has already decided that Robinson can appear in civilian clothing but must remain physically restrained in court. However, media outlets are prohibited from photographing or filming his restraints, as defense attorneys argued such images could bias potential jurors. A hearing set for February will address whether cameras will be allowed in the courtroom at all.

Kirk’s death, which occurred during a campus debate, triggered widespread condemnation of political violence from across the ideological spectrum.

Judge grants release of redacted transcript of Charlie Kirk case hearing | Reuters

As 2025 winds down, my Bloomberg column this week is a year-end piece reflecting not just on what was written, but on which ideas still resonate because the problems they address remain unresolved. The lasting relevance of several pieces underscores how little has shifted in tax and policy debates. A July column urging states to break free from federal tax volatility feels even more urgent now, as states still cling to unstable baselines. Early in the year, hopes that efficiency rhetoric (read: DOGE) might close the tax gap faded, with political discomfort around auditing the wealthy preventing any meaningful change. April’s look at the step-up in basis revealed how death, not borrowing, remains the biggest capital gains loophole—and one Congress left untouched in the 2025 tax law. A May column on IRS immigration enforcement gains new resonance as the crackdown deepens, pushing some immigrant workers further from voluntary compliance. And October’s piece on Pung v. Isabella County remains live, with the Supreme Court set to decide whether fairness in tax foreclosures means market value or simply what the government collects.

Each of these columns anticipated weather patterns we’re now standing in—proof less of foresight and more of inertia. If 2026 brings more engagement, even without clear solutions, there’s hope that next year’s retrospective won’t feel like a reprint with new dates.

Read the 5 Most Relevant Technically Speaking Columns of 2025

On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment surrounded a Lakota Sioux encampment near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The soldiers had orders to disarm the Lakota, who had recently fled the Standing Rock Reservation following the killing of Sitting Bull. Tensions were high, and as troops attempted to confiscate weapons, a shot was fired—its origin remains unclear. What followed was a brutal onslaught in which U.S. forces opened fire on largely unarmed Lakota men, women, and children. Estimates suggest that between 250 and 300 Lakota were killed, many while fleeing or after surrendering.

The Wounded Knee Massacre was the final major confrontation between Native Americans and the U.S. military during the so-called Indian Wars. It marked the culmination of decades of broken treaties and violent enforcement of federal Indian policy. Despite the civilian toll, 20 soldiers were later awarded the Medal of Honor, a decision that has since drawn sustained criticism and calls for revocation. The legal status of the massacre—framed at the time as a military engagement—has increasingly been re-evaluated through the lens of human rights law and treaty violations.

The Lakota were supposed to be protected under treaties like the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which guaranteed their land and autonomy. However, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills and growing U.S. expansionism led to the steady erosion of those promises. Wounded Knee became a symbol of that betrayal and the failure of the U.S. government to uphold its legal obligations. In 1990, on the massacre’s centennial, Congress passed a resolution expressing “deep regret” but stopped short of issuing a formal apology. The massacre remains a central moment in the legal and political history of Native American rights in the United States.

California announced it had dropped its lawsuit against the federal government over the Trump administration’s decision to cancel over $4 billion in high-speed rail funding. The California High-Speed Rail Authority said the move reflected a lack of trust in the federal government as a reliable partner. Despite the loss of funds, the agency stated it would continue the project using mostly state resources, noting that only 18% of total expenditures have come from federal dollars. A judge had recently declined to dismiss the case, but California chose to end the legal fight regardless.

The U.S. Department of Transportation supported the funding withdrawal, citing a Federal Railroad Administration report that found the rail project riddled with missed deadlines, budget issues, and unrealistic ridership forecasts. Governor Gavin Newsom previously criticized the cuts as politically motivated and driven by Trump’s hostility toward California. The high-speed rail project, initially expected to cost $33 billion and be completed by 2020, is now projected to cost up to $128 billion with a completion target of 2033. So far, over 50 major structures and nearly 80 miles of guideway have been built.

The state plans to attract private investors by mid-2026 and emphasized that construction will continue. Recent legislation provides $1 billion in annual state funding through 2045. Earlier in 2025, the federal government also rescinded $175 million for related projects. Despite legal and financial setbacks, the state remains committed to building the rail line connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco.

California drops lawsuit over Trump decision to pull $4 billion in high-speed rail funds | Reuters

Longtime Motel 6 spokesman Tom Bodett settled a lawsuit against the motel chain after accusing it of using his name and voice without consent. Bodett, who became synonymous with the brand through his signature line, “we’ll leave the light on for you,” alleged the company continued using his likeness even after their professional relationship ended. The dispute arose when Motel 6’s new parent company, OYO, allegedly failed to make a $1.2 million contractual payment due in January, prompting Bodett to terminate their agreement.

Despite the split, Bodett claimed his voice and name remained on Motel 6’s reservation phone system, violating federal trademark law and the terms of their contract. The company denied any wrongdoing, arguing Bodett himself breached the agreement, which they said nullified their payment obligation. The lawsuit, filed in June, was resolved in Manhattan federal court, though the settlement terms remain confidential.

Bodett, now 70, is a well-known author and voice actor, with credits including NPR and Ken Burns documentaries. He had been the face and voice of Motel 6 since 1986 and was responsible for creating the brand’s iconic tagline. The lawsuit came after Motel 6 was acquired by India-based OYO, part of Prism (formerly Oravel Stays), in a $525 million deal from Blackstone in December 2024.

Longtime Motel 6 spokesman Tom Bodett settles lawsuit against chain | Reuters

FBI Director Kash Patel announced a surge in federal investigative resources to Minnesota to probe alleged fraud involving public funds. While the FBI has offered few specifics, Patel’s comments followed the circulation of a viral video showing allegedly inactive daycare centers in the state receiving government subsidies. Republican officials, including U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer and Vice President JD Vance, quickly amplified the video online, calling for action and linking the issue to broader concerns about state oversight.

Critics, however, argue that the investigation is politically and racially charged. The Trump administration has repeatedly pointed to Minnesota’s Somali American community as the center of alleged fraud, even as immigrant-rights groups warn that the pattern of enforcement suggests targeted profiling rather than impartial justice. The FBI has not clarified whether the focus on Somali defendants is supported by broader data or if the agency is treating these cases as representative of a larger trend.

Governor Tim Walz’s office has not yet commented, though tensions have grown between federal and state officials over the framing and scope of the investigations. Many of those charged in recent fraud cases are of Somali descent, according to federal sources cited by CBS News, but the disproportionate attention has led to accusations that the government is conflating individual criminal acts with an entire immigrant community.

The lack of transparency about evidence and investigatory methods has fueled concerns that the DOJ under Trump may be using criminal enforcement as a political tool. Given President Trump’s repeated attacks on Minnesota’s Somali population, observers view this surge not as neutral law enforcement, but as part of a broader strategy to vilify immigrants and score political points.

FBI investigating Minnesota fraud scheme, director says | Reuters

New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced a new state law requiring social media platforms to display mental health warning labels on features such as infinite scroll, auto-play, and algorithm-driven feeds. The law targets platform elements deemed “addictive” and likely to encourage compulsive use among young users. It reflects growing concerns over the impact of social media on youth mental health and follows recent actions in other jurisdictions, including Australia’s ban on social media for children under 16.

Under the law, platforms that operate partly or entirely in New York must comply, even if users access the services while physically outside the state. Enforcement authority rests with the New York Attorney General, who may bring civil suits and seek penalties of up to $5,000 per violation. Hochul likened the labels to those found on tobacco products or plastic packaging, positioning them as a public health measure designed to inform and protect.

Major companies like Meta, TikTok, Snap, and Alphabet have not yet responded publicly to the law. The move aligns with ongoing legal efforts across the U.S., including lawsuits by school districts against social media companies and recommendations from the U.S. Surgeon General for stronger safety measures and clearer warnings. Critics may question the efficacy or enforceability of such warnings, especially in a fragmented digital landscape, but New York’s law signals a growing willingness by states to directly regulate platform design in the name of mental health.

New York to require social media platforms to display mental health warnings | Reuters

On December 23, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, creating the Federal Reserve System, the central banking system of the United States. The law was the culmination of decades of debate over banking reform, intensified by the financial panic of 1907. The Act aimed to provide the country with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system. It established twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks overseen by a central Board in Washington, D.C., striking a balance between public oversight and private banking interests.

The Federal Reserve was given key powers, including the ability to issue Federal Reserve Notes (now the dominant form of U.S. currency), regulate banks, and serve as a lender of last resort during financial crises. This marked a significant shift from the fragmented and largely unregulated banking environment of the 19th century.

Critics feared it concentrated too much financial power in the hands of a few, while supporters believed it brought necessary structure and national oversight. Over the decades, the Fed’s role expanded, especially during the Great Depression, World War II, and more recently the 2008 financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic. The creation of the Fed also represented a broader legal evolution in how the federal government engaged with economic policy.

A coalition of 21 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Oregon to prevent the Trump administration from defunding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The states argue that the administration’s decision to stop requesting funds from the Federal Reserve is unlawful and undermines Congress’s constitutional authority. Since returning to office in January, President Trump has taken steps to dismantle the CFPB, including appointing his budget director, Russell Vought, as acting head and halting most agency operations.

The CFPB was created in 2011 to safeguard consumers in the financial sector and has recovered over $21 billion for Americans. It is uniquely funded directly by the Federal Reserve rather than through Congressional appropriations. The administration claims the Dodd-Frank Act requires the CFPB’s funding to come from the Fed’s combined earnings, which they argue are unavailable due to the Fed operating at a loss since 2022.

The lawsuit highlights that the CFPB is legally required to process consumer complaints from states, and without funding, it cannot fulfill this duty. Plaintiffs also contend that the administration’s move violates the separation of powers by interfering with a congressionally established funding mechanism. Additional lawsuits from a federal employee union and nonprofits are pending in other courts, also seeking to compel the agency to resume funding requests.

Democratic-led states sue to block US consumer watchdog’s defunding under Trump | Reuters

A new push by the Trump administration to challenge corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) faces steep legal hurdles. Under EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, the agency is shifting toward what she calls a more “conservative view of civil rights,” focusing on potential discrimination against white men. Lucas has announced plans to investigate corporate DEI policies and pursue enforcement where race- or sex-based decisions are suspected.

However, legal experts emphasize that proving such claims is difficult. Discrimination cases require clear evidence that someone was denied a job or benefit specifically because of their race or sex, not just because they were part of a changing applicant pool. Critics argue that the administration’s narrative misunderstands the legal and practical realities of workplace diversity, which is often designed to prevent discrimination, not perpetuate it.

Despite aggressive executive orders targeting DEI, many companies are maintaining or quietly adjusting their programs to remain compliant. Legal audits and program rebranding are common, especially in industries like automotive. DEI advocates point out that the business case for inclusion remains strong, as companies see diverse teams as essential to long-term success.

Ultimately, while the administration’s rhetoric may galvanize parts of its base, experts say turning that rhetoric into enforceable legal action will be difficult under existing anti-discrimination laws.

Trump’s anti-corporate DEI campaign faces high legal hurdles | Reuters

Mercedes-Benz has agreed to pay $120 million to settle environmental and consumer protection claims brought by multiple U.S. states over its use of emissions-cheating software in certain diesel vehicles. The settlement resolves the remaining U.S. legal actions tied to the broader Dieselgate scandal, which has affected several automakers. The claims focused on Mercedes’ BlueTEC diesel models, which were previously marketed as especially clean and advanced.

As part of the agreement, Mercedes will continue retrofitting affected vehicles with approved emissions software. These additional updates are expected to cost the company tens of millions more. However, the company stated that its financial results won’t be impacted, as it had already set aside sufficient funds to cover the settlement and associated costs.

Mercedes reaches $120 million settlement with US states over emissions scandal | Reuters

In my column for Bloomberg this week, I argue that the IRS has a rare opportunity to repair its deeply flawed Voluntary Disclosure Program (VDP), which has become so punitive and complex that it actively discourages taxpayers from coming forward. While the program is supposed to help bring people back into compliance, its current structure demands that taxpayers essentially confess to wrongdoing—sometimes criminal—in a sworn statement, without any assurance the IRS will even consider their disclosure.

Recent proposed reforms introduce a more structured penalty system and eliminate the notorious “willfulness checkbox” from Form 14457, a small but significant change that previously forced taxpayers to admit to criminal conduct just to apply. Still, the process remains risky. The IRS continues to require extensive narratives of past noncompliance, and for taxpayers with crypto assets, the demands are even greater: wallet addresses, transaction hashes, and mixer use must all be disclosed upfront. That level of technical and legal exposure could deter even well-meaning taxpayers.

I argue the IRS must go further. It should offer flexible payment options—like installment agreements or offers in compromise—and abandon its rigid “pay-in-full” approach. It should also adopt a tiered penalty framework that accounts for intent, scale, and the evolving complexity of assets like cryptocurrency. Finally, the IRS needs to delay the most invasive digital asset reporting until after a taxpayer has been preliminarily accepted into the program, rather than forcing exhaustive disclosures at the outset.

Without deeper changes, the VDP risks continuing as a trapdoor rather than a lifeline—one that punishes honesty and rewards silence. The current moment of public review is the best chance to realign the program with its original purpose: restoring compliance, not burying it.

The IRS Has a Chance to Fix Its Voluntary Disclosure Program

On this day in legal history, December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot and wounded four young Black men—Troy Canty, Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, and James Ramseur—on a New York City subway train. Goetz, who was white, claimed the men had attempted to rob him and that he acted in self-defense. The case quickly became a national sensation, exposing deep racial fault lines in public discourse and in the justice system. Supporters hailed Goetz as a vigilante hero responding to unchecked urban crime, while critics denounced his actions as racially motivated violence that reinforced systemic bias.

Goetz fled the scene but turned himself in nine days later. During the investigation, he told police that he had intended to kill the men and expressed explicitly racist sentiments, calling them “savages.” Despite this, a grand jury initially refused to indict him for attempted murder, charging him only with criminal possession of a weapon. After public outcry, a second grand jury indicted him on multiple counts, including attempted murder and assault. In his 1987 trial, however, Goetz was acquitted of all charges except for illegal firearms possession.

The verdict underscored how race and fear influenced perceptions of self-defense and victimhood. The jury accepted Goetz’s narrative of fear despite his own admission of intent and inflammatory language. The case highlighted the elasticity of self-defense laws, especially when invoked by white defendants against Black victims. It also foreshadowed later debates in high-profile cases where racial bias intersected with claims of justified force. Goetz ultimately served just over eight months in jail. Darrell Cabey, left paralyzed by the shooting, later won a $43 million civil judgment against him—a sum Goetz claimed he could never pay. The case remains a stark example of how legal standards of justification can mask broader social inequities.

President Trump is preparing to expand immigration enforcement in 2026 with a significant boost in funding and more aggressive tactics, including a renewed focus on workplace raids. Despite growing political backlash, Trump plans to hire thousands of new agents, expand detention centers, and partner with private companies to track undocumented immigrants. His administration has already deployed federal agents to major cities, sparking protests over the use of tear gas, extrajudicial tactics, and the detention of U.S. citizens.

ICE and Border Patrol are set to receive $170 billion through 2029, a massive increase over their current annual budgets. Miami recently elected its first Democratic mayor in decades, with voters citing Trump’s immigration policies as a motivating factor. While Trump continues to frame his crackdown as targeting criminals, government data shows a large portion of recent ICE arrests have involved individuals with no criminal record beyond immigration violations.

Trump has also moved to strip temporary protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants and aims to deport one million people annually, although he’s likely to fall short of that target. Legal immigrants haven’t been spared either—some have been detained during green card interviews or had their naturalization ceremonies interrupted. The administration’s new workplace-focused approach could strain the economy, especially in industries reliant on immigrant labor, raising concerns about inflation and employer backlash.

Critics argue the crackdown undermines due process and civil liberties, militarizes communities, and disproportionately targets people of color. As enforcement expands, business groups may be forced to respond more vocally, especially if employer raids disrupt operations. Trump’s overall approval on immigration has dropped sharply since March, suggesting growing public discomfort with the scope and style of enforcement.

Trump set to expand immigration crackdown in 2026 despite brewing backlash | Reuters

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from implementing new restrictions on over $3 billion in federal grants that support housing and services for homeless individuals. U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy issued a preliminary injunction after finding that the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) planned changes to the Continuum of Care program likely violated the McKinney-Vento Act, which mandates a focus on stable, permanent housing for vulnerable populations.

The lawsuit was brought by 20 mostly Democratic-led states, Washington, D.C., and a coalition of nonprofits and local governments. Plaintiffs argued that HUD’s proposed changes would endanger the housing of around 170,000 people, including families, veterans, and survivors of domestic violence—particularly concerning as winter sets in. McElroy, a Trump appointee, emphasized the public interest in upholding lawful agency action and maintaining stability for at-risk groups.

The Trump administration had sought to move away from the long-standing “housing-first” model, which provides housing without preconditions like sobriety or employment, and instead proposed work requirements and transitional housing. HUD also attempted to ban funding for services related to diversity, gender identity, and abortion, while aligning programs with its immigration enforcement efforts.

Critics viewed the move as a politically motivated attempt to reshape federal homelessness policy, while the judge noted HUD’s last-minute changes to its own policy appeared strategic and disruptive to legal proceedings. Despite the ruling, HUD stated it remains committed to reforming the program “in accordance with the law.”

US judge blocks Trump administration from altering homelessness funding conditions | Reuters

David O’Keefe, a retired Manhattan prosecutor, has filed a federal lawsuit against New York City and Brookfield Properties, claiming he was unlawfully arrested while protesting outside the Manhattan offices of the law firm Skadden Arps. The protest took place in April 2025 in a privately owned public space (POPS), where O’Keefe staged a solo demonstration criticizing Skadden’s agreement to provide $100 million in pro bono legal services for initiatives backed by President Donald Trump. He alleged the firm’s involvement threatened the rule of law.

According to the complaint, O’Keefe was arrested for trespassing after refusing to leave the plaza, detained for 90 minutes, and later had the charge dismissed. His lawsuit seeks not only damages but also a court ruling affirming that First Amendment rights apply in POPS—publicly accessible spaces maintained by private owners in exchange for zoning benefits. His legal team argues the arrest violated his constitutional rights and aims to clarify protections for protest in such hybrid public-private areas.

Skadden is not named as a defendant and has not commented. The firm was one of several major law firms that agreed to work with the Trump administration following the president’s efforts to pressure the legal industry over prior political affiliations and diversity practices. A photo included in the suit shows O’Keefe holding a sign labeling Skadden “Trump’s $100 million lap dog.”

Ex-prosecutor sues over arrest while protesting law firm Skadden’s deal with Trump | Reuters

On December 19, 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Sorrells v. United States, a case that reshaped how American courts evaluate government conduct in criminal investigations. The case involved a Prohibition-era prosecution in which a federal agent repeatedly pressured the defendant to obtain illegal liquor. The Court held that criminal convictions should not stand when the government induces a crime that the defendant was not otherwise predisposed to commit. This decision formally recognized entrapment as a valid defense under federal law.

Rather than focusing only on the defendant’s actions, the Court emphasized the importance of limiting improper law enforcement tactics. The majority opinion reasoned that Congress could not have intended criminal statutes to be enforced through deception that manufactures crime. As a result, courts were instructed to examine whether the criminal intent originated with the government or the accused. The ruling reflected growing concern about aggressive policing methods during Prohibition. Over time, Sorrells became a foundational case cited whenever defendants challenge undercover operations. The decision also highlighted the judiciary’s role in supervising executive conduct in criminal prosecutions.

The Trump administration has suspended the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program—commonly known as the green card lottery—following two high-profile campus attacks. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the move, stating that the suspect in the fatal shootings of a Brown University student and an MIT professor had entered the U.S. through the program. The shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national and former Brown student, was found dead in an apparent suicide. Noem said the pause is necessary to prevent further harm from what she called a “disastrous program.”

The lottery program, which grants up to 50,000 green cards annually, has long been a target of Trump’s immigration agenda, which links violent incidents to immigration policy failures. This suspension follows earlier actions by the administration, including visa restrictions after a separate shooting by an Afghan national and a proposal to impose a $100,000 application fee for H-1B work visas, which are heavily used in the tech industry.

Trump’s broader immigration crackdown also includes enhanced social media vetting for tourists, expanded ICE operations in major cities, and the development of large-scale immigration detention centers known as “mega centers.” These moves align with Trump’s campaign promises to tighten border controls and execute large-scale deportations.

Trump Suspends US Green Card Lottery After Brown, MIT Attacks

Trump administration officials are scrambling to meet a Friday deadline to release a large cache of documents related to the Justice Department’s investigations into Jeffrey Epstein. The release was mandated by a recently passed law, supported by both parties in Congress, following months of political pressure and public frustration over the administration’s resistance to transparency. Though President Trump initially opposed the legislation, he reversed course shortly before the vote amid growing dissent from his own supporters.

The new law permits the Justice Department to withhold certain details, including victims’ identities and information tied to ongoing investigations. Attorneys in the department’s National Security Division have been racing to redact sensitive data, raising internal concerns about the risk of mistakes, especially regarding private information. The tight timeline has disrupted other DOJ casework since Thanksgiving.

Trump’s handling of the Epstein matter has dented his support among Republicans, with only 44% approving of his actions, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. This contrasts sharply with his broader 82% approval within the party. Critics argue that Trump’s past friendship with Epstein and his failure to follow through on a 2024 campaign promise to declassify the records have fueled suspicions of a cover-up. While Trump has denied knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and has not been accused of wrongdoing, past email disclosures have added to the controversy.

As more emails emerge—some implying Trump’s involvement, others suggesting no direct misconduct—the administration has tried to redirect attention toward figures like Bill Clinton and JPMorgan. But with midterms approaching, the Epstein file release may remain a political liability.

Trump administration officials race to meet Friday deadline for Epstein files | Reuters

Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan was found guilty of obstructing a federal proceeding for aiding a migrant in avoiding an immigration arrest at the courthouse, marking a significant legal win for the Trump administration’s intensified immigration enforcement efforts. The jury acquitted Dugan on a lesser charge of concealing a person from arrest but convicted her on the more serious obstruction count. The case is part of a broader Justice Department campaign targeting local officials accused of interfering with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.

Prosecutors alleged that in 2023, Dugan helped Mexican national Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who faced domestic violence charges, avoid a planned ICE arrest by rerouting him and his lawyer through a restricted exit after confronting ICE agents stationed near her courtroom. Dugan, a former head of Catholic Charities and longtime legal aid attorney, argued she was following internal court policies meant to manage ICE activity in courthouses, especially after prior arrests caused confusion and concern.

Flores-Ruiz was ultimately arrested outside the courthouse after a brief chase. The Justice Department framed the case as a message that even judges are not above the law when it comes to obstructing federal immigration enforcement. Critics, however, view courthouse arrests as damaging to the legal system’s integrity, potentially deterring vulnerable individuals from seeking legal protection.

Judge found guilty of obstructing arrest in Trump immigration crackdown | Reuters

In a piece I wrote for Forbes earlier this week, I take down yet another One Big Beautiful Bill Act tax “reform” that, upon closer examination, isn’t as great a deal as it may first seem.

Starting in 2025, a new federal tax deduction allows taxpayers to deduct up to $10,000 in interest on qualifying new car loans—but only under strict conditions. The car must be newly purchased (not leased or used), assembled in the U.S., and not used for business purposes. The deduction phases out for individuals earning over $100,000 and joint filers over $200,000, narrowing its reach to a slim demographic of middle- to upper-middle-income earners. While promoted as consumer relief amid high car prices and interest rates, critics argue it’s a veiled subsidy for automakers, not a meaningful economic benefit for struggling Americans.

The policy resembles the mortgage interest deduction, which has long been criticized for inflating home prices and disproportionately benefiting wealthier borrowers. Similarly, this car loan deduction doesn’t lower car costs—it subsidizes borrowing, pushing consumers toward pricier new vehicles and encouraging debt accumulation. The IRS will also gain new data from lenders, who must now report annual interest paid, further expanding government oversight.

Despite the flashy $10,000 cap, few borrowers will come close to that threshold. A typical new car loan might yield only a $600 annual tax benefit—negligible compared to high monthly payments and rapid depreciation. Rather than meaningful relief, the policy appears to be more of a political gesture, using tax code tweaks to create the illusion of support while primarily serving industry interests.

‘No Tax On Car Loan Interest’—Tax Reform Or Facade?

This week’s closing theme is by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault.

This week’s closing theme comes from Clérambault, a French Baroque composer born on December 19, 1676, whose music captures the elegance and structure of early 18th-century Paris. Clérambault is best known today for his sacred cantatas and his refined works for keyboard and chamber ensemble. He spent much of his career as an organist, serving at prominent Paris churches and developing a style that balanced expressive melody with formal clarity. His music reflects the French taste for ornamentation while remaining grounded and disciplined.

The piece featured here is Suite du premier ton: V. Basse et Dessus de Trompette, presented in a complete performance. This movement highlights the contrast between a strong bass line and a bright, trumpet-like upper voice, a hallmark of French Baroque color and texture. Rather than showcasing virtuosity for its own sake, the music emphasizes balance and conversation between parts. The result is confident and ceremonial, yet never overstated.

As a closing theme, this work offers a sense of order and resolution, bringing the week to a measured and dignified close. Clérambault’s writing reminds us that Baroque music was as much about structure and purpose as it was about beauty. His music endures because it is clear, expressive, and carefully crafted. Ending the week with this piece is a quiet nod to tradition, discipline, and lasting musical craft.

Without further ado, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault’s Suite du premier ton: V. Basse et Dessus de Trompette–enjoy!

On December 18, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump, marking the third presidential impeachment in American history. The impeachment followed a months-long investigation centered on Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. House Democrats alleged that the president abused the powers of his office by pressuring a foreign government to investigate a political rival. A second article charged Trump with obstruction of Congress for directing executive branch officials not to comply with House subpoenas. The votes largely split along party lines, reflecting deep political polarization.

Impeachment itself did not remove Trump from office, but instead formally accused him of constitutional wrongdoing. Under the Constitution, the House holds the sole power of impeachment, functioning similarly to a grand jury. Once impeached, the process shifted to the Senate, which is responsible for conducting a trial. Chief Justice John Roberts later presided over the Senate proceedings, as required when a president is tried. The Senate ultimately acquitted Trump in February 2020, falling short of the two-thirds vote needed for conviction. Despite the acquittal, the impeachment reinforced Congress’s oversight authority over the executive branch. The episode also highlighted ongoing debates about the limits of presidential power and the role of impeachment as a constitutional check.

A federal appeals court in Washington reversed an earlier ruling that would have allowed the Trump administration to move forward with mass firings at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Sitting as a full bench, the court blocked plans to cut as much as 90% of the agency’s workforce and agreed to rehear the administration’s appeal of a lower court order that had paused efforts to dismantle the bureau. As a result, the administration remains temporarily barred from gutting the agency while litigation continues. The legal fight has stretched on for months, during which the CFPB has been largely sidelined. Congress originally created the CFPB after the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices by banks, lenders, and other financial companies. Its mission includes enforcing federal consumer financial laws and preventing the kinds of predatory conduct that helped trigger the financial collapse. Supporters of the agency, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, praised the ruling as necessary to shield families from financial harm.

Critics within the Trump administration have argued the CFPB is politically motivated (as protecting consumers from predatory financial practices is political, apparently) and should be eliminated, though they have also claimed in court that some version of the agency would remain. Complicating matters further, the CFPB faces a funding dispute over whether it can draw money from the Federal Reserve, raising concerns that it could run out of operating funds.

US appeals court tosses decision allowing Trump mass firings at consumer bureau | Reuters

Full DC Circuit Will Review Trump’s Bid to Dismantle CFPB (2)

A group of leading medical organizations asked a federal judge to allow their lawsuit challenging vaccine policy changes under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to move forward. The groups argue that recent actions by Kennedy and the Department of Health and Human Services will reduce vaccination rates and endanger public health. They point to a directive removing COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for pregnant women and children without advance notice or explanation. The lawsuit also challenges Kennedy’s decision to dismiss 17 experts from a CDC advisory panel and replace them with members more aligned with his views. That reconstituted panel later voted to scale back broad vaccine recommendations, including limiting COVID-19 shots to shared decision-making with doctors and eliminating universal recommendations for certain childhood vaccines.

The plaintiffs claim the panel was unlawfully reshaped in violation of federal law requiring advisory committees to be balanced and free from improper influence. Government lawyers argue the medical groups lack standing because the CDC’s guidance merely advises consultation with doctors and does not directly harm them. The plaintiffs counter that they have been injured by having to divert resources to help doctors navigate confusing and abrupt policy shifts. The judge indicated skepticism toward the government’s standing argument, particularly in light of statements suggesting doctors could face liability for deviating from CDC guidance. A ruling on whether the case can proceed is expected before a scheduled January hearing.

US medical groups urge judge to allow challenge to Kennedy-backed vaccine policies to proceed | Reuters

A federal appeals court allowed President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., to remain in place while legal challenges continue. A three-judge panel said the administration was likely to succeed in defending the deployment, temporarily blocking a lower court order that would have ended it. The ruling gives Trump an interim victory as he claims broad authority to use troops for domestic law enforcement. The deployment began earlier in the year and expanded after two Guard members were shot near the White House. The judges emphasized that Washington, D.C.’s unique status—because it is not a state—strengthens presidential authority there. District officials who sued to stop the deployment said the decision is preliminary and does not resolve the underlying legal questions. The White House praised the ruling as confirmation of the president’s lawful powers and credited the deployment with improving public safety. The case comes amid broader disputes over Trump’s efforts to deploy troops in several major cities despite objections from local and state leaders. Lower courts have generally been skeptical of those efforts, rejecting claims that protests against federal immigration enforcement qualify as rebellions. The Supreme Court is widely expected to weigh in on the scope of presidential power in this area.

US appeals court says Trump’s National Guard deployment in DC may continue | Reuters

Trump’s DC Troop Deployment Gets Extension From US Appeals Court

A federal judge allowed President Donald Trump to continue work on a proposed White House ballroom, rejecting an emergency request from preservation advocates to immediately halt the project. The judge ruled that the National Trust failed to show imminent, irreparable harm that would justify stopping construction at this early stage. However, he cautioned that the government may be required to reverse certain underground work if it ends up locking in a specific design. The project involves replacing the demolished East Wing with a large ballroom that would be significantly bigger than prior White House renovations. Trump has described the ballroom as a privately funded project and recently increased its estimated cost. Preservationists argue the administration moved forward without required public input and bypassed federal planning and design review processes. The government countered that the design is still in flux and that above-ground construction will not begin for several months. Relying on those representations, the judge found no immediate risk of irreversible aesthetic damage. He scheduled another hearing to reconsider whether the project should be paused as the lawsuit continues. For now, construction may proceed while the court reviews whether the administration complied with historic preservation and planning laws.

Judge allows Trump’s ballroom project to proceed for now | Reuters

On this day in legal history, December 17, 1969, the U.S. Air Force officially terminated Project Blue Book, its two-decade-long investigation into unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Launched in 1952 during a peak in UFO sightings and Cold War anxiety, Project Blue Book reviewed over 12,000 reports of aerial phenomena. The Air Force concluded that most sightings could be explained by natural phenomena, aircraft, or hoaxes, and found no evidence of extraterrestrial activity or threats to national security. With its closure, the government effectively stepped back from public-facing UFO investigations, although some believe military interest continued behind closed doors.

Legally, the end of Project Blue Book catalyzed decades of litigation and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, as citizens, journalists, and researchers sought access to government-held UFO data. The skeptical legal view has often emphasized that classified information typically relates to military technology or surveillance programs, not alien spacecraft. Despite popular culture’s fixation on extraterrestrials, courts have routinely deferred to executive branch claims of national security in resisting full transparency.

While the project’s conclusion did not trigger direct legislation, it helped shape a legal culture around government secrecy, classification standards, and the public’s right to know. It also fueled persistent legal tension between conspiratorial narratives and evidentiary standards. As UFOs—now reframed as “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAPs)—have resurfaced in congressional hearings in recent years, Blue Book remains a touchstone for the limits of disclosure and the enduring gap between public curiosity and provable claims.

Skepticism remains warranted: decades later, no clear evidence has emerged to support the claim of extraterrestrial contact—despite tens of thousands of pages released and re-litigated under FOIA.

U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston expressed openness to again striking down a Trump policy that allows for the rapid deportation of migrants to third countries without meaningful notice or an opportunity to raise fears of persecution or torture. The case challenges Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policies that permit deportation to countries other than a migrant’s country of origin, often with as little as six hours’ notice. Judge Murphy had previously issued an injunction in April to halt such deportations, arguing they violated due process, but the Supreme Court paused that order in June via its “shadow docket” without providing detailed reasoning.

Despite acknowledging the likely involvement of the Supreme Court again, Murphy indicated that he may still rule on the merits of the case, though any decision would likely be temporarily stayed. The lawsuit, a class action, targets a DHS memo from March and guidance from July that permits deportations based on “credible” diplomatic assurances. Plaintiffs argue these policies fall short of constitutional protections, while the Justice Department insists migrants already have opportunities to raise objections during proceedings. The judge criticized the lack of clarity from the Supreme Court’s earlier intervention and emphasized the importance of due process in removal proceedings.

US judge open to again striking down Trump policy on third-country deportations | Reuters

A Trump-appointed federal appeals court judge has argued that constitutional rights do not extend to immigrants who entered the United States unlawfully, a position he laid out in a partial dissent in a Second Amendment case. Sixth Circuit Judge Amul Thapar agreed with upholding a federal ban on firearm possession by undocumented immigrants but rejected the majority’s reasoning. Instead, he argued the case should have been resolved by declaring that only U.S. citizens are included in “the people” protected by the Constitution. Thapar relied heavily on the Constitution’s preamble and an originalist reading of history, asserting that the Founders never intended constitutional protections to apply to non-citizens, especially those unlawfully present.

The majority opinion rejected that framing, pointing to Supreme Court precedent recognizing that non-citizens who develop substantial connections to the country may invoke constitutional rights. Thapar went further, suggesting that even the First and Fourth Amendments were not originally meant to protect non-citizens. The case arose from a challenge by a Guatemalan national convicted of unlawfully possessing firearms, but Thapar’s reasoning reached far beyond gun regulation. His dissent echoes arguments long advanced by the Trump administration and aligns with his status as a former Trump Supreme Court shortlist candidate.

From my perspective, this is a racist, xenophobic, and profoundly ahistorical take that threatens to usher in a shameful new era of American jurisprudence. It reflects either a fundamental misunderstanding of constitutional law or a wanton, careerist obsequiousness to Trumpism, delivered with the unmistakable tone of someone auditioning for a Supreme Court seat while extolling the flavor of boot. Judge Thapar is an embarrassment to the bench.

Judge Thapar’s theory represents a fundamental shift away from the traditional understanding of constitutional rights as inherent and inalienable—that is, rights present in every individual that the government is bound to respect, not rights it doles out at its discretion. By asserting that non-citizens, especially those here unlawfully, are not part of “the people” and therefore not entitled to constitutional protections, Thapar effectively treats these rights as government-bestowed privileges rather than limits on state power–that should frighten citizens, as well.

But if rights are inherent, as our legal tradition holds, and yet non-citizens don’t possess them, the implication is clear: they are being denied not because of legal status, but because of a presumed inferiority. That’s not a theory of constitutional law—it’s a supremacist framework gussied up in originalist language.

Trump-appointed judge argues US Constitution’s rights do not extend to non-citizens | Reuters

3-D animator Eric Ryder filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in California federal court against Disney and director James Cameron, alleging that the 2022 film Avatar: The Way of Water copied substantial elements from his science fiction story KRZ. Ryder claims he collaborated with Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment in the late 1990s on developing a film based on KRZ, and that key features of Avatar 2—including anthropomorphic beings, a vast oceanic world, and an exploitative Earth corporation mining a moon called Europa—mirror those from his work.

Ryder previously sued over the first Avatar film in 2011, but that case was dismissed when a California state court ruled Cameron had created Avatar before Ryder submitted his material. Ryder insists this new case is not an attempt to relitigate the past, but rather to address new alleged acts of copying specific to The Way of Water, such as the central plot point involving an animal-based substance that extends human life, which he says did not appear in the original Avatar.

Ryder is seeking at least $500 million in damages and a court order to block the release of the upcoming Avatar 3: Fire and Ash. His lawyer described the alleged copying as “blatant and egregious.” Disney and Lightstorm have not yet commented publicly on the lawsuit.

Disney, James Cameron sued for copyright infringement over ‘Avatar’ | Reuters

On December 16, 1936, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, a case that would become a cornerstone in constitutional law and mark a significant turning point in the Court’s approach to economic regulation. At issue was the constitutionality of Washington State’s minimum wage law for women, which had been challenged by the West Coast Hotel Company after Elsie Parrish, a maid, sued for back wages.

The case arrived during a period when the Court had consistently struck down New Deal-era economic regulations, relying on a broad interpretation of “freedom of contract” under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Earlier cases like Lochner v. New York had enshrined a judicial skepticism toward government interference in labor and wage arrangements.

However, in Parrish, the Court’s posture shifted. The eventual decision, handed down in 1937, upheld the minimum wage law, effectively signaling the end of the so-called Lochner era. The majority reasoned that the state had a legitimate interest in protecting the health and well-being of workers, particularly vulnerable low-wage employees.

Justice Owen Roberts, who had previously sided with the Court’s conservative bloc, voted with the majority—his move later came to be known as “the switch in time that saved nine,” as it followed President Roosevelt’s controversial proposal to expand the Court.

The decision validated broader governmental authority to regulate the economy, and it cleared the path for many New Deal policies to take root. It also marked a recalibration in the balance between individual economic liberty and the public interest.

West Coast Hotel remains a landmark case in US constitutional history, exemplifying how judicial interpretation can evolve in response to changing social and economic realities.

The 2025 tax-and-spending law introduced an overtime tax deduction that was billed as relief for overworked, working-class Americans. But the reality shaping up for the 2026 filing season is far more complicated—and far less beneficial—than its political framing suggested. The deduction does not exempt overtime pay from taxation; instead, it offers a narrow, post-withholding deduction that workers must calculate themselves, often without support from their employers or sufficient guidance from the IRS.

The structure of the deduction is flawed: it only applies to the “half” portion of time-and-a-half pay and is capped at $12,500. For lower-wage workers to take full advantage, they must clock extraordinary amounts of overtime—something not feasible for many. Meanwhile, employers are actively disincentivized from helping employees understand or claim the benefit. If they report eligibility and make an error, they could face legal penalties, while doing nothing carries no risk. The system thus favors inaction and leaves employees to fend for themselves.

Without clear W-2 guidance or safe harbor rules, the deduction becomes accessible primarily to those with tax professionals or payroll tools—functioning as a quiet subsidy for the well-advised. For others, it’s a bureaucratic maze with limited reward. To prevent administrative failure, the IRS should at least provide a legal safe harbor for employers and model W-2 language. A more ambitious fix would be a flat-rate standard deduction for eligible workers, reducing complexity. Until then, this “relief” policy punishes transparency, discourages compliance, and places the greatest burden on those with the fewest resources.

Trump Overtime Tax Break More a Political Tagline Than Tax Relief

Donald Trump filed a lawsuit in federal court in Miami seeking up to $10 billion in damages from the BBC, alleging defamation and violation of Florida’s unfair trade practices law. The suit stems from an edited segment in a BBC Panorama documentary that combined parts of Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech—specifically his calls to “march on the Capitol” and to “fight like hell”—while omitting language where he encouraged peaceful protest. Trump claims the edit falsely portrayed him as inciting violence and caused substantial reputational and financial harm.

The BBC had previously admitted to an error in editing, apologized publicly, and acknowledged the clip could give a misleading impression. However, the broadcaster argues that there is no legal basis for the lawsuit. UK officials have backed the BBC’s position, saying it has taken appropriate steps. Despite this, Trump’s legal team claims the broadcaster has shown no real remorse and continues to engage in what they describe as politically motivated misrepresentation.

The documentary in question aired before the 2024 U.S. presidential election and triggered significant fallout for the BBC, including the resignations of its top two executives. While the program did not air in the U.S., it was available via BritBox—a BBC-controlled streaming service—and possibly distributed in North America through licensing deals with Canadian firm Blue Ant Media.

Legal experts say Trump faces a high bar in U.S. courts under First Amendment standards. He must prove not only that the edited content was false and defamatory, but also that the BBC acted with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth. The BBC may argue that the content was substantially accurate and did not materially harm Trump’s reputation. Other networks, including CBS and ABC, previously settled defamation claims with Trump after his 2024 election victory.

Trump seeks up to $10 billion in damages from BBC over editing of January 6 speech | Reuters

U.S. law school enrollment surged 8% in 2025, reaching a 13-year high with 42,817 first-year students, according to new data from the American Bar Association. The increase follows an 18% rise in law school applicants and continues a multi-year upward trend, fueled by a mix of economic uncertainty, political intensity, and a growing interest in legal careers. The sluggish job market for college graduates, coupled with the centrality of legal issues during Donald Trump’s second presidential term, has contributed to renewed interest in law degrees.

A significant number of prospective students also cited personal and social motivations. A survey of 15,000 LSAT takers found rising interest in using law degrees to “help others” and “advocate for social justice,” with both reasons seeing double-digit percentage increases over last year. The pool of LSAT test-takers has grown as well, signaling likely continued enrollment growth in 2026.

Some elite law schools, including Harvard, enrolled their largest first-year classes in over a decade. However, the long-term outlook remains uncertain. Legal employment has been strong in recent years, with the class of 2024 posting record job placement, but experts warn that advances in artificial intelligence could reduce demand for new associates—particularly at large firms offering high salaries. Smaller sectors like government and public interest law may struggle to absorb excess graduates if hiring slows.

US job market, politics fuel 8% surge in law school enrollment | Reuters

Donald Trump’s controversial plan to build a $300 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the White House grounds is facing its first legal challenge in federal court. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued Trump and several federal agencies, alleging that the demolition of the East Wing to make way for the ballroom violated multiple preservation laws and bypassed required reviews. The group is seeking a temporary restraining order to halt ongoing construction, citing irreversible damage to the historic structure.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has made high-profile aesthetic changes to the White House, including installing gold accents in the Oval Office and converting the Rose Garden lawn into a patio modeled after Mar-a-Lago. But the scale and visibility of the ballroom project has drawn particularly intense criticism, especially as heavy machinery was seen dismantling the 120-year-old East Wing.

The lawsuit argues that no president, including Trump, has the unilateral authority to alter protected parts of the White House without following procedures involving public input and reviews by agencies like the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts.

The administration defended the project as lawful, citing historical precedent and presidential authority to modify the executive residence. It emphasized that above-ground construction was not scheduled to begin until April, rendering emergency relief unnecessary. Still, the National Trust contends that public consultation and proper approvals are not optional and must be upheld regardless of the project’s timeline or presidential status.

Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom makeover faces day in court | Reuters

A federal judge has ruled that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) must extend the deadline for states to implement new immigration-related restrictions on food aid benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The decision, issued by U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai in Oregon, came in response to a lawsuit brought by 21 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia. The states argued they were not given adequate time or clarity to comply with the new rules, which were tied to President Donald Trump’s domestic policy legislation passed in July.

The USDA had initially set a November 1 deadline for states to comply with the restrictions, which limit SNAP benefits to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. However, the guidance issued on October 31 created confusion by implying that some lawful residents—such as those who entered the U.S. as asylees or refugees—were ineligible, contrary to what the law allowed. The USDA later revised the guidance, but still maintained the November 1 deadline.

Judge Kasubhai extended the grace period for compliance until April 9, finding the original deadline arbitrary and harmful to state budgets. He noted that the USDA’s sudden guidance rollout undermined states’ ability to respond and eroded trust in federal-state cooperation. The ruling blocks the USDA from penalizing states that don’t meet the earlier deadline while the lawsuit proceeds.

USDA must give states more time to implement new food aid restrictions, judge rules | Reuters

On December 15, 1791, the Bill of Rights was officially ratified, marking a foundational moment in American legal history. With Virginia becoming the crucial eleventh state to approve the measure, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution achieved the three-fourths majority required for adoption. These amendments were crafted in response to fears that the newly formed federal government might trample on individual freedoms, a concern strongly voiced by the Anti-Federalists during the Constitution’s ratification debates. Drafted primarily by James Madison, the Bill of Rights was intended to secure essential civil liberties and limit government power.

The amendments enshrine core protections such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press, the right to bear arms, and safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures. They also provide important rights to those accused of crimes, including the right to a fair trial, protection against self-incrimination, and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. At the time, these provisions applied only to the federal government, but their scope was later expanded through the Incorporation Doctrine using the Fourteenth Amendment.

The ratification of the Bill of Rights represented a political compromise but ultimately became a defining element of American constitutional identity. Over the centuries, courts have invoked these amendments in countless rulings, from free speech cases to gun rights and due process protections. The Bill of Rights not only shapes modern legal debates but also remains a symbol of the nation’s enduring commitment to individual liberty and the rule of law. Its ratification on this day in 1791 continues to influence how justice is understood and delivered in the United States.

Judge Hannah Dugan of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court is on trial for allegedly obstructing an immigration arrest in her courtroom, a case seen as a test of Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies. Federal prosecutors accuse Dugan of helping a Mexican migrant, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, evade arrest by redirecting ICE agents and escorting the defendant through a non-public exit after his hearing. Dugan, who has been suspended from the bench, has pleaded not guilty to charges of concealing a person from arrest and obstructing federal proceedings.

Prosecutors claim she acted corruptly and misled law enforcement, allegedly showing anger when she learned of ICE’s presence and insisting a judicial warrant was needed. Dugan’s defense argues she acted in good faith, following courthouse policy designed to handle ICE encounters after previous controversial arrests. The trial highlights growing legal and political tensions around courthouse arrests, which critics say intimidate immigrants and undermine trust in the legal system. The outcome could influence how far judges and local officials can go in pushing back against federal immigration actions.

Wisconsin judge faces trial for stopping courtroom arrest of migrant in Trump crackdown | Reuters

California filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for cutting over $33 million in federal grants intended for commercial vehicle safety programs. The U.S. Department of Transportation, led by Secretary Sean Duffy, justified the funding termination by claiming California failed to properly enforce English proficiency requirements for truck drivers. California argues its standards align with federal rules and called the decision unlawful and harmful to public safety and the economy.

The lawsuit comes amid broader efforts by the Trump administration to crack down on non-English-speaking and non-U.S. citizen truck drivers. This includes halting commercial driver visas and threatening similar funding cuts in states like New York and Minnesota. The administration has also targeted Democrat-led states for other transportation-related penalties. In California’s case, the withheld funds were designated for safety inspections, audits, traffic enforcement, and education programs.

California contends that its licensed drivers are involved in significantly fewer fatal crashes than the national average, challenging the administration’s justification. The legal dispute reflects escalating tensions between federal agencies and Democratic states over immigration and transportation enforcement.

California sues Trump administration over terminated transportation grants | Reuters

A federal judge ruled that evidence seized from Daniel Richman, a former attorney for ex-FBI Director James Comey, was wrongfully retained by prosecutors, presenting a hurdle for any new charges against Comey. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the Department of Justice to return the files but allowed a sealed copy to remain with the court should prosecutors later obtain a valid warrant. Richman had filed a lawsuit claiming the DOJ had improperly held onto materials seized during an investigation that ended in 2021 without charges.

While the judge found the DOJ’s actions amounted to an unreasonable seizure, she declined to prevent the department from pursuing future leads based on the information already reviewed. The seized files had been used earlier this year to support an indictment against Comey, accusing him of making false statements and obstructing Congress over his 2020 testimony.

That indictment, along with one against New York Attorney General Letitia James, was dismissed last month after it was found the prosecutor involved had been unlawfully appointed. The judge’s ruling now complicates the DOJ’s ability to revive its case against Comey, a frequent critic of Donald Trump and a central figure in past investigations into Trump’s conduct.

Judge says Comey evidence was wrongfully retained, creating hurdle for new charges | Reuters

A California jury has ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $40 million to two women who claimed its talc-based baby powder caused their ovarian cancer. The jury awarded $18 million to Monica Kent and $22 million to Deborah Schultz and her husband, finding the company failed to warn consumers despite allegedly knowing of the product’s risks for decades. Both women testified that they used the powder for over 40 years and have undergone extensive cancer treatments since their diagnoses in 2014 and 2018.

J&J denies the product causes cancer and plans to appeal the verdict, calling it an “aberrant” outcome. The company points out that no major U.S. health agency has definitively linked talc to ovarian cancer and argues that plaintiffs’ claims rely solely on legal arguments rather than scientific consensus.

This is the first talc trial to move forward since J&J’s latest bankruptcy attempt, aimed at resolving over 67,000 similar lawsuits, was rejected by the courts. The company previously stopped selling talc-based baby powder in the U.S. in 2020. While it has faced some large verdicts—including a $4.69 billion award in a past case—it has also won dismissals and reductions on appeal. In addition to ovarian cancer claims, J&J is also facing suits linking its talc products to mesothelioma, with some recent verdicts exceeding $900 million.

Jury orders Johnson & Johnson to pay $40 million to two women in latest talc trial | Reuters

On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Bush v. Gore, effectively ending the Florida recount and resolving the 2000 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush. The per curiam opinion held that the Florida Supreme Court’s method for ordering a manual recount violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment due to inconsistent standards across counties. The Court also ruled that there was not enough time to implement a constitutionally valid recount before the deadline for certifying electors.

The decision was one of the most controversial in the Court’s history. It was split 5-4 along ideological lines, with the majority—led by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and O’Connor—arguing that allowing the recount to continue would irreparably harm Bush. The dissent, written by Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter, criticized the majority for intervening in a state election process and undermining public confidence in judicial neutrality.

The ruling effectively awarded Florida’s 25 electoral votes to Bush, giving him 271 electoral votes—one more than needed to win the presidency—despite losing the national popular vote to Al Gore. The case remains a flashpoint in debates over judicial activism, the politicization of the courts, and the role of federal courts in state election matters. It also raised enduring questions about election integrity and the limits of judicial power in resolving political disputes.

The watchdog group American Oversight filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Commerce and Justice Departments, demanding records of legal arrangements between the Trump administration and nine major law firms. The group had submitted eight Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in October seeking details about agreements in which the firms pledged to provide nearly $940 million in pro bono or discounted legal services to the federal government. After receiving inadequate responses, the group took legal action to compel the release of any related contracts, communications, or internal legal analyses.

The agreements were announced by Trump earlier in the year on social media, shortly after he issued executive orders targeting law firms for their previous political and diversity-related work. American Oversight is particularly concerned about whether the deals were transparent and whether they might have influenced government policy or enforcement decisions. Several firms—Kirkland & Ellis, Paul Weiss, Simpson Thacher, and Skadden Arps—were reported to have been involved in trade matters or other projects with the administration. None of the firms or the agencies responded to requests for comment.

This lawsuit follows a similar legal action by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, which alleged in October that related federal record requests had been improperly denied. Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers have also asked several of the firms to explain their government work, but the firms declined, citing client confidentiality and discretion in matter selection.

Trump administration sued for records of law firm deals | Reuters

A federal judge blocked a renewed attempt by immigration authorities to detain Kilmar Abrego, just one day after his court-ordered release from ICE custody in Pennsylvania. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis had previously ordered Abrego’s temporary release, but an immigration judge quickly issued a new directive requiring him to report back to detention by the following morning. In response, Abrego’s attorneys filed an emergency request to stop the re-detention, which Xinis granted.

In her ruling, Judge Xinis emphasized that judicial decisions must be respected and cannot be reversed hastily without due process. Abrego’s case has drawn national attention, serving as a high-profile example of what critics view as the Trump administration’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement tactics. Originally deported in March to El Salvador under disputed circumstances, Abrego was returned to the U.S. in June to face charges related to human smuggling.

Supporters argue his case reflects serious due process violations, while administration officials have maintained he poses a public safety risk. The legal tug-of-war over Abrego’s detention has become emblematic of broader legal and political conflicts surrounding immigration enforcement and civil liberties under the Trump administration.

Judge blocks new effort to detain Kilmar Abrego | Reuters

A federal judge in Boston ruled that the Trump administration acted unlawfully when it attempted to terminate a FEMA program designed to help states prepare for natural disasters. U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns sided with a coalition of 20 mostly Democratic-led states, finding that the administration overstepped its authority by trying to cancel the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program and redirect its funds elsewhere without congressional approval.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, had labeled the program wasteful and politically driven when it moved to end it in April. Judge Stearns rejected that rationale, emphasizing that Congress—not the executive branch—has the power to decide how federal funds are spent. He previously issued an order in August blocking FEMA from diverting more than $4 billion in BRIC funding. In this latest decision, he ordered the program reinstated and required FEMA to take immediate steps to undo its termination.

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell praised the ruling, stating it would save lives by preserving funding for critical infrastructure improvements meant to prevent disaster-related harm. The Department of Homeland Security, in contrast, denied that it had ended BRIC and accused the court of siding with a politicized narrative, claiming the program had been misused by the Biden administration.

Since its launch, BRIC has approved over $4.5 billion in grants for nearly 2,000 disaster mitigation projects, many located in vulnerable coastal states. The lawsuit, led by states like Washington and Massachusetts, argued that canceling the program delayed or canceled hundreds of vital community projects aimed at reducing disaster risk.

Trump administration unlawfully canceled disaster prevention program, US judge rules | Reuters

President Trump announced an executive order threatening to withhold federal broadband funding from states with AI regulations deemed obstructive to national technological dominance. The order targets state-level laws that the administration argues create a fragmented, burdensome environment for AI innovation, particularly for startups. Trump emphasized the need for a single, centralized regulatory system, positioning the U.S. to compete more aggressively with China in the AI sector.

The order authorizes the Commerce Department to review state AI laws and restrict access to the $42 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment fund for non-compliant states. It also criticizes anti-discrimination measures in states like Colorado, claiming such laws inject “ideological bias” into AI development. While the administration supports certain safeguards, such as child protection, it aims to dismantle what it sees as excessive oversight.

Critics argue the move undermines state authority and risks public safety. Representative Don Beyer warned the order violates the 10th Amendment and discourages meaningful congressional action. State leaders from both parties have defended their right to regulate AI, citing the federal government’s inaction on tech legislation. States like New York, California, and Florida have already enacted laws addressing AI’s risks, from data transparency to deepfake bans.

Trump threatens funding for states over AI regulations | Reuters

This week’s closing theme is by Abigail Leahey and her classmates.

This week, we are proud to present a performance of singular clarity, youthful ambition, and the product of more than a little bit of dedicated practice: The First Scale March, recorded live on December 10th at a school Winter Concert. Its thematic simplicity belies its pedagogical complexity: it is equal parts warm-up and war cry. The holidays are upon us.

The featured artist, Abigail, is one of several violins. She was born in New Jersey in 2014 and has been defying expectations and delighting her family ever since. A gifted writer, illustrator, softball player, and—crucially—violinist, she began studying the instrument in earnest in early 2025. In a bold display of ambidextrous courage, she agreed to learn the instrument right-handed.

Abigail’s musical sensibility combines the raw urgency of a student recital with the unmistakable rhythmic intensity of a group trying very hard to play the same tempo at the same time. Her phrasing evokes a deep respect for the discipline of practice; she has come a long way—and is still going.

We are honored to showcase this piece as a representative work from a performer at the dawn of her musical journey, backed by a supporting cast of equally determined string players. With hearts full and bows raised, they march forward—one note at a time.

On December 11, 2008, Bernard L. Madoff was arrested by federal agents and charged with securities fraud, marking the start of one of the most consequential white-collar crime cases in American legal history. Madoff, a former NASDAQ chairman and respected figure in the investment world, confessed to running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of investors—individuals, charities, and institutional clients—out of an estimated $65 billion. The legal scheme unraveled when Madoff admitted to his sons that the business was “one big lie,” prompting them to alert authorities. Prosecutors swiftly brought charges under multiple statutes, including securities fraud under 15 U.S.C. § 78j(b), mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, perjury, and false statements.

The Department of Justice pursued criminal charges while the SEC, heavily criticized for prior inaction, launched civil enforcement actions under the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Madoff waived indictment and pleaded guilty on March 12, 2009, to 11 felony counts without a plea deal. He was sentenced to 150 years in federal prison—the statutory maximum—and ordered to forfeit $170.8 billion, reflecting the full scope of the fraud. The case catalyzed intense scrutiny of the SEC’s oversight failures and led to internal reforms within the agency, including new whistleblower protections and enhanced enforcement procedures.

In the bankruptcy proceedings under SIPA (Securities Investor Protection Act), trustee Irving Picard was appointed to recover funds for victims, using clawback lawsuits under fraudulent transfer laws to retrieve ill-gotten gains from those who had profited—wittingly or not. The legal theories underpinning those suits, including the application of actual and constructive fraud standards, sparked complex litigation that continues to shape bankruptcy and securities jurisprudence. Madoff’s arrest also prompted Congress to review gaps in financial regulation, laying groundwork for reforms later codified in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010.

Jury selection began in the federal trial of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan, who is accused of helping a Mexican migrant avoid arrest by U.S. immigration agents. The case, brought by the Trump administration’s Justice Department, charges Dugan with concealing a person from arrest and obstructing federal proceedings, alleging she deliberately diverted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and allowed the migrant, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, to exit through a non-public courthouse door following a domestic violence hearing.

Federal prosecutors argue that Dugan acted corruptly, citing her visible anger upon learning that ICE agents were present and her claim that a judicial warrant was required for the arrest—an assertion prosecutors say was false. Flores-Ruiz was ultimately arrested outside the courthouse after a brief chase.

Dugan’s defense contends that she was navigating unclear rules around courthouse immigration enforcement and had sought guidance from court leadership days earlier. Her legal team maintains she was not trying to obstruct justice but rather to understand what rules applied.

The case illustrates the broader tension between local judicial discretion and federal immigration enforcement under Trump’s expanded deportation policies, which have included more aggressive operations in local courthouses. Critics argue such tactics deter immigrants from accessing courts and undermine public confidence in the legal system.

Dugan, a judge since 2016 and formerly head of Catholic Charities in Milwaukee, has been suspended from the bench pending the outcome of the trial. Her prosecution echoes an earlier Trump-era case against a Massachusetts judge accused of similar conduct—charges that were later dropped during the Biden administration.

Wisconsin judge on trial as Trump administration targets immigration enforcement resistance | Reuters

The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Interior Department to block its decision to feature President Donald Trump’s image on the 2026 America the Beautiful national parks annual pass. The group argues the move violates the Federal Lands Recreational Enhancement Act of 2004, which requires the pass to display the winning photograph from a public contest depicting natural scenery or wildlife in a national park or forest.

This year’s winning photo—a landscape of Glacier National Park—was allegedly discarded in favor of a close-up image of Trump, posed beside George Washington, without any new contest or congressional approval. The lawsuit calls the switch an unlawful act of self-promotion and criticizes it as an attempt to turn a public symbol into a personal branding tool.

Adding to the controversy, the lawsuit claims that the Glacier photo was demoted to a new $250 pass for foreign visitors, part of Trump’s newly introduced “America-first” admissions system. The updated pricing structure and design were part of a broader Interior Department announcement touting “modernization” of park access.

The lawsuit also highlights changes to the free admission calendar, noting that Trump’s birthday (June 14) was added as a holiday, while existing free days honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and Juneteenth were eliminated. These shifts coincide with Trump’s efforts to slash the national parks budget and workforce while raising fees for international visitors.

Lawsuit seeks to keep Trump’s face off of national parks annual pass | Reuters

In a piece for Forbes this week I unpacked the misleading claim that Social Security is no longer taxed under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Despite bold headlines and political messaging to the contrary, Social Security remains taxable, just as it has been since 1983. What the bill actually includes is an expanded senior-specific deduction—$6,000 for individuals and $12,000 for couples—that may reduce taxable income, but doesn’t isolate or exempt Social Security from taxation in any way.

The structure of Social Security taxation—where up to 85% of benefits can be taxed for higher-income seniors—remains untouched. What changed is that some seniors, depending on income and deductions, might now end up paying less tax, including on Social Security, not because the income is tax-exempt, but because the overall taxable income has been reduced. This is a fungible deduction, applicable to any income source, not a targeted policy shift.

The White House’s messaging reframes a broad-based, temporary deduction as a specific, permanent tax relief for seniors, creating confusion. While some retirees may see a tax reduction, the underlying rules that govern when and how Social Security is taxed have not changed, and inflation-adjusted thresholds that pull more seniors into taxability remain. The deduction itself expires in 2028, unlike other OBBBA provisions that benefit wealthier taxpayers and corporations.

The element worth highlighting is the difference between a deduction and an exemption, and how political messaging often blurs this. Deductions reduce taxable income; exemptions remove specific income from taxation entirely. In this case, branding a general deduction as a Social Security exemption is both legally inaccurate and politically strategic—obscuring the truth behind a familiar and emotionally charged issue.

The Truth About ‘No Tax On Social Security’

The estate of an 83-year-old woman filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that their chatbot, ChatGPT, played a central role in a tragic murder-suicide in Connecticut. The suit claims that Stein-Erik Soelberg, a 56-year-old man experiencing delusions, had been interacting for months with GPT-4o, which allegedly validated and intensified his paranoid beliefs, ultimately leading him to kill his mother, Suzanne Adams, before taking his own life.

The complaint, filed in California Superior Court, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of product liability, negligence, and wrongful death, arguing that the chatbot systematically encouraged Soelberg’s psychosis—affirming fantasies about divine missions, assassination attempts, and even identifying his mother as an operative. The plaintiffs argue that Microsoft shares liability because it benefited directly from the deployment of GPT-4o and played a role in bringing the model to market.

This is the first known lawsuit to link ChatGPT to a homicide, though it follows a growing number of legal actions that claim the AI system has fostered delusions and contributed to suicides. OpenAI denies wrongdoing, emphasizing efforts to improve mental health safeguards and noting that newer models have significantly reduced inappropriate responses in emotionally sensitive conversations.

The suit also names OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a defendant and cites Soelberg’s social media posts as evidence of his deteriorating mental state and dependence on the chatbot. The plaintiffs seek monetary damages and a court order to compel OpenAI to implement stronger safety measures. The law firm behind the case, Edelson PC, is also representing a similar lawsuit involving a California teenager’s suicide allegedly linked to ChatGPT.

OpenAI, Microsoft Sued Over Murder-Suicide Blamed on ChatGPT

On this day in legal history, December 10, 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gregory v. City of Chicago, a case involving the arrest of civil rights demonstrators under a local disorderly conduct ordinance. The demonstrators, led by comedian and activist Dick Gregory, had peacefully marched from Chicago’s City Hall to the home of Mayor Richard J. Daley to protest school segregation. Though the march itself remained nonviolent, an unruly crowd of onlookers gathered, prompting police to demand that the demonstrators disperse. When they refused, Gregory and others were arrested and later convicted of disorderly conduct.

The key legal issue before the Court was whether the demonstrators’ First Amendment rights had been violated when they were punished for the hostile reactions of bystanders. In a per curiam opinion issued the following year, the Court reversed the convictions, holding that the peaceful demonstrators could not be held criminally liable for the disruptive behavior of others. Justice Black, concurring, emphasized that the First Amendment protects peaceful expression even in the face of public opposition or discomfort.

The case is a critical reaffirmation of the “heckler’s veto” doctrine — the principle that the government cannot suppress speech simply because it provokes a hostile reaction. It underscored the constitutional duty to protect unpopular or provocative speech, especially in the context of civil rights protests. The Court’s decision also reinforced the due process requirement that criminal statutes must be applied in a way that is not arbitrary or overbroad.

Gregory v. City of Chicago remains a foundational case in First Amendment jurisprudence and protest law, balancing public order concerns against the fundamental rights of assembly and expression.

The Trump administration’s proposed repeal of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) definition of “harm” could significantly weaken protections for imperiled species in federally managed forests, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. The change would limit the ESA’s scope to cover only direct physical injury to species, excluding habitat destruction from regulation. Environmental groups argue this could devastate species like the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet, both of which depend on old-growth forests increasingly targeted for logging under recent federal mandates. Legal experts warn that without habitat protections, ESA enforcement becomes largely ineffective, as species cannot survive without suitable environments. The rollback is expected to reduce permitting requirements for developers and extractive industries, a move welcomed by business groups but opposed by conservationists.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service initially defined “harm” in 1981 to include habitat degradation, but now argues that interpretation overextends the ESA’s intent. Logging has already surged in owl and murrelet habitats, especially in Oregon, with timber sales up 20% in 2025. Population declines among spotted owls—down 70% since 1990—are linked to habitat loss and competition from invasive barred owls. Critics of the repeal emphasize that previous conservation plans, like the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, successfully slowed species decline by curbing old-growth logging. Industry groups argue the ESA has been “weaponized” to block necessary forest management and wildfire prevention. Meanwhile, lawsuits are brewing on both sides: environmentalists are expected to challenge the rollback, while timber interests seek to overturn broader habitat protections.

Trump’s Changes to What Harms Species Adds Risk in Logging Areas

The U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to hear a case involving Joseph Clifton Smith, an Alabama death row inmate whose death sentence was overturned after a federal court found him intellectually disabled. The dispute centers on how courts should interpret multiple IQ scores and other evidence when determining whether someone meets the legal criteria for intellectual disability. This analysis is critical because, in 2002’s Atkins v. Virginia, the Supreme Court held that executing individuals with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Smith, now 55, was sentenced to death for the 1997 killing of Durk Van Dam during a robbery. His IQ scores have ranged from 72 to 78, but the lower court applied the standard margin of error, concluding his true score could fall below 70. The court also found substantial, lifelong deficits in adaptive functioning, including challenges in social skills, independent living, and academics. These findings led the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the decision to set aside his death sentence.

Alabama officials argue the courts erred by evaluating Smith’s IQ scores collectively rather than individually. The Supreme Court previously asked the 11th Circuit to clarify its reasoning, and the court responded that it used a holistic approach, incorporating expert testimony and broader evidence of disability. Now back before the Supreme Court, the case could refine or reshape how courts nationwide assess intellectual disability in capital cases. A ruling is expected by June.

US Supreme Court to weigh death row inmate’s intellectual disability ruling | Reuters

Jack Smith, the former special counsel who led federal prosecutions against Donald Trump, is launching a new law firm alongside three other high-profile former prosecutors: Tim Heaphy, David Harbach, and Thomas Windom. All four attorneys have extensive backgrounds in public service and were involved in major investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling of classified documents. The new firm, expected to begin operations in January, will offer full-service legal work, including litigation and investigations, with a mission rooted in integrity and zealous advocacy.

Heaphy, who previously served as the lead investigator for the House committee probing the January 6th Capitol attack, is leaving his position at Willkie Farr & Gallagher to help found the firm. That firm had drawn criticism for its dealings with Trump but has defended its actions. The Justice Department and members of the new firm declined to comment on the launch.

Smith had dropped the Trump prosecutions following Trump’s 2024 election win, citing the DOJ’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. Trump’s administration has since condemned those cases, firing multiple DOJ and FBI officials and claiming political bias. Smith maintains the investigations were legitimate and nonpartisan. He is expected to testify behind closed doors before the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee next week.

Trump prosecutor Jack Smith to launch firm with ex-Justice Department lawyers | Reuters

The U.S. Justice Department has announced new federal charges against Victoria Eduardovna Dubranova, a Ukrainian national accused of aiding Russian-aligned cyberattack groups targeting critical infrastructure. The latest indictment, filed in Los Angeles, links Dubranova to the group NoName057(16), which prosecutors say has carried out hundreds of cyberattacks globally, many aimed at essential services like food and water systems. These alleged actions are said to pose serious national security risks.

Dubranova had already been extradited to the U.S. earlier in 2025 to face charges related to another Russian-backed hacking group known as CyberArmyofRussia_Reborn (CARR). She now faces conspiracy charges in both cases and has pleaded not guilty. Trials are scheduled for February 2026 (NoName) and April 2026 (CARR). Prosecutors allege both groups receive financial backing from the Russian government, though the Russian embassy has not commented on the case.

The Justice Department emphasized that it will continue to pursue cyber threats tied to state-sponsored or proxy actors. The U.S. State Department is offering up to $10 million for information on NoName operatives and up to $2 million for tips on CARR affiliates.

Justice Department unveils new charges in alleged Russia-backed cyberattacks | Reuters

On this day in legal history, December 9, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in the presidential election with a pivotal order in Bush v. Gore. The Court issued a 5-4 decision to halt the manual recount of ballots in Florida, which had been ordered by the Florida Supreme Court due to the razor-thin margin between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The justices cited potential violations of the Equal Protection Clause, expressing concern that differing standards across counties for evaluating ballots could lead to unequal treatment of voters.

The per curiam order did not decide the case outright but signaled deep skepticism about the recount process, effectively pausing it while the Court considered broader constitutional questions. This stay was the first significant sign that the nation’s highest court might ultimately decide the outcome of the 2000 election. Three days later, the Court would issue its final ruling, effectively awarding Florida’s 25 electoral votes to Bush and securing his presidency.

The December 9 order was controversial not only for its impact on the election but for its constitutional implications. Critics argued the Court had overstepped by interfering in a state-managed election process, while supporters claimed it was necessary to ensure legal consistency and fairness. The episode raised enduring questions about the judiciary’s role in democratic governance and electoral integrity.

The Court’s use of the Equal Protection Clause in this context was novel and has rarely been invoked in similar cases since. The justices themselves noted that the ruling was limited to the specific circumstances of the 2000 election. Nevertheless, the decision left a lasting mark on American law and politics, serving as a stark example of how constitutional interpretation can intersect with high-stakes political conflict.

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a major challenge to federal campaign finance limits in a case involving Vice President JD Vance and two Republican political committees. The case targets restrictions on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates they support, with plaintiffs arguing that these limits violate the First Amendment’s free speech protections. The legal challenge stems from a 2022 lawsuit filed while Vance was running for Senate in Ohio.

At issue are “coordinated party expenditure limits” under the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, which differentiates between independent spending (unlimited) and coordinated spending (restricted). The challengers argue that the current rules unconstitutionally restrict political speech by capping how much support a party can directly offer its candidates. In contrast, Roman Martinez, appointed by the Court to defend the law after the Trump-aligned FEC declined to do so, argues that without these limits, parties could act as loopholes for donors to evade individual contribution caps—raising corruption risks.

A lower court upheld the law, citing a 2001 Supreme Court precedent, but the challengers now argue that subsequent changes in campaign finance law—especially since Citizens United—warrant a reassessment. Three Democratic campaign committees have joined the case to defend the law, represented by attorney Marc Elias. The outcome could significantly reshape the balance between campaign finance regulation and political speech, especially in high-stakes federal elections.

US Supreme Court weighs challenge to campaign spending curbs in JD Vance case | Reuters

Massachusetts is taking legal action to block Kalshi, a prediction-market platform, from allowing residents to bet on sports outcomes, arguing the company is operating as an unlicensed gambling business. Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell is seeking a preliminary injunction in state court to stop Kalshi’s operations in Massachusetts, marking the first time a U.S. state has pursued a court order against the platform. At least nine other states have issued cease-and-desist letters to Kalshi, but none have yet gone this far.

Kalshi offers users the ability to buy “event contracts” on the outcomes of various occurrences—including sporting events—through a platform regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The company maintains that its activities are legal under federal law, claiming its contracts are financial derivatives (swaps), not wagers, and thus fall outside the scope of state gambling laws.

Massachusetts disagrees, alleging that Kalshi is effectively offering sports betting to users, including individuals as young as 18—below the state’s legal betting age of 21. The case highlights a growing tension between federal financial regulation and state-level gambling laws. Kalshi’s position has already faced judicial setbacks: federal judges in Nevada and Maryland have ruled that state gambling laws apply to Kalshi’s operations, though those decisions are under appeal. Meanwhile, the company has pending legal challenges against other states, including New York and Connecticut.

Massachusetts seeks to block Kalshi from operating sports-prediction market | Reuters

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against the Loudoun County School Board in Virginia, challenging its policy that allows transgender students to use locker rooms aligned with their gender identity. The DOJ claims the policy violates the constitutional rights of religious students who object to “gender ideology,” framing the case as a denial of equal protection rooted in religious freedom concerns. This lawsuit is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to roll back transgender-inclusive policies in schools, sports, and the military.

The Loudoun County school board has maintained its gender policy despite federal pressure, citing prior court rulings supporting the rights of transgender students to use facilities aligned with their identity. Critics, including state officials, claim the school has retaliated against students and parents who objected to the policy, particularly in cases involving locker room complaints.

The case represents a new front in an escalating legal and political campaign to police gender expression and access, using constitutional arguments around religion and sex-based rights to challenge trans inclusion in public spaces. This comes amid a broader moral panic over gender identity, echoing the structure and rhetoric of the 1980s satanic panic—but with even more tangible consequences, especially for already marginalized transgender youth. While the panic of that earlier era was rooted in fabricated threats, today’s version is targeting real people, shaping policies that affect their education, safety, and public presence.

US Justice Department sues Virginia school board over transgender use of locker rooms | Reuters

In my latest column for Bloomberg Tax, I argue that Texas’ new sales tax sourcing rules expose the shaky logic behind decades of municipal incentives for fulfillment centers—and offer a timely reason to abandon the practice altogether. The recent revision to Rule 3.334 by the Texas Comptroller clarifies that a location must actively receive customer orders—not merely fulfill them—to count as a “place of business” for local tax purposes. That change has triggered a lawsuit from the City of Coppell and other Texas municipalities, who now stand to lose out on lucrative sales tax revenue tied to online commerce routed through local warehouses.

But regardless of the lawsuit’s outcome, I believe the real issue is the flawed economic development model these cities have been relying on. For years, under Chapter 380 agreements, municipalities handed out infrastructure upgrades and tax rebates to lure backend logistics operations with promises of rising sales tax revenue. Yet these facilities, often low-wage, temporary, and increasingly automated, were never a strong foundation for community growth. Their value was always tied to creative interpretations of tax code language—not meaningful employment or local investment.

Now that the tax arbitrage game is falling apart, municipalities should see this as an opportunity to rethink their approach. I argue for redirecting public resources toward workforce development, technical training, and support for regionally rooted industries—investments that actually build capacity, not just capture transactional flows. If a city’s financial health depends on how an e-commerce order is defined in the tax code, that’s not economic development—it’s dependence.

Texas Sales Tax Sourcing Fight Is More Reason to Drop Incentives

On December 8, 1902, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, beginning one of the most storied judicial careers in American history. Appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt, Holmes brought not just legal brilliance but a fierce sense of independence to the bench—qualities that would define his nearly 30-year tenure. He would become known as “The Great Dissenter,” not because he loved conflict, but because he saw the Constitution as a living document that demanded humility, skepticism of dogma, and above all, respect for democratic governance.

Holmes shaped modern constitutional law, particularly in his groundbreaking First Amendment opinions. In Schenck v. United States (1919), he famously coined the “clear and present danger” test, establishing a foundational limit on government power to suppress speech. Though that decision upheld a conviction, Holmes’s dissent later that year in Abrams v. United States marked his turn toward a much broader vision of free expression—one that laid the groundwork for modern civil liberties jurisprudence.

A Civil War veteran wounded at Antietam, Holmes served with the Massachusetts Volunteers and carried shrapnel in his body for the rest of his life. His long memory gave him historical depth: legend holds he met both Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy—Lincoln as a young Union officer in Washington, and JFK decades later when the future president visited the aged Holmes on his 90th birthday. While the Lincoln meeting is plausible and widely accepted, the Kennedy encounter is well documented—photos exist of JFK visiting Holmes in 1932, shortly before the justice’s death.

Holmes’s legal philosophy emphasized restraint, often reminding fellow jurists that the Constitution “is made for people of fundamentally differing views.” He resisted turning the judiciary into a super-legislature, warning against confusing personal preference with constitutional mandate. His opinions, dissents, and aphorisms—“taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” among them—still echo in courtrooms and classrooms today.

By the time he retired in 1932 at age 90, Holmes had become an icon: not just a jurist, but a symbol of intellectual honesty and constitutional humility. His December 8 appointment wasn’t just another judicial swearing-in—it was the beginning of a philosophical legacy that still defines the boundaries of American legal thought.

Amit Agarwal, a former clerk to Justices Alito and Kavanaugh, will soon find himself arguing against the very ideology he once clerked under—defending limits on presidential power in a case that could gut a nearly century-old precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935). He’ll be representing former FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, who sued after President Trump gave her the boot, and whose case now tees up a potentially seismic shift in how presidents control independent agencies.

At issue is whether the president can remove members of independent commissions—like the FTC—at will, or whether statutory “for cause” protections, created by Congress and upheld since the New Deal, still mean anything. If the Supreme Court overturns Humphrey’s Executor, it would blow a hole in the legal framework that has shielded multi-member agencies from raw political interference since Roosevelt tried—and failed—to remake the FTC in his own image.

Let’s pause here: Humphrey’s Executor isn’t just some dusty New Deal relic. It drew a sharp line between executive officers who serve the president directly and independent regulators who are supposed to be immune from daily political whims. The Court in 1935 said: no, FDR, you can’t just fire an FTC commissioner because he’s not singing from your hymnbook. That ruling became the backbone of modern agency independence—from the Fed to the SEC to the NLRB. Without it, the next president could dismiss any regulatory head who doesn’t toe the party line. You want crypto rules to mean something? Food safety? Banking supervision? Say goodbye to all that if we pretend these agencies are just White House interns with better titles.

But here’s where it gets interesting: Agarwal is making the conservative case for restraint. Now working at Protect Democracy, he’s arguing that letting presidents fire independent commissioners at will isn’t a win for constitutional governance—it’s a power grab that warps the original design. He’s invoked Burkean conservatism—the idea that practical experience should trump theoretical purity—and warns that blind devotion to the “unitary executive theory” threatens institutional integrity more than it protects separation of powers.

And Agarwal isn’t alone. A collection of conservative legal scholars, former judges, and ex-White House lawyers—some with deep Federalist Society credentials—have filed briefs supporting his position. Their argument? That Humphrey’s Executor is an “originalist” decision, faithful to the Founders’ ambivalence about concentrated executive power, especially in domestic administration.

Still, let’s be honest: the Court is unlikely to be swayed by this internal dissent. The Roberts Court has already chipped away at agency independence in decisions like Seila Law (2020) and Loper Bright (2024), where it let Trump fire the CFPB director and overturned Chevron deference respectively. With a solid conservative majority, and multiple justices openly embracing a muscular vision of presidential control, the writing may already be on the wall.

Which is precisely what makes Agarwal’s stand so notable. This isn’t some progressive legal activist parachuting in from the ACLU (though his wife did work there). This is someone who backed Kavanaugh publicly, donated to Nikki Haley, and spent years rising through the conservative legal pipeline—only to conclude that this version of executive power isn’t conservative at all. It’s reactionary.

So what happens if Humphrey’s goes down? Beyond the short-term question of whether Slaughter gets her job back, the bigger issue is how much power presidents will wield over what were supposed to be politically insulated regulatory bodies. Will a ruling in Trump’s favor mean future presidents can purge the Fed board? Fire NLRB members mid-term? Flatten the independence of enforcement agencies? The Court may claim it’s just restoring “constitutional structure,” but don’t be surprised if that structure starts to look a lot like one-man rule.

Agarwal, to his credit, is saying: not so fast. Sometimes conserving means preserving. And sometimes defending the Constitution means restraining the people who claim to speak for it the loudest.

Ex-Alito, Kavanaugh Clerk Defends Limits on Trump’s Firing Power

Fight over Trump’s power to fire FTC member heads to US Supreme Court | Reuters

A federal judge has temporarily barred the Justice Department from using evidence seized from Daniel Richman, a former legal adviser to ex-FBI Director James Comey, in any future attempts to revive criminal charges against Comey. The move comes just weeks after the original case was dismissed due to the lead prosecutor’s unlawful appointment.

At issue is whether federal prosecutors violated Richman’s Fourth Amendment rights by searching his personal computer without a warrant during earlier investigations into media leaks tied to Comey’s 2020 congressional testimony. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly sided with Richman—for now—saying he’s likely to succeed on the merits and ordering the government to isolate and secure the data until at least December 12.

The contested materials had been used to support now-dropped charges that Comey made false statements and obstructed Congress regarding FBI leaks about the Clinton and Trump investigations. But Richman, once a special FBI employee himself, argues the search was illegal and wants the files deleted or returned.

The Justice Department, undeterred, is reportedly considering a second indictment of Comey. But between shaky prosecutorial appointments and constitutional challenges like this one, their case is rapidly sliding into legally questionable territory.

US federal judge temporarily blocks evidence use in dismissed Comey case | Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a controversial book removal case out of Llano County, Texas, effectively allowing local officials to keep 17 books off public library shelves—titles that deal with race, LGBTQ+ identity, puberty, and even flatulence.

The justices let stand a divided 5th Circuit ruling that found no First Amendment violation in the county’s decision to pull the books. That decision reversed a lower court order requiring the books be returned and rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that library patrons have a constitutional “right to receive information.” The 5th Circuit held that libraries have wide discretion to curate collections, and that removing titles doesn’t equate to banning them altogether—people can still buy them online, the court reasoned.

The dispute began in 2021 when local officials responded to complaints by residents, ultimately purging books including Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen (due to nude illustrations), as well as works on slavery and gender identity. Opponents of the removal sued, citing free speech violations. But the case now stands as a significant blow to that theory—at least in the 5th Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

The Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene leaves unresolved a key question: does the First Amendment protect not just the right to speak, but the right to access certain information in public institutions? For now, in parts of the South, the answer appears to be no.

US Supreme Court turns away appeal of Texas library book ban | Reuters

On December 5, 1933, the United States ratified the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, officially ending the era of national Prohibition. This amendment repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, which had banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors since 1920. Prohibition, championed by temperance movements and moral reformers, was initially seen as a solution to social problems such as crime and poverty. However, over the following decade, it led instead to a surge in organized crime, illegal speakeasies, and widespread disregard for the law.

The Twenty-first Amendment is unique in American legal history—it is the only amendment to repeal a previous amendment. It is also the only amendment ratified through state conventions rather than by state legislatures, a strategic move to bypass potential legislative gridlock. Utah became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, securing the three-fourths majority needed for adoption.

The repeal of Prohibition returned control over alcohol regulation to the states, many of which continued restrictions at the local level. The amendment’s passage marked a shift toward a more pragmatic and less moralistic approach to federal lawmaking. It also highlighted the limits of federal power to regulate personal behavior and underscored the complexities of enforcing unpopular laws.

In the broader context of constitutional law, the Twenty-first Amendment demonstrated the capacity of the Constitution to adapt and self-correct. It remains a pivotal example of how constitutional amendments can respond to changing public sentiment and unintended legal consequences.

A federal appeals court allowed President Donald Trump to continue deploying National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., halting a lower court ruling that would have required the troops to withdraw by December 11. The temporary order from the D.C. Circuit Court does not address the underlying legality of the deployment but permits it to proceed while litigation continues. The deployment, which began in August, intensified after a November 26 shooting near the White House left two National Guard members injured—one fatally. Trump responded by sending 500 additional troops and renewing his call to halt immigration from what he called “third-world countries,” after a 29-year-old Afghan national was charged in the attack.

D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued the administration in September, arguing Trump unlawfully took over local policing authority and violated federal restrictions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. A federal judge initially sided with Schwalb, calling the deployment likely unlawful, but delayed enforcement of her ruling to allow time for appeal. The Trump administration maintains it can deploy troops to D.C. without local approval, citing the city’s unique federal status. Meanwhile, similar deployments in other Democratic-led cities have sparked lawsuits and accusations that Trump is using federal force for political purposes. Lower courts have largely ruled against these moves, and the Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on the legality of the Chicago deployment soon.

Appeals court allows Trump National Guard deployment in DC to continue | Reuters

Tom Goldstein, a prominent Washington attorney and co-founder of SCOTUSblog, is fighting to sell his $3 million home in D.C.’s Wesley Heights to fund his defense against 22 financial crime charges, including tax evasion. Prosecutors allege that Goldstein, who has made millions as a poker player, misrepresented his financial situation to obtain loans, including one used to purchase the property. A Maryland federal judge barred the sale, ruling the house is likely connected to the alleged crimes. Goldstein has appealed, arguing that blocking the sale violates his Sixth Amendment right to use untainted assets for legal defense, and insists the home is not tied to the alleged misconduct.

The appeal is before the 4th Circuit, where Goldstein—representing himself—says he’s accumulated millions in legal fees. Prosecutors maintain the house is tainted because Goldstein omitted over $15 million in debt from the mortgage application. The home is also collateral for Goldstein’s appearance bond, due to his being labeled a flight risk. One of Goldstein’s key financial backers, litigation funder Parabellum Capital, is a witness in the case but not accused of wrongdoing. Legal experts say his effort to sell the house faces steep odds given the property’s legal entanglements and standard federal practices regarding tainted assets.

Tom Goldstein fights to sell home as tax trial looms | Reuters

A federal grand jury has declined to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James, rejecting prosecutors’ second attempt to bring criminal charges against her, according to sources familiar with the matter. The Justice Department had sought to revive a case involving allegations of bank fraud and false statements related to a mortgage, after the initial indictment was dismissed in November due to the unlawful appointment of the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan. Despite the setback, prosecutors reportedly plan to seek a new indictment.

James, a Democrat and prominent critic of Donald Trump, was accused of misrepresenting financial information to obtain favorable mortgage terms on a Virginia property. She pleaded not guilty to the original charges. The failed indictment effort comes amid broader DOJ efforts targeting Trump critics, including former FBI Director James Comey and ex-national security adviser John Bolton—cases that have also faced legal hurdles.

Grand jury rejections are rare, as prosecutors usually face a low threshold of probable cause to proceed. James is now the highest-profile figure to have such a case rejected during Trump’s second term. The president has publicly attacked James for leading a civil fraud lawsuit against him, which resulted in a massive financial penalty, later reduced on appeal but with Trump still found liable for fraud.

Grand jury rejects second criminal case against New York Attorney General Letitia James, sources say | Reuters

Lawyers representing authors and publishers in a $1.5 billion copyright settlement with AI company Anthropic have requested $300 million in legal fees, amounting to 20% of the total settlement. Filed in federal court in San Francisco, the fee request comes after Anthropic agreed in October to settle claims it used pirated books to train its AI models, including its commercial product Claude. As part of the agreement, Anthropic will pay over $3,000 per infringed work, destroy the infringing datasets, and certify they are not part of its commercial systems.

The legal team, led by Susman Godfrey and Lieff Cabraser, argued that the fee is “conservative” by class action standards, citing more than 26,000 hours of high-risk work. The settlement, which received preliminary approval in September, is being described as the largest reported copyright class action resolution to date. Anthropic has denied wrongdoing and retains the right to contest the fee amount.

Authors have until January 15 to opt out of the class action and pursue individual claims. A final fairness hearing before U.S. District Judge William Alsup is scheduled for April, where objections from class members and fee disputes will be reviewed.

Authors’ lawyers in $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement seek $300 million | Reuters

This week’s closing theme is by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a composer of some note.

On December 5, 1791, the world lost one of its greatest musical minds: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Just 35 years old at the time of his death, Mozart left behind an astonishing body of work that shaped the course of Western classical music. His death, shrouded in speculation and mystery, came while he was in the midst of composing what would become one of his most profound and haunting works—the Requiem in D minor, K. 626. The Lacrymosa movement, in particular, captures the emotional gravity of that moment, as if echoing his own impending end.

Although Mozart did not live to finish the Requiem, the fragments he left behind were completed by his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr, guided by sketches and oral instruction. The Lacrymosa, with its solemn melodies and aching harmonies, stands as one of the most emotionally resonant sections of the work. Franz Liszt later transcribed it for solo piano, creating a version that retains its choral intensity while adding a layer of intimate, virtuosic expressiveness.

Listening to Liszt’s transcription of the Lacrymosa is like hearing Mozart’s farewell whispered through the keys of a piano—stark, mournful, and deeply human. December 5, then, is not only the date of Mozart’s passing but also a reminder of the enduring beauty he left behind, etched into every phrase of the Requiem. His music, especially in this piece, speaks across centuries to the depths of loss and the hope of transcendence.

Without further ado, Mozart’s Requiem in D. minor – enjoy!

On December 4, 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Skidmore v. Swift & Co., a case interpreting the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The plaintiffs were firefighters employed by a private company who sought overtime pay for time spent waiting on the employer’s premises, even when not actively fighting fires. The Court ruled that such “waiting time” could qualify as compensable work depending on the circumstances — a fact-intensive inquiry rather than a rigid rule. More significantly, the Court declined to treat the Department of Labor’s interpretation of the FLSA as binding. Instead, Justice Jackson, writing for the Court, articulated what became known as “Skidmore deference,” explaining that agency interpretations are entitled to respect based on their “power to persuade,” not their authority.

This approach emphasized judicial independence while still valuing agency expertise, setting a flexible standard for reviewing administrative interpretations. For decades, Skidmore shaped the way courts evaluated regulatory guidance, particularly where statutes were silent or ambiguous. That changed in 1984, when the Court decided Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, introducing a more deferential, two-step test that often required courts to uphold reasonable agency interpretations. Chevron effectively sidelined Skidmore, making agency interpretations more binding than persuasive.

That more restrained approach to agency interpretation—Skidmore’s “power to persuade”—quietly persisted in the background during the decades-long dominance of Chevron deference. But on June 28, 2024, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court formally overruled Chevron, declaring that courts must exercise independent judgment in interpreting statutes, even when those statutes are ambiguous. The Court emphasized that the Administrative Procedure Act assigns to the judiciary—not agencies—the duty to “decide all relevant questions of law” and interpret statutory provisions without default deference to agency views. In doing so, the Court explicitly endorsed the Skidmore model of respect rather than deference, reaffirming that agency interpretations may still inform judicial decisions, but only to the extent they are persuasive. So, 80 years after Skidmore was decided, its modest, judge-centered vision of statutory interpretation has once again become the law of the land.

A group of former federal employees filed a proposed class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging the Trump administration unlawfully removed them from their jobs due to their work in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. The plaintiffs claim the dismissals were politically motivated and violated their First Amendment rights as well as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

According to the complaint, the reductions in force went beyond typical administrative turnover, instead constituting a deliberate effort to punish perceived political opponents. The plaintiffs argue they were targeted because they held, or were believed to have held, roles connected to DEI initiatives, which President Trump vocally opposed. The lawsuit points to executive orders that allegedly discriminated against women, people of color, and nonbinary individuals.

Defendants named include the White House, Justice Department, CIA, Defense Department, Federal Reserve, Labor Department, and Treasury. The plaintiffs are seeking reinstatement, back pay, restoration of seniority, and attorneys’ fees.

Trump, Agencies Hit With Ex-Federal Workers’ Political Bias Suit

Under President Trump’s second administration, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is on track for its lowest number of earnings fraud and auditor liability enforcement actions since the Reagan era. So far in 2025, only 20 such cases have been filed—far below the historical average of 79 per year since Trump’s first term began in 2017. The decline is attributed to leadership changes, a 43-day government shutdown, shifting agency priorities, and a shrinking SEC staff due to retirements and buyouts.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins has emphasized targeting only the most harmful and deliberate frauds, deprioritizing minor or technical violations. Enforcement has also slowed due to procedural constraints, including legal challenges limiting the use of in-house judges and forcing more cases into federal court. Despite the drop in formal actions, former officials and commission watchers caution that investigations continue behind the scenes and could yield future penalties.

The agency did finalize some notable settlements early in the year, including $19 million from American Electric Power and $8 million from GrubMarket. However, enforcement activity has since dropped steeply, marking the largest first-year decline following a presidential inauguration since the 1980s.

SEC’s Earnings Fraud, Auditor Liability Cases Plunge Under Trump

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced it will stop processing green cards and related immigration benefits for individuals from 19 countries named in a June Trump administration travel ban. This expanded restriction follows a separate decision by the State Department to suspend visa processing for Afghan nationals after a deadly shooting involving two National Guard members in Washington, D.C.

The new USCIS policy affects several types of applications, including those for permanent residency, green card replacements, travel documents, and requests by permanent residents to maintain status while abroad. The halt applies regardless of when the applicant entered the U.S. The agency cited national security concerns as the reason for the changes and indicated all affected individuals may face renewed interviews or screenings.

The travel ban currently includes countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Venezuela, and others, with reports suggesting the administration plans to expand the list to about 30 nations. The memo emphasized that individuals from these “high-risk countries of concern” who arrived in the U.S. after January 20, 2021, are subject to re-evaluation.

Trump Travel Ban Limits Extend to Green Cards, Other Benefits

On December 3, 1946, the NAACP filed the pivotal case Morgan v. Virginia, challenging state-enforced segregation on interstate buses. The case arose after Irene Morgan, a Black woman, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Greyhound bus traveling from Virginia to Maryland in 1944. Arrested and fined under Virginia law, Morgan appealed her conviction with the support of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first Black Supreme Court Justice, argued the case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The legal argument hinged on the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress—not individual states—the power to regulate interstate commerce. Marshall argued that Virginia’s segregation law placed an undue burden on interstate travel and was thus unconstitutional. In a 7–1 decision issued in June 1946, the Court agreed, holding that states could not impose segregation on interstate passengers.

Though the ruling did not end segregation on all public transportation, it was a critical legal breakthrough. It limited the reach of Jim Crow laws and marked one of the earliest Supreme Court victories for the civil rights movement. The decision also served as a foundation for future rulings, including Boynton v. Virginia (1960), and inspired direct action like the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s.

Morgan v. Virginia helped establish a constitutional framework for challenging racially discriminatory laws under federal authority. It demonstrated the NAACP’s strategy of incremental legal challenges and the importance of judicial victories in the broader civil rights struggle.

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing a law that would strip Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood and similar organizations in 22 states. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled that the provision, part of the Republican-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, likely violates the Constitution’s Spending Clause by retroactively imposing ambiguous conditions on state Medicaid participation. The law bars Medicaid funding for nonprofit reproductive health providers that offer abortions and received over $800,000 in Medicaid funds during fiscal year 2023.

Talwani issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily halting the law’s enforcement in the states that sued, including California, New York, and Connecticut, along with the District of Columbia. However, she stayed her ruling for seven days to allow the Trump administration time to appeal. The judge warned that enforcing the law would increase healthcare costs and reduce access to preventive services like birth control and screenings.

Planned Parenthood welcomed the ruling, calling the law unconstitutional and harmful. The organization reported that at least 20 health centers have closed since the law began taking effect in September. States argued the law forced an unexpected change to Medicaid operations and undermined their authority to choose eligible healthcare providers.

US judge blocks Trump from cutting Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood in 22 states | Reuters

The Trump administration has dismissed at least seven immigration judges from New York City’s immigration court, located at 26 Federal Plaza, a central site for immigration enforcement and protests. This move is part of a broader pattern under President Trump’s second term, with over 100 immigration judges reportedly removed nationwide since January, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Critics say these firings are worsening backlogs at a time when arrests and deportations are increasing.

Immigration judges operate under the Department of Justice, not the independent federal judiciary, and are considered inferior officers who can be dismissed by the president or attorney general. The Justice Department declined to comment on the terminations. Among those fired was Amiena Khan, the court’s assistant chief immigration judge and former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, who had previously opposed efforts to dismantle the judges’ union.

Khan and six other judges, all women, had their names removed from the court’s staff directory, with five appointed by Democratic administrations and two during Trump’s first term. These dismissals follow similar firings in San Francisco, Boston, and elsewhere. One former judge in Ohio has filed a lawsuit, alleging her termination was due to discrimination based on sex, national origin, and political beliefs.

Trump administration fires numerous New York immigration judges | Reuters

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the suspect in a deadly Washington, D.C. ambush that killed one National Guard member and critically injured another, pleaded not guilty during his first court appearance. He participated remotely from a hospital bed and was ordered held without bond due to the violent nature of the attack, which occurred just blocks from the White House. The judge cited the “sheer terror” of the incident in denying release.

Prosecutors allege that Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national, traveled from Washington state to D.C. with the intent to carry out the shooting. He reportedly opened fire while shouting “Allahu akbar,” fatally shooting 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom and injuring 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, both West Virginia National Guard members deployed to aid law enforcement. Lakanwal was subdued by military personnel and a Secret Service officer after being shot.

He faces four charges, including first-degree murder and assault with intent to kill while armed. Lakanwal’s defense highlighted his lack of criminal history, but prosecutors emphasized the premeditated nature of his actions. His immigration status has drawn political attention—he entered the U.S. under a resettlement program launched during the Biden administration and was granted asylum under Trump, making the case a focal point in renewed debates over immigration policy.

Washington shooting suspect pleads not guilty to murder, ordered detained | Reuters

On December 2, 1859, abolitionist John Brown was executed by hanging in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia), following his conviction for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, murder, and inciting a slave insurrection. Brown had led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in October, attempting to seize weapons and incite a large-scale slave uprising. His plan failed, with most of his men either killed or captured, and Brown himself wounded and arrested by U.S. Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. The legal proceedings against him were swift: Brown was indicted within days, tried in state court, and sentenced to death less than a month after the raid.

His execution was a national event, drawing immense media coverage and polarized public reaction. In the North, many abolitionists hailed him as a martyr who sacrificed his life to end the moral atrocity of slavery. In the South, he was widely viewed as a terrorist whose actions confirmed fears of Northern aggression and interference. Brown’s trial and punishment underscored the deepening legal and moral divide between free and slave states, particularly regarding states’ rights, federalism, and the use of violence to oppose injustice. The charges of treason and insurrection also raised complex constitutional questions, since Brown was prosecuted under state, not federal, law — despite attacking a federal facility. His case set the stage for intensifying legal and political disputes over the limits of protest, the legitimacy of armed resistance, and the definition of loyalty to the state.

Brown’s final words, predicting that “the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood,” would prove prescient less than two years later when the Civil War began.

A federal appeals court has ruled that Alina Habba, a former personal attorney to Donald Trump, was unlawfully appointed as the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower court’s finding that the Trump administration violated federal appointments law in installing Habba without Senate confirmation or proper legal authority. This decision disqualifies her from overseeing federal cases in the state, potentially disrupting numerous active prosecutions.

The case was brought by defense attorneys who argued that the Justice Department used procedural workarounds to improperly extend Habba’s tenure after New Jersey’s district judges declined to reauthorize her. In response, DOJ fired her court-appointed successor and tried to reassign Habba under a different title, which the court rejected. The ruling is significant because it’s the first appellate decision pushing back on Trump-era efforts to place loyalists in key legal roles without Senate oversight.

Habba, who had no prior prosecutorial experience, previously represented Trump in high-profile civil litigation, including the defamation case involving E. Jean Carroll. During her controversial tenure, she was criticized for politicized statements and for filing charges against a Democratic congresswoman. Similar appointment disputes are playing out in other states, and this decision sets a strong precedent against bypassing constitutional and statutory nomination processes. The administration is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Court disqualifies Trump ally Habba as top New Jersey federal prosecutor | Reuters

HSBC has announced a multi-year partnership with French start-up Mistral AI to integrate generative AI tools across its global operations. The bank plans to self-host Mistral’s commercial AI models and future upgrades, combining its own tech infrastructure with Mistral’s cutting-edge AI capabilities. The collaboration aims to boost automation, productivity, and customer service, with use cases spanning financial analysis, multilingual translation, risk assessment, and personalized client interactions.

By adopting Mistral’s tools, HSBC expects to significantly reduce time spent on routine, document-heavy tasks, such as those in credit and financing teams. Already active in AI applications like fraud detection and compliance, the bank sees this deal as a way to accelerate innovation cycles and roll out new features more efficiently. The move comes amid a broader industry trend as banks seek to scale generative AI solutions, while addressing ongoing concerns around data privacy. HSBC emphasized that all deployments will comply with its responsible AI governance standards to ensure transparency and protection.

HSBC taps French start-up Mistral to supercharge generative-AI rollout | Reuters

President Donald Trump has commuted the prison sentence of David Gentile, the former CEO of GPB Capital Holdings, who was convicted under the Biden administration for his role in what prosecutors called a Ponzi scheme. Gentile had been serving a seven-year sentence after being found guilty of securities fraud in 2024. The DOJ argued that GPB misled investors by using new investor funds to pay returns, rather than profits from legitimate operations.

However, in announcing the commutation, a White House official pushed back on the prosecution’s claims, arguing that investors had been clearly informed about the firm’s payment practices and that prosecutors failed to directly link fraudulent misrepresentations to Gentile during trial. The official also alleged misconduct, claiming the government elicited and failed to correct false testimony.

The commutation comes amid heightened political scrutiny of financial fraud prosecutions and continues Trump’s trend of intervening in controversial white-collar cases. The Department of Justice has not yet responded to the decision.

Trump frees former GPB Capital CEO after Biden admin’s Ponzi scheme sentence | Reuters

My column for Bloomberg this week is about … the penny. The official end of penny production may seem trivial, but it’s creating real legal headaches for retailers and tax administrators alike. Without the one-cent coin, states are facing ambiguity about how to round sales tax totals for cash transactions—should it happen before or after tax, and who absorbs the rounding loss? These questions go largely unanswered, and in the absence of clear rules, businesses are improvising, which risks inconsistent compliance and enforcement challenges. There’s also a legal tension where cash transactions require rounding but card payments do not—potentially running afoul of laws banning payment-method discrimination or even the Internet Tax Freedom Act.

Streamlined Sales Tax rules add more complexity, limiting when and how rounding can occur and cautioning against systems that enrich the state at consumers’ expense. I argue that instead of patchwork fixes, this moment should push states to modernize their sales tax systems with mandatory e-invoicing and real-time reporting. This would standardize how tax is calculated and rounded, reduce compliance uncertainty, and shrink the window for fraud. Paired with something like a receipt lottery—used successfully in countries like Brazil and China—states could turn customers into compliance allies by rewarding them for scanning and validating receipts.

Ultimately, automating rounding decisions and reporting in point-of-sale systems would lift the burden off retailers and give governments cleaner data with lower enforcement costs. The penny may be dead, but this is a rare chance to bring sales tax enforcement into the 21st century.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated city bus. Parks, a 42-year-old Black seamstress and longtime activist, had been sitting in the “colored” section when the driver demanded she move. Her quiet but firm defiance violated local segregation laws, which mandated racial separation in public transportation and required Black passengers to yield seats to white passengers when buses became crowded. Parks’ arrest became a catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a coordinated campaign to end racial segregation on public transit.

The boycott began four days later, organized by the Montgomery Improvement Association, with a then-unknown Martin Luther King Jr. as its president. It lasted over a year, during which thousands of Black residents refused to use the city’s buses, severely impacting the transit system’s finances. The protest was not only a powerful act of collective resistance but also a carefully structured legal challenge. Civil rights attorneys, including Fred Gray, filed a federal lawsuit—Browder v. Gayle—on behalf of several Black women who had experienced bus segregation.

In November 1956, the federal district court ruled that Montgomery’s segregated bus system was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision, and on December 20, 1956, the boycott officially ended when the Court’s ruling was implemented. Rosa Parks’ arrest and the movement it sparked marked a turning point in the American civil rights struggle. Her individual act of resistance ignited a mass movement and set the stage for future legal and social change.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a key copyright case today involving Cox Communications and several major record labels, including Sony, Warner, and Universal. The case centers on whether Cox can be held financially liable for allegedly enabling its users to illegally download music. A jury originally awarded the labels $1 billion in 2019 after finding Cox secondarily liable for over 10,000 copyright infringements, but the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed part of that decision, leading to a retrial on damages.

Cox argues it shouldn’t be held accountable for users’ actions, warning that a ruling against it could force ISPs to terminate internet access for entire households or public institutions over alleged piracy. The company claims it reasonably handled piracy reports and criticized the notion that it failed to act. In contrast, the labels accuse Cox of ignoring thousands of infringement notices and protecting profitable repeat offenders while readily cutting off nonpaying customers.

Big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have sided with Cox, suggesting that a ruling for the labels could harm the internet economy. Meanwhile, the Trump administration—represented by Solicitor General John Sauer—is supporting Cox’s view that merely knowing about piracy isn’t enough to establish liability. Industry groups in music, film, and publishing back the labels, arguing that Cox’s stance threatens collaborative anti-piracy efforts. The Supreme Court’s decision could reshape how ISPs respond to copyright violations.

US Supreme Court to hear copyright dispute between Cox and record labels | Reuters

Following a deadly shooting in Washington, D.C., involving an Afghan immigrant accused of killing a National Guard member, President Donald Trump has intensified efforts to restrict legal immigration. Within 48 hours of the attack, Trump paused Afghan immigration applications, launched a review of asylum approvals from the Biden era, and hinted at expanded vetting under his existing travel ban targeting 19 countries. These moves revive and build upon restrictive immigration policies from Trump’s first term, now framed as necessary for national security.

Critics argue the administration is exploiting a tragic but isolated incident to justify sweeping immigration rollbacks. Afghan advocacy groups stressed that Afghan immigrants undergo extensive vetting and should not be broadly blamed. While Trump and top officials suggested large-scale reforms—like ending federal benefits for non-citizens and denaturalizing those deemed a threat—federal agencies have so far announced more limited actions, such as case reviews for applicants from travel-ban countries.

Legal experts warn that some of the proposed policies, including denying welfare to lawful residents and mass denaturalization, would likely be ruled unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the administration is signaling an aggressive stance, despite polls showing declining public approval of Trump’s immigration policies. Meanwhile, Democrats accuse Trump of targeting law-abiding immigrants and using fear-based tactics for political gain.

Trump sharpens focus on legal immigration after National Guard shooting | Reuters

A federal judge’s decision to ban generative AI from his chambers after an intern used it in a flawed court opinion has sparked debate over how technology should be used in the legal system. Judge Julien Neals of New Jersey attributed the error in a June ruling to a law student who used AI in violation of their school’s policy, prompting Neals to prohibit AI use entirely among his staff. His response to Senator Chuck Grassley drew concern from legal academics and judges who argue that banning AI outright may be shortsighted.

Proponents of AI in the judiciary say the technology, if used responsibly, could reduce case backlogs and improve efficiency amid staffing shortages. Judge Xavier Rodriguez of Texas ran an experiment comparing traditional opinion writing with AI-assisted drafting, showing significant time savings without sacrificing quality. He and others advocate for structured AI use, emphasizing vetting, fact-checking, and clear protocols to preserve judicial integrity.

Magistrate Judge Allison Goddard and law professors like David Kemp suggest that instead of bans, institutions should focus on teaching students ethical and effective AI use. With many law students already accustomed to using generative AI, schools are scrambling to develop policies and training. Some institutions, like the University of Chicago Law School, have embraced AI integration, while others lag behind. The incident in Judge Neals’ courtroom has become a wake-up call for courts and law schools to align on responsible AI use in legal education and practice.

Judges’ AI Blunders Spark Debate on Technology Use in Courts

Luigi Mangione, accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in a high-profile shooting outside a Manhattan hotel, appeared in court today for key pretrial hearings. The 27-year-old, arrested in December 2024, has pleaded not guilty to murder and multiple related charges in both state and federal cases. The hearings will determine whether crucial evidence—including a 3-D printed gun, silencer, and journal writings found in Mangione’s backpack—can be used at trial. His defense argues that the items were obtained through an illegal search during his arrest in Pennsylvania and that statements he made to police should also be excluded.

Prosecutors dispute those claims and are seeking to admit the materials, which they argue implicate Mangione in the killing. Mangione, who has gained a controversial following among critics of the U.S. healthcare system, faces life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder. In a separate federal case, prosecutors intend to seek the death penalty. Earlier in September, two terrorism charges were dismissed after a judge ruled there was insufficient evidence Mangione intended to intimidate healthcare workers or influence government policy.

The hearings, overseen by Judge Gregory Carro, are expected to last through the week and include testimony from arresting officers. No trial date has yet been set, and Mangione remains in federal custody in Brooklyn.

Luigi Mangione due in court for pretrial hearings over US healthcare executive’s killing | Reuters

On this day in legal history, November 25, 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, holding that motion pictures were not protected under the First Amendment. The case arose when Ohio enacted a law requiring films to be approved by a censorship board before public exhibition. Mutual Film Corporation challenged the statute, arguing it infringed upon free speech and press freedoms. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected that argument, declaring that movies were a business enterprise, not a medium of public expression deserving constitutional protection. The Court emphasized that films could be used for evil and lacked the inherent public value of newspapers or books.

This ruling gave states and cities wide discretion to censor films, leading to the rise of local and state censorship boards that controlled what audiences could legally view. It also provided a legal foundation for the Motion Picture Production Code, or Hays Code, a system of industry self-censorship that dominated Hollywood for decades. For nearly 40 years, this decision limited the creative scope of filmmakers and allowed governments to suppress films based on moral, religious, or political grounds.

It wasn’t until Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson in 1952 that the Supreme Court reversed course, striking down New York’s ban on a film deemed “sacrilegious” and recognizing movies as a significant medium for the communication of ideas. The reversal marked a turning point for First Amendment jurisprudence and artistic freedom. But on November 25, 1915, the legal system closed the door on film as protected speech—setting the stage for a long legal battle over cinema’s place in American constitutional law.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s misconduct complaint against U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes was dismissed. The rare complaint accused Reyes of bias in her handling of a case challenging President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender individuals serving in the military. Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan ruled in September that judicial misconduct proceedings were not the proper venue to raise such concerns, suggesting instead that the DOJ could have filed for Reyes’ recusal if it believed she was unfit to preside.

The complaint, filed in February before Reyes ruled on the case, alleged she had shown hostility during hearings by expressing disbelief, questioning a lawyer’s religion, and engaging in behavior the DOJ claimed compromised the dignity of the courtroom. The Justice Department claimed her conduct showed potential bias. In March, Reyes blocked Trump’s executive order, though her ruling is currently on hold pending appeal. The complaint was one of only two such filings by the DOJ amid broader tensions between Trump’s administration and the judiciary. Neither Reyes nor the DOJ commented on the dismissal.

US DOJ’s misconduct complaint against judge in transgender military ban case gets tossed | Reuters

A federal judge dismissed the criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James after finding that the prosecutor who brought the charges lacked lawful authority. The judge concluded that Lindsey Halligan, appointed by the Trump administration as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was installed in violation of the Constitution’s Appointments Clause and federal law governing interim U.S. attorney appointments. Because her appointment was invalid, every step she took—including securing indictments—was deemed an unlawful exercise of executive power and therefore had to be vacated. The judge rejected the Justice Department’s argument that the attorney general could repeatedly make interim appointments without Senate confirmation, noting that doing so would sidestep the constitutionally required process. Attempts by Attorney General Pam Bondi to retroactively validate Halligan’s actions—such as re-appointing her as a special attorney and “ratifying” the indictments—were also found ineffective.

Under the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution and federal statute, U.S. Attorneys must be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. When a vacancy arises, the Attorney General may make an interim appointment, but that appointment is limited by law to 120 days. If a permanent U.S. Attorney is not confirmed within that time, the district court may appoint a replacement to serve until the vacancy is officially filled. This process is designed to ensure both accountability and separation of powers, preventing the executive branch from indefinitely bypassing Senate oversight by cycling through temporary appointments. Repeated or back-to-back interim appointments without Senate confirmation undermine this framework, raising constitutional concerns about legitimacy and legality.

The cases were dismissed without prejudice, leaving the door open to new prosecutions, though the expired statute of limitations appears to bar refiling against Comey. Defense lawyers had additionally characterized the charges as politically driven, but the court did not need to reach those claims because the appointment defect alone required dismissal. The ruling underscores that prosecutions must be brought by properly appointed officials, and that structural constitutional violations invalidate downstream actions—even in high-profile or politically charged cases.

US judge tosses cases against ex-FBI chief Comey, New York AG James | Reuters

A federal judge has denied Arkansas health worker Joy Gray’s request for immediate reinstatement after she was fired over social media comments made following the murder of conservative figure Charlie Kirk. Gray sought a preliminary injunction requiring the Arkansas Department of Health to rehire her, continue paying her, or provide a “name-clearing hearing” to protect her reputation. However, U.S. District Judge Lee P. Rudofsky ruled that Gray failed to demonstrate the kind of irreparable harm necessary to justify emergency relief, emphasizing that job loss—even from a government position—does not automatically meet that legal standard. He cited controlling precedent, noting Gray did not show she couldn’t be adequately compensated by monetary damages if she ultimately wins her case.

The judge also rejected her claim that the department’s actions were currently chilling her speech, pointing out that the firing was a past event and not part of an ongoing restriction. Additionally, her request for a name-clearing hearing was unlikely to succeed, as the court found no stigmatizing statements in the department’s response. Rudofsky was careful to clarify that this ruling does not determine the outcome of Gray’s broader First Amendment retaliation claim, which may involve more complex legal questions as the case proceeds.

State Worker Fired for Kirk Posts Can’t Revive Job During Trial

On November 24, 1963, two days after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the nation watched in shock as Lee Harvey Oswald—the alleged assassin—was gunned down on live television. The shooter, Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, entered the basement of the Dallas police headquarters and fatally shot Oswald as he was being transferred to the county jail. The killing unfolded in front of journalists, cameras, and law enforcement, searing itself into the American consciousness and further fueling public distrust in official accounts of the assassination.

Though Ruby claimed his act was motivated by grief and a desire to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of a trial, his actions raised immediate concerns about the adequacy of security in high-profile cases. Oswald’s death eliminated any opportunity for a public trial, which would have offered a transparent legal accounting of the events in Dallas. Ruby was later convicted of murder, though his conviction was overturned on appeal before he died of cancer in 1967.

The legal ramifications of Oswald’s televised murder were broad and lasting. It led to reforms in detainee protection, prompted scrutiny over media access in sensitive law enforcement operations, and spotlighted the vulnerability of chain of custody and judicial process in emotionally charged cases. The event also highlighted the need for careful separation between law enforcement procedures and the media spectacle surrounding them. Ruby’s case prompted legal scholars to revisit the balance between a defendant’s right to a fair trial and the public’s right to observe proceedings.

This legal flashpoint helped set the stage for subsequent debates about pretrial publicity, venue changes, and judicial instructions to mitigate media influence on juries. It also foreshadowed a new era where courtroom access and high-profile criminal justice collided in an age of mass media.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will hear arguments in a press freedom case between the Associated Press (AP) and President Donald Trump’s administration. The case centers on whether the White House violated constitutional protections by restricting AP’s access to presidential events after the agency refused to adopt Trump’s preferred term “Gulf of America” instead of the long-recognized “Gulf of Mexico.”

In April, a federal judge—appointed by Trump—granted a preliminary injunction in AP’s favor, requiring the administration to restore the agency’s full access. However, the appeals court later paused that ruling while it considers the government’s challenge. The Trump administration argues that news organizations do not have a constitutional right to “special access” to areas like the Oval Office.

AP’s lawsuit, filed in February, claims the restrictions are retaliatory and violate the First and Fifth Amendments. The case has drawn attention for its potential implications beyond journalism, touching on the broader question of whether the government can punish speech that conflicts with its messaging. The administration has defended its actions as part of a general press policy rather than targeted retaliation.

The conflict escalated after Trump signed an executive order to rename the Gulf, which AP chose not to adopt due to its editorial standards. The White House then limited the agency’s access and removed AP and Reuters from the regular press pool. AP has framed the case as critical to preventing government coercion of the press.

US appeals court to rule if Trump can ban AP from Oval Office | Reuters

Newly unsealed court filings allege that Meta Platforms shut down internal research after discovering evidence that Facebook use caused measurable harm to users’ mental health. In a 2020 internal study, dubbed “Project Mercury,” Meta partnered with Nielsen to examine the effects of Facebook deactivation. Users who left the platform for a week reported lower levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison—results the company allegedly found troubling enough to halt further study and dismiss as tainted by public bias.

Despite internal acknowledgment that the findings were valid, Meta did not publish the results and later told Congress it could not quantify harm from its products. The lawsuit—filed by U.S. school districts against Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google—claims the platforms concealed known risks from users, parents, and educators. Plaintiffs also allege that Meta’s safety features were deliberately underdeveloped, and that high thresholds for user removal allowed exploitative behavior to persist unchecked.

Among the more serious accusations: Meta allegedly deprioritized child safety concerns in favor of platform growth, suppressed internal safety testing, and allowed human trafficking accounts to remain active until repeated violations were flagged—up to 17 times. Plaintiffs say Meta and other companies also tried to buy favorable public positioning by sponsoring child advocacy groups, such as TikTok’s internal brag about its influence over the National PTA.

Meta has denied the allegations, calling them misleading and based on selective quotes. The company says it has robust teen safety measures and that accounts involved in trafficking are now removed upon first report. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for January in federal court.

Meta buried ‘causal’ evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege | Reuters

The Trump administration is moving forward with plans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and relocate its functions across six other federal agencies, including Labor and Health and Human Services. According to multiple sources familiar with the effort, senior officials and department directors have been required to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), an uncommon move for a civilian agency without a national security mandate. These agreements are reportedly being used to limit information sharing as the reorganization proceeds behind closed doors.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the restructuring this week, framing it as a way to “end federal micromanagement” while still supporting education through other agencies. Some staff have already transitioned to new posts, and more are expected to relocate by January. However, specifics on the timeline and scope of the overhaul remain vague, even to congressional oversight committees and education advocates.

Critics argue the administration is sidelining Congress and the public in what they call an opaque and potentially destabilizing shift. Senator Patty Murray called the effort “sabotage,” citing the lack of transparency and collaboration. Meanwhile, McMahon has reportedly met with lawmakers and urged Congress to formalize the changes through legislation, though no formal bill has yet been introduced.

US Education Department requiring non-disclosure agreements in Trump reorganization, sources say | Reuters

In a deep-dive investigation, FOIAball uncovered how UCLA Athletics appears to have routed large sums of money intended for football player NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) deals through a tax-exempt charity—Shelter 37, run by the co-founder of the school’s official NIL collective, Bruins for Life. This maneuver may have allowed donors to receive tax deductions for contributions that ultimately compensated athletes, despite recent IRS rulings stating such collectives do not qualify for charitable status.

Emails obtained through public records show that UCLA development staff actively coached donors to send checks to Shelter 37 while explicitly designating those funds for Bruins for Life, the school’s NIL program. These emails often discussed timing, amounts, and communication with the charity’s leadership to ensure the money was redirected as intended. In several cases, UCLA staff reassured donors that contributions through donor-advised funds (DAFs)—normally restricted from supporting private benefit—could be routed to Shelter 37 and still benefit athletes.

After the IRS began denying charitable status to NIL collectives in 2023 due to private benefit concerns, most programs shifted to non-deductible donations. But UCLA’s workaround relied on Shelter 37’s 501(c)(3) status to continue offering donors deductions, despite Shelter 37’s own filings showing the vast majority of its funds in 2024—$3.6 million of $4.8 million—were raised for UCLA football NIL purposes. By contrast, it spent only $200 on scholarships for at-risk youth, its purported mission.

Legal experts, including yours truly, told FOIAball that this could constitute fraudulent behavior, noting that charities must exercise control over their funds and serve the public interest—not act as pass-throughs for private benefit. UCLA officials, when asked for comment, did not address the specifics. Meanwhile, Shelter 37’s president denied improper coordination but acknowledged the charity paid players to appear at events, an arrangement experts say still violates nonprofit law if the real intent is athlete compensation.

How UCLA used a friendly charity to get tax-free NIL money

On November 21, 1964, a federal grand jury convened in Meridian, Mississippi, and indicted 19 men in connection with the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—three civil rights workers abducted and killed by the Ku Klux Klan during Freedom Summer. The brutal killings had shocked the nation, but Mississippi officials refused to pursue murder charges, prompting the federal government to step in. Lacking jurisdiction over homicide, federal prosecutors turned to a rarely used provision of the Reconstruction-era Civil Rights Act of 1870, charging the defendants with conspiracy to violate the victims’ civil rights.

This legal maneuver led to United States v. Price (1967), a pivotal Supreme Court case that affirmed the federal government’s authority to prosecute state actors and private citizens working in concert to deprive others of constitutional rights. The Court unanimously held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could be enforced through criminal prosecution when state officials or their proxies engaged in unlawful conduct.

At trial, seven of the defendants, including a deputy sheriff, were convicted—though none received more than ten years in prison. Several of the most notorious perpetrators, including Edgar Ray Killen, evaded justice for decades. Still, the case marked one of the first successful federal efforts to hold white supremacists accountable for racial violence in the Jim Crow South.

The Mississippi Burning case revealed both the limits of federal power—since murder charges were off-limits—and its emerging role as a necessary backstop when local justice systems failed. It signaled a new willingness by the Department of Justice to engage in civil rights enforcement, even in the face of deep local hostility. The grand jury’s action on this day helped set legal and moral precedent for future federal interventions in civil rights cases.

Google is making a final argument in federal court to avoid a forced breakup of its advertising technology business, as the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) wraps up its antitrust case. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema already ruled in April that Google maintains two illegal monopolies in the ad tech space. Now the court is weighing remedies, with the DOJ and several states pushing for the sale of Google’s AdX exchange, a key platform where digital ads are auctioned in real time.

During an 11-day trial that began in September, the DOJ argued that only a forced divestiture would effectively curb Google’s anticompetitive conduct. In response, Google contended that breaking up its ad business would be technically disruptive and harmful to customers. The company also emphasized that it would comply with less drastic remedies.

The trial represents one of the most serious legal threats to Google’s ad empire to date. While Google has largely avoided major penalties in previous antitrust actions, this case—and others still pending against Meta, Amazon, and Apple—could mark a turning point in federal enforcement against Big Tech.

Google has pledged to appeal any adverse ruling, including Judge Brinkema’s earlier decision and a separate finding in Washington that declared Google’s dominance in online search and advertising unlawful. In that case, Google was not forced to sell its Chrome browser but was ordered to share more data with competitors.

The outcome of this trial could have lasting implications for the structure of the digital ad industry and the future of antitrust enforcement in the tech sector.

Google aims to dodge breakup of ad business as antitrust trial wraps | Reuters

As the federal government considers limiting state regulation of artificial intelligence, many U.S. states are moving in the opposite direction—introducing legislation to curb algorithmic pricing practices that may be inflating costs for consumers. These laws target the growing use of software that sets prices based on personal data, such as location, browsing history, and past purchases. Critics argue this enables businesses to charge consumers what they’re perceived to be willing to pay, not a fair market rate.

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan, now advising New York City’s incoming administration, is helping shape efforts to leverage state authority to combat such practices. Laws already passed in New York and California prohibit algorithmic collusion in rental markets, and 19 other states are considering similar bills to restrict price-setting based on competitor data.

The issue has attracted bipartisan concern. Utah Republican Tyler Clancy plans to introduce legislation aimed at giving consumers more control over the data companies collect and use to personalize prices. Advocacy groups like Consumer Reports warn that AI-driven pricing risks exacerbating inequality, allowing companies to charge different prices based on who they think the buyer is—effectively punishing certain groups of consumers.

Meanwhile, President Trump is reportedly considering an executive order that would block state-level AI rules, escalating the tension between federal deregulation efforts and state-led consumer protection initiatives.

US states take aim at data-driven pricing to ease consumer pain | Reuters

In a landmark decision, the New Jersey Supreme Court has become the first high court in the U.S. to ban prosecutors from introducing expert testimony that shaking alone can cause the internal injuries typically attributed to Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS). The 6–1 ruling came in two separate child abuse cases involving fathers accused of harming their infant sons. The court held that the state failed to show sufficient scientific consensus across relevant fields, particularly from biomechanical engineering, to justify presenting SBS as a reliable diagnosis in the absence of external trauma.

While SBS has long been used to explain serious injuries like brain swelling and internal bleeding in infants—forming the basis for thousands of abuse prosecutions—the court emphasized that scientific evidence must be broadly accepted and reliable, not speculative or limited to select disciplines. Pediatricians and neurologists largely support the SBS diagnosis, but the court noted that the foundational research stemmed from a 1968 whiplash study, and the biomechanics field has not confirmed that shaking alone, without head impact, can produce the injuries.

One of the defendants, Darryl Nieves, had his case dismissed, while the other, Michael Cifelli, remains charged but plans to seek dismissal based on the ruling. The decision opens the door for challenges in past SBS convictions and may limit future prosecutions relying solely on SBS testimony.

Justice Fabiana Pierre-Louis wrote that the door isn’t permanently closed—if future research can establish consensus, such testimony may be admitted. But for now, the ruling significantly raises the bar for the use of SBS in court. Justice Rachel Wainer Apter dissented, warning that the majority gave too much weight to a single scientific field over others.

New Jersey high court first in US to ban Shaken Baby Syndrome testimony | Reuters

A piece I wrote for Forbes this week examined how Foreign Bank and Financial Account (FBAR) reporting enforcement has evolved into a penalty system wildly out of sync with the actual harm caused. I opened with the United States v. Saydam decision, where a dual citizen was hit with a $437,000 civil penalty for failing to file FBAR forms—even though the government’s tax loss was only about $29,000. There was no fraud, no evasion, and no criminal behavior, yet the punishment looked like something reserved for offshore tax schemers. I argued that this case shows how FBAR has drifted far from its original purpose under the Bank Secrecy Act, which was aimed at serious financial crime, not routine reporting lapses.

In the article, I explained how the concept of “willfulness” has morphed into something elastic enough to include recklessness or even simple inattention, giving the IRS license to impose penalties of up to 50% of an account’s highest balance per year. That structure means the punishment often bears no relation to any underlying tax obligation. Saydam’s case illustrates this perfectly—the government simply took his highest‑balance year, sliced it in half, spread it across the years he didn’t file, and ended up with a crushing figure.

I also emphasized that the people being hit hardest aren’t drug traffickers or money‑launderers; they’re ordinary taxpayers with overseas ties—dual citizens, immigrants, retirees—whose “wrongdoing” is usually limited to missing a form. The court’s acknowledgment that FBAR penalties are indeed “fines” under the Eighth Amendment should have prompted a stronger proportionality analysis, but instead it set a very forgiving standard for the government, effectively blessing massive penalties for paperwork lapses.

In my view, when penalties exceed the actual tax loss by a factor of fifteen, we’re no longer talking about a compliance tool—we’re talking about a punitive revenue mechanism. The system now incentivizes extracting large sums from people who pose no threat to the tax base. Saydam didn’t hide money or lie about his income; he just didn’t file a disclosure. Yet he now faces nearly half a million dollars in liability. As I wrote, if this is the precedent, FBAR has stopped being a transparency measure and has become a blunt instrument aimed at immigrant taxpayers.

The Rise And Proliferation Of Excessive FBAR Penalties

This week’s closing theme is by Henry Purcell.

This week’s closing theme comes from Purcell, the brilliant English Baroque composer often called “the Orpheus Britannicus” for the beauty and depth of his music. Born in 1659 and active during the late 17th century, Purcell’s work bridged the gap between Renaissance polyphony and the emerging Baroque style, blending French elegance, Italian expressiveness, and a distinctly English sensibility. Though he died young at just 36, his influence on British music would echo for centuries.

While his “Ode to Saint Cecilia”—written for the patron saint of music—is his most direct connection to November 22, the official feast day of Saint Cecilia, Purcell’s music is appropriate listening for this week. His compositions often graced the St. Cecilia Day festivals held annually in London, celebrating music itself as a divine art.

The Overture in G minor, which closes our episode today, is not among his ceremonial odes but showcases many of his signature strengths: tight contrapuntal writing, a dark, dignified mood, and striking harmonic shifts that feel centuries ahead of their time. The overture begins with a slow, solemn introduction before launching into a more vigorous section, where rhythmic vitality meets melodic restraint.

It’s a concise, powerful piece that reflects Purcell’s talent for writing music that is both emotionally direct and structurally refined. Though originally composed for a larger suite or theatrical context, it stands on its own as a miniature masterwork. As the week draws to a close and Saint Cecilia’s Day approaches, Purcell’s music reminds us that even in constraint—of time, of scale, of form—there can be grandeur.

And with that, enjoy Purcell’s Overture in G minor!

On November 20, 1789, New Jersey became the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights, a landmark moment in American constitutional history. Just months after the U.S. Constitution went into effect, debate over its lack of explicit protections for individual liberties sparked calls for amendments. Responding to this concern, James Madison introduced a series of proposed amendments in the First Congress in June 1789, aiming to ease Anti-Federalist fears and solidify support for the new federal government. Congress approved twelve amendments on September 25, 1789, and sent them to the states for ratification.

New Jersey acted swiftly, ratifying eleven of the twelve proposed amendments less than two months later. The state rejected the first proposed amendment, which concerned congressional representation, and accepted the rest, including protections for freedom of speech, religion, the press, the right to bear arms, and safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures. New Jersey’s early endorsement gave momentum to the broader ratification effort, which required approval by three-fourths of the states.

By December 15, 1791, ten of the amendments had been ratified by the necessary eleven states and became known as the Bill of Rights. These provisions would become foundational to American legal doctrine, judicial interpretation, and civil liberties jurisprudence. New Jersey’s rapid ratification also signaled the willingness of smaller states to embrace a constitutional framework that better balanced federal power with individual protections.

The ratification process itself reflected the structural legal mechanism required to alter the Constitution—Article V mandates both congressional proposal and state approval. This episode demonstrates how early American legal institutions navigated public pressure and political compromise to create durable legal norms. The Bill of Rights remains central to constitutional interpretation today, frequently invoked in court cases involving speech, privacy, and due process.

A group of senior judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has recently influenced several rulings on politically sensitive cases, softening the conservative tone of one of the nation’s most right-leaning appellate courts. These judges, many appointed decades ago by presidents like Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, were part of three-judge panels that struck down or allowed challenges to laws involving religion in schools, drag shows on campus, and firearm signage. However, these decisions are now set for reconsideration by the court’s full active bench in January, as part of a growing trend of en banc rehearings.

The Fifth Circuit includes 17 active judges and seven senior judges. While senior judges can still hear cases and author opinions, their influence is ultimately limited because active judges control en banc reviews, which can overturn panel rulings. Most of these upcoming en banc cases saw dissents from Trump-appointed judges at the panel level. Some senior judges, like Edith Brown Clement, are conservative and remain highly active, while others like James Dennis and Patrick Higginbotham are known for their moderate or liberal views and are key voices in current and upcoming decisions.

Legal experts say senior judges’ experience and moderation often make them more willing to adhere to precedent rather than pursue ideological shifts. Their dissents and opinions can also help signal to the U.S. Supreme Court that a case warrants review. With an increase in ideologically charged cases on topics like immigration and free speech, the Fifth Circuit’s internal dynamics reflect a broader national tension between judicial restraint and a more activist, conservative legal agenda.

Full Fifth Circuit Overrides Moderate Senior Judges’ Rulings

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has asked a federal court to enforce a subpoena against the University of Pennsylvania as part of an ongoing investigation into alleged antisemitic harassment. The EEOC’s request was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and stems from a charge initiated in December 2023 by Republican-appointed Chair Andrea Lucas. The agency is seeking documents and information identifying victims and witnesses to reported religious-based harassment affecting faculty and staff.

The investigation centers on claims that the university failed to adequately respond to internal complaints of antisemitism. The EEOC under Lucas—particularly during and after the first Trump administration—has prioritized enforcement actions related to religious discrimination, with higher education institutions facing increased scrutiny. Penn has not yet issued a public response regarding the subpoena or the broader investigation.

EEOC Seeks UPenn Information Disclosure in Antisemitism Probe

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken announced that it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States. The move positions Kraken among several digital asset firms seeking to go public amid renewed investor interest in the crypto sector. Other companies like Circle and Gemini have also made progress toward U.S. listings this year.

Kraken recently reported a $20 billion valuation in its latest fundraising round, marking a 33% increase over the past two months. While the company did not disclose specific details about the IPO structure or timeline, the filing indicates growing momentum for digital finance firms in public markets.

Crypto exchange Kraken confidentially files for US IPO | Reuters

The U.S. government has loaned Constellation Energy $1 billion to restart a nuclear reactor at the former Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania. The project, now called the Crane Clean Energy Center, involves reviving an 835-megawatt reactor that was shut down in 2019. Constellation entered a partnership with Microsoft in 2024 to help offset the tech company’s energy use, especially for power-intensive data centers. The reactor’s restart reflects rising energy demand tied to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) issued the loan to help lower financing costs and encourage private investment. Officials emphasized that nuclear energy offers stable, carbon-free baseload power critical for both grid reliability and climate goals. While Constellation is financially strong enough to obtain private funding, the administration said public support signals a national commitment to clean and dependable energy infrastructure.

The plant still needs regulatory approvals, including from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Constellation has already begun hiring workers, inspecting systems, and ordering essential equipment. The company now expects the reactor to come online by 2027, a year ahead of the original timeline due to an accelerated grid connection review.

US loans Constellation $1 billion for Three Mile Island reactor reboot | Reuters

On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, months after the blood-soaked Civil War battle that left over 50,000 dead or wounded. The speech nearly didn’t make it—Lincoln’s draft was reportedly misplaced during the train ride to Gettysburg, and he completed the final version just the night before the ceremony. The headliner that day was Edward Everett, a famed orator who delivered a two-hour address rich in historical detail and classical references. Lincoln followed with a two-minute speech of just 271 words.

Drawing inspiration from Pericles’ Funeral Oration in ancient Athens, Lincoln sought to elevate the sacrifices of Union soldiers into a reaffirmation of democratic ideals. He framed the war as a test of whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could endure. In his address, Lincoln humbly suggested that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,” asserting that the deeds of the fallen, not words, would be remembered by future generations.

Afterward, Lincoln reportedly told his bodyguard, “that speech won’t scour,” using a Midwestern farming phrase to express doubt about its impact. But Everett, recognizing its brilliance, wrote to Lincoln the next day to say that the president had accomplished in two minutes what he had failed to do in two hours. Indeed, Everett himself is now most famous for his connection to Lincoln’s words. Though met with mixed reviews at the time, the speech has since eclipsed the Battle of Gettysburg itself in cultural memory and certainly legal significance.

Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg echoed something he had written five years earlier, after his defeat in the 1858 Illinois Senate race to Stephen Douglas. Reflecting on what seemed like the end of his political career, Lincoln wrote, “and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.” These words, penned just two years before he became president, speak to Lincoln’s deep conviction that principles—not personal success—leave the most enduring legacy. The Gettysburg Address ultimately became one of those “marks,” still telling for the cause of civil liberty over 160 years later.

The Gettysburg Address endures not just as a piece of oratory but as a touchstone of American constitutional values, echoing through the Fourteenth Amendment and generations of civil rights jurisprudence.

A federal judge in Virginia will hear arguments from former FBI Director James Comey’s legal team seeking dismissal of criminal charges against him, alleging the case was politically motivated by President Donald Trump’s long-standing animosity. Comey’s lawyers argue the prosecution is a form of “vindictive” retaliation for his public criticism of Trump, who has often called for Comey’s prosecution since firing him in 2017. Comey, charged in September with making false statements and obstructing a congressional investigation, has pleaded not guilty and is pursuing multiple avenues to have the case thrown out before trial.

The hearing will also examine the controversial role of Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump personal lawyer with no prosecutorial background, appointed as interim U.S. Attorney overseeing the case. A separate judge is reviewing whether Halligan’s appointment was lawful, while a magistrate judge recently flagged serious procedural concerns with how she handled the grand jury that indicted Comey. Prosecutors maintain that Trump’s public statements and criticism of Comey do not meet the legal threshold for a vindictive prosecution claim and argue the charges are legitimate.

Comey’s case is part of a broader pattern, with other Trump critics, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and former national security adviser John Bolton, also facing charges following Trump’s calls for retribution. Legal observers are closely watching whether courts will allow such prosecutions to proceed given the appearance of political targeting.

US judge to weigh Trump’s influence over case against ex-FBI chief Comey | Reuters

Cravath, Swaine & Moore has kicked off the 2025 year-end bonus season for major U.S. law firms by announcing associate bonuses of up to $140,000. According to an internal memo, standard year-end bonuses will range from $15,000 for first-year associates (on a pro-rated basis) to $115,000 for the most senior associates. Additionally, the firm will issue special bonuses between $6,000 and $25,000, aligning with bonus levels previously set by competitor Milbank.

Cravath, long viewed as a market-setter in associate compensation, made the announcement on Tuesday, prompting at least one other major firm—Paul Hastings—to follow suit with matching payouts. These bonuses mirror those issued last year, maintaining pressure on peer firms to remain competitive in compensation.

Currently, associates at top U.S. firms earn base salaries ranging from $225,000 to $435,000 depending on seniority. Firms often wait for Cravath to act before making their own compensation decisions. The announcement comes amid strong financial performance across the legal sector, with a surge in client demand—especially for transactional work—reported in the third quarter. Analysts suggest this demand positions firms for a profitable close to 2025.

Cravath sets pace for US law firm bonuses, promising associates up to $140K | Reuters

Cravath Doles Out Associate Bonuses Ranging Up to $140,000 (2)

The U.S. Senate is set to question Michael Selig, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), with a focus on his views on cryptocurrency regulation and election betting markets. Selig, currently the chief counsel for the SEC’s crypto task force and an adviser to Republican SEC chair Paul Atkins, has been an outspoken supporter of pro-crypto policies. In a recent social media post, he pledged to help make the U.S. the “Crypto Capital of the World.”

Trump’s administration has embraced the crypto sector, rolling back enforcement efforts and enacting a regulatory framework for stablecoins. The CFTC could gain expanded oversight powers under the proposed CLARITY Act, which passed the House in July and is now being reviewed by the Senate. That legislation aims to clarify when a digital asset is a commodity versus a security, a long-standing jurisdictional issue between the CFTC and the SEC.

Selig’s nomination follows the withdrawal of Trump’s earlier pick, Brian Quintenz, who alleged his nomination was derailed by pressure from major crypto donors, the Winklevoss twins. Senators are expected to press Selig on his approach to inter-agency cooperation, how he would regulate crypto spot markets, and how the CFTC might handle politically sensitive areas like election betting. Currently, only one commissioner remains on the CFTC, Republican Caroline Pham, who is serving as acting chair and has signaled plans to step down once a new leader is confirmed.

Senate to grill Trump’s pick for CFTC head on crypto regulation | Reuters

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled on Tuesday that Donald Trump cannot revive his defamation lawsuit against CNN over its use of the term “Big Lie” to describe his false claims about the 2020 presidential election. Trump filed the suit in 2022, arguing that the phrase linked him to Nazi propaganda and unfairly compared him to Adolf Hitler. However, both the district court and the appeals court found that CNN’s language constituted protected opinion, not provable falsehoods.

The court emphasized that Trump failed to demonstrate that CNN’s statements were factually false, which is a necessary element of a defamation claim. While Trump asserted that “Big Lie” was unambiguous and defamatory, the panel disagreed, finding the term inherently subjective and open to interpretation—particularly in political contexts. They noted that if politically charged terms like “fascist” are ambiguous, then “Big Lie,” which is facially apolitical, must be considered at least as ambiguous.

Trump had also tried to compare CNN’s interpretation of his actions to his own self-assessment, in which he saw himself as exercising constitutional rights. But the court held that differing views on Trump’s conduct are subjective and not subject to clear proof. The district court’s refusal to reconsider or allow Trump to amend the complaint was upheld, as he failed to present new evidence or show any legal error.

The opinion was issued per curiam by Judges Adalberto Jordan, Kevin Newsom, and Elizabeth Branch.

Trump Fails to Revive Defamation Suit Against CNN Over ‘Big Lie’

On November 18, 1267, the Statute of Marlborough was enacted during the reign of King Henry III of England. It is the oldest piece of English statute law still partially in force, with four of its original twenty-nine chapters remaining on the books. The statute emerged from a period of intense baronial conflict and civil unrest, notably the Second Barons’ War, and was part of a broader effort to restore royal authority and stabilize governance through legal reform. It reinforced the crown’s prerogatives while addressing grievances raised by rebellious nobles, making it a compromise between royal and feudal powers.

Among its most enduring provisions were regulations on the practice of “distress,” which referred to the seizure of property to compel debt repayment or enforce court judgments. The statute restricted unlawful and excessive distresses, requiring them to occur only with legal justification and in the appropriate jurisdiction. These reforms curtailed private self-help remedies and emphasized formal court processes, laying foundational principles for due process and the centralization of judicial authority. It also addressed issues like wardship, waste of land, and the obligations of tenants—key concerns in the feudal legal structure.

The Statute of Marlborough built upon earlier reforms such as the Provisions of Oxford and Westminster, but had a more lasting legal impact. Its survival into modern times speaks to the durability of certain legal concepts, especially those reinforcing procedural fairness. Some of its language has been modernized, but the essence of its rules remains intact in English law. The statute reflects an early attempt to systematize and limit both public and private power through legal mechanisms. Legal historians often point to it as a stepping stone on the path to the English common law tradition.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case challenging the federal government’s authority to limit asylum processing at official U.S.-Mexico border crossings under the now-rescinded “metering” policy. Originally implemented under President Trump and formalized in 2018, metering allowed border agents to stop asylum seekers before they crossed into the U.S. and decline to process their claims, even when they were physically present at ports of entry. The Biden administration repealed the policy in 2021, but Trump’s return to office has revived interest in reestablishing it.

At the core of the case is the legal meaning of the phrase “arrives in the United States,” with the Ninth Circuit ruling in 2024 that it includes people who reach official border entry points—even if still on the Mexican side. That ruling held that federal law requires asylum seekers at ports of entry to be inspected and allowed to apply, regardless of logistical constraints like capacity. The advocacy group Al Otro Lado, which brought the lawsuit in 2017, argues the metering policy illegally circumvented these obligations, leaving vulnerable migrants stranded in dangerous border conditions.

Trump’s Justice Department contends that “arrives in” means actual entry, not mere proximity—using analogies ranging from Normandy to football to make its point. The administration has also signaled that it intends to resume the policy if conditions warrant. The case, which will likely be decided by June, comes amid broader efforts to restrict asylum protections globally and may clarify the limits of executive power over humanitarian migration policy.

Supreme Court to review US government power to limit asylum processing | Reuters

A California judge has blocked a proposed class action lawsuit involving 6,000 Black workers at Tesla’s Fremont factory who alleged systemic racial harassment, marking a significant legal win for the company. Judge Peter Borkon ruled that the case could not proceed as a class action because the plaintiffs’ attorneys failed to secure testimony from at least 200 workers—raising doubts about whether the experiences of a smaller group could represent the broader workforce. This reverses a 2024 decision by another judge who had previously allowed the class to move forward.

The original lawsuit, filed in 2017 by former worker Marcus Vaughn, alleged pervasive racism at the facility, including slurs, racist graffiti, and even nooses in work areas. Tesla has denied allowing harassment and said it takes disciplinary action against those who violate company policy. While this ruling narrows the scope of Vaughn’s lawsuit, Tesla still faces other legal challenges, including a similar case from California’s civil rights agency and a separate federal suit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Tesla has previously settled other race discrimination lawsuits brought by individual employees.

Tesla wins bid to undo race bias class action by Black factory workers | Reuters

Ashurst and Perkins Coie have agreed to merge, forming a global law firm with 3,000 lawyers and $2.7 billion in revenue—placing it among the world’s top 20 legal outfits by size. The merger, expected to close in late 2026 pending partner approval, will create Ashurst Perkins Coie, with 52 offices across 23 countries. The move is part of a broader trend of transatlantic law firm consolidation aimed at scaling up to serve cross-border clients more effectively.

Leadership will be shared between Ashurst’s global CEO Paul Jenkins and Perkins Coie’s managing partner Bill Malley, who emphasized the merger’s value for clients in technology, financial services, and energy. Talks began in early 2025, with both firms framing the deal as a long-term strategic alignment. Perkins Coie recently gained attention for its role in successfully challenging executive orders from President Trump’s administration targeting the firm and others tied to his political adversaries. While the firms say they have no current plans to expand their office footprint, the combination signals a deepening of U.K.-U.S. legal market integration.

Law firms Ashurst, Perkins Coie agree merger to create global top-20 outfit | Reuters

My column for Bloomberg this week looks at OpenAI’s effort to expand the CHIPS Act tax credit into a broad-based AI infrastructure subsidy—and what it reveals about the government’s evolving role in underwriting the AI economy. OpenAI has asked the federal government to stretch the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit—originally designed to revive U.S. semiconductor manufacturing—to cover the entire AI stack, from servers to steel. That request arrives as data centers’ energy consumption and land use start imposing real costs on local grids, budgets, and communities, raising the question: who’s actually footing the bill for AI?

I argue that this isn’t a bailout so much as a bid for taxpayer-backed central planning, with a venture-capital gloss. AI infrastructure projects like OpenAI’s Stargate centers already benefit from layers of state and local tax breaks, discounted electricity, and favorable land deals. Adding a 35% federal credit on top creates a subsidy stack that warps local priorities—school districts lose tax revenue, utilities are forced to reroute energy, and residents pay more on their bills. The public impact is mounting, even as the private benefit remains largely proprietary and insulated.

Rather than offering blank checks, Congress should condition federal support on clear benefit-sharing requirements: job thresholds, emissions transparency, energy sourcing obligations, and clawbacks for missed targets. I propose a framework that makes federal aid contingent on upfront impact disclosures, co-investment in the grid, and full accounting of overlapping subsidies. Industrial policy isn’t inherently bad—but without enforceable terms, we’re not funding a public-private partnership. We’re subsidizing a corporate buildout dressed up as a national security imperative.

On November 17, 1800, the United States Congress convened for the first time in the new Capitol building in Washington, D.C., marking a foundational moment in American legal and political history. The relocation came after a decade of Congress meeting in temporary quarters, most recently in Philadelphia, as the young republic grappled with questions of permanence and national identity. Washington, D.C. had been selected as the capital through the Residence Act of 1790, a political compromise that helped balance regional power between North and South. By 1800, the city remained largely undeveloped, and the Capitol itself was still under construction—only the north wing was usable.

Despite its incomplete state, the Capitol’s occupation by Congress signaled the institutional maturity of the federal government. It gave physical shape to the separation of powers by housing the legislative branch in its own dedicated space, distinct from the executive and judiciary. This move also underscored the federal character of the American system, establishing a neutral location not belonging to any one state. John Adams, still president at the time, had moved into the President’s House (now the White House) just weeks earlier, completing the federal trifecta.

The decision to proceed with the session in an unfinished building reflected a commitment to constitutional governance and the rule of law, even in the face of logistical and environmental hardships. Lawmakers contended with the muddy streets and sparse accommodations of the nascent city, yet their presence inaugurated what would become one of the most symbolically and functionally important legislative chambers in the world. This moment laid the groundwork for Washington, D.C. to become not only the seat of American government but a focal point for legal development, political conflict, and democratic debate for centuries to come.

More than 500 lawsuits alleging that Tylenol use during pregnancy causes autism in children may be revived, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit prepares to hear arguments from plaintiffs challenging a 2024 dismissal of their cases. A lower court had rejected the claims after finding that the plaintiffs’ expert testimony lacked scientific rigor, a conclusion supported by Tylenol maker Kenvue. The plaintiffs argue the judge mischaracterized their experts’ findings and are citing public support from President Trump and health officials, who linked autism to Tylenol use during a September 2025 press conference.

Scientific consensus continues to hold that no definitive link exists between acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) and autism, a position echoed by Kenvue. The company is also facing a separate suit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who accuses Kenvue of concealing risks to children, though a Texas judge recently denied Paxton’s efforts to halt a $398 million shareholder dividend and restrict Tylenol marketing. Meanwhile, it remains uncertain whether the appeal will impact Kimberly-Clark’s pending $40 billion acquisition of Kenvue, though both companies have indicated that litigation over autism claims won’t derail the deal.

US appeals court to weigh reviving cases over Tylenol and autism | Reuters

Gupta Wessler, a boutique appellate firm in Washington, D.C., known for its U.S. Supreme Court advocacy on behalf of plaintiffs, has hired Matthew Guarnieri, a former assistant to the U.S. solicitor general. Guarnieri argued 13 Supreme Court cases under both the Biden and Trump administrations and is the first attorney to leave the solicitor general’s office for a firm that exclusively handles plaintiff-side appellate work. His move reflects a growing recognition of Gupta Wessler’s nontraditional model, which competes with corporate-heavy appellate practices at larger firms.

Guarnieri becomes the fifth principal at the 18-lawyer firm, which is currently involved in high-profile litigation, including representing Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employees challenging President Trump’s mass firings and securing a $185 million verdict against Monsanto over chemical contamination. The firm also represents Uber passengers alleging sexual assault and recently blocked an attempt in Nevada to limit contingency fees in civil cases. Guarnieri left the DOJ in October after nine years of service; the department declined to comment on his departure.

DC appellate firm picks up departing DOJ Supreme Court advocate | Reuters

A federal jury in California has ordered Apple to pay $634 million to Masimo, a medical technology company, for infringing a patent related to blood-oxygen monitoring used in Apple Watches. The jury found that specific features like workout mode and heart rate notifications violated Masimo’s patent rights. Apple has announced plans to appeal, arguing that the patent in question, which expired in 2022, covers outdated technology and that most of Masimo’s other patent claims have been invalidated.

This verdict is part of a broader legal conflict between Apple and Masimo, which accuses Apple of poaching employees and misappropriating pulse oximetry technology. In 2023, the U.S. International Trade Commission imposed an import ban on certain Apple Watch models, prompting Apple to remove the disputed feature and later reintroduce it with customs approval. A new ITC review is now underway to determine if the updated models should also be banned. The legal fight spans several courts and includes ongoing challenges from both companies over import restrictions and intellectual property claims.

US jury says Apple must pay Masimo $634 million in smartwatch patent case | Reuters

On this day in legal history, November 14, 1922, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, a foundational case in American property law. At issue was a Pennsylvania statute—the Kohler Act—that prohibited coal mining beneath certain structures to prevent surface subsidence. The Pennsylvania Coal Company had previously sold the surface rights to a parcel of land but retained the right to mine the coal beneath. When the state blocked their ability to do so, the company sued, arguing that the law had effectively stripped them of valuable property rights without compensation. The case reached the Supreme Court, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. delivered the majority opinion.

In his decision, Holmes introduced the now-famous principle that “while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking.” This line marked the birth of the regulatory takings doctrine, which holds that government actions short of full appropriation can still require just compensation under the Fifth Amendment. Holmes emphasized that the economic impact of a regulation on the property owner must be weighed, not just the public interest it serves. In this case, the regulation was deemed too burdensome to be considered a mere exercise of police power.

The Court sided with the coal company, holding that the Kohler Act, as applied, amounted to an unconstitutional taking. The dissent, penned by Justice Brandeis, warned against undermining states’ ability to protect public welfare. Despite being a 5–4 decision, Mahon has had lasting influence on land use, zoning, and environmental regulation. It reframed the boundaries between public regulation and private rights, signaling that not all public-interest laws are immune from constitutional scrutiny. Today, Mahon remains a cornerstone case for litigants challenging regulations that significantly diminish property value.

A Texas judge is set to hear arguments on Attorney General Ken Paxton’s request to block Kenvue from issuing a $398 million dividend and from marketing Tylenol as safe during pregnancy. Paxton sued Kenvue in October, accusing the company of hiding risks linked to prenatal Tylenol use, including autism and ADHD—a claim not supported by the broader medical community. The lawsuit follows public comments by Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promoting the same unproven theory. Kenvue and Johnson & Johnson, which previously owned Tylenol, maintain the drug’s safety and argue the state has no authority to interfere in federal drug regulation or corporate dividends.

The companies also say the dividend will not impair Kenvue’s solvency and warn that Paxton’s effort could undermine both the First Amendment and the credibility of Texas courts. Paxton, however, argues that the public interest justifies intervention, citing potential future liabilities from Tylenol and talc-related lawsuits. He contends that misleading commercial speech can be regulated, and that the dividend should be halted to preserve cash in the face of those risks. The case could have broader implications, particularly for Kimberly-Clark’s $40 billion acquisition of Kenvue, announced shortly after the lawsuit. Kenvue has vowed to appeal any injunction.

Judge to weigh if Texas AG can block Kenvue dividend over Tylenol claims | Reuters

Sierra Leone has reached a tentative settlement with U.S. law firm Jenner & Block to resolve a dispute over $8.1 million in unpaid legal fees. The law firm sued the West African nation in 2022, claiming it was still owed money for representing Sierra Leone in a high-stakes case against Gerald International Ltd., which had sought $1.8 billion in damages over an iron ore export ban. Jenner argued the legal work was more extensive than initially expected and said it had only been paid $3.6 million by the end of 2021.

Sierra Leone pushed back, disputing the existence of a valid contract and asserting that no further payments were owed. The country also tried to claim sovereign immunity, but a federal judge rejected those arguments in January, allowing the lawsuit to proceed. U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey announced the settlement in principle last week, although specific terms were not disclosed. Neither party has commented publicly on the resolution.

Sierra Leone, law firm Jenner & Block reach settlement over $8 million legal tab | Reuters

McDermott Will & Emery has become the first major U.S. law firm to publicly confirm that it is considering private equity investment, signaling a potential shift in how Big Law might operate. The firm’s chairman acknowledged preliminary talks with outside investors, a move that stunned the legal industry, where non-lawyer ownership has long been resisted due to ethical and regulatory restrictions. McDermott is reportedly exploring a structure that would separate its legal services from administrative operations by creating a managed service organization (MSO) owned by outside investors, allowing the firm to raise capital without violating professional conduct rules.

This model has gained traction among smaller firms, but McDermott’s adoption could legitimize the MSO approach for large firms. Proponents argue it would free lawyers to focus on client work while upgrading support systems through external funding. Critics caution that it involves relinquishing control of critical firm functions and raises concerns about maintaining ethical standards, particularly regarding fee-sharing with non-lawyers. While still early, industry experts say other firms are beginning to explore similar paths to stay competitive, especially in jurisdictions like Arizona that allow non-lawyer ownership.

McDermott’s Outside Investor Talks Augur Big Law Transformation

The Trump administration has filed suit against California over its recently approved congressional redistricting maps, which were adopted through a ballot initiative known as Proposition 50. The measure, passed by voters last week, allows temporary use of new district lines that could give Democrats up to five additional U.S. House seats. The Justice Department joined a lawsuit initially filed by the California Republican Party and several voters, alleging that the redistricting plan was racially motivated and unconstitutional.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi called the maps a “brazen power grab,” accusing California of using race to unlawfully boost Hispanic voting power. California Governor Gavin Newsom dismissed the lawsuit, framing it as retaliation for California’s resistance to Trump’s broader political agenda. Newsom also argued that the new maps are a necessary corrective to Republican-led gerrymandering efforts, like those in Texas, where civil rights groups have sued over alleged dilution of minority voting power.

The lawsuit claims California’s map violates the U.S. Constitution by improperly using race in the redistricting process. The outcome could impact the balance of power in the House and add fuel to ongoing legal battles over partisan and racial gerrymandering nationwide.

Trump administration sues California over new redistricting maps | Reuters

This week’s closing theme is by Ludwig van Beethoven, a composer of some note.

This week’s closing theme is the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93 – I. Allegro vivace e con brio, a work that balances classical clarity with Beethoven’s unmistakable wit and rhythmic drive. Composed in 1812 during a period of personal turmoil, the Eighth is often described as a cheerful outlier among his symphonies, compact and effervescent despite being written amid deteriorating health and emotional strain. It was premiered in 1814, but it was a revival performance on November 14, 1814, in Vienna that helped solidify its reputation and gave the public a second opportunity to appreciate its lightness and humor in contrast to the more dramatic works surrounding it.

Unlike the grand scale of the Seventh or Ninth, the Eighth is shorter and more classical in form, often drawing comparisons to Haydn in its wit and economy. Yet Beethoven infuses it with his unique voice—syncopations, dynamic extremes, and abrupt harmonic shifts abound, particularly in the first movement. The Allegro vivace e con brio opens with a bold, playful theme, tossing melodic fragments between the orchestra with cheerful assertiveness. It’s less stormy than many of Beethoven’s first movements, but no less commanding.

Critics at the time were puzzled by the symphony’s restraint and humor, expecting more overt heroism from Beethoven. But modern listeners often recognize the Eighth as a masterwork of compression and invention. The first movement in particular plays with rhythmic momentum, frequently disrupting expectations just as they form. There’s a confidence in its restraint, a knowing smile behind the forceful accents and offbeat rhythms. It’s music that’s both technically impressive and viscerally enjoyable, which is perhaps why Beethoven held it in especially high regard.

As we close out the week, we leave you with that November 14 revival spirit—a reminder that even a “little Symphony” can land with enduring force.

Without further ado, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 in F Major, Op. 93 – I. Allegro vivace e con brio, enjoy!

On November 13, 1856, Louis Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He would go on to become one of the most influential jurists in American legal history. Appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson, Brandeis was the first Jewish justice and brought a deeply progressive and pragmatic philosophy to the bench. Long before his judicial career, he co-authored the seminal 1890 Harvard Law Review article “The Right to Privacy,” articulating a legal theory that would shape decades of constitutional interpretation. On the Court, he consistently championed civil liberties, individual privacy, and limitations on unchecked government and corporate power.

Brandeis was known for his meticulous reasoning and willingness to dissent, often laying the groundwork for future majority opinions. In Whitney v. California (1927), his concurring opinion defended free speech in sweeping terms, arguing that the remedy for harmful ideas was more speech, not enforced silence—a principle that remains central to First Amendment jurisprudence. In economic cases, he frequently opposed monopolistic practices and was skeptical of concentrated financial power, earning him the moniker “the people’s lawyer.” His distrust of large institutions was not ideological but rooted in a belief that democracy and individual autonomy could only flourish when those institutions were held accountable.

Brandeis also advanced the use of social science and empirical data in legal arguments, exemplified by the famous “Brandeis Brief” in Muller v. Oregon (1908), which emphasized real-world facts over abstract legal theory. He believed that courts should understand the broader implications of their rulings, particularly in cases affecting labor, privacy, and civil rights. Though his views were sometimes out of step with his contemporaries, many of his ideas became mainstream in later decades. Brandeis served on the Court until 1939, leaving a legacy of principled independence and intellectual rigor.

House Democrats have released emails suggesting that Donald Trump may have been aware of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of underage girls. The documents include a 2019 email in which Epstein told author Michael Wolff that Trump “knew about the girls” and asked Ghislaine Maxwell to “stop,” as well as a 2011 message from Epstein to Maxwell claiming Trump spent significant time at his house with one of Epstein’s victims. The victim’s name is redacted, but the White House says it refers to the late Virginia Giuffre, who has publicly stated that Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing.

Trump has consistently denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, emphasizing that their friendship ended years before Epstein’s death in jail in 2019. The White House dismissed the email release as a politically motivated stunt and accused Democrats of constructing a “fake narrative.” Still, the controversy has stirred unease among Trump’s base, with recent polling showing only 40% of Republicans support his handling of the Epstein case—far less than his usual approval ratings.

Wednesday’s release coincides with the swearing-in of Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, whose vote could trigger a full House vote to declassify all Epstein-related records. Democrats, led by Rep. Robert Garcia, are pushing for full transparency, alleging that attempts to conceal the files raise deeper concerns about Trump’s connection to Epstein.

House Democrats release Epstein papers saying Trump ‘knew about the girls’ | Reuters

Apple says recent fee cuts for app developers in the EU, made to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), have not led to lower prices for consumers. The company commissioned a study showing that developers kept prices the same or raised them for 90% of products, with only 9% seeing reductions—and those were consistent with typical pricing trends, not fee changes. Most of the financial benefit from reduced commissions, totaling €20.1 million, went to non-EU developers.

Apple argues this undermines the DMA’s goal of helping consumers and fostering competition, instead creating new hurdles for startups and potential risks for users. The European Commission has not yet commented. The DMA targets tech giants like Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, aiming to level the playing field and offer users more choice.

Developer fee cuts not passed on to EU users, Apple says | Reuters

Google has filed a federal lawsuit in New York aiming to dismantle an international phishing operation it claims originated in China. According to the complaint, the group used software called “Lighthouse” to impersonate entities like Google, the U.S. Postal Service, and E-ZPass, sending fake text messages that tricked users into revealing sensitive personal and financial information. Nearly 200,000 fraudulent websites were allegedly created in just 20 days, targeting over a million people across more than 120 countries.

Google accuses the 25 unnamed defendants of trademark infringement, false advertising, and racketeering, and is seeking financial damages as well as legal orders to shut the scheme down in the U.S. The company estimates the group may have stolen between 12.7 million and 115 million U.S. credit card numbers. Google’s general counsel also backed proposed federal legislation to strengthen protections against similar scams.

Google sues in New York to break up text phishing scheme | Reuters

On November 12, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 into law, enacting one of the most ambitious environmental regulatory packages in U.S. history. The amendments addressed a broad range of air quality concerns, including acid rain, smog in urban areas, and emissions of hazardous air pollutants. At the time, the legislation was notable for its bipartisan support and its embrace of both traditional regulation and market-based solutions. Among its most innovative features was the introduction of a cap-and-trade program to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions, the primary cause of acid rain. This program placed a national cap on emissions and allowed utilities to buy and sell allowances, incentivizing the adoption of cleaner technologies and practices.

The legislation also directed the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate 189 toxic air pollutants, a massive expansion from the original eight. It required cleaner gasoline in high-pollution areas and set deadlines for phasing out ozone-depleting chemicals. States were mandated to submit detailed plans for meeting federal air quality standards, significantly increasing local accountability. The law established a new operating permit system for major sources of air pollution, centralizing compliance efforts. It also increased civil and criminal penalties for violators and expanded the public’s right to sue polluters and the government for non-enforcement.

The amendments reflected growing public concern about environmental degradation and represented a turning point in how the federal government approached pollution control. By pairing stricter standards with economic incentives, the 1990 law helped redefine regulatory strategy in environmental law.

The U.S. Supreme Court extended a temporary pause on a lower court order that would have required the Trump administration to fully fund SNAP benefits during the ongoing government shutdown. The administration is currently withholding approximately $4 billion from the program, which supports 42 million low-income Americans. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who initially granted the pause, stated she would have denied the request to extend it further. The pause is now set to expire Thursday, though an end to the shutdown could render the legal fight moot. Meanwhile, the Senate has approved a bipartisan bill to end the shutdown, which has become the longest in U.S. history. The lapse in SNAP funding marks the first such disruption in the program’s six-decade existence, prompting recipients to rely on food pantries and cut back on essential expenses like medications.

US Supreme Court extends pause on order requiring Trump to fully fund food aid | Reuters

Three former senior enforcement officials from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have launched a new legal initiative aimed at holding corporations accountable in the absence of federal action. The project, backed by the advocacy group Protect Borrowers, will focus on bringing strategic lawsuits against companies accused of exploiting consumers, workers, and small businesses. The team—Eric Halperin, Cara Petersen, and Tara Mikkilineni—previously held top roles at the CFPB before it was effectively sidelined by the Trump administration.

The CFPB’s enforcement and supervision functions were largely dismantled this year, leaving a vacuum in consumer protection at the federal level. In response, consumer advocates and state officials have begun stepping in to fill the enforcement gap. Halperin emphasized that rising corporate profits alongside deepening financial stress for ordinary Americans is no coincidence, pointing to a lack of oversight that enables corporate misconduct to go unchecked.

Former top enforcers at US watchdog join project to bring pro-consumer lawsuits | Reuters

The NCAA has agreed to a $303 million settlement to resolve claims from over 7,700 current and former Division I coaches who say they were illegally denied pay under a now-repealed policy that barred compensation for so-called “volunteer” coaches in all sports except baseball. Filed in federal court in Sacramento, the proposed class action settlement still requires approval from U.S. District Judge William Shubb. If approved, no coach will receive less than $5,000, with average payouts expected to be around $39,260 before fees, and some six-figure awards anticipated.

The plaintiffs argued the NCAA and its member schools violated antitrust laws by maintaining the compensation ban, a rule repealed in 2023. The NCAA denies wrongdoing but said the deal provides “certainty and clarity.” The lawyers representing the coaches plan to seek up to 30% of the settlement—around $90.9 million—in legal fees. This case follows a $49 million NCAA settlement with baseball coaches over similar claims and comes amid broader legal pressure on the NCAA, including a pending $2.8 billion settlement allowing schools to pay student-athletes directly.

NCAA agrees to $303 million settlement with unpaid college coaches | Reuters

My column for Bloomberg this week looks at Mexico’s latest attempt to crack down on value-added tax (VAT) invoice fraud—and why it misses the mark. The new measure shifts enforcement burdens onto digital platforms like Amazon and eBay, criminalizing them for fraud they are neither equipped nor authorized to detect. Instead of building a real-time fiscal invoicing system that validates transactions as they occur, the government is digitizing enforcement without changing the underlying system that enables fraud in the first place.

False VAT invoice fraud in Mexico typically involves shell companies, or factureras, issuing legally compliant but entirely fictitious receipts that allow taxpayers to inflate deductions or claim improper refunds. The fraud takes root not in shady ads or informal platforms, but in a tax infrastructure that fails to verify the legitimacy of transactions in real time. Despite having a digital identity framework and certified validators in place, more than 8,000 shell entities have used these tools to issue fake invoices that are indistinguishable from valid ones.

The government’s move to deputize digital platforms sidesteps the real problem: the lack of a transactional choke point where the buyer, seller, and tax authority all converge—namely, the point of sale. Countries like Brazil and Italy have shown that embedding validation at checkout prevents fraud from scaling. Until Mexico adopts this kind of infrastructure, enforcement efforts will continue to target the periphery while the core system remains vulnerable.

Mexico Effort to Curtail VAT Fraud Needs Real-Time Verification

On November 11, 1918, World War I came to an end with the signing of the Armistice between the Allies and Germany. While not a legal instrument in the treaty sense, the armistice was a binding agreement that had massive legal and geopolitical ramifications. Its terms, including a cessation of hostilities, withdrawal of German forces, and surrender of military equipment, were enforced by military and diplomatic means, laying the groundwork for the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The legal aftermath of the war led to the creation of new nation-states, redrawn borders, and the first formal attempt at international governance through the League of Nations.

November 11 would later be recognized in the United States as Veterans Day, originally commemorated as Armistice Day, reflecting the legal shift from honoring only WWI veterans to recognizing all who served in the U.S. Armed Forces. The legal transition occurred in 1954 when President Eisenhower signed legislation formally renaming the holiday. The legal framework surrounding veterans’ benefits also expanded post-WWI, with landmark legislation like the GI Bill of Rights in 1944 and its subsequent reauthorizations, shaping how the U.S. compensates military service.

Internationally, the armistice also contributed to legal debates over war guilt and reparations, particularly with Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles—the so-called “War Guilt Clause”—which placed sole responsibility for the war on Germany and its allies. That clause became a flashpoint in both legal and political discussions and was later cited by Germany as a grievance contributing to the rise of Nazism and WWII.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples following the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. Davis had argued that her First Amendment right to free exercise of religion shielded her from liability, but lower courts rejected that defense, awarding damages and attorneys’ fees exceeding $360,000 to plaintiffs David Ermold and David Moore. The Sixth Circuit found that Davis’s actions constituted state action, not protected private conduct, and that she could not invoke her own constitutional rights to infringe on the rights of others while acting in an official capacity.

Davis had also asked the Supreme Court to reconsider Obergefell, arguing it rested on the same substantive due process doctrine as Roe v. Wade, which the Court overturned in 2022. However, the justices declined to take up that issue, just as they had in 2020. The Court’s refusal to revisit Obergefell signals a reluctance, at least for now, to reexamine established rights to same-sex marriage, even as the bench remains deeply conservative.

US Supreme Court rejects bid to overturn same-sex marriage right | Reuters

Senior U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf, appointed by President Reagan in 1985, announced his resignation in order to publicly oppose what he describes as President Donald Trump’s abuse of legal authority. In an article for The Atlantic, Wolf accused Trump of weaponizing the law against political enemies while shielding allies, a pattern he claims contradicts the principles he upheld over five decades in the Justice Department and on the bench. Wolf cited Trump’s direction to Attorney General Pam Bondi to indict political opponents, including New York AG Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, as especially troubling.

Wolf expressed frustration over the ethical constraints on judges that prevent them from speaking out publicly, saying he could no longer remain silent as Trump undermined the rule of law and dismantled oversight mechanisms such as inspectors general and the FBI’s public-corruption unit. His resignation comes amid heightened tensions between the Trump administration and the judiciary, underscored by combative rhetoric at a recent Federalist Society event. Wolf, who had previously criticized the handling of ethics complaints against Justice Clarence Thomas, said he now plans to support litigation and advocacy efforts to protect democratic norms and defend judges unable to speak for themselves.

Reagan Judge Says He Quit Bench to Speak Out Against Trump

The Trump administration has significantly shortened the time between publicly announcing judicial nominees and holding their Senate confirmation hearings, in some cases to as little as two days—far less than the typical 28-day window used by past administrations. While the Senate Judiciary Committee still adheres to its rule requiring 28 days between receiving nominee questionnaires and hearings, the White House now delays public disclosure until much later in the process, often after nominees have cleared internal background checks. Critics argue this reduces transparency and limits public scrutiny of lifetime judicial appointments, while supporters claim the process is efficient and appropriate given the nominees’ qualifications.

Some nominees, like Louisiana district court picks William Crain and Alexander Van Hook, received swift hearings with little controversy, though others, like appellate nominee Emil Bove, drew public concern during the brief window between announcement and hearing. Observers also criticized the administration’s choice to reveal nominees via Trump’s Truth Social account, often late at night, bypassing traditional press channels. Legal experts suggest this shift reflects a strategic move to minimize opposition and accelerate confirmations, but it has alarmed advocacy groups who say it undermines public trust and democratic norms.

Trump Changes How Judicial Nominees Get Publicly Revealed

On November 10, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Social Security Amendments of 1983, a landmark piece of legislation aimed at addressing a looming fiscal crisis in the Social Security system. At the time, the program was projected to run out of funds within months, threatening benefits for millions of retirees. The bipartisan effort, led by a commission chaired by Alan Greenspan, produced a package of reforms that fundamentally altered the structure of Social Security and continue to shape its operation today. One of the most significant changes was the gradual increase in the full retirement age from 65 to 67, a shift that reflected growing life expectancies and was designed to reduce long-term benefit payouts.

Another major provision subjected Social Security benefits to federal income tax for higher-income recipients, marking a departure from the program’s previously tax-exempt status. These changes helped restore solvency to the system and underscored the evolving view of Social Security not merely as a safety net, but as part of a broader fiscal policy framework. The amendments also mandated that federal employees begin paying into Social Security and included temporary payroll tax increases.

The 1983 reforms were notable for their rare bipartisan consensus, forged between a Republican president and a Democrat-controlled House. The political compromise demonstrated that major structural entitlement reform was possible when both parties shared a sense of urgency and responsibility. The law’s legacy is complex—it shored up the system for decades but left future generations facing similar solvency questions. Legal scholars and policymakers still reference the 1983 amendments as a model of negotiated reform, even as the political climate has become more polarized. The taxation of benefits and the higher retirement age remain central to debates about equity and sustainability within the program.

The Social Security Amendments of 1983 exemplify how statutory changes can recalibrate entitlement programs to respond to demographic and economic pressures, while raising ongoing questions about intergenerational fairness and fiscal responsibility.

A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court’s order requiring the Trump administration to fully fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for November, despite the ongoing government shutdown. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had planned to rely solely on $4.65 billion in contingency funds, which would have resulted in reduced aid, but the court found this inadequate. The Rhode Island judge had ordered the USDA to tap into a separate $23.35 billion fund intended for child nutrition programs to cover the $4 billion shortfall and avoid widespread harm to the 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP.

While the 1st Circuit declined to stay the lower court’s ruling, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson temporarily paused the order, creating ongoing uncertainty about benefit distribution. The USDA has since directed states to reverse any moves to issue full benefits made before the pause, warning of potential financial penalties. The administration argued that it couldn’t be forced to reallocate funds during a shutdown, blaming Congress for the funding crisis. However, the appeals court emphasized the urgent need to prevent food insecurity during the winter. The case arose from a lawsuit brought by cities, nonprofits, a union, and a food retailer seeking full benefit payments.

Trump administration cannot withhold full funding for food aid, US appeals court rules | Reuters