Minimum Competence

This Day in Legal History: Ada Kepley GraduatesOn 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 | SCOTUSblogThe 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 | SCOTUSblogIn 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Furman v. GeorgiaOn 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 | ReutersFederal 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 | ReutersBail 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Windsor and ObergefellOn 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Shelby County v. HolderOn 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 | ReutersNew 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 | ReutersA 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: DobbsOn 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 | ReutersGoogle’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 | ReutersA 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Title IXOn 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 | ReutersA 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 | ReutersIn 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Plessy v. FergusonOn 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 CaseThe 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 ActionsA 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Susan B. Anthony Fined for VotingOn 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 EnforcementAn 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 TransfersA 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: The Watergate BurglaryOn 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 | Law360A 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 | Law360A 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 | Law360My 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: The End of Roosevelt’s Hundred DaysOn 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 RecordThe 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 SignalThe 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Magna Carta Sealed at RunnymedeOn 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 PostGoogle 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 | TechCrunchA 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 This is a public episode. 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This Day in Legal History: Loving v. Virginia DecidedOn 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 NewsThe 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. | SCOTUSblogThe 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Wallace Stands in the Schoolhouse DoorOn 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 NewsA 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 PostA 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Kennedy Signs the Equal Pay ActOn 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 PatentThe 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 CallSCOTUSblog’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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: The Burning of the GaspeeOn 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 | NewsBustersSCOTUSblog 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 | SCOTUSblogThe 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 | SCOTUSblogIn 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Madison Introduces the Bill of RightsOn 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 NewsU.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 NewsA 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Congress Repeals the Gold ClauseOn 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 PharmaAlso 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 NewsThe 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Congress Passes the Nineteenth AmendmentOn 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 | Law360The 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 | ReutersIn 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) This is a public episode. 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This Day in Legal History: The National Defense Act of 1916On 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 | Law360President 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 | Law360The 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924On 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 | Law360The 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 | Law360A 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: The First Act of CongressOn 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 | Law360The 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 | Law360The 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 | Law360A 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 This is a public episode. 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This Day in Legal History: Rhode Island Ratifies the Constitution, 1790On 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 | Law360Caesars 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 | Law360The 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 | ReutersABC’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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: The Indian Removal Act of 1830On 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 | Law360The 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 | ReutersThe 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 | Law360A 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Black Monday and the End of the NIRAOn 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 | ReutersThe 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 - Law360Billionaire 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 - Law360The 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Andrew Johnson Impeachment Trial EndsOn 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? - Law360The 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 | ReutersMy 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Truman DoctrineOn 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’ - Law360Meta 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 | ReutersOpenAI 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: First Speed Limit LawOn 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 | ReutersTwo 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’ | ReutersLee 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Homestead ActOn 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 - Law360Workers 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 | ReutersAnthropic 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 - Law360A 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: 27th AmendmentOn 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 - Law360A 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 | ReutersState 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 | ReutersMy 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Plessy v. FergusonOn 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 - Law360The 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 - Law360President 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Abe Fortas Resigns SCOTUSOn 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 UKMusk accused of ‘selective amnesia,’ Altman of lying as OpenAI trial nears end | ReutersThe 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 | ReutersA 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Frontiero v. RichardsonOn 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 - Law360The 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 | ReutersU.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 | ReutersA 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Mexican-American WarOn 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 - Law360Federal 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 - Law360In 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Anti-Spitting LawsOn 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 | ReutersSome 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 | ReutersA 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Christmas is Canceled in MassachusettsOn 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 - Law360Virginia’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 | ReutersInstructure, 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 - Law360The 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: V-E DayOn 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 | ReutersNew 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 | ReutersIllinois 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Salmon P. Chase DiesOn 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 - Law360Bayer 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 UKThe 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Chinese Exclusion ActOn 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 | ReutersPublishers 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 | ReutersThe 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Prayer in … Local Government Meetings?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 | ReutersNew 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 | ReutersMassachusetts’ 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 | ReutersMy 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Freedom RidersOn 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 UKThe 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 - Law360A 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: May Day vs. Law DayOn 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 UKPurdue 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 - Law360A 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Rodney KingOn 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 | ReutersThe 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 | ReutersThe 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

This Day in Legal History: Maryland Ratifies the ConstitutionOn 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 | ReutersThe 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 | ReutersMy 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe