Minimum Competence

We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: The Treasury Department Is CreatedOn September 2, 1789, Congress passed the act establishing the Department of the Treasury—the third executive department created under the new Constitution, after Foreign Affairs and War, both of which we've marked on this show. A week or so later, President Washington would name Alexander Hamilton its first Secretary, and with that appointment, one of the most consequential careers in American governance began.The Treasury Department was, in a real sense, where the abstract new government became a functioning state. Hamilton inherited a country drowning in Revolutionary War debt, with no reliable revenue, no national bank, and shaky credit at home and abroad. Over the next few years, from that department, he engineered the financial architecture of the United States: the federal assumption of state debts, a system of customs duties and excise taxes to actually bring in revenue, the First Bank of the United States, and the establishment of public credit as a national asset. His conviction—captured in today's opening quote—was that a manageable national debt, properly serviced, would knit the country's creditors to its success and give the young republic financial standing in the world.The significance of September 2, 1789 is that the Treasury became, and remains, one of the most powerful institutions in American life. It runs the IRS, manages the public debt, enforces sanctions, and shapes economic policy in ways that touch every person in the country. The debates Hamilton started—about debt, about taxation, about how much the federal government should do with its fiscal power—are debates we are still having, quite literally, in every episode where we cover a tax question. And it's a fitting anniversary for today, because our final segment is a tax story—a reminder that the unglamorous machinery of how governments raise revenue, which Hamilton built, is where an enormous amount of real policy actually happens.A Utah judge has ruled that there is enough evidence to send Tyler Robinson to trial for the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk—and, critically, that prosecutors may seek the death penalty. We covered the prosecution's theory of this case back in July; now it has cleared its first major legal hurdle. At a preliminary hearing, Judge Tony Graf found the state had met the probable-cause standard on all seven counts, including aggravated murder, concluding that the evidence was “sufficient at this stage to support a reasonable belief that the defendant is the individual who shot and killed Charlie Kirk.” A word on that standard, because it matters: a preliminary hearing is a low bar. The state doesn't have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt—that's for the trial. It only has to show probable cause, a reasonable belief that a crime occurred and this defendant committed it. So this ruling isn't a verdict; it's a green light to proceed. The most consequential fight at the hearing was over whether this qualifies as aggravated murder, the charge that makes the death penalty available. Under Utah law, that generally requires an aggravating circumstance—and here prosecutors argued that Robinson, by allegedly firing a rifle from a rooftop toward Kirk near a crowd at Utah Valley University, knowingly created a great risk of death to people other than his target. The prosecutor called it “common sense” that shooting into a crowd endangers others; the defense contested it. The judge sided with the state, keeping capital punishment in play. The significance is that this now becomes a death-penalty trial in a case already saturated with political meaning, and everything—the evidence, the alleged motive, the aggravating circumstances—will now be tested under the far more demanding standard of a jury trial. Utah judge rules accused killer of Charlie Kirk will stand trial, face death penalty | ReutersNPR · CNNNow for something lighter, though still a real lesson in criminal procedure: Tiger Woods has reached a plea deal in his Florida impaired-driving case, and will lose his driver's license for five years. Woods was arrested in March after a rollover crash on Jupiter Island; no one was hurt. Under the plea agreement, prosecutors amended the charges—the first count down to reckless driving as a second offense, and the second to a careless-driving citation—and Woods agreed to the five-year license suspension plus a $1,500 fine, avoiding jail time. This is a textbook illustration of how plea bargaining actually works: the vast majority of criminal cases never go to trial, and instead resolve through negotiated pleas in which the defendant accepts responsibility for a reduced charge in exchange for a lighter, more certain outcome, and the state secures a conviction without the cost and risk of trial. Two details are worth flagging. First, “second offense”—Woods had a prior reckless-driving plea back in 2017, and repeat offenses generally carry stiffer consequences, which is part of why the license suspension is so long. Second, the judge was pointed about that suspension, saying it's “for the safety of the public” and that there are “no exceptions”—drive for any reason at all, the judge warned, and Woods goes straight to jail. The significance, beyond the celebrity, is a clean look at how the system handles impaired driving for someone who isn't a first-timer: not incarceration, but a charge reduction paired with a long, strictly-enforced license suspension aimed squarely at keeping him off the road. It's the everyday machinery of criminal justice, applied to an extraordinarily famous defendant. Woods gets 5-year license suspension in plea deal | ReutersABC News · CNNAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on a delightfully wonky problem with a real-world bite: the way Massachusetts taxes interstate trucks. My argument is that the state's rolling-stock tax is backward—it functions, weirdly, as a reverse carbon tax and a hidden tax on consumers—and that the fix isn't simply to exempt trucks, but to redesign the tax around where the trucks are actually used.Here's the problem. Massachusetts applies its sales and use tax to the full purchase price of an interstate truck, even if only a sliver of that truck's miles are logged in Massachusetts. Under state guidelines, a truck basically escapes the tax only if it spends six or fewer days in the state over a year—spend a week, and you can owe tax on the vehicle's entire price. Now layer on a perverse consequence: newer, cleaner trucks cost more money, so a tax based on purchase price falls hardest on the newest, most efficient, lowest-emission equipment. That gives carriers an obvious incentive to keep their clean new trucks out of Massachusetts and send in their older, dirtier ones. A state that says it cares about emissions has built a tax that literally rewards operating older, more polluting trucks within its borders. And because this is a tax on a business input, it doesn't stay with the trucking companies—it gets baked into freight costs and shows up in the price of groceries, medicine, and building materials, a phenomenon economists call tax pyramiding and the rest of us call higher prices.So what should Massachusetts do? There's a House bill to exempt qualifying interstate rolling stock, and I say that moves in the right direction—but the state shouldn't stop at a blanket exemption. The cleaner solution is apportionment: tax the Massachusetts share of the truck's use, based on in-state mileage, the same way states already apportion other business activity. Massachusetts taxes the Massachusetts piece, New York the New York piece, and so on. That six-day threshold is a lousy proxy—the seventh day a truck rolls through the state doesn't magically make the other 358 days of interstate driving Massachusetts activity. I also argue the state should make sure that upgrading to a cleaner fleet never increases a carrier's tax bill—give newer, higher-emissions-standard vehicles a credit or adjustment. And because no carrier should face a different tax regime every time it crosses a state line, I think the right long-term answer is a uniform, mileage-based model rule developed through something like the Multistate Tax Commission. The bumper-sticker version of my argument: removing this distortion is environmental policy, even though it looks like a tax break—because sometimes the cheapest, smartest thing a government can do is just stop taxing the very behavior it claims to want. Massachusetts Truck Taxes Need Revamp Beyond Adding an Exemption | Bloomberg Tax 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: Aaron Burr Acquitted of TreasonOn September 1, 1807, a jury in Richmond, Virginia acquitted Aaron Burr—the former Vice President of the United States—of treason, in what remains the only time such a high-ranking American official has ever been tried for that crime. The verdict was delivered in memorably grudging terms: the jury said Burr was “not proved to be guilty under this indictment by any evidence submitted to us.” Burr had allegedly conspired to carve an independent republic out of western territory, but he walked free.The reason he walked free is one of the most important principles in American criminal law. The framers of the Constitution, remembering how English kings had used vague, elastic treason charges to destroy their political enemies, deliberately wrote the narrowest possible definition into Article III: treason against the United States consists only of levying war against them, or adhering to their enemies, and—crucially—no one can be convicted except on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. Presiding over the trial was Chief Justice John Marshall, and Marshall enforced that definition strictly. He held that mere conspiracy, mere intention, mere assemblage of men was not enough—the government had to prove an actual overt act of levying war, with two witnesses. It couldn't, and Burr was acquitted.The significance of September 1, 1807 is layered. It was a dramatic clash between the branches: President Thomas Jefferson desperately wanted Burr convicted and worked behind the scenes to make it happen, while Marshall's court insisted on rigorous proof and refused to bend to political pressure—even subpoenaing the president himself for documents. It cemented the idea that “treason” cannot be a catch-all for disloyalty, and that an independent judiciary must hold the line on proof even when a president demands a scalp. On a day featuring both a murder verdict and several tests of executive power, Burr's acquittal is a fitting reminder that the highest function of a court is sometimes to say no.A jury in Las Vegas has found Duane “Keffe D” Davis guilty of first-degree murder for orchestrating the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur—closing, at last, one of the most notorious cold cases in American music history nearly thirty years after the fact. We've tracked this trial from jury selection through the defense's remarkable “don't believe my client” strategy, and now it's over: after a weeks-long trial, the jury deliberated for under three hours before convicting. Prosecutors never claimed Davis pulled the trigger. Their theory, as the deputy district attorney put it in closing, was that “this was a case about gang retaliation and revenge”—that Davis provided the gun and ordered the attack, making him criminally responsible for the murder even though someone else fired the shots. And the evidence that convicted him was, essentially, Davis himself: the interviews, the podcasts, and the 2019 memoir in which he described his role in the killing. His own lawyer's defense was to beg the jury not to credit those statements—to treat them as the lies of a braggart embellishing for money and street credibility. The jury didn't buy it. The significance is a striking answer to the evidentiary question I flagged when this trial opened: yes, a man's public boasts about a crime can be enough to convict him of it. Davis talked his way from “long-suspected” to “convicted murderer.” It's a cautionary tale as old as the law itself—that the words you say to burnish your legend can become the words that put you in prison—and it brought a measure of accountability to a killing that went unpunished for three decades. Jury convicts Duane “Keffe D” Davis in Tupac killing trial | ReutersNBC Los Angeles · CNNThe legal war over mail-in voting grinds on: the Trump administration has asked the First Circuit Court of Appeals to lift the order still blocking parts of the president's executive order overhauling how ballots are delivered. Recall the state of play. Last week, the Supreme Court, on its emergency docket, lifted one of two injunctions—letting some pieces of the order take effect—but pointedly did not rule on whether any of it is actually lawful, and the Postal Service's role remained blocked nationwide. Now the administration is going back to the appeals court to try to clear that remaining block. Its arguments are largely practical: it says the lower court's injunction was premature, issued before the Postal Service and other agencies had even finalized their plans, and that the injunction created an impossible situation—a “bifurcated” system where the order is blocked in the 23 states that sued but allowed everywhere else, which the government says is logistically unworkable. Meanwhile, there's a new wrinkle: a whistleblower has reportedly claimed the Postal Service's plan to implement the order could actually “derail” the midterms. The significance is that this is heading, almost inevitably, back to the Supreme Court—which still has not addressed the fundamental question of whether the president can restructure how Americans vote by mail. We are now roughly two months from the election, and the machinery of how ballots get delivered is being litigated in real time, court by court, on emergency timelines. The uncertainty itself is a problem: election administrators and voters need to know the rules, and right now the rules are moving. Trump administration asks US appeals court to lift order blocking mail-in voting | ReutersThe Hill · NPRAnd finally, a divided Supreme Court has cleared the way—for now—for construction of President Trump's new White House ballroom to continue. In a 5-4 emergency ruling, the Court granted the administration's request and blocked lower-court orders that would have paused the aboveground portion of the project. Some background: in 2025, the administration had the White House's East Wing demolished—without notifying Congress—to make room for a planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom projected to cost $400 million or more, including an extensive underground component the administration says houses secure facilities. The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued, arguing the president had no authority to demolish part of the White House and build this on his own. The legal hook the Court used is a familiar one: standing. The majority said the Trust likely doesn't have standing—the legal right to bring the suit in the first place—which is often how courts dispose of cases without confronting the underlying merits. And that's the key caveat: the unsigned order does not decide whether Trump actually has the authority to build a massive ballroom without congressional approval. That question stays open as the litigation continues. The significance is twofold. Substantively, a president reshaping the White House itself, demolishing a historic wing without telling Congress, raises real questions about the limits of executive authority over federal property. Procedurally, this is once again the emergency docket letting the executive proceed on a threshold technicality—standing—while leaving the hard constitutional question for another day, if it's ever answered at all. By the time the merits are sorted out, the ballroom may simply be built. Supreme Court lets Trump's White House ballroom construction continue for now | ReutersCNBC · NBC News 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

We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: The Neutrality Act of 1935On August 31, 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the first of what would become a series of Neutrality Acts—laws designed to keep the United States out of the wars gathering in Europe and Asia. This first act imposed a mandatory embargo on shipping arms and ammunition to any nation the president declared to be at war, and it put America's armaments industry under a measure of federal control. It was a legal expression of the deep isolationism that gripped the country between the world wars.Here's the constitutional wrinkle that makes it interesting, and that Roosevelt himself chafed against. FDR wanted flexibility—he asked Congress for a law that would let him embargo arms to an aggressor nation while still selling weapons to its victim. Congress refused. Instead, it wrote a rigid, evenhanded rule: once the president declared that a state of war existed, he had to embargo arms to all sides, aggressor and victim alike. That was a deliberate congressional choice to tie the executive's hands in foreign affairs, to prevent a president from drawing the country toward one belligerent or another. Roosevelt signed it reluctantly, believing he could get it revised—and over the next several years, as the threat from fascism grew undeniable, the Neutrality Acts were indeed loosened, culminating in Lend-Lease and, ultimately, American entry into the war.The significance of August 31, 1935 is as a case study in the perennial struggle between Congress and the president over foreign affairs, and in the moral limits of legal neutrality. The mandatory embargo's great flaw was exactly its neutrality: by treating aggressor and victim the same, it arguably aided aggressors, who were already armed, against victims who were not. That's the tension in today's opening quote from Desmond Tutu—the idea that neutrality in the face of injustice is not really neutral at all. It's a fitting backdrop for a day that includes a story about the government's power over foreign companies, and one about whether the state can suppress speech it dislikes.A federal judge has dealt a significant blow to the administration's campaign to deport noncitizen students over pro-Palestinian activism, ruling that the effort is unconstitutional. In a lengthy 90-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise in San Jose found that the administration's use of existing immigration law to cancel foreign students' visas and put them into deportation proceedings—based on their campus advocacy and criticism of Israel—violates the First Amendment right to free speech. The ruling traces the policy back to March 2025, when the government began revoking visas and detaining noncitizens for pro-Palestinian advocacy, starting with the high-profile arrest of Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. The lawsuit was brought, notably, by the Stanford Daily, Stanford's student newspaper. Here's the core legal principle, and it's an important one that surprises people: noncitizens physically present in the United States have First Amendment rights. The government has broad power over immigration, but the judge found it can't use that power as a pretext to punish people for protected speech—that would be viewpoint discrimination, targeting people precisely because of the ideas they express. Judge Wise sharply criticized the State Department and Homeland Security for deploying immigration law to suppress views they didn't like. The significance connects to threads we've followed all summer—the pressure on universities, the Comey prosecution, the fights over dissent. This is a court drawing a hard line: the immigration system is not a loophole around the First Amendment, and the government cannot deport people for saying things it wishes they hadn't. Expect an appeal, but as a statement of principle, it's a forceful one. Judge deals blow to Trump moves to deport pro-Palestinian activists | ReutersAl Jazeera · The HillNow a story about the business of law: U.S. law firm office leasing surged 17% in the first half of 2026, with firms signing leases for nearly 12.2 million square feet, according to Cushman & Wakefield—and the second quarter was up a striking 27% over the same period last year. This is a boom, concentrated in the big legal markets of New York, Chicago, and Washington, and it includes some eye-popping deals, like Simpson Thacher's roughly 916,000-square-foot Manhattan lease—the same firm we discussed back in July over its rare malpractice trial. What's driving it is worth unpacking, because it contains a real paradox. Firms say their caseloads are exploding under a combination of forces: rising regulatory uncertainty, a more litigious business climate, and—here's the twist—the surge in artificial intelligence. AI adoption in law has rocketed, with something like 62% of firms now using it, up from just 17% a few years ago. And here's the paradox worth sitting with: we covered, a few weeks ago, how AI is thinning out entry-level hiring by automating the document review and first drafts that junior associates used to do. So how are firms leasing more space while hiring fewer juniors? The answer seems to be that the high end of legal work is booming—more complex, higher-stakes matters that generate demand for experienced lawyers and premium space—even as the bottom of the pyramid gets automated. The significance is a snapshot of a profession in transition: Big Law is physically expanding and financially thriving at the top, while the traditional on-ramp for young lawyers narrows. The office towers are filling up; it's just less clear who will be sitting in the entry-level offices a decade from now. US law firm leasing jumped 17% in first half, report says | ReutersCushman & Wakefield · Law360And finally, China's largest memory chipmaker, ChangXin Memory Technologies—CXMT—has sued the Pentagon to get itself off a U.S. government blacklist of companies it says are tied to China's military. The list in question is the Defense Department's roster of “Chinese military companies,” maintained under a provision of federal defense law, and landing on it carries real consequences: restrictions on government contracting and significant reputational damage that can spook customers and partners worldwide. CXMT's argument is straightforward—it says it's not affiliated with the Chinese military at all, and that it designs and sells its DRAM memory chips purely for civilian and commercial use. The most interesting piece of the lawsuit, legally, is a procedural one. CXMT alleges that the Pentagon actually published a notice in February saying the company would be removed from the list—then withdrew that notice the very same day, and later relisted the company in June without adequately explaining why it reversed course. That's the heart of an administrative-law claim: under the standards that govern federal agency action, the government generally can't act arbitrarily or capriciously, and a sudden, unexplained reversal is exactly the kind of thing courts scrutinize. And CXMT isn't alone—Alibaba filed a similar suit in June, and Xiaomi actually won removal from the list through U.S. litigation back in 2021. The significance is a reminder that even in the highly deferential arena of national security, designations like this are reviewable in American courts—foreign companies can, and increasingly do, use U.S. administrative law to challenge being branded a security threat, and sometimes they win. CXMT sues Pentagon over inclusion on list of companies tied to China's military | ReutersUS News · Benzinga 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 Murder of Emmett TillOn August 28, 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was abducted, tortured, and murdered in the Mississippi Delta by two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, after Till—a Black teenager visiting from Chicago—was accused of offending a white woman in a grocery store. His killers beat him, shot him, weighted his body, and threw it in the Tallahatchie River. He was a child, and his murder, and what came after, helped ignite the modern civil rights movement.The legal story is one of justice utterly failing, and then, slowly, refusing to disappear. Bryant and Milam were tried the next month in a segregated Mississippi courtroom. The trial lasted five days; the all-white, all-male jury deliberated for barely an hour before acquitting both men, with one juror later saying it wouldn't have taken that long if they hadn't stopped for a soda. Protected by double jeopardy, the two men then sold their confession to a magazine for a few thousand dollars, describing in detail how they'd killed the boy they had just been acquitted of murdering. It was one of the starkest demonstrations imaginable that the machinery of Southern justice was not built to deliver justice to Black victims.The significance of August 28, 1955 reaches across the decades. Emmett's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made the searing decision to hold an open-casket funeral and let the world photograph her son. That act of witness galvanized a generation. And there is a haunting piece of calendar symmetry worth honoring: exactly eight years later, on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial and delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech to the March on Washington. The law eventually, partially, caught up—the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and, only in 2022, a federal anti-lynching law that bears Emmett Till's name. It's a reminder that some of the most important developments in American law began not in a courtroom win, but in a courtroom failure so profound that the country could not look away.The brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate were back in a Miami federal courtroom this week, shackled, asking a judge to release them on bond while they fight extradition to the United Kingdom. The two, who have built a massive and controversial online following, have been held in a federal detention center since their July arrest on U.K. rape and sex-trafficking charges. Their lawyers made a pointed argument: if Romania, where the brothers face a separate sex-crimes case, is willing to let them remain free pending those proceedings, then a U.S. court should free them too—especially since, they argue, two of the most recognizable men on the internet can't exactly disappear. Prosecutors pushed back hard, and here the law is decidedly against the Tates. In ordinary criminal cases, release pending trial is the norm. But international extradition is different: there is a strong, long-standing presumption against bail, rooted in the idea that the United States has a treaty obligation to actually produce the person for the requesting country, and that letting an extradition target go free risks a diplomatic and legal failure if they flee. Courts generally require “special circumstances” to grant bail in an extradition case—a demanding standard—and prosecutors noted the brothers have money and have bragged about holding multiple passports. Legal experts quoted in the coverage thought it unlikely they'd win release. The significance is a useful window into a corner of the law most people never see: that fighting extradition is not like fighting ordinary charges, and the presumption of liberty that normally protects defendants is largely flipped when a foreign government is waiting to prosecute.Tate brothers press for release from US jail during extradition fight | ReutersPBS NewsHour · NPRA federal appeals court has cleared a significant hurdle for Bayer's $7.25 billion settlement of tens of thousands of Roundup cancer claims. The Eighth Circuit dismissed a challenge by a group of objecting plaintiffs who were trying to derail the deal—and the fight was about forum, which sounds dry but matters enormously in mass litigation. Bayer structured this as a class-action settlement in Missouri state court, an unusual move: it's using a single state-court proceeding to try to resolve claims nationwide. The objectors argued that a state court has no business fast-tracking a nationwide resolution, and that the whole thing belongs in front of the federal judge already overseeing the consolidated federal Roundup litigation. A federal judge ruled in June that the case could stay in Missouri state court, and now the Eighth Circuit has agreed, dismissing the appeal. Why does the forum matter so much? Because a settlement that binds a nationwide class of people—including people who haven't actively participated—raises real due-process questions about whether a single state court can bind absent claimants across the country, and because plaintiffs and defendants often have strong strategic preferences about which court, and which rules, govern a mega-settlement. This connects to the Bayer story we covered earlier this summer, when the Supreme Court handed the company a big win on failure-to-warn claims; this settlement is the other half of Bayer's campaign to finally contain a decade of Roundup litigation. A hearing to approve the deal is set for September 14, with roughly 65,000 claims hanging in the balance. The significance is that Bayer is close to buying its way out of a liability that has dogged it for years—and the courts just removed one of the last procedural obstacles.US court dismisses appeal over objections to $7.25 billion Roundup deal | ReutersRTÉ · Maryland Daily RecordAnd finally—though this is anything but a footnote—the biggest story of the week, and arguably the summer: Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and fundamentally change how its apps work for teenagers, settling the landmark case accusing it of designing Facebook and Instagram to addict children. This is the resolution of the very trial we watched begin just ten days ago—the 29-state case in Oakland, with the whistleblower testimony from Arturo Bejar. Rather than let it run to a verdict, Meta settled, and the numbers are staggering: more than $17.6 billion to 48 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the territories, plus another $459 million to resolve privacy claims tied to the old Cambridge Analytica scandal. But the money may be the less important part. For the next decade, Meta has agreed to concrete design changes: teens will be capped at two hours a day on the apps, and blocked from using them between midnight and 6 a.m. without a parent's consent. And in a clever pressure mechanism, part of the payout is contingent on whether YouTube and TikTok adopt similar protections—effectively using this settlement to try to move the whole industry. Everything we've tracked all summer led here: the New Mexico verdict, the Tennessee trial, the bellwether cases, the Ninth Circuit clearing these suits past Section 230. This is the reckoning arriving. It still needs approval from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who presided over the trial, but if it holds, it's one of the largest consumer-protection settlements in American history—and, more consequentially, the first time a court-supervised deal will reach inside these platforms and re-engineer them for the safety of kids. The era of treating social media's effect on children as an unregulated externality may have just ended, not with a verdict, but with $18 billion and a clock that shuts the app off at midnight.Meta reaches $18 billion of settlements over children's social media addiction | ReutersCNN · Al Jazeera 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

We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: The Kellogg-Briand PactOn August 27, 1928, representatives of fifteen nations gathered in Paris and signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact—an international agreement in which the signatories solemnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy. Named for U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, it was born of the still-fresh horror of World War I and the earnest hope that the great powers could simply agree to stop settling disputes by force. Eventually 64 nations signed on.It is, on its face, one of the most idealistic documents in the history of international law—and one of the most famous cautionary tales about law's limits. The pact had a fatal flaw: it contained no enforcement mechanism, no sanctions, no army, nothing but the promise itself and the hope that world opinion would keep nations honest. Within a few years, that hope was in tatters—Japan invaded Manchuria, Italy invaded Ethiopia, Germany rearmed, and the whole edifice collapsed into the Second World War. As a device for preventing war, Kellogg-Briand failed almost completely.And yet the significance of August 27, 1928 is more complicated than “noble failure.” The pact planted a legal idea that outlived its own impotence: that aggressive war is not just tragic but unlawful. After World War II, that principle became the backbone of the Nuremberg trials, where Nazi leaders were prosecuted for “crimes against peace”—waging aggressive war—a charge that traced its lineage directly to Kellogg-Briand. So the pact is a genuinely instructive anniversary for lawyers: it's a reminder that a law without an enforcement mechanism is mostly an aspiration, but also that even an unenforced principle can lodge itself in the legal conscience and reappear, with teeth, decades later. It's worth keeping that dual lesson in mind on a day when we've got stories about whether court orders and legal protections will actually be honored.A federal judge in Washington holds a hearing this afternoon on a question that sounds trivial but isn't: whether adding President Trump's name to the Kennedy Center's signage defies a court order. We set this up yesterday. Back in May, Judge Christopher Cooper ordered the Kennedy Center to remove Trump's name from the building, siding with Democratic Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, who sued over the renaming of the memorial to President John F. Kennedy. Then, on August 13, the center's board—now stacked with Trump appointees—voted to alter the signage to read “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” and to christen the grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” The administration says this complies with the injunction because the building is still, technically, named for Kennedy—the Trump language is just a donor acknowledgment. Beatty says it's open defiance. Today Judge Cooper hears them out. And this is genuinely the crux of the rule of law: an injunction isn't a word game. Courts have long held that you can't evade a court order by finding a technical workaround that accomplishes the very thing the order forbade. If Cooper concludes the board's maneuver is a bad-faith attempt to do indirectly what he directly prohibited, the consequences can escalate toward contempt. The significance, as I noted yesterday, is that this small fight over a plaque is really a test of whether the executive branch treats a court order as a binding command or a puzzle to be solved. And on today's Kellogg-Briand anniversary, it's a pointed reminder that a legal order matters only if it's actually enforced. US judge weighs challenge to restore Trump's name to Kennedy Center | ReutersThe Hill · PBS NewsHourNow to a fight with far bigger stakes for the economy: the effort to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Cook's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, has sent a letter to the White House declaring there is “no legally cognizable cause” to fire her, arguing she “has never committed mortgage fraud or any intentional wrongdoing.” The White House has been trying to oust Cook for over a year, most recently by building a formal process to remove her over allegations that she listed two different properties as her primary residence in mortgage documents—and this comes after the Supreme Court already ruled against an earlier, more summary attempt to fire her. Here's why this is one of the most important legal stories of the year. Federal Reserve governors are not ordinary executive officials who serve at the president's pleasure; under the Federal Reserve Act, they can only be removed “for cause.” That phrase is doing enormous work. It traces back to the 1935 Supreme Court decision in Humphrey's Executor, which upheld Congress's power to insulate the heads of independent agencies from at-will presidential removal—the legal foundation of the Fed's independence. The current Supreme Court has been chipping away at Humphrey's Executor for other agencies, but it has pointedly signaled that the Fed is special and its independence protected. So the battle is being fought on the meaning of “cause”: Cook's team says a disputed mortgage-paperwork allegation, with no finding of intentional wrongdoing and no crime, doesn't come close to the kind of malfeasance that “cause” requires. The significance could hardly be larger. If a president can remove a Fed governor he disagrees with by gathering allegations and declaring “cause,” then the Fed's independence—the firewall that's supposed to keep monetary policy insulated from short-term political pressure—becomes a fiction. Markets, and the rule of law, are watching this one closely. Lawyer for Fed's Cook, targeted by Trump, says there is no grounds for dismissal | ReutersCNBC · AxiosAnd finally, Elon Musk's X has lost its First Amendment challenge to a New York law requiring social-media companies to disclose how they handle hate speech. U.S. District Judge John Cronan in Manhattan dismissed the suit—and did so “with prejudice,” meaning X can't refile. The law at issue is New York's “Stop Hiding Hate Act,” signed by Governor Hochul in late 2024, which requires large social-media platforms to disclose their policies for handling hate speech, extremism, harassment, foreign interference, and disinformation, and to report on their efforts. X argued this compelled it to speak—forcing it to make statements about “highly sensitive and controversial” content under threat of lawsuits and fines, in violation of the First Amendment. The judge disagreed, and the legal reasoning is worth understanding. There's a well-established doctrine that governments can require businesses to disclose “purely factual and uncontroversial information” about their own practices, as long as the requirement is reasonably related to a legitimate government interest—the standard from a case called Zauderer. Judge Cronan found that making X describe its own content-moderation policies is exactly that kind of factual disclosure, tied to New York's interest in helping users make informed choices about the platforms they use. The significance is that this lands on one side of a genuinely unsettled national fight. Courts have split over social-media transparency laws—a similar California law was partly struck down on First Amendment grounds—so this New York ruling, upholding a disclosure mandate, deepens a divide that may ultimately need the Supreme Court to resolve. And there's an irony worth noting: X, the platform that markets itself as the champion of free speech, just lost a free-speech case—by arguing that being made to describe its own rules violated its rights. Judge dismisses lawsuit by Elon Musk's X challenging New York hate speech law | ReutersUS News · Daily Maverick 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

We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: The Declaration of the Rights of ManOn August 26, 1789, France's National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the foundational documents of modern constitutional government. The Marquis de Lafayette played a major role in drafting it, with input from his friend Thomas Jefferson, who was then serving as the American minister in Paris. In just seventeen articles, the Declaration tried to turn Enlightenment ideas about natural rights and legitimate government into law.A lot of it will sound familiar to American ears, in part because the American and French revolutions were very much in conversation with each other. Article I declares that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights”—today's opening quote. The Declaration identifies liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression as natural rights. It says the law must apply equally, punishment must be authorized by law, defendants are presumed innocent, and the free communication of ideas is “one of the most precious of the rights of man.” It also makes separation of powers part of the definition of constitutional government: a society where rights are not secured and powers are not separated “has no constitution at all.”The Declaration mattered well beyond France. Its ideas influenced constitutions throughout Europe and Latin America and eventually found echoes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. There was also an enormous gap between the Declaration's promises and what followed. Within a few years, the French Revolution had descended into the Terror, and the supposedly universal rights announced in 1789 were plainly not being extended to everyone.That makes August 26 an especially fitting date for another reason. In the United States, it is Women's Equality Day, commemorating the 1920 certification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The coincidence is a useful reminder that declaring people “equal in rights” is considerably easier than actually making them so—and that many of the people supposedly covered by universal declarations of equality had to spend generations fighting to make those words apply to them.A federal judge previously issued an injunction barring the administration from renaming the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after President Trump. Then, earlier this month, the Kennedy Center's board—now dominated by Trump appointees—voted 20 to 3 to change the building's signage to read “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” and to name the surrounding grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” The administration's argument, in a new filing, is essentially semantic: it says this doesn't violate the injunction because the building is still named the John F. Kennedy Center, and the added inscription is merely a donor acknowledgment—the kind, it says, that's “ubiquitous in similar facilities.” Democratic Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, who's part of the suit, says the board “openly defied” the court's ruling and has asked the judge to block the signage. Here's the legal question, and it's a real one: when does creative compliance with a court order become defiance of it? Courts don't just police the literal words of an injunction—they police attempts to accomplish the forbidden thing through a technical workaround. If the injunction's purpose was to stop the center from being turned into a monument to the sitting president, a judge may well look past the “we didn't technically rename it” framing to the practical reality. The judge, Christopher Cooper, has set a fast briefing schedule with deadlines today. The significance is that this small, almost absurd dispute over building signage is really a test of something fundamental: whether the executive branch will comply with a court order in substance, or look for the narrowest possible reading to get what it wanted anyway. Trump administration says new Kennedy Center renaming does not violate court order | ReutersBloomberg Law · TimeDeloitte has agreed to pay $21.5 million to settle Justice Department allegations that its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs amounted to illegal discrimination—a landmark in the administration's campaign against corporate DEI. And note the legal vehicle, because it's clever and aggressive: the DOJ brought this under the False Claims Act, the federal government's primary anti-fraud statute. The theory is that Deloitte, as a federal contractor, certified compliance with anti-discrimination requirements while allegedly running DEI programs that themselves discriminated—making its certifications false. The specific allegations: Deloitte's business units received monthly summaries tracking progress against “demographic goals”; roughly 150 senior partners and managing directors had part of their compensation tied to hitting those targets, some risking tens of thousands of dollars; and race and sex were allegedly factored into promotion decisions and access to certain training and mentoring programs. Of the $21.5 million, about $10 million is designated as restitution. Crucially, Deloitte denies the allegations and the settlement includes no admission of liability. The significance is that this reframes DEI from a corporate HR initiative into potential fraud against the United States. We've tracked the administration's use of Title VI against universities—Harvard, Columbia, William & Mary—and this is the corporate front of the same campaign, deploying the False Claims Act against a major government contractor. That's a powerful deterrent, because the False Claims Act carries treble damages and invites whistleblower suits. Whatever you think of DEI programs on the merits, the legal move here is significant: it puts every federal contractor on notice that diversity targets tied to pay and promotion could be recast as discriminatory, and therefore as a false certification the government can prosecute. Deloitte to pay $21.5 million to settle US government probe over DEI | ReutersJustice Department · Fox BusinessAnd finally, a federal appeals court has ruled that the administration cannot attach ideological conditions to federal grants for homelessness and transportation—another entry in the running saga over the limits of the executive's power over the money. The Ninth Circuit, in a decision backing Santa Clara County and other local governments, affirmed a lower court and found that the administration abused its authority by imposing new strings on grants like the Continuum of Care program, which has funded homelessness services since 1987. Those grants have long been built around a “housing-first” philosophy—the approach of getting people into permanent housing without preconditions like sobriety or employment—and the administration sought to attach conditions cutting against that model and advancing its own policy priorities. The court found the cities would suffer irreparable harm if the funds were withheld. Here's the legal principle, and longtime listeners will recognize it: back in July, we covered the anniversary of South Dakota v. Dole, the case that lets the federal government attach strings to the money it gives states—but only within limits. The conditions have to be clearly stated, related to the purpose of the funding, and not coercive. When an administration tries to bolt novel, ideological conditions onto grants Congress created for a specific purpose, courts have repeatedly said that exceeds those limits. This fits a pattern we've followed all summer—from the OMB grant clawbacks to the EPA's frozen climate funds—of courts telling the executive that money Congress appropriated for a purpose can't be turned into a lever for unrelated policy goals. The significance is that the spending power, real as it is, keeps running into the same wall: you can fund homelessness programs, or not, but you can't quietly rewrite what they're for. Trump cannot impose conditions on transportation, homelessness grants, US appeals court rules | ReutersPalo Alto Online · Mountain View Voice 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

We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: The National Park Service Is CreatedOn August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act, creating a new federal bureau inside the Department of the Interior to manage the country's national parks and monuments. Before this, the roughly 35 parks and monuments the government had accumulated were administered in a haphazard, piecemeal way—some by the Army, some by scattered Interior officials—with no unified mission and no consistent protection.The genius of the Organic Act is compressed into a single, oft-quoted sentence that has generated a century of law and litigation. It directed the new Park Service to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein” and to “leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” That phrasing contains a built-in tension that lawyers and the courts have wrestled with ever since: the Park Service is told both to provide for the public's enjoyment of the parks and to leave them unimpaired—two goals that can pull hard against each other when you're deciding whether to build a road, permit a concession, or limit the number of visitors. That “dual mandate” is the central puzzle of public-lands law.The significance of August 25, 1916 is that it enshrined in law a genuinely radical idea: that some places belong to the whole public, in perpetuity, held in trust by the government for people who haven't been born yet. Today the Park Service manages more than 400 sites across all fifty states and welcomes hundreds of millions of visitors a year. The writer Wallace Stegner, who gave us today's opening line, called the national parks “the best idea we ever had”—absolutely American, absolutely democratic. On a day whose news is heavy with contested executive power, it's a nice reminder that the law is also the instrument through which a society decides to preserve something for the common good.The Supreme Court has handed the Trump administration an interim victory on mail-in voting—but it's important to be precise about what the Court did and didn't do. In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the justices lifted an injunction that a Massachusetts federal judge imposed in June, which had blocked key parts of Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting in California and 22 other states that sued. That order aims to create a federal list of eligible voters and, controversially, to have the Postal Service deliver ballots only to people on that list. Here's the crucial nuance. This is a stay, not a ruling on the merits—the Court did not decide whether the president actually has the authority to reshape how states run their elections. It merely paused the lower court's block while the litigation continues. And it's partial: the Postal Service's role in the scheme remains blocked nationwide. Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, made the point sharply—she wrote that the decision doesn't suggest the executive branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to do this, it just postpones the day of reckoning. This is the shadow docket in action, a theme we keep returning to: the Court altering the rules for a national election months before that election, through an emergency order, without a full merits decision or a written explanation of its reasoning. The significance is that, for now, parts of Trump's order can take effect for the November midterms—a real-world consequence—even as the fundamental question of whether any of it is lawful remains formally undecided. The status quo the courts had maintained all summer just shifted, at least temporarily, and it shifted on the emergency docket.US Supreme Court lifts judicial hurdle to Trump's mail-in ballot curbs | Reuters Washington Post · NPRThe administration is preparing what would be the largest mass visa revocation in U.S. history: according to the Associated Press, the State Department plans to revoke the tourist and business visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are seeking asylum. The targets are holders of so-called B1 and B2 visas—the standard business and tourism visas—issued between 2016 and 2026, whose holders later sought asylum, with the action coordinated between the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. The legal logic is worth understanding. A visitor visa rests on a premise: that you intend to come temporarily and then go home. When someone on a tourist visa applies for asylum, the government's position is that they've revealed an intent inconsistent with that temporary-visitor status—so it's moving to strip the visitor visa. Importantly, officials say this wouldn't necessarily mean immediate deportation; most people with pending asylum cases would be recategorized, losing their visitor status but not instantly removed. Still, the scale is staggering and unprecedented, and it raises hard questions. Seeking asylum is a legal right, protected by statute and international obligation, and there's a real tension in penalizing people's immigration status precisely because they used the lawful asylum process. There are also due-process concerns lurking in any mass action that recategorizes 200,000 people, and a potential chilling effect on those weighing whether to come forward and claim protection. The significance is that this fits the aggressive immigration-enforcement pattern we've tracked all summer—but at a scale that's genuinely new, using visa revocation as a lever against the asylum system itself.US plans to revoke up to 200,000 tourism, business visas, AP reports | ReutersWTOP · Houston Public Media / NPRAnd a story close to home for everyone in this profession: Google has launched a version of its Gemini AI built specifically for lawyers. Google Cloud unveiled “Gemini Enterprise for Legal,” an agentic AI platform purpose-built for legal workflows—with specialized skills, connectors to legal research and document systems, and an ecosystem of partner tools. And its launch customers are not fringe experimenters; they're elite firms: Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, Weil, and Williams & Connolly. When firms of that caliber sign on as launch partners, it's a signal that AI in legal practice has moved from novelty to infrastructure. Here's the significance, and the tension. On one hand, this is the mainstreaming of AI in law—the same shift that, as we discussed a few weeks ago, is thinning out entry-level hiring at big firms as software absorbs the document review and first-draft work once done by junior associates. Google is now competing directly with the specialized legal-AI companies for that market, and its entry accelerates everything. On the other hand, this collides with a problem we've covered again and again: the fake, hallucinated citations, the AI-generated errors, even the litigant hiding prompt injections in his filings. A more powerful, more deeply integrated AI tool doesn't dissolve a lawyer's duties of competence, confidentiality, and candor—it raises the stakes on them. The significance is that the profession is being reshaped in real time. The tools are getting better and more embedded, the biggest firms are adopting them, and the hard questions—about verification, about who's accountable when the machine is wrong, about what happens to the training pipeline for young lawyers—are all arriving at once.Google expands Gemini AI platform for law firms, lawyers | ReutersArtificial Lawyer · Google CloudAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a big loss for Maryland—and a valuable lesson for every other state eyeing the digital economy for revenue. Maryland's first-in-the-nation digital advertising tax just took a potentially fatal blow, with the state tax court siding with Google, Apple, and Peacock in their challenges. My argument is that this doesn't prove you can't tax digital advertising—it proves Maryland went about it the wrong way, by designing a tax around the companies it wanted to pay rather than the activity it wanted to tax.Two design choices doomed it. First, Maryland taxed digital advertising while leaving comparable non-digital advertising—billboards, print, radio, television—completely alone. Second, the tax only kicks in for companies above a huge global revenue threshold, and the rate actually climbs, from 2.5% up to 10%, based on a company's worldwide revenue, not its Maryland activity. The court saw that for what it was: a structure that, in practice, hits big out-of-state tech companies while sparing basically every in-state business, which runs into both the dormant Commerce Clause and the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act. As I put it, using worldwide corporate revenue to set the rate on identical in-state transactions is just a backward way of making big companies pay more—two companies doing the exact same amount of business in Maryland can end up with wildly different bills.There's also a cautionary detail I love, because it says everything: Maryland passed this tax in 2021, but by 2025 the state comptroller had to hire an outside expert just to figure out what “digital advertising services” even means—introducing terms like “programmatic” and “visual” that weren't in the statute at all. If you need to hire an expert four years after enactment to ascertain what your own tax taxes, maybe the problem isn't that taxpayers are being difficult. And the fiscal stakes are real: the tax pulled in about $535 million earmarked for education, but now the challengers may be owed refunds with interest, right as Maryland stares down a multibillion-dollar budget gap. A tax that collects hundreds of millions for a few years and then has to hand it all back, with interest, is quantifiably worse than no tax at all. So my takeaway for states is that the durable path is the boring one—broad tax bases, treat economically similar transactions the same, scale liability to in-state activity. A neutral tax on all advertising would have reached less convenient targets too, including local businesses, and that's exactly the point: a tax principle that only applies when it lands on the politically preferred target isn't much of a principle.Maryland's Digital Ad Tax Defeat Is Teachable Moment for States | Bloomberg Tax 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

We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: Communist Control ActOn August 24, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Communist Control Act, a law that did something extraordinary in a country built around the First Amendment: it effectively outlawed a political party. The Act declared the Communist Party of the United States an instrument of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. It stripped it of “all rights, privileges, and immunities” available to legal organizations, and made knowing membership in the party potentially criminal.Perhaps more remarkable is how little resistance any of this encountered. This was the height of the McCarthy era, when the political cost of appearing insufficiently hostile to communism was enormous. The bill passed the Senate 79-0 and the House 265-2. Those margins tell you something important about the moment: liberals and conservatives alike had strong incentives to demonstrate their anti-communist bona fides, and almost no one had much incentive to be the person standing up for the constitutional rights of communists. Eisenhower signed the bill, and, at least on paper, an American political party ceased to have any legal existence.The significance of August 24, 1954 is mostly as a lesson in what happens to civil liberties when they are placed under enough political pressure—and in the messier ways our constitutional system often corrects itself. The Communist Control Act was constitutionally dubious from the start; punishing someone for just belonging to a political organization runs directly into the freedoms of speech and association. But the law was rarely enforced, courts largely avoided confronting its most sweeping provisions head-on, and it gradually withered into a stricture approaching a dead letter, though it technically remains on the books. Later Supreme Court decisions made considerably clearer that the government can't punish mere association or abstract advocacy, as opposed to incitement to imminent lawless action.That makes this a fitting anniversary for a day when we also have a story about protesters sentenced for their political activity. The point captured in today's opening quote from Justice Brandeis is easy to endorse when the speaker and the cause are popular. The real test of the freedom to think and speak as you will comes when neither is.A federal judge has struck down one of the administration's broader immigration policies, vacating a State Department decision that suspended immigrant visa processing for applicants from 75 countries.The policy, announced in January, halted immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries—including Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, and Somalia—on the theory that applicants from those countries were likely to require public assistance. U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan called the policy “patently unlawful,” but the interesting part of the decision is less the rhetoric than the relatively straightforward statutory problem she identified: Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not have the power Congress gave someone else.Federal immigration law expressly limits the Secretary of State's authority over how consular officers process immigrant visas. The administration therefore could not use the Secretary's general authority to accomplish something Congress had specifically placed beyond his reach. It is a theme we have seen repeatedly this summer: not some enormous constitutional confrontation over presidential power, but the considerably more mundane question of whether the executive branch can point to a statute that actually authorizes what it is doing.Vargas's order also does more than stop the policy going forward. She vacated visa denials based solely on the suspended-processing policy, meaning applicants who were turned away under it can have their applications reconsidered. The lawsuit was brought by immigrant-rights organizations, visa applicants, and U.S. citizens seeking visas for family members.The broader point is that immigration and foreign affairs may be areas in which the executive branch enjoys substantial discretion, but discretion is not the same thing as unlimited authority. The government still needs to identify where Congress gave it the power it claims to possess. Here, the court concluded Congress had done essentially the opposite.US judge strikes down policy suspending immigrant visa processing for 75 nations | ReutersWashington Post · Al JazeeraSeven pro-Palestinian protesters who shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in 2024 have now been sentenced, and the result is a useful little illustration of how the law handles civil disobedience.The seven were among 26 protesters who drove onto the bridge in April 2024, stopped their vehicles, and chained themselves together to protest the war in Gaza, blocking traffic for hours. They were convicted in July of misdemeanor false imprisonment, obstruction of a thoroughfare, and unlawful assembly. On Friday, they were sentenced to 30 days in jail—with an option that could cut that time in half—along with six months of probation and roughly $1,000 in fines and restitution.The First Amendment line here is not especially mysterious. Protest is protected; physically preventing other people from leaving is not. That is the significance of the false-imprisonment charge: motorists were stuck on a bridge with nowhere else to go. You can stand alongside the road holding a sign. You do not acquire a First Amendment right to chain the road shut merely because your reason for doing it is political.But the sentence is interesting in the other direction. The defendants potentially faced years in prison and received 30 days, while prosecutors dropped the most serious felony conspiracy charge after the jury deadlocked on it. That gap illustrates just how much calibration occurs after we decide that conduct is criminal. Prosecutors and judges can recognize both that the protesters deliberately interfered with the rights of hundreds of other people and that they did so as part of nonviolent political expression rather than for personal gain or predatory purposes.That is more or less how a legal system metabolizes civil disobedience: the political motivation does not erase the underlying offense, but neither must the law pretend that motivation is irrelevant when deciding how severely to punish it. On the anniversary of the Communist Control Act, it is an especially useful reminder that the legal treatment of dissent rarely comes down to a simple choice between “protected” and “illegal.” Much of the real work happens in between.Pro-Palestinian protesters sentenced over blocking Golden Gate Bridge traffic | ReutersKQED · Mission LocalAnd finally, TikTok and parent company ByteDance have agreed to pay $400 million to settle the Justice Department's lawsuit accusing the platform of violating federal children's privacy law—an enormous number for a case built around a statute passed before TikTok, or really modern social media, existed.The Justice Department filed the lawsuit in 2024 on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that TikTok allowed millions of children under 13 to create accounts without their parents' knowledge or consent and then made it unnecessarily difficult for parents to have those accounts deleted. The statute at issue is COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, which generally requires online services covered by the law to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13.There is an especially interesting wrinkle in how the $400 million settlement is structured. TikTok will pay $300 million now and another $100 million once a court vacates an earlier consent decree entered against Musical.ly, TikTok's predecessor. That matters because this is not the first time the platform has encountered the government over children's privacy. Musical.ly had already been penalized over COPPA violations, and the government's latest case alleged that the problems continued afterward.TikTok is settling without admitting wrongdoing and says it has made substantial changes to its age controls and parental-oversight systems. But whatever one thinks of the underlying allegations, $400 million is a fairly substantial reminder that COPPA is not merely a disclosure statute sitting around from the early Internet.And this case fits into the larger fight over children and social media from a somewhat different direction than the addiction and product-design litigation we have been following. Those cases ask what platforms may design for children and what harms those designs may cause. COPPA asks the considerably less glamorous but foundational question that comes before all of that: who gets to collect information about children in the first place, and on what terms? Four hundred million dollars suggests the government still thinks the answer matters quite a bit.US Justice Department, TikTok settle $400 million children's privacy suit | ReutersAxios · Justice Department 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

We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: The American Bar Association Is FoundedOn August 21, 1878, seventy-five lawyers from twenty-one states gathered in Saratoga Springs, New York, and founded the American Bar Association. The stated mission had all the ambition—and word count—you would expect from a nineteenth-century professional organization: “the advancement of the science of jurisprudence, the promotion of the administration of justice, and a uniformity of legislation throughout the country.”James Overton Broadhead, a Missouri lawyer, became the ABA's first president. And the idea apparently had some appeal. Within a year, the organization had grown from its original 75 members to nearly 300.It is worth remembering just how different the legal profession looked at the time. There were few meaningful licensing standards, legal education varied enormously from one place to another, and there was nothing resembling a national voice for lawyers. “The bar,” such as it was, was largely a collection of state and local institutions operating under their own rules and traditions.The ABA helped change that.Over the next century, it became one of the principal forces behind the professionalization of American law. It developed model ethics standards, eventually producing what became the Model Rules of Professional Conduct that form the basis for lawyer regulation in most states. It became enormously influential in law-school accreditation. And for decades, its assessments of federal judicial nominees carried substantial weight in Washington.In other words, the ABA became something close to an institutional center of gravity for a profession that, by design, does not really have one. Whether that has always been a good thing is a separate question—and there is certainly no shortage of lawyers willing to debate it.But the date is particularly interesting this year because the ABA is once again squarely in the headlines.Just this week, we covered the organization's lawsuit challenging the administration's executive orders targeting major law firms. The ABA's argument, at bottom, is that the government is attempting to use its power to punish lawyers and firms for representing clients or causes the administration dislikes—and, in doing so, pressure the broader legal profession into falling in line.There is a rather striking symmetry to it.An organization founded nearly 150 years ago in part to promote “the administration of justice” now finds itself in court arguing that the independence of the lawyers responsible for administering that system is itself under threat.One can agree or disagree with the ABA's politics—and plenty of people do. But the principle underlying its founding is harder to dismiss. A legal profession capable of governing itself, enforcing its own standards, and, when necessary, telling political power “no” is not merely a professional convenience. It is part of the architecture of the rule of law.Of course, independence is only valuable if lawyers actually use it. Which brings us neatly back to today's opening quote from Charles Hamilton Houston: what lawyers choose to do with the power and independence their profession gives them matters enormously.Nearly 150 years after those 75 lawyers met in Saratoga Springs, that question has hardly become less relevant.Another key test case in the massive social-media litigation has evaporated: a New Jersey teenager has voluntarily dropped her lawsuit against Meta, Google, and Snap, just weeks before it was set for trial in October. The 15-year-old, identified in court records only by her initials, had alleged that the companies' platforms fueled addiction, depression, and self-harm. Notably, her lawyer said she received no payment to walk away—she simply wanted, in the attorney's words, to “resume her life.” TikTok had earlier settled her claims separately. If you've been following along, this should sound familiar: back in July, we covered a different teen plaintiff, in a bellwether case against Meta, dropping his claims days before trial. Now it's happened again. Here's why it matters strategically. These are “bellwether” cases—representative individual lawsuits, plucked from a pool of thousands, tried first so both sides can gauge how juries will react and calibrate settlement value. When a marquee bellwether disappears right before trial, it removes a data point everyone was watching. And the reason this one vanished is worth sitting with: not a secret settlement, but a teenager deciding she didn't want to spend her life as the face of a landmark lawsuit, subjected to discovery into her mental health and cross-examination about her worst moments. The significance is a quiet illustration of a real tension in mass litigation—the individual plaintiffs who anchor these cases are often young and vulnerable, and the litigation itself exacts a toll that can lead them to walk away. Meanwhile, the states' cases, like the 29-state trial underway in California, march on without that problem, because a state attorney general doesn't have a childhood to protect. US teen drops lawsuit against Meta, Google, Snap ahead of trial | ReutersBenzinga · WJLAThe Justice Department is seeking to question the FBI officials who carried out the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago—a striking move that turns the machinery of investigation around to point at the investigators. According to sources, the requests are coming from a team working under Joe diGenova, a Trump ally now overseeing a Florida-based probe, and the investigation is reportedly built on the theory that Trump was the victim of a criminal conspiracy against his rights. Let's recall the facts, because they matter. The 2022 search was authorized by a federal judge and turned up more than 100 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, including highly sensitive national-security records. That led to charges against Trump and two associates for retaining classified material and obstruction. The case never reached a jury on the merits—it was dismissed after a judge concluded the special counsel, Jack Smith, had been unlawfully appointed, and the DOJ dropped its appeal after Trump won the 2024 election. So here's the inversion: agents who executed a lawful, court-approved search warrant, and found exactly the classified documents the warrant anticipated, are now themselves the subjects of scrutiny, under a theory that pursuing Trump was itself a crime against him. The significance is about the independence of law enforcement and the chilling effect of retribution. When agents who followed a valid warrant can be investigated years later for having done so—by a team led by a political ally of the person they investigated—it sends a message to every FBI agent and prosecutor about the personal risk of investigating the powerful. It's the same thread we pulled on yesterday with the Comey prosecution: the concern that federal law-enforcement power is being turned to punish the president's perceived enemies rather than to pursue crime. DOJ seeks to question FBI officials tied to search of Trump Mar-a-Lago estate, sources say | ReutersWashington Post · Yahoo NewsAnd finally, a fight is heating up that will help define who owns the raw material of the AI era: your voice. In federal court in Illinois, a group of journalists, podcasters, voice actors, and audiobook narrators are suing a who's-who of tech—Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, Alphabet, Adobe, and the AI voice company ElevenLabs—alleging the companies harvested their “voiceprints” from publicly available audio recordings and used them to train commercial AI voice models without consent. This week, the two sides squared off over the companies' motions to dismiss. The legal engine here is a powerful Illinois statute called BIPA, the Biometric Information Privacy Act—the same law that produced a $650 million settlement from Facebook over face-tagging. BIPA treats biometric identifiers, including voiceprints, as something a company can't collect or use without informed consent, and it comes with statutory damages and a private right of action, which makes it a serious threat. The core dispute is about harm. The tech companies argue the plaintiffs can't point to any concrete injury—no cloned voice showed up in a product they can identify—so there's nothing to sue over. The plaintiffs counter that the harvesting itself is the harm: BIPA was designed to stop the nonconsensual capture of your biometric identity in the first place, whether or not it later surfaces in a product. The significance is that this is a preview of the defining legal question of AI training: the models are built on enormous quantities of human-created data—our voices, our writing, our faces—often scraped without asking, and the law is scrambling to decide whether that scraping is a harm in itself. Old privacy statutes like BIPA are becoming the sharpest tools plaintiffs have, and how these motions come out will shape whether the people whose voices train the machines have any say at all. Lawyers square off in fight over voice data used to train AI | ReutersMacDailyNews · Crypto Briefing This is a public episode. 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This Day in Legal History: The War on PovertyOn August 20, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act, the legislative centerpiece of the “War on Poverty” he had declared in his State of the Union address seven months earlier. It was among the most ambitious pieces of social legislation in American history. More fundamentally, it committed the federal government to the idea that poverty was not merely an individual misfortune, but a national problem the country could organize itself to confront.The Act was broad by design. It authorized roughly $1 billion and created a collection of programs whose names remain familiar: the Job Corps, which trained young people; VISTA, conceived as a domestic version of the Peace Corps; the Neighborhood Youth Corps; and the Community Action Program. The last of those sent federal money directly to local organizations and required the “maximum feasible participation” of poor people in designing the programs intended to help them. The Act also created the Office of Economic Opportunity to oversee the broader effort. Head Start, which continues operating today, grew out of the same framework.The legacy of August 20, 1964, is genuinely mixed, which is precisely why it is worth remembering honestly. The War on Poverty created durable institutions, including Head Start, Job Corps, and legal-services programs for poor Americans, while embedding the principle that the federal government has some responsibility for expanding opportunity. But the “maximum feasible participation” requirement also produced fierce battles between local activists and city governments that were accustomed to controlling federal money. The initiative was then starved of funding as the war in Vietnam consumed both the federal budget and the country's political attention. The Economic Opportunity Act remains a reference point in nearly every argument about what the government owes its most vulnerable citizens. It also pairs pointedly with a day of legal news dominated by criminal prosecutions and judicial power—a reminder that law is not only a mechanism for punishment, but, at its most aspirational, a tool for creating opportunity.In the trial of the man accused of orchestrating Tupac Shakur's 1996 murder, the defense has settled on a genuinely remarkable strategy: asking the jury not to believe its own client. When we covered the opening of the trial, I noted that the case largely rests on Duane “Keffe D” Davis's own words. Over the years, Davis said in media interviews and in a 2019 memoir that he was inside the Cadillac on the night Tupac was shot and that he handed the gun to the men in the back seat. Police had long suspected Davis, but they did not have enough evidence to charge him until he began publicly talking about the crime. His lawyer, Michael Sanft, is now attacking the reliability of those same admissions, at one point displaying a slide for jurors bearing a single word: “b******t.” The defense theory is that Davis is a braggart who exaggerated or invented his involvement to sell books and improve his street reputation—and that self-aggrandizing talk is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.Legally, this is a fascinating position because Davis's statements are doing much of the work a live confession ordinarily would, except that he made them for money and status rather than during a police interrogation. His effort to claim immunity based on a 2008 proffer has already failed before the Nevada Supreme Court, clearing the way for the statements to be used at trial. The case therefore turns on a basic but difficult evidentiary question: when someone publicly brags about participating in a notorious crime for personal gain, is that a confession the government can use to convict him, or is it just talk? The jury must decide whether Keffe D was telling the world the truth—or, as his own lawyer now argues, lying for profit.Defense strategy in Tupac murder case: don't believe my client | ReutersCNN · KELOPresident Trump has announced nine new judicial nominees for federal courts in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Alaska as the November midterms approach. The group notably includes an Oklahoma state attorney who supported allowing taxpayer-funded religious charter schools, offering a preview of the church-state disputes these judges could eventually be asked to decide. The larger legal point is that lifetime federal judgeships may be the most durable form of power a president exercises.These nominees, if confirmed, will continue interpreting federal law and the Constitution for decades after the president who selected them has left office. There is an unusual wrinkle this time, however: Trump's pace of judicial appointments has slowed because there are not many vacancies left. His first term substantially reshaped the federal judiciary, and an aggressive beginning to his second term further reduced the number of available seats. That is why a nine-person slate spanning six states is meaningful in a year when there simply is not much left to fill. The “as midterms loom” framing matters as well, because control of the Senate determines whether a president's nominees receive confirmation votes at all. The administration therefore has every reason to move nominees while the current Senate math remains favorable. Even a comparatively modest batch of nominations illustrates the quiet, cumulative way presidents shape American law—not through the executive orders that dominate a news cycle, but through lifetime appointments that survive countless news cycles. Each of these nine nominees, if confirmed, would represent a decades-long imprint on the federal judiciary.Trump names nine new judicial nominees as November midterms loom | ReutersLaw360 · Bloomberg LawAnd finally, we have a genuinely novel legal argument—literally. The Justice Department is prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly threatening President Trump, and prosecutors are now pointing to Comey's own novel as evidence against him. The charge arises from a May 2025 Instagram post in which Comey shared a photograph of seashells arranged on a beach to spell “86 47.” In that formulation, “86” is slang for getting rid of something, while “47” refers to Trump as the 47th president. Comey said he encountered the shells while walking on a North Carolina beach and posted the image as a clever piece of political commentary. Prosecutors have adopted a much darker interpretation. In a new filing urging the judge not to dismiss the case, the Justice Department cites Comey's legal thriller FDR Drive, published that same month, in which a right-wing podcaster uses coded language to incite followers against political opponents.The government's theory is that the novel demonstrates Comey understood how coded language can function as a threat and therefore knew what “86 47” would communicate. Prosecutors also suggested that he exploited the resulting controversy to sell books, quoting a message to his agent in which Comey wrote that the attention was “not my intention, but I'll be OK if it sells books.” The First Amendment does not protect “true threats,” but it strongly protects political criticism and hyperbole, and the Supreme Court has held that the government generally must prove a speaker was at least reckless about how a statement would be understood. The central question is therefore whether “86 47” amounted to a genuine threat of violence or protected political speech. Using a defendant's fictional writing to establish his state of mind is an aggressive and unusual prosecutorial move. Comey's lawyers describe the case as retaliation for his criticism of Trump. The prosecution sits directly on the fault line between criminalizing a threat and criminalizing dissent—and the government is effectively asking the court to treat a novelist's imagination as evidence of criminal intent.DOJ argues Comey novel shows he knew ‘86 47' post was a threat against Trump | ReutersCNBC · The Hill 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

We've launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court's decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities.Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com.This Day in Legal History: The Salem Witch TrialsOn August 19, 1692, five people—George Burroughs, John Proctor, John Willard, Martha Carrier, and George Jacobs Sr.—were hanged at Salem, Massachusetts, convicted of witchcraft. It was one of the darkest days in a period that has become the enduring American shorthand for a legal system gone catastrophically wrong.What makes the Salem trials so instructive for lawyers is that they weren't lawless in form—they had judges, juries, indictments, and testimony. They failed on substance, and specifically on evidence. The courts admitted so-called “spectral evidence”: testimony from accusers that the defendant's ghostly apparition had tormented them, something no one else could see or disprove. It was, by its nature, impossible to rebut—the perfect engine for convicting the innocent. The case of George Burroughs, a Harvard-educated former minister, captures the horror of it. At the gallows, Burroughs recited the Lord's Prayer flawlessly—something a witch, according to popular belief, should have been incapable of doing. The crowd was shaken; it looked like proof of innocence. He was hanged anyway. When the evidence and the conclusion pointed in opposite directions, the conclusion won.The significance of August 19, 1692 is that it became a permanent cautionary tale baked into American law. Within months, prominent voices—including the minister Increase Mather, who gave us today's opening quote about the danger of condemning the innocent—turned against the use of spectral evidence, and the trials collapsed. In the centuries since, the reforms we associate with due process—rules of evidence, the presumption of innocence, the requirement of proof that can actually be tested and challenged—are in many ways a long answer to Salem. It's a fitting backdrop for a day when two of our stories turn on evidence: what an insider witness reveals under oath, and what a litigant is allowed to keep hidden. Salem is the reminder of what happens when a legal system stops caring whether its evidence is real.In the landmark trial where 29 states accuse Meta of designing its platforms to addict and harm children, jurors heard from a powerful first witness: Arturo Bejar, a former Facebook engineering director turned whistleblower. Bejar worked at the company for years, and he told the Oakland jury that internal culture put growth ahead of kids' safety—that “move fast and break things” was the mantra, that Meta took a “don't ask, don't tell” approach to whether children under 13 were on the platform, and that the company used the softer euphemism “problematic use” instead of “addiction” in a way that, he testified, undercounted the real harm. His central accusation is that Meta's leadership knew, from its own internal research, what its products were doing to young users—and chose not to act. There's a revealing legal sub-story here, too. Meta tried hard to keep Bejar off the stand, arguing he'd failed to preserve evidence because he deleted some Signal messages with former colleagues. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected that as a long-shot bid to eliminate a key witness. Meta, for its part, flatly denies the claims, insisting it never set out to hook children and has worked to make its platforms safer. The significance is that this is the evidentiary heart of the case: not abstract allegations about algorithms, but an insider describing, under oath, what he says the company knew and how it talked about it internally. It's the same pattern that broke open the tobacco cases—a witness from inside translating the company's own euphemisms back into plain English for a jury. Whether jurors believe him will shape one of the most consequential product cases in years. Former Meta engineer resumes testimony in landmark trial over social media's harm to young users | ReutersThe Globe and Mail · LPM / NPRA federal judge in Texas has declared the Biden-era “ghost gun” rule unconstitutional—a striking move, because the Supreme Court upheld that very rule just last year. Some background: ghost guns are firearms assembled from parts or kits that lack serial numbers, making them largely untraceable, and in 2022 the ATF issued a rule bringing those parts and kits under federal firearms regulation. Judge Reed O'Connor in Fort Worth had originally struck the rule down as exceeding the agency's statutory authority—but in March 2025, the Supreme Court reversed him, holding the rule was a permissible reading of the Gun Control Act. Here's the maneuver worth understanding: the Supreme Court decided a statutory question—whether the agency had the power to issue the rule. It did not decide the constitutional questions. So O'Connor has now ruled again, this time on entirely different grounds, holding that the rule violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and is unconstitutionally vague under the Fifth Amendment's due process clause. In effect, when the statutory door closed, the challengers walked through the constitutional one, and the same judge let them in—blocking the rule as to certain products for Defense Distributed and members of the Second Amendment Foundation. Gun-control advocates called the decision “egregiously wrong” and predicted an appeal. But there's a genuine wrinkle: the Justice Department that would normally defend a Biden-era rule is now the Trump administration's DOJ, which is far more sympathetic to gun-rights arguments—so whether the government vigorously appeals its own rule's defeat is an open question. The significance is a vivid lesson in how litigation adapts: a Supreme Court win on statutory grounds does not necessarily end a fight if constitutional theories remain, and a determined judge can find a new path to the same result. Biden-era ‘ghost guns' restrictions are unconstitutional, US judge rules | ReutersUS News · Maryland Daily RecordThe Trump administration has invoked presidential privilege to keep secret the identities of the people who crafted its executive orders targeting major law firms. The context: last year the American Bar Association sued the White House and Justice Department over what it calls a “law firm intimidation policy”—a series of executive orders aimed at punishing firms for representing clients, causes, or positions the president dislikes, and, the ABA argues, coercing lawyers into dropping those clients. In discovery, the ABA wants to know who was behind the orders and whether officials specifically intended to discourage firms from taking on cases against the government. The administration's response is what's notable. It has formally invoked the presidential communications privilege—the same doctrine at the heart of the Nixon tapes case—but stretched it in an aggressive direction: the DOJ argues the privilege shields not just the substance of confidential advice, but the very identities of the people who gave it, whether or not they're executive-branch employees, and whether or not they're even lawyers. In other words, the government is claiming it can keep secret who wrote the orders. Here's the tension. The presidential communications privilege is real and important—presidents need candid advice—but it's qualified, not absolute; the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon made clear it can yield to a sufficient showing of need. Extending it to conceal the mere identity of outside advisers, people who may not work for the government at all, is a notably broad claim. The significance is a double irony worth sitting with: these are executive orders designed to punish lawyers for their advocacy, and now the government is using one of the law's most powerful secrecy doctrines to hide who dreamed them up. Whether a court accepts that will say a lot about how far executive privilege can be stretched to shield the process behind a controversial policy. Trump invokes presidential privilege in lawsuit over law firm orders | ReutersAbove the Law · Law & CrimeAnd finally, in a piece I wrote for Forbes this week, I take up a question the president has apparently been chewing on: can the federal government stop New York's new pied-à-terre tax—the surcharge on second homes I've written about before? My short answer is that there's a federal solution, but it almost certainly isn't the one Trump wants, because he has almost nothing he can do on his own.Start with the executive branch. The president cannot simply nullify a state tax by executive order—that's not a power he has. The Justice Department could jump into the existing litigation or file its own federal challenge, but neither goes anywhere useful. The big obstacle is the Tax Injunction Act, a federal statute that keeps federal district courts out of the business of blocking state tax collection whenever taxpayers have an adequate remedy in their own state courts—which, here, they do. And when the DOJ once tried to get around that law by suing on behalf of homeowners over an allegedly discriminatory New York property-tax system, a federal court said no, you can't evade the Tax Injunction Act that way. So the executive route is basically a dead end; the administration can litigate, apply pressure, and post on Truth Social, but it can't make the tax disappear.Congress, though, has a real—if difficult—path, and this is where it gets genuinely interesting as a matter of federalism. Congress has more power over state taxation than the president does. It has limited state taxes before: a federal railroad law, for instance, bars certain discriminatory property taxes on railroads and even gives federal courts jurisdiction to enforce it despite the Tax Injunction Act. And in a case called Arizona Public Service v. Snead, the Supreme Court upheld a federal statute enacted specifically to preempt a New Mexico tax that Congress found discriminated against interstate commerce. So using its affirmative Commerce Clause power, Congress can prohibit state taxes it decides burden interstate commerce. But there are two catches I walk through. First, anti-commandeering: Congress can't order New York to repeal anything—it would have to regulate all states directly, invalidating a defined category of tax. Second, and harder, New York drafted this tax cleverly to dodge the obvious constitutional attack: it taxes based on use—whether a home is your primary residence—not based on whether you're an in-stater or an out-of-stater. A New Jerseyan's Manhattan apartment can be exempt if it's their primary home; a New Yorker's second home gets taxed. That use-not-residency design makes the usual discrimination claim much harder, and it means Congress would have to build a long, strained logical chain connecting a residence-neutral property tax to interstate commerce, then tailor a preemption statute to it and defend the whole contraption in court. So, yes, a federal fix is theoretically possible—but it runs entirely through Congress, and it's a heavy lift. Which is a lawyer's way of saying there's probably not much the administration can actually do. My bet is that Trump just stops posting about it.Trump Can't Stop New York's Pied-À-Terre Tax 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 Nineteenth Amendment Is RatifiedOn August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment—the final state needed to reach the three-quarters threshold—and with that vote, the constitutional guarantee that the right to vote could not be denied on account of sex became part of American law. It enfranchised, at a stroke, roughly half the adult population of the United States.The story of how it happened is almost unbelievably close. Tennessee's state senate had ratified comfortably, but the house was deadlocked, tied 48 to 48. The decisive vote belonged to a 24-year-old representative named Harry Burn, who had a red rose on his lapel signaling opposition to the amendment—and a letter in his pocket from his mother, Phoebe, urging him to “be a good boy” and vote for suffrage. He did. His single vote broke the tie, Tennessee ratified, and the amendment was certified into the Constitution days later. A generational struggle turned, in the end, on a young man listening to his mother.The significance of August 18, 1920 is best understood as the payoff to a story we told on this show back in July. When we covered the Seneca Falls Convention and its 1848 Declaration of Sentiments—the founding document of the American women's rights movement, which dared to demand the vote—I noted that it would take seventy-two years to win the ballot. This is that day. The distance from Seneca Falls to Nashville is the distance from a bold, ridiculed demand to a line in the Constitution. And like the Fifteenth Amendment before it, the Nineteenth didn't instantly deliver on its promise—many women of color, in particular, remained effectively disenfranchised for decades until the Voting Rights Act. But it permanently changed who “the people” are in a democracy. It's a reminder, on a day full of stories about the law's unfinished business, that some of the most fundamental rights we now take for granted were won slowly, against fierce resistance, and sometimes by a single vote.A landmark trial has begun in California federal court that could reshape the most popular apps on the planet: a bipartisan coalition of 29 states has put Meta on trial, alleging it deliberately designed Instagram and Facebook to addict and harm children. This is the big one we've been building toward all summer—the federal counterpart to the state cases in New Mexico and Tennessee. The states, led by Colorado, California, New Jersey, and Kentucky, told the court that Meta engineered features like infinite scrolling, notifications, “likes,” visual filters, and algorithmic recommendations to drive compulsive use, and misled the public about the platforms' safety for young people. Here's an important procedural wrinkle: while there's an eight-person jury in Oakland, it's serving only in an advisory capacity—the case will ultimately be decided by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. That's because this is largely an equitable case, and what the states are really after isn't just money but sweeping changes to how the platforms work: stronger age verification, restrictions on algorithms trained on children's data, limits on notifications, and the removal of features like infinite scroll. On damages, Meta itself has floated the staggering figure of $1.4 trillion as its potential exposure, though the states haven't named a number and legal experts consider an award anywhere near that scale unlikely. The significance is that this trial could force concrete, structural redesign of Instagram and Facebook for young users—not a settlement negotiated in private, but a judge's findings after a public trial. Everything we've tracked, from the multistate penalties to the New Mexico verdict to the Ninth Circuit clearing these suits, has been leading here. This is where the social-media reckoning gets its fullest public airing yet. Meta faces 29-state trial that could reshape Instagram and Facebook | ReutersYahoo Finance · anewsThe Justice Department has opened a civil-rights investigation into the College of William & Mary, alleging the Virginia public university runs scholarship and mentorship programs that unlawfully discriminate in favor of minority students. The Department's Civil Rights Division announced a “compliance review” under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—which bars race discrimination by institutions that receive federal funding—targeting several specific programs: a fellowship in the education school that gives preference to Hispanic or Latina women with financial need, a doctoral mentorship program for “future education leaders of color,” and a law-school scholarship program. Here's the legal backdrop that makes this a national trend and not a one-off. After the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ended race-conscious admissions, the fight didn't end—it moved. The administration is now using Title VI to argue that race-conscious scholarships, fellowships, and pipeline programs are themselves a form of unlawful discrimination, framing programs designed to expand opportunity for underrepresented groups as illegal “discrimination in favor of minorities.” Supporters of these programs say they're lawful efforts to remedy historic exclusion and build diverse professions; critics say any use of race, even to help, runs afoul of the post-SFFA legal landscape. It's worth being precise: this is a compliance review, an investigation, not yet a lawsuit or a finding of wrongdoing. The significance is that this is part of a systematic campaign we've tracked against universities—from Harvard to Columbia—and it signals that the enforcement frontier after affirmative action has shifted from the admissions office to the financial-aid office. Every race-conscious scholarship in the country is now, potentially, a legal target. DOJ probes College of William & Mary alleging discrimination in favor of minorities | ReutersBloomberg · Fox NewsA federal judge has ordered the release of a woman charged with vandalizing the World War II Memorial in Washington—and the top federal prosecutor there, Jeanine Pirro, is not happy about it. The defendant, 41-year-old Melissa Farris of Kentucky, was arrested last week and charged with two felony counts after the memorial's fountain was filled with soap suds and the words “Clean hands Dirty $” were spray-painted across a surface in red and green. A judge ordered her released on conditions—surrendering her passport and not leaving the continental U.S. without approval—and Pirro publicly criticized that decision. Let's unpack the legal pieces, because there are two distinct ones. First, pretrial release: in the American system, the default is that a defendant awaiting trial should be released unless the government shows they're a flight risk or a danger, with conditions used to manage any risk. A judge ordering release with conditions is the system working as designed—the presumption of innocence is not an empty phrase—even when a prosecutor would prefer detention. Second, the underlying conduct: Farris reportedly said on social media that she acted to protest tax dollars not being spent on ordinary Americans and alleged corporate wrongdoing. But political motivation doesn't convert property destruction into protected speech—you can hold the message and still prosecute the spray paint. The significance ties into a thread we've followed: this is the same U.S. Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, at the center of the Reflecting Pool saga, again clashing over how a memorial-vandalism case should be handled—this time frustrated that a judge released a defendant rather than that a case was dropped. A preliminary hearing is set for September 3, and it's a reminder that the everyday machinery of bail and pretrial release keeps operating regardless of how politically charged the underlying act may be. US judge orders release of woman accused of vandalism at World War Two Memorial | ReutersWashington Post · CBS NewsAnd finally, in my column this week, I take on a well-intentioned proposal to tax artificial intelligence in order to help the workers it displaces—and argue that, while the instinct is right, the mechanism is wrong. The proposal in question is Representative Greg Casar's AI Tax and Work Protection Act. Its premise is sound: if firms are capturing the gains from replacing human workers with AI while pushing the costs—unemployment, lost tax revenue—onto workers and society, those costs look like an externality, the same way pollution does. And we tax externalities all the time: cigarettes, gasoline, carbon. So taxing AI to fund worker protections is a reasonable idea in principle.My problem is with the particulars. Casar's bill doesn't actually tax worker displacement—it taxes AI “tokens,” the technical units of AI computation, with the rate keyed to the unemployment rate. That creates an appealing feedback loop on paper: as AI drives up unemployment, the tax rises and generates more money to put people back to work. But it asks the Treasury to do two things it's genuinely bad at. First, it has to figure out, in real time and on a political calendar, how much of any given rise in unemployment is actually caused by AI, as opposed to a recession, a pandemic, or a war. That's a causal judgment the tax code has no machinery for. Second, and worse, it has to put a stable dollar value on a “token”—an unstable, non-standardized unit that spans text, code, images, audio, and video, and isn't sold in any clean arm's-length market. You're trying to tax the meter, and the meter doesn't have a reliable price.So here's the alternative I argue for: instead of taxing AI use, give the public an equity stake in the companies that capture AI's gains—let the government own a piece of the franchise rather than tax the meter. This isn't as exotic as it sounds; scholars like Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz have proposed having AI firms pay tax in kind, transferring equity rather than cash, and Senator Sanders has floated a far more aggressive version—a 50% stake funding a sovereign wealth fund. My point is that you don't have to go to 50% to adopt the underlying architecture. Equity is a better proxy than token usage: it scales with the actual size of the economic reallocation AI produces, and it only asks the government to value a company once, rather than to price billions of individual computations or adjudicate whether a particular prompt cost a particular job. If AI merely augments workers and produces modest gains, the public's share stays modest; if it produces extraordinary gains, the public shares in the upside. A smaller equity assessment on the largest firms, held through an independently managed vehicle, would let the public participate in AI's wealth without handing a shrunken Treasury an impossible measurement problem. The instinct to make sure the public benefits from AI is exactly right—we should just own a piece of the thing, not tax the ticker. Taxing AI to Help Workers Sounds Good, But Public Deserves More | Bloomberg Tax This is a public episode. 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This Day in Legal History: Clinton Testifies Before the Grand JuryOn August 17, 1998, President Bill Clinton became the first sitting president to testify before a grand jury as the subject of its investigation. He gave his testimony via closed-circuit television from the White House to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury, concerning his relationship with a White House intern—and that same evening, he addressed the nation to admit he had misled the public about it.The legal machinery that brought a president to that moment is worth understanding. It began, improbably, with a civil lawsuit: Paula Jones's sexual-harassment suit, which produced the 1997 Supreme Court decision in Clinton v. Jones holding that a sitting president is not immune from civil litigation over unofficial conduct and can be deposed while in office. That deposition, and the questions in it, are what put Clinton's statements under oath—and when those statements collided with what Starr's investigation uncovered, the independent counsel built a case around perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton, carefully, insisted his earlier answers had been “legally accurate,” a phrase that became emblematic of the entire episode.The significance of August 17, 1998 is layered. It led directly to Clinton's impeachment by the House on charges of perjury and obstruction—only the second presidential impeachment in American history—and his acquittal by the Senate. But its deeper legal legacies are the ones that still echo: Clinton v. Jones established that the presidency is not a shield against civil accountability for private conduct, a principle you can hear resonating in today's fights over presidential immunity, and the whole saga became a national seminar on perjury, executive privilege, and the limits of the independent-counsel model, which Congress let expire the following year. It's a fitting anniversary for a day when the relationship between political power and prosecutorial judgment is, once again, at the center of the news.Opening statements begin today in Las Vegas in the murder trial of Duane “Keffe D” Davis, nearly thirty years after the 1996 killing of rapper Tupac Shakur. Davis, 63, is charged with murder with a deadly weapon with intent to promote a criminal gang. He has pleaded not guilty and faces life in prison if convicted.A sixteen-person jury has been selected, and prosecutors are expected to call roughly forty witnesses. The witness list includes Suge Knight, who was driving the car in which Shakur was shot, and Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, who responded to the shooting as a Las Vegas police sergeant in 1996.Prosecutors say Davis was the “shot caller” behind a quickly assembled plan to retaliate after Shakur and members of his entourage beat Davis's nephew at the MGM Grand earlier that evening. The government's theory places the killing within a larger conflict involving rival street gangs.The obvious problem for prosecutors is time. Trying a murder case three decades after the crime means dealing with faded memories, unavailable witnesses, and physical evidence that may have been lost or degraded. What eventually revived the case, however, was Davis himself.Over the years, Davis publicly discussed his involvement in Shakur's killing in interviews and in a memoir. Those statements now form an important part of the prosecution's case. They also give the defense an obvious line of attack: statements made years later for publicity, money, or street credibility are not necessarily reliable accounts of what actually happened.That makes Davis's own words one of the most important legal issues to watch. Prosecutors do not merely have to show that he repeatedly claimed involvement; they have to persuade jurors that those claims, considered alongside the remaining evidence, prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The trial is therefore as much about the reliability of decades-old admissions as it is about solving one of the most famous unsolved murders in American popular culture.Tupac shooting trial begins with opening statements | ReutersWashington Post · PBS NewsHourAttorney General Todd Blanche is publicly backing U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro after President Trump criticized her office for dropping a vandalism prosecution involving the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Speaking on NBC's Meet the Press, Blanche said he “absolutely” supports Pirro, the top federal prosecutor in Washington. The comments came after Trump criticized her decision to abandon the prosecution of former Olympian David Hearn and others accused of damaging the Reflecting Pool.The case grew out of a roughly $15 million renovation project that the administration pushed to complete before July 4. After an algae bloom appeared and portions of the pool's lining began peeling, Pirro's office brought vandalism charges. Prosecutors later dropped the case after concluding that the damage resulted from problems with the renovation rather than deliberate sabotage.Trump was not happy with that conclusion. He publicly called on Pirro to revisit what he described as her “hastily made decision,” and the White House reportedly asked the Justice Department to consider whether additional charges were available.Blanche is now defending the prosecutor's decision. He said it was unfair to judge Pirro based on a single case when her office had made its decision based on the evidence available to prosecutors.The legal principle here is prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutors have substantial authority to decide whether the available evidence justifies bringing or continuing criminal charges, and those decisions are supposed to turn on the law and evidence rather than the political preferences of the president. That principle takes on additional importance because Blanche, who previously served as Trump's personal lawyer, faced questions during his confirmation about whether he could operate the Justice Department independently.There is an important qualification. Blanche also said Trump supports Pirro, despite the president's public criticism of her handling of this case. Still, an attorney general publicly defending a prosecutor's evidence-based decision against presidential criticism is a meaningful test of how much independence federal prosecutors will have when their charging decisions conflict with the White House.US Attorney General Blanche publicly backs Pirro after Trump criticism over Reflecting Pool | Reuters · US NewsAOLA federal judge has cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 1,100 Somalis living in the United States.U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston lifted a pause she had imposed in March on the Department of Homeland Security's termination of Somalia's TPS designation. The change largely reflects what has happened at the Supreme Court since Burroughs entered that earlier order.Temporary Protected Status allows people from designated countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary conditions to remain and work legally in the United States for a limited period. The protection does not itself provide permanent immigration status, and the executive branch periodically decides whether conditions in a particular country continue to justify the designation.The administration maintains that conditions in Somalia have improved enough to end TPS. Opponents point to continuing violence in the country, including fighting involving al-Shabaab militants, as evidence that returning people to Somalia remains dangerous.Four Somali plaintiffs and advocacy organizations also argued that the administration's decision was motivated by racial discrimination, citing President Trump's previous comments about Somalis. Burroughs rejected that discrimination claim at this stage, although the broader litigation continues.The most important legal development, though, happened above the district court. In June, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to terminate similar protections involving people from Haiti and Syria. Burroughs concluded that the Supreme Court's intervention changed the legal landscape and limited her ability to continue blocking the Somali termination.That illustrates how a Supreme Court ruling can affect considerably more than the people immediately involved in a particular case. Once the Court signaled that the executive branch has broad authority to terminate TPS designations, lower courts confronting similar challenges had less room to intervene. For the roughly 1,100 Somalis affected here, that means a temporary immigration protection that allowed them to remain legally in the United States can now be withdrawn while the underlying legal fight continues.US judge clears way for Trump to end Somalis' deportation protections | ReutersUS News · Fox News 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 Social Security ActOn August 14, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, creating the foundation of the American social safety net and permanently changing the relationship between citizens and their government. Flanked by members of Congress and photographers, FDR put his signature to a law that guaranteed, for the first time in American history, a measure of economic security against the hazards of old age, unemployment, and poverty.The Act was born of the Great Depression, when the suffering of millions—elderly people with no savings, workers with no jobs, families with no support—overwhelmed the old assumption that hardship was a purely private matter. Social Security established old-age benefits funded by taxes on workers and employers, created a federal-state system of unemployment insurance, and provided aid for dependent children, the blind, and people with disabilities. Roosevelt himself was clear-eyed about its limits, saying at the signing that no law could insure everyone against every vicissitude of life, but that this one gave “some measure of protection” against poverty-ridden old age and unemployment.The legal significance runs deep, and it connects to a story we've told before on this show. When the Social Security Act was challenged as an unconstitutional federal overreach and an improper use of the taxing power, it reached a Supreme Court that had been striking down New Deal programs left and right. But in 1937—in the same term as the failed court-packing fight and the Court's famous doctrinal shift—the justices upheld Social Security, in Steward Machine Company v. Davis and Helvering v. Davis, broadly reading Congress's power to tax and spend for the general welfare. Those decisions helped cement the constitutional foundation of the modern administrative and welfare state. Ninety-one years later, Social Security remains the single largest program in the federal budget, and the principle it established—that the national government has a role in securing the economic dignity of its people—remains, as our opening quote from FDR suggests, a live measure of the country's progress.A federal trade court has upheld President Trump's authority to close the “de minimis” tariff exemption—handing the administration a rare courtroom win on tariffs. The U.S. Court of International Trade, a three-judge panel in New York, ruled that Trump lawfully used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to end the duty-free treatment that low-value imports—parcels worth $800 or less—had long enjoyed. Some quick background: the de minimis exemption is what let a flood of cheap packages, especially from Chinese e-commerce sellers, enter the U.S. tariff-free, and closing it has already generated over a billion dollars in new duty payments. What makes this ruling notable is that it cuts against the trend. Trump's tariff agenda has fared badly in court—the Supreme Court ruled in February that IEEPA does not authorize him to unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs, which led to that roughly $100 billion in refunds we covered, and the trade court later struck down a replacement tariff. So how does the administration win this one? The court drew a fine but important distinction: ending a duty-free privilege is not the same as affirmatively imposing a tariff. The challenger, an auto-parts importer, argued IEEPA gave the president no independent power to close the exemption, but the panel found that rescinding a trade-related “privilege” falls within the emergency-powers statute even if imposing new tariffs does not. The significance is that it carves out a narrow lane where the administration's emergency-powers theory actually holds up—a reminder that in the tariff wars, the difference between taking away a benefit and imposing a new burden can be the difference between winning and losing in court. US court backs Trump's power to close ‘de minimis' tariff exemption | ReutersCNBC · BloombergThe Supreme Court has taken up a case that sounds technical but goes to the heart of whether wrongly detained immigrants can find a lawyer at all. The question is whether attorneys who successfully challenge an immigrant's detention through a habeas corpus petition can recover their fees from the federal government. It turns on the Equal Access to Justice Act—a statute that lets people who beat the government in court recover their attorney's fees, unless the government's position was “substantially justified.” Here's why this matters enormously right now. As immigration detention has surged, so have habeas petitions challenging it: one court in California went from a handful of these cases in 2021 to hundreds in a single month this year, and courts have repeatedly ordered the government to pay fees after finding people were detained unlawfully. But two federal appeals courts, the Fourth and Fifth Circuits, have held that habeas challenges to immigration detention aren't the kind of “civil case” the fee statute covers—which would mean the lawyers who win these cases can't recover a dime. Think about the practical stakes. Detained immigrants are frequently poor, often can't work, and have no right to a free lawyer in immigration proceedings. Fee-shifting is a big part of what makes it economically possible for attorneys to take these cases at all. If the Supreme Court rules that EAJA doesn't apply, it doesn't change the substance of anyone's detention—but it quietly removes much of the financial incentive for lawyers to challenge unlawful detention, weakening one of the few real checks on the system. The significance is that this is access to justice in its most concrete form: whether the courthouse door stays open depends, as it so often does, on who can afford to walk through it. US Supreme Court case tests fees for immigration detainees | ReutersSCOTUSblog · Bloomberg LawAnd finally, a story from the frontier of AI misuse that is equal parts alarming and absurd. A Connecticut judge has sanctioned a plaintiff who hid secret instructions inside his own court filings—instructions aimed not at the judge, but at any artificial intelligence that might read the documents. The plaintiff, representing himself, buried text in white font on a white background, invisible to a human eye, telling any AI model reviewing the filing to side with him. This is what's known as a “prompt injection” attack, and it's reportedly the first documented instance of one aimed at a U.S. court. The court caught it—apparently tipped off by strange white spaces in the text—and issued an order warning him to stop. He didn't. At the next hearing, he'd hidden a message reading “hi, I hope you can't see me,” and, in another filing, a concealed link to a SpongeBob SquarePants video. The judge was not amused, issuing a decision bluntly titled “Court Sanction for Plaintiff's Use of Prompt-Injection.” The remedy is almost poetically low-tech: the plaintiff is now barred from filing electronically and must submit everything on paper. Now, it's easy to laugh—and the SpongeBob link earns a chuckle—but the serious point is real. This is a new species of the AI-integrity problem we've tracked all summer, alongside the fake hallucinated citations. It's an attempt to corrupt the decision-making process itself, and it quietly reveals something bigger: that courts and their staff may increasingly be using AI tools to help review filings, which creates a brand-new attack surface for litigants willing to game it. The significance is that the age-old duty of candor to the tribunal now has to contend with adversaries trying to whisper to the machines—and courts are going to need new rules, and sharp eyes, to catch them. Connecticut judge says plaintiff hid messages for AI in court filings | Reuters404 Media · Tom's Hardware 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: Britain's Last ExecutionsOn August 13, 1964, two men—Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans—were hanged simultaneously in two different English prisons for the murder of a man during a robbery. They were the last people ever executed in the United Kingdom. Evans died at Strangeways Prison in Manchester and Allen at Walton Prison in Liverpool, both at eight in the morning, and with them, centuries of capital punishment in Britain came quietly to an end.Neither man knew he was making history; the abolition of the death penalty wasn't yet law. But the machinery of change was already turning. The very next year, in 1965, Parliament passed the Murder Act, which suspended the death penalty for murder for a trial period of five years. In 1969, Parliament made that suspension permanent for England, Scotland, and Wales. The death penalty lingered on the books for a handful of exotic offenses—treason, piracy with violence, certain military crimes—until it was finally abolished completely in 1998, bringing British law into line with the European Convention on Human Rights.The significance of August 13, 1964 is sharpened by contrast. Britain reached the end of capital punishment through ordinary legislation, and much of Europe followed a similar path, treating abolition as a basic human-rights commitment. The United States took the opposite fork: the Supreme Court briefly halted the death penalty in 1972 in Furman v. Georgia, only to allow it back four years later in Gregg v. Georgia, and capital punishment remains part of American law today, administered by the federal government and a number of states. So this anniversary is a useful mirror—a reminder that two closely related legal systems, working from a shared common-law inheritance, reached opposite conclusions on one of the deepest questions a legal system can face: whether the state should ever have the power to take a life. That's the question our opening quote, from Bryan Stevenson, puts squarely on the table.The law firm Motley Rice is in line for a payday of more than $67 million—its fee for winning New Mexico's sprawling case against Meta. We covered the underlying result: a judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a teen mental-health fund, on top of $375 million in civil penalties a jury imposed in March, bringing New Mexico's potential recovery to more than $942 million. Motley Rice represented the state on contingency, and under its contract it can seek a sliding-scale cut—20% of the first $50 million recovered, scaling down to 5% on amounts over $250 million—which works out to roughly 7% of the total, or about $67 million. Here's the practice-of-law angle worth understanding. States increasingly hire private plaintiffs' firms to bring these massive cases because they don't have the in-house firepower to go toe-to-toe with a company like Meta and its armies of lawyers. The firm fronts the enormous cost and risk of years of litigation in exchange for a percentage if it wins—the same model that produced the giant tobacco settlements of the 1990s, in which Motley Rice was a central player. Supporters say it lets under-resourced states take on deep-pocketed defendants they otherwise couldn't touch; critics say it hands public law-enforcement power to private firms with a profit motive. The significance is that this is the economic engine behind the whole wave of state social-media litigation we've been tracking. The fee comes out of New Mexico's recovery, and it only gets paid after appeals conclude—and Meta has said it will appeal—so the number, like the verdict, isn't final. But it's a rare, concrete look at the money that makes this kind of public-interest litigation actually happen. Law firm Motley Rice's fee for Meta case in New Mexico could top $67 million | ReuterAlbuquerque Journal · JD JournalTwo press-freedom organizations—The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation—have sued in Manhattan federal court to shut down a Trump Media service that sells wealthy subscribers early access to President Trump's social media posts. The service, called Truth API, launched August 1 and charges up to $100,000 a month for a faster feed of ten high-profile Truth Social accounts, including the president's own. The legal concern at the heart of the suit is a specific and serious one: Trump's posts routinely move financial markets—an announcement about tariffs or a company can send stocks lurching—and a paid feed that delivers those posts to deep-pocketed subscribers before the general public gives those subscribers a head start to trade on market-moving information. In other words, it potentially creates a two-tiered market in the president's words, where those who can pay six figures a month get to act on presidential statements seconds or minutes before everyone else. That's the kind of information asymmetry securities law generally frowns on. The service drew scrutiny fast—Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff had already called for a government investigation days before this suit. It's also legally novel: the plaintiffs are press-freedom groups, framing public access to a president's official-ish communications as a matter of public interest, which raises interesting questions about their theory and standing. The significance is that this sits at a genuinely new intersection—of a president who governs partly through market-moving social media posts, the business incentive to monetize that, and a securities and public-information framework that never contemplated selling early access to the president's feed. However the case comes out, it's a preview of the strange legal questions created when official speech becomes a paid product. Trump sued over service that offers paid early access to Truth Social posts | ReutersWashington Post · NPRA group of current and former Palestinian students and staff have sued Columbia University, alleging that the school discriminated against its Palestinian community over the past two years. According to the complaint filed in New York, the plaintiffs say Columbia failed to protect Palestinian members from harassment, subjected them to what they call “unfair and biased disciplinary hearings,” and “actively participated in and amplified” what they describe as racially, ethnically, and politically motivated targeting of Palestinians on campus. The legal vehicle here is worth understanding, because it's the same one being wielded on multiple sides of the campus fights. Civil-rights law—principally Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—bars institutions that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. We've seen Title VI invoked against universities over allegations of antisemitism, and we've seen the Justice Department use it to pressure schools like Harvard. Here, Palestinian and Arab plaintiffs are invoking that same framework to allege discrimination against them. The context matters: Columbia suspended more than 65 students last year over a pro-Palestinian protest that shut down its main library, and it agreed to pay the federal government over $200 million to resolve federal probes and restore funding. Columbia has denied discriminating and says it condemns hate, and it declined to comment on the pending litigation. To be clear, these are allegations in a complaint, not proven facts, and I'm not weighing in on the underlying political conflict. The significance is legal and institutional: universities are now being sued from opposite directions under the very same civil-rights statute, and Columbia in particular finds itself squeezed between federal enforcers, one set of students, and another—each claiming the protection of Title VI. It's a vivid illustration of how anti-discrimination law becomes the battleground when a campus fractures. Palestinian students and staff sue Columbia University alleging discrimination | ReutersUS News · Middle East Eye 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 Suspends Secretary StantonOn August 12, 1867, President Andrew Johnson suspended Edwin Stanton, his Secretary of War, and installed General Ulysses S. Grant to run the department temporarily. It was a quiet-sounding personnel move that lit the fuse on one of the great constitutional confrontations in American history—and it turned on a question we still argue about: how much control a president has over the officials who serve beneath him.The context was Reconstruction. Stanton was a close ally of the Radical Republicans in Congress, and as Secretary of War he controlled the Army's presence across the defeated South, including the Freedmen's Bureau—making him essential to Congress's plans to remake the region and protect the newly freed. Johnson, who bitterly opposed that agenda, wanted Stanton gone. But Congress had anticipated exactly this: it had passed the Tenure of Office Act, which barred the president from removing a Senate-confirmed cabinet officer without the Senate's consent. Johnson, trying to thread the needle while Congress was in recess, suspended Stanton rather than firing him outright. When the Senate later refused to concur and Johnson removed Stanton anyway in early 1868, the House impeached him—and he survived removal in the Senate by a single vote.The significance of August 12, 1867 reaches all the way to the present. The Tenure of Office Act was eventually repealed and, decades later, the Supreme Court in Myers v. United States suggested it had been unconstitutional all along, endorsing a robust presidential removal power—the same removal-power debate that traces back to the very first Congress and runs through today's fights over the independence of agencies and prosecutors. Johnson's clash with Stanton is the original American showdown over whether a president can be checked in the control of his own executive branch. And on a day when we've got a story about the White House leaning on the Justice Department, that 159-year-old question feels remarkably current.A federal appeals court has thrown out the government formula at the heart of the law meant to protect patients from surprise medical bills—handing a significant win to doctors and hospitals over insurers. Sitting en banc, all seventeen judges of the Fifth Circuit issued an unsigned opinion mostly siding with physicians and air-ambulance companies, and invalidating a federal rule as going beyond what Congress actually authorized in the No Surprises Act. Here's how this works, because it's less about patients than it sounds. The No Surprises Act protects you, the patient—if you get care from an out-of-network provider in an emergency, you only owe your normal in-network cost-sharing. The fight is over who pays the rest: the insurer or the provider. That gets decided in arbitration, and the key benchmark is something called the “qualifying payment amount,” or QPA. Whoever controls how the QPA is calculated basically controls who wins. The court found that federal agencies had let insurers game that number—by baking in so-called “ghost rates,” contracted amounts for services that providers never actually deliver, which dragged the benchmark down in insurers' favor—and by improperly excluding bonus and incentive payments. The significance is twofold. Substantively, it rebalances a high-stakes payment fight away from insurers and toward providers. But the deeper theme is administrative law: this is a court holding that agencies rewrote a statute to favor one side beyond what Congress wrote—exactly the kind of post-Chevron scrutiny of agency rulemaking we've been tracking all summer. The patient protections stay; the multibillion-dollar question of who pays just got sent back to the drawing board. US appeals court voids formula used to avert surprise medical bills | ReutersAmerican Medical Association · Bloomberg LawA federal judge has blocked the U.S. Postal Service nationwide from enforcing the mail-in voting restrictions in President Trump's executive order—and if this story sounds familiar to longtime listeners, it should. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston expanded an order she first issued in June, which had covered 23 states, into a nationwide injunction. Under the executive order, the Postal Service was supposed to gather state lists of eligible voters and deliver absentee ballots only to people on those lists; Talwani's ruling bars USPS from refusing to deliver mail ballots based on those new federal verification requirements. Her reasoning is the same principle we keep coming back to: the executive branch, she wrote, has no authority to regulate elections—that power belongs to the states under the Constitution. And she stressed the timing, noting it's now less than 90 days before the November 3 midterms, which makes it especially important not to let the federal government change election rules on the eve of the vote. This connects to the entire voting-rights arc we've followed—the administration's 0-and-21 losing streak on voter rolls, the Supreme Court emergency application, the Voting Rights Act anniversary. The significance is that the courts continue to hold a firm, near-unbroken line: however much the administration wants federal control over how Americans cast and count ballots, judges keep ruling that elections are run by the states, and the closer we get to November, the more urgently they're saying it. Judge blocks US Postal Service from restricting mail-in voting | ReutersNPR · US NewsThe White House has reportedly asked the Justice Department to explore bringing new charges against David Hearn—the former Olympian in the Reflecting Pool case—just over a week after the department dropped the case because its own evidence showed he didn't do it. Recall the sequence: Hearn was indicted on a felony for allegedly damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but prosecutors then moved to dismiss, telling the court that newly disclosed documents showed the damage came from a botched renovation, not vandalism. According to sources, President Trump was furious at U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for dismissing the case, and the White House has since asked the department to examine whether there's a basis for a new charge—possibly a misdemeanor. The talks are described as preliminary, with no decision made, and Congressman Jamie Raskin has already launched a probe into the whole affair. Here's why this is legally striking. The decision to drop the case wasn't a technicality—it was the government concluding, on the evidence, that the underlying premise was false. To now go looking for new charges against the same person, at the White House's urging and reportedly out of the president's personal anger, raises the specter of vindictive prosecution—using the charging power not to pursue justice but to punish. The significance goes to the core of prosecutorial independence, the theme running through the Blanche confirmation fight and beyond: charging decisions are supposed to be driven by evidence and law, not by a president's displeasure that a case was dropped. It's a live test of whether that line still holds. Trump White House asked DOJ to explore new Reflecting Pool charges, sources say | ReutersUS News · MS NOWAnd finally, the law graduates who suffered through California's disastrous 2025 bar exam have reached a settlement in their class action against the company that administered it. You may remember the debacle: the February 2025 California bar exam, run by the vendor Meazure Learning, collapsed into login failures, software crashes, frozen screens, and lost answers, throwing thousands of aspiring lawyers into chaos on the single most important test of their careers. That fiasco spawned multiple lawsuits—the test-takers' claims were consolidated into a class action in federal court—as well as a state audit and a legislative inquiry. This settlement resolves the graduates' own case, and it's distinct from the separate deal the State Bar itself reached with Meazure last month, in which the vendor agreed to pay the Bar $5.25 million and forgive $1.36 million in unpaid invoices. The significance connects directly to a story we covered a couple of weeks ago—the meltdown of the new NextGen exam in Washington State. Two different states, two different vendors and formats, the same underlying failure: the high-stakes gateway to the legal profession buckling under basic technology problems, and leaving the people trying to enter the profession to pick up the pieces. These settlements put a price on that failure—but they also intensify a growing question about whether the bar exam, as currently built and administered, is a reliable way to license lawyers at all. Law grads reach settlement in class action over botched California bar exam | ReutersBloomberg Law · ICLG 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 Weimar ConstitutionOn August 11, 1919, President Friedrich Ebert signed the Weimar Constitution into force, creating the first parliamentary democracy in German history. It came into effect a few days later, ending the provisional government that had followed Germany's defeat in the First World War and the fall of the monarchy. On paper, it was a strikingly modern and liberal document—and its story is one of the most important cautionary tales in all of constitutional law.The Weimar Constitution rested on genuinely progressive foundations: popular sovereignty, a separation of powers, and an extensive bill of fundamental rights, including—remarkably for 1919—formal equality between men and women and the right to vote for both. It established a directly elected president, a parliament, the Reichstag, and a framework that looked, in many respects, like a model twentieth-century democracy. For a document drafted in the chaos of postwar Germany, it was an ambitious attempt to build a rights-respecting republic from the ground up.But the Weimar Constitution is remembered today largely for the flaw that helped destroy it: Article 48, which gave the president sweeping power to rule by emergency decree, suspending civil liberties when he deemed public order to be threatened. That emergency clause was invoked more and more frequently as the republic's politics fractured—and in 1933 it became the legal mechanism through which the Nazi regime dismantled democracy from the inside, using the constitution's own emergency powers to suspend rights and seize dictatorial control. Which brings us back to today's opening quote: the Weimar experience is the definitive real-world example of Justice Jackson's warning that an emergency power, once available, “lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” The significance of August 11, 1919 is that it stands as an enduring lesson that a constitution's protections are only as durable as the limits it places on emergency power—that a democracy can be subverted not in spite of its own laws, but through them.Luigi Mangione is due back in court for a pretrial hearing ahead of his murder trial, set to begin September 8, in the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel. Mangione, who is 28, has pleaded not guilty to murder, weapons, and forgery charges brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, and he has separately pleaded not guilty to federal stalking charges. At today's hearing before Justice Gregory Carro, the parties are expected to take up jury selection and the thorny question of public access to what is shaping up to be one of the most closely watched trials in years. Let's talk about the real legal challenges here, because this case is unusual on several fronts. First, Mangione faces parallel state and federal prosecutions arising from the same killing—something the Constitution permits under the “dual sovereignty” doctrine, even though it can feel like being tried twice. Second, the defense has signaled it may argue that Mangione lost control of his actions due to an extreme mental-health breakdown, and notably has not conceded that he was even the shooter, despite prosecutors citing surveillance video, DNA, ballistics, and a notebook. And third—the elephant in the courtroom—is that this case became a cultural flashpoint, with a wave of public anger at the health-insurance industry curdling, in some corners, into sympathy for the accused. That makes jury selection genuinely difficult: finding impartial jurors amid saturation coverage and strong public feeling is exactly the kind of problem that tests the machinery of a fair trial. The significance is that beyond the headlines, this is a serious test of whether the system can give a fair, dispassionate trial to a defendant the public has turned into a symbol—which is precisely when the guarantees of criminal procedure matter most. Luigi Mangione due in court ahead of insurance CEO murder trial | ReutersUPI · 6abcPresident Trump has said that whether to revive the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” is now up to his newly confirmed attorney general, Todd Blanche—a statement that lands like the punchline to a story we've been telling for weeks. Recall the sequence: Blanche rescinded the fund on the eve of his confirmation to win over Republican holdouts, but Trump then acknowledged that he himself never signed the rescission order, which left the door open. Now, with Blanche confirmed as attorney general by that razor-thin 50-49 vote, Trump is saying the future of the fund rests with Blanche. And that is exactly the scenario that critics warned about. Think back to what senators extracted as the price of confirmation: a promise to kill a fund that would have used taxpayer money to pay people, including January 6 defendants, who claimed to be victims of the prior Justice Department. But a promise made by the executive branch can be unmade by the executive branch, and here the president is openly signaling that his former personal lawyer, now running the Justice Department, could bring it back. The significance goes to the very heart of the concern that dogged Blanche's nomination: the independence of the attorney general. When the president publicly frames the revival of a controversial payout fund as a decision for “his” attorney general to make, it underscores the worry that the Justice Department's most consequential choices may run through the lens of the president's personal and political interests. The confirmation fight is over, but the question it raised is very much alive. Trump says future weaponization fund is up to Blanche | ReutersForbes · AxiosA federal appeals court has cleared thousands of lawsuits to proceed against the major social-media companies over claims they deliberately designed their platforms to addict young users. The San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit rejected the bid by Meta, Google's YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat to escape roughly 2,400 lawsuits consolidated in federal court, brought by states, municipalities, school districts, and individuals. The legal fight here is all about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—the 1996 law that shields online platforms from liability for content their users post. The companies argued that Section 230 also immunizes them from claims that they failed to warn about, or engineered, the addictive nature of their platforms. The court said no, and the distinction it drew is the crucial one: Section 230 protects a platform from being sued over what its users say, but it does not necessarily protect the platform's own product-design choices—the infinite scroll, the algorithmic feeds, the notification schedules engineered to maximize engagement. Claims aimed at that design, the court reasoned, are different from claims aimed at user content. If you've been listening, you know this is the federal counterpart to everything we've tracked at the state level—the New Mexico judgment, the Tennessee trial, the multistate penalty fight. The significance is that the industry's most powerful legal shield, Section 230, is being narrowed: plaintiffs are increasingly framing their cases around addictive design rather than harmful content, and courts are increasingly letting those cases through. That reframing may prove to be the key that unlocks the courthouse door for the whole wave of social-media harm litigation. US appeals court allows thousands of lawsuits against social media companies to proceed | ReutersNBC News · Al JazeeraAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a question hiding underneath the AI gold rush: who's actually paying for it? My starting point is a striking data point—Microsoft's current federal tax expense fell year over year from about $14.1 billion to just $2.5 billion, even as its revenue surged. And a big part of that drop comes from accelerated deductions in last year's massive 2025 tax law, which restored 100% bonus depreciation—letting companies write off the full cost of huge investments, like AI data centers, in the very first year.My core argument is that the tax law is financing the AI infrastructure boom, but it isn't creating it—and that distinction matters enormously before anyone declares the policy a success. The political narrative writes itself: capital spending soared after the tax cut, therefore the tax cut worked. But I think correlation is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there. Microsoft and its rivals aren't pouring tens of billions into AI infrastructure because Congress rediscovered depreciation. They're doing it because falling behind in AI could threaten their core businesses—it's become about as close to a strategic necessity as it gets. And here's the tell: Microsoft announced its roughly $80 billion AI data-center plan in a blog post in January 2025, a full six months before the tax law was even signed. The trajectory was public, budgeted, and well underway before the depreciation rules changed.So my point to Congress is: prove it. Before congratulating yourselves, you owe the public evidence that these tax benefits actually changed corporate behavior rather than just rewarding investments companies were already racing to make. And I want to push back on the idea that this is “just” a timing benefit and therefore basically free. Timing isn't free—letting a company keep its cash now in exchange for tax revenue later is like giving it an interest-free loan, and every dollar of accelerated depreciation is a dollar the Treasury can't use for something else this year. That's a real opportunity cost, felt in deficits or forgone public investment. My recommendation is concrete: Congress should require the Treasury and the Joint Committee on Taxation to regularly estimate how much of this investment is genuinely induced by the tax break, how much was simply pulled forward, and how much would have happened anyway. Because the public is quietly helping finance the AI revolution—and if Congress intends to make taxpayers silent investors in it, it should at least have the honesty to say so, and to show the math. Tax Law Is Funding the AI Infrastructure Boom, Not Creating It | Bloomberg Tax 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: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Joins the CourtOn August 10, 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, becoming the second woman—and the first Jewish woman—ever to serve on it. She had been confirmed by the Senate just a week earlier by a lopsided 96 to 3, a margin that is almost unimaginable for a Supreme Court nominee today, and she took the seat vacated by the retiring Justice Byron White.Ginsburg reached the Court after one of the most consequential legal careers of the twentieth century—much of it spent, as a litigator, dismantling sex discrimination brick by brick. In the 1970s, as head of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project, she argued a series of cases before the very Court she would later join, persuading an all-male bench to recognize that treating men and women differently under the law often rested on nothing but stereotype. She was strategic and incremental, sometimes choosing male plaintiffs to show that gender lines cut both ways. On the Court, she became known for landmark majority opinions like United States v. Virginia, striking down the male-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute, and, later, for pointed dissents that made her an unlikely cultural icon.The significance of August 10, 1993 is a fitting frame for today's news, because it raises a question the Court is wrestling with right now: when justices come and when they go. Ginsburg famously declined to retire during President Obama's second term, confident she could outlast the political moment; when she died in September 2020, President Trump filled her seat, shifting the Court's balance for a generation. That episode turned “strategic retirement” from an academic debate into a live and painful one—and it's the exact debate hanging over our second story today. Ginsburg's life is a reminder both of how much a single justice can shape the law, and of how fraught the timing of a lifetime appointment has become.The Senate has confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general, ending one of the most bruising cabinet fights of Trump's second term with a razor-thin 50-49 vote taken overnight on Saturday. We've followed this saga from the beginning—the tense confirmation hearing, the stalled committee vote, the eleventh-hour deal to rescind the anti-weaponization fund—and this is where it lands. Two Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, broke ranks and voted no, citing concerns ranging from the Epstein files to that $1.8 billion fund; Senator Bill Cassidy provided the decisive vote, saying Blanche was the best option the president was likely to offer. Blanche, you'll recall, was Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer before joining the Justice Department, and that's the heart of why this was so contested: the concern that the nation's top law-enforcement officer would serve the president personally rather than the law. The significance is twofold. First, the margin itself—a single vote, with defections from the president's own party—signals just how uneasy even some Republicans were about Blanche's independence. Second, remember what it took to get here: Blanche had to formally dismantle a controversial initiative to win confirmation. But as Democrats pointed out, that was an executive-branch promise, not a law, and the same executive branch can revisit it. So Blanche takes office as attorney general having made a concession whose durability is genuinely uncertain—confirmed, but on the narrowest possible terms and with the questions about his independence very much unresolved. Senate Republicans narrowly confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general | ReutersNPR · Washington PostJustice Samuel Alito has put an end to a summer of retirement speculation, confirming that he intends to stay on the Supreme Court. “Obviously, I'm here for another term,” the 76-year-old justice said in an interview published in the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages. The speculation had reached a fever pitch back in June, when a veteran Supreme Court reporter's pre-written retirement story was published by mistake and then quickly retracted—but the talk never fully died down. What makes Alito's statement legally and politically interesting is what he pushed back on. He explicitly rejected the suggestion that he should time his retirement strategically—stepping down now, while President Trump is in office and Republicans control the Senate, so that a younger conservative could be confirmed to replace him and hold the seat for decades. And that is exactly where today's Ginsburg anniversary comes crashing in. Justice Ginsburg made the opposite bet: she declined calls to retire while President Obama could name her successor, and when she died in 2020, a president of the opposite party filled her seat and reshaped the Court. That history is precisely why so many now urge aging justices to retire strategically. Alito is declining to play that game—at least publicly. The significance is that this keeps a reliably conservative vote on the Court for now, but it also spotlights an uncomfortable feature of our system: lifetime tenure means the timing of a single retirement can shape constitutional law for a generation, and we increasingly expect justices to make that intensely personal decision with one eye on the electoral calendar. Justice Alito says he is staying on Supreme Court for another term | ReutersABC News · FortuneAnd finally, a federal judge has approved more than $2.5 billion in settlements that New Jersey reached with DuPont, Chemours, Corteva, and 3M to resolve claims over contamination from PFAS—the “forever chemicals” that have become one of the biggest environmental-liability stories of the decade. Chief U.S. District Judge Renée Marie Bumb signed off on Friday, ending a legal battle that began back in 2019. A quick primer: PFAS are a family of synthetic chemicals used in everything from nonstick coatings to firefighting foam, and they're called “forever chemicals” because they essentially don't break down in the environment or the human body, and they've been linked to serious health harms. New Jersey sued under a natural-resource-damages theory—the idea that these companies polluted the state's shared resources, its water and land, and must pay to restore them. The numbers are substantial: DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva will pay $875 million over 25 years, clean up four former industrial sites, and fund a $1.2 billion remediation account; 3M will pay up to $450 million. The judge called the deal “fair, reasonable and adequate” and even an “impressive windfall” given the risks of taking such a case to trial. The significance is that this is one of the largest state PFAS recoveries yet, and it fits the mass-tort pattern we've watched all summer—from talc to Roundup—where companies, facing enormous litigation exposure, choose certainty over trial. But this one has an environmental twist: beyond the money, it forces the actual cleanup of contaminated sites, and it gives every other state attorney general eyeing PFAS litigation a $2.5 billion data point to bring to their own negotiating table. New Jersey's $2.5 billion ‘forever chemicals' settlements with DuPont, 3M, others win court approval | ReutersPhiladelphia Inquirer · New Jersey Attorney General 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 Gulf of Tonkin ResolutionOn August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, one of the most consequential—and most cautionary—delegations of power in American history. The vote was overwhelming: unanimous in the House, and 88 to 2 in the Senate. The resolution authorized President Lyndon Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” in Southeast Asia—and it became the legal foundation for the escalation of the Vietnam War, all without a formal declaration of war.The resolution passed after Johnson told the public that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had made unprovoked attacks on two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. In the years that followed, serious doubts emerged about what had actually happened—particularly regarding the second reported attack, which may never have occurred at all. Congress, acting on the president's account and in a moment of Cold War urgency, handed the executive branch what amounted to a blank check for war. At the time there were only about 25,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam; that number would eventually exceed half a million.The significance of August 7, 1964 is that it became the defining lesson in the dangers of Congress ceding its war powers to the president. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war precisely because the founders feared executive war-making, and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution showed what happens when the legislature abdicates that role. The backlash shaped a generation of law: Congress rescinded the resolution in 1970, and in 1973 passed the War Powers Resolution over President Nixon's veto, trying to claw back some control over the commitment of American forces. It's a permanent reminder—resonant on a day full of stories about the reach of executive power—that authority handed over in a crisis is very hard to take back.The Trump administration's campaign to force states to hand over their voter registration data has now lost twenty-one court cases in a row—an unbroken streak of defeats as the November midterms approach. According to a Reuters analysis, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking their voter rolls, and it has gone zero for twenty-one, with federal courts from Pennsylvania to California to Michigan, plus the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, all rejecting the effort. Here's the detail that really tells the story: seven of the fifteen district judges who ruled against the administration were appointed by Trump himself, and some Republican state officials—in Idaho, Kentucky, Utah, and West Virginia—have resisted the requests too. This isn't a partisan split; it's a near-consensus rejection. The legal problem is structural. Under the Constitution, the administration of elections is primarily the job of the states, and courts have repeatedly found the federal government lacks the authority to simply demand statewide voter data. We've tracked the pieces of this all summer—the SAVE database fights, the threats to prosecute election officials, the mail-in voting order—and this is the throughline: a coordinated push for federal control over election machinery running headlong into a judiciary, staffed partly by the president's own appointees, that keeps saying no. The significance is that the courts are holding a hard line on the decentralized structure of American elections, and doing it unanimously enough that it's hard to dismiss as politics. It's a fitting counterpoint to yesterday's Voting Rights Act anniversary: sixty years apart, the fights over who controls the ballot continue. Analysis: Trump loses 21 straight court battles for state voter rolls as midterms near | ReutersCBS News · Brennan CenterPresident Trump has signed two new executive orders attempting to narrow birthright citizenship—despite the fact that the Supreme Court rejected his last attempt just over a month ago. Recall that on June 30, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil, striking down his earlier order. These new orders are narrower. The White House is taking aim at “birth tourism”—foreigners traveling to the U.S. specifically to give birth—and at denying birthright citizenship to children of some foreign diplomatic staff, with the possibility of extending limits to U.S. territories later. It's worth being precise here, because the two pieces are legally very different. The diplomatic-staff piece actually sits on firmer ground: the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to those “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and children of accredited foreign diplomats have long been recognized as a genuine exception. But the birth-tourism piece runs straight into the June ruling, which held that a child's citizenship doesn't depend on the immigration status or purpose of the parents. And crucially, these are executive orders—they set executive-branch policy, but they don't carry the force of a statute or override a constitutional holding. After his June loss, Trump had called on Congress to act; instead he's gone back to the executive-order well. The significance is a real test of what a president can do after the Supreme Court has ruled against him on constitutional grounds. Legal experts say it's unclear what practical effect these orders can even have, and fresh legal challenges are all but certain. It's an attempt to chip at the edges of a ruling the administration couldn't overturn head-on. Trump to sign orders on birthright citizenship, Axios reports | ReutersCBS News · Al JazeeraAnd finally, a New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a teen mental-health fund and to substantially overhaul how its platforms work for young users—one of the most significant rulings yet in the wave of litigation over social media and children. Judge Bryan Biedscheid in Santa Fe found that Meta created a “public nuisance” in New Mexico, siding with Attorney General Raúl Torrez—the same AG who, as we noted yesterday, is suing the Justice Department over the Epstein files. Torrez had accused Meta of designing its products to addict young users and failing to protect children from sexual exploitation on its platforms. The “public nuisance” theory is worth flagging, because it's the same legal tool that drove the big opioid settlements: the idea that a company's conduct created a widespread harm to the public that it can be forced to help abate. And the money is only part of it. The judge imposed a five-year decree requiring concrete design changes—monthly limits on teens' time on Facebook and Instagram, restrictions on notifications, tighter controls on adult contact with minors, safeguards around AI chatbots, and enhanced review of child sexual abuse reports. This lands amid everything we've tracked: the Tennessee trial that just opened, the multistate penalty fight, the bellwether cases. Meta says it will appeal and that it's been working to remove harmful content. The significance is that a court hasn't just put a price on Meta's conduct—it has ordered the company to redesign its products for kids, backed by the public-nuisance theory. If that approach holds up on appeal, it's a template other states will follow, and it moves the social-media reckoning from damages into the far more consequential territory of forced design change. New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567 mln teen mental health fund | ReutersWashington Post · Yahoo Finance 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 Voting Rights Act of 1965On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, arguably the most effective civil-rights statute in American history. Johnson signed it at the Capitol, and after a ceremony in the Rotunda, he moved to the President's Room near the Senate Chamber—the same room where Abraham Lincoln had signed a bill freeing enslaved people pressed into Confederate service—flanked by congressional leaders, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and others who had fought and bled for this moment.The Act was a direct response to the machinery of disenfranchisement that Southern states had built after Reconstruction. For nearly a century, literacy tests, poll taxes, and outright intimidation had kept Black Americans from the ballot box despite the Fifteenth Amendment's guarantee. The Voting Rights Act attacked that machinery head-on: it banned literacy tests, and—crucially—in Section 5, it required jurisdictions with the worst histories of discrimination to “preclear” any change to their voting rules with the federal government before those changes could take effect. It also authorized federal examiners to register voters directly. The impact was immediate and staggering: over a quarter-million new Black voters registered by the end of 1965 alone.The significance of August 6, 1965 is that it transformed American democracy by finally making the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment real. But it's also a living, contested statute, which is why it belongs in the news and not just the history books. In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court effectively disabled the Section 5 preclearance requirement, holding that the formula for deciding which jurisdictions were covered was outdated. In the years since, fights over voting rules, voter rolls, and ballot access—many of which we've covered on this show—have unfolded on the terrain the Voting Rights Act created and that Shelby County reshaped. Sixty years on, the argument the Act tried to settle is still very much open.A court filing has revealed the striking scale of the aftermath of one of the biggest separation-of-powers rulings in years: the U.S. government has already refunded about $100 billion in tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down. According to the filing in the U.S. Court of International Trade, roughly $100 billion in refunds—duties plus interest—had been completed as of the end of July, representing more than half of the $166 billion the government had collected under the invalidated tariffs. Here's the backstory. After returning to office, President Trump used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—a law meant for genuine national emergencies—to impose sweeping tariffs on trading partners. This February, the Supreme Court ruled he had exceeded his authority, holding that IEEPA doesn't hand the president that kind of open-ended tariff power. Now the bill is coming due, and the refunds go to the importers who paid the duties in the first place. There's a direct line from this to a story we covered last week: after losing the IEEPA tariffs at the Supreme Court, the administration reached for Section 338, a dormant 1930s trade statute, to hit Canada—a workaround that itself invites fresh legal challenge. The significance is a vivid, hundred-billion-dollar lesson in the cost of executive overreach. When a president stretches a statute past its limits and the courts say no, the consequences aren't abstract—they're measured in massive refunds and a scramble for new legal authority. It's the separation of powers with a price tag attached. US refunds $100 billion in tariffs struck down by Supreme Court, filing shows | ReutersNBC News · US NewsNew data shows that entry-level hiring at the country's largest law firms has fallen—and the reasons say a lot about where the profession is heading. According to the National Association for Law Placement, firms with more than 500 lawyers pulled back on hiring associates straight out of law school, and for the first time in memory, those firms brought in more lateral associates—attorneys with prior experience—than fresh graduates. Laterals made up about 49% of associate hires, while entry-level grads fell to roughly 38%, a sharp drop from the 46% share they'd held. Three forces are driving this, and the middle one should get your attention. First, clients increasingly want sophisticated, autonomous counsel who can hit the ground running. Second—and this is the newsy part—artificial intelligence is absorbing exactly the kind of tasks that used to be assigned to first-year associates: document review, initial research, first drafts. Third, there's a deep pool of experienced lateral talent available to poach. The significance is both immediate and long-term. In the short run, it's a harder market for new graduates entering six-figure debt into a profession that's hiring fewer of them. But there's a real structural risk the report flags: the junior-associate years are how firms train the next generation of partners. If AI hollows out entry-level work and firms stop hiring and mentoring juniors, they may find themselves, a decade from now, with no mid-level talent to promote—having automated away the bottom of the pipeline that feeds the top. It's a preview of a question every knowledge profession is about to face. Entry-level hiring at large US law firms declined for first time in a decade, data shows | ReutersLaw.com (American Lawyer) · NALPNew Mexico has sued the U.S. Justice Department for access to the unredacted files on Jeffrey Epstein, accusing the federal government of stonewalling the state's own investigation. New Mexico's attorney general, Raúl Torrez, reopened the state's Epstein investigation earlier this year and requested the unredacted federal files to identify people—visitors and staff at Epstein's Zorro Ranch property in New Mexico—who allegedly participated in or witnessed crimes. The state says the DOJ reneged on a 2019 arrangement under which New Mexico paused its own probe and turned evidence over to federal authorities in exchange for continued information-sharing. The Justice Department counters that under the Epstein Files Transparency Act and protective court orders, it is neither required nor permitted to disclose victim-identifying information, and that New Mexico has offered “no lawful basis” for such sweeping disclosures. Torrez put the stakes plainly: the state says it needs to see those files before it can decide whether to charge anyone. The significance is a genuine legal collision between two legitimate interests. On one side is a state prosecutor who says he can't do justice—can't bring charges—without evidence the federal government is holding. On the other are real statutory and court-ordered protections for the privacy of victims, which exist for good reason in a case defined by the sexual abuse of young women and girls. It's also another chapter in the long-running, politically charged fight over transparency in the Epstein files, an issue that has repeatedly surfaced around this administration. A court will now have to weigh a state's investigative need against federal victim-protection rules. New Mexico sues US government for access to Epstein files | ReutersAl Jazeera· UPIAnd finally, OpenAI has asked a federal judge to throw out Apple's lawsuit accusing it of stealing trade secrets—a case we covered when Apple filed it back in July. To recap, Apple alleged that OpenAI misappropriated its confidential information to jump-start its own push into consumer hardware, using former Apple employees, aggressive recruiting, and supply-chain connections. In its motion to dismiss, OpenAI calls the allegations “baseless” and makes a pointed argument: “OpenAI has no use, need, or desire for Apple's trade secrets,” its lawyers wrote, insisting it's “building something entirely new and different from anything at Apple.” OpenAI's core defense is to reframe the story—not as theft of secrets, but as ordinary competition for talent. It says its real interest is in recruiting top engineers, many of whom simply chose to leave Apple for more exciting work. And that reframing goes right to the heart of trade-secret law. Hiring a competitor's employees is completely legal—people are free to change jobs and use the general skills and knowledge they've built. What's illegal is taking or using the former employer's specific, protected confidential information. So the whole case turns on which side of that line the conduct falls: lawful talent raid, or unlawful secret-grab. The judge is set to hear arguments on October 1, and OpenAI faces an August 17 deadline to respond to Apple's request for a preliminary injunction. The significance is that this is shaping up to be a marquee test of where the law draws the line between competing for people and stealing their knowledge—a question that will define a lot of fights in the AI talent wars.OpenAI asks US judge to dismiss Apple's trade secrets case | ReutersBloomberg · Axios 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 Federal Income TaxOn August 5, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Revenue Act of 1861, and with it created the first federal income tax in the history of the United States. The country was three months into the Civil War, the Union's costs were exploding, and the government needed money on a scale the old system of tariffs and land sales simply couldn't provide. So Congress reached for something new: a tax of three percent on annual incomes over $800.The 1861 income tax was, in practice, a bit of a false start. The $800 threshold meant only a small slice of the population owed anything, the administrative machinery to collect it barely existed, and in fact no income tax was ever actually collected under the 1861 Act—it was superseded the next year by the Revenue Act of 1862, which built the real apparatus, including the office of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the direct ancestor of the modern IRS. But the significance of August 5, 1861 is conceptual and enduring: it was the moment the federal government first asserted the power to tax the incomes of individual Americans directly.That assertion would be contested for decades—the Supreme Court struck down a later income tax in 1895, and it took the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 to settle the question for good. But the line runs straight from Lincoln's wartime measure to the entire modern federal tax system. It's a fitting anniversary for a day when one of our stories is about the fees and sanctions flowing from a lawsuit against the IRS—the very institution whose origins trace back to this Civil War revenue scramble. The income tax was born of necessity, in the middle of the gravest crisis the country ever faced, and it's been at the center of American political and legal argument ever since.After Trump's roughly $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS was thrown out as brought in “bad faith,” a federal judge ordered him to pay the legal fees of those who fought it—and now the Justice Department is fighting the size of that bill. In this particular case, the challengers are seeking a fairly modest sum, around $43,500. But it's part of a much bigger pattern: according to a Bloomberg analysis, attorneys have sought fees topping $100,000 in at least ten cases over the past year, totaling more than $2.5 million, and the DOJ is pushing courts to throw out or shrink many of those requests. Here's the legal mechanism at work. Ordinarily in American litigation, each side pays its own lawyers—that's the “American rule.” But courts can shift fees onto a party as a sanction when a lawsuit is frivolous or brought in bad faith, which is exactly what happened with the IRS suit, a case that also named Trump's sons and alleged harm from the leak of the family's tax records. Fee-shifting like this is meant to deter abusive litigation and to make whole the people forced to defend against it. The significance—and the irony—is that after a court found the underlying suit was an abuse of the judicial process, the government is now spending its lawyers' time contesting comparatively small fee awards owed to the people who were dragged into it. And because the DOJ is doing the contesting, it's taxpayers funding both sides of that fight. It's a small-dollar story that illustrates a large-dollar problem: what happens, and who pays, when the government itself is found to have litigated in bad faith. Trump fights fees for challengers in lawsuit against IRS | ReutersYahoo Finance (Bloomberg) · AOLA federal appeals court has overturned a ban on Perplexity's AI-powered shopping agents accessing Amazon—and it's a genuinely landmark ruling for the future of “agentic” artificial intelligence. Back in March, a court had temporarily barred Perplexity's shopping tool, built into its Comet browser, from operating on Amazon's platform. Amazon's legal theory rested on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act—the federal anti-hacking statute that makes it illegal to access a computer “without authorization.” Amazon argued that when Perplexity's AI agent logs into Amazon and shops on a user's behalf, that's unauthorized access. The appeals court disagreed, and the reasoning is what makes this important: the court found Amazon unlikely to succeed, concluding that it was Perplexity's users—real people, with real Amazon accounts—who were accessing the platform, not Perplexity itself. The AI agent was simply acting as the user's tool. This is the first time a federal appeals court has addressed whether AI agents acting on behalf of users can lawfully access online platforms, and that question is about to be everywhere. We're heading into a world where your AI assistant books your travel, does your shopping, and manages your accounts—and the legal system has to decide whether that's you using a tool, or a company trespassing on someone else's system. The significance is that this ruling plants an early flag on the side of the user: if you're authorized to be somewhere online, your AI agent acting for you is authorized too. Expect this to be cited constantly as the agentic-AI economy collides with decades-old computer-access law. Amazon loses US court ban on Perplexity's AI shopping tools | ReutersBloomberg Law · EngadgetA federal judge has dismissed the last of the January 6 Oath Keepers prosecutions—but he did so under vocal protest, in a rebuke that is itself the story. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta granted the Justice Department's motion to drop the cases against nine remaining Oath Keepers members tied to the Capitol attack, closing out the final chapter of the January 6 prosecutions. The dismissal flows from the administration's decision, on the first day of Trump's second term, to drop all pending January 6 cases. Here's the legal framework and the tension inside it. Under the rules of criminal procedure, prosecutors have broad power to dismiss charges, and courts generally must defer to that call—the executive branch, not the judge, decides whom to prosecute. Mehta acknowledged the government had the authority. But he made unmistakably clear he thought it was wrong, writing that “today's epilog diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy—the peaceful transfer of presidential power—to buckle.” That's extraordinary language from a sitting federal judge. The significance is a stark illustration of the limits of judicial power against prosecutorial discretion. A judge who presided over these seditious-conspiracy trials, who saw the evidence and entered the convictions, had to sign the order erasing them because the decision to prosecute—or not—belongs to the executive. He could register his profound disagreement for the historical record, but he could not stop it. It's a study in where one branch's power ends and another's begins. US judge grants Justice Department bid to dismiss Oath Keepers prosecutions | ReutersWashington Post · CNNAnd finally, a divided federal appeals court has ruled that the EPA cannot claw back roughly $20 billion in clean-energy grants—another decision drawing a hard line around executive power over money that Congress has already committed. The D.C. Circuit restored an injunction against EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin's move to terminate grants that had been awarded to nonprofit groups from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program Congress created in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to finance renewable-energy projects, including in communities historically shut out of green financing. Zeldin had frozen the money in early 2025, saying it didn't align with the agency's priorities and might be tainted by fraud, waste, and abuse. The court wasn't persuaded: six judges concluded that terminating the grants and clawing back the funds “based solely on a policy disagreement” likely violated the Inflation Reduction Act, and pointedly noted the EPA gave no assurance it would leave the money alone if the injunction were lifted. This should sound familiar—it's the same principle we saw when a judge blocked the administration from canceling grants it deemed inconsistent with its priorities. The significance is the recurring constitutional boundary of this era: when Congress appropriates money for a purpose and an agency awards it, a new administration generally can't just unwind those commitments because it dislikes the policy. The EPA says it's reviewing the decision and may take it to the Supreme Court—which would tee up a definitive answer on just how much power a president has to stop spending money Congress told him to spend. EPA cannot block billions in climate grants, US appeals court rules | ReutersUS News 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 Acquittal of John Peter ZengerOn August 4, 1735, a New York jury acquitted printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel—a verdict that planted one of the earliest seeds of freedom of the press in America. Zenger published the New York Weekly Journal, which had spent a year printing scathing criticism of the colonial governor, William Cosby. For that, Zenger was jailed for nearly ten months and put on trial for libeling the governor.Here's what made the case so important. Under the English common law of the time, truth was no defense to a charge of seditious libel—in fact, the more true the criticism, the more “dangerous” it was thought to be, because it was more likely to undermine the government's authority. The judge instructed the jury accordingly: they were only to decide whether Zenger had published the words, and the court would decide whether they were libelous. But Zenger's brilliant lawyer, Andrew Hamilton of Philadelphia, went over the judge's head and appealed directly to the jury, arguing that they had the power to weigh the truth of what Zenger printed—and that truthful criticism of government could not be a crime. The jury agreed, and acquitted.The Zenger verdict didn't immediately change the formal law—truth wouldn't be firmly established as a defense to libel for decades—but its influence was enormous. It established, in the American mind, two ideas that would prove foundational: that truth ought to be a defense to a charge of defaming the government, and that a jury of ordinary citizens could stand between the state and a critic it wanted to silence. Those principles run straight through the First Amendment and into modern press-freedom law, including New York Times v. Sullivan two centuries later. The significance of August 4, 1735 is that it's a origin point for the American conviction that the freedom to criticize those in power is not a privilege the government grants, but a liberty the people hold—an idea that, as today's stories show, is still very much contested.Todd Blanche's nomination to be attorney general has cleared its biggest obstacle: the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to advance him after he cut a deal with the Republican holdouts who had threatened to sink it. We've tracked this saga closely—the stalled vote, Senator Cornyn's refusal, and then Blanche's move over the weekend to formally rescind the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund.” The final piece came in a deal struck late Sunday with Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who had demanded written assurances about the settlement of Trump's lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns. With those assurances in hand, the committee's Republicans are now expected to line up behind him. It's worth noting the Democrats' objection, because it's a substantive legal point: they argue Blanche's rescission order doesn't actually prevent the administration from reviving the fund after he's confirmed, and they're calling for legislation to bar it permanently. In other words, an executive-branch promise can be undone by the same executive branch, which is exactly why they want a statute. The significance is that advice-and-consent worked as a real check—Blanche had to publicly dismantle a controversial initiative to win the votes—but it also exposed the limits of that check. A confirmation deal extracts a promise; it doesn't write a law. The nation's next top law-enforcement officer advances, having conceded the point, but with the durability of that concession still an open question.Blanche set to clear nomination hurdle after deal wins senators' vote | ReutersUS News (AP) · CNNA coalition of two dozen Democratic-led states has sued to block a new federal policy that would let immigration authorities get their hands on personal data about low-income families enrolled in a cash-assistance program. The policy would allow the Administration for Children and Families—which runs welfare programs—to share detailed personal information about benefit recipients with other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, and it's set to take effect August 11. The states' legal theory is twofold. First, they argue the policy violates the Administrative Procedure Act—the law that requires federal agencies to follow proper procedures and not act arbitrarily—by ignoring existing data-sharing restrictions and slapping new conditions on federal funding. Second, they invoke the Constitution. And a separate suit filed in Brooklyn by civil-rights and privacy groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, adds a Privacy Act claim—the federal statute that limits how the government can use and share the personal data it collects. Here's why this matters beyond the courtroom. Programs like this cash-assistance program serve some of the most vulnerable families in the country, and the fear that applying for help could funnel your information to immigration enforcement produces a powerful chilling effect—people forgo food and cash aid they're legally entitled to. It's the same dynamic behind the “public charge” fights, and fittingly, today marks the anniversary of the 1882 immigration law that first tied benefits to immigration status. The significance is a collision between the machinery of the welfare state and the machinery of immigration enforcement, with data privacy law as the battleground—and courts once again asked whether the administration followed the rules before repurposing sensitive government data.States sue over Trump policy of sharing benefits data with immigration authorities | ReutersDetroit News (AP) · UPIAnd a striking piece of accountability journalism: a Reuters investigation has found that judges in 75 separate cases have ruled that the Trump administration violated First Amendment rights—this despite the president campaigning as a free-speech champion who vowed to end what he called years of “government censorship.” The 75 rulings span the full range of First Amendment protections: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press. According to the reporting, judges have repeatedly found that the administration chilled or suppressed the speech of citizens and groups who oppose its agenda—an unusually broad pattern of judicial pushback on constitutional grounds. A few caveats worth stating plainly, in fairness: many of these are trial-level rulings, some are preliminary, and the administration disputes them and is appealing in various cases, so not every one is a final word. But the sheer volume is the story. When dozens of federal judges, appointed by presidents of both parties, independently conclude that the same administration is infringing the First Amendment, that's a signal that's hard to wave away. The significance ties directly to today's Zenger anniversary. The whole American tradition of free expression rests on the idea that the government cannot punish or silence its critics—and this reporting suggests that principle is being tested, and defended by the courts, on an extraordinary scale. It's a reminder that the First Amendment is not self-enforcing; it lives or dies in the accumulation of individual rulings by judges willing to say no.Trump vowed to ‘bring free speech back.' Judges in 75 cases ruled that he has stifled it | ReutersCNN · Yahoo NewsAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on New York City's brand-new pied-à-terre tax—the city's first surcharge on high-value second homes—and my basic take is that it's good policy being undermined by a messy rollout. The trigger for the piece is a striking number: the city's initial roll flagged about 31,000 potentially liable properties, versus the roughly 10,000 officials had projected. That gap set off a backlash, and I wanted to separate the policy from the implementation.On the policy, I come down in favor. High-value second homes are actually a really sensible tax base, because they represent concentrated, largely immobile wealth. That's the key word—immobile. A wealthy person's labor income or investments can pick up and leave, but a condo can't reincorporate in Delaware or establish residency in West Palm Beach. It just sits there, and its value depends overwhelmingly on the city around it—the transit, the sanitation, the parks, the public safety, the cultural institutions. So a well-calibrated surcharge is really just asking people who hold significant, location-keyed wealth to return a share of the value the city itself creates and preserves. Across the OECD, the top wealth quintile holds roughly three-quarters of secondary-real-estate wealth, so this is a genuinely progressive base, and economists generally find recurring taxes on immovable property are among the least damaging to growth.Where I get critical is the data and the process. That 31,000-property list isn't a final bill—it's a preliminary screening pool, and many of those owners will be winnowed out. But the size of it exposes how hard it is for City Hall to tell a true second home from a rental, a family residence, or a property held in trust, using fragmented government records. Property records can identify an expensive apartment; they're much worse at revealing who's actually sleeping in it, and when. My core recommendation is transparency: every formal notice should include a plain-language reason code explaining exactly why a property was flagged and what records produced that conclusion, and the city should publish aggregate data on how many determinations are screened out, appealed, reversed, and upheld. The burden of the government's record gaps shouldn't fall on homeowners forced to rebut an unexplained conclusion. So my bottom line is that a second-home surcharge can be progressive, economically sound, and administratively workable—but only if the government is willing to show, clearly, whom it means to tax and how it got there. Make the first two years a genuinely transparent implementation period, and the policy earns its legitimacy before the real revenue arrives.New York City's Second-Home Tax Is Good Policy With a Data Issue | Bloomberg Tax 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 Immigration Act of 1882On August 3, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Immigration Act of 1882, the first comprehensive federal law regulating immigration into the United States. Before this, immigration had largely been left to the individual states; this Act marked the moment the federal government claimed the subject as its own, and it built the first federal machinery for controlling who could enter the country.The Act did two enduring things. First, it imposed a “head tax”—fifty cents on every immigrant arriving by ship—to fund the administration of immigration, and it placed enforcement under the Secretary of the Treasury, creating the country's first federal immigration bureaucracy. Second, and more consequentially for the law that followed, it created categories of people who would be excluded: convicts, the “insane,” and—in language that would echo for the next century and a half—”any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” That public-charge concept, born here in 1882, is the same doctrine we discussed just a couple of weeks ago when the current administration revived an expansive version of the public-charge rule.The significance of August 3, 1882 is that it is the taproot of the entire federal immigration system. Coming just months after the Chinese Exclusion Act, it established the foundational premise that the national government decides the terms of admission to the United States, and it introduced the framework—head taxes, excludable categories, federal enforcement—on which everything since has been built. It's worth sitting with the tension in the date: 1882 is also, almost exactly, the moment Emma Lazarus was composing “The New Colossus,” with its welcome to the tired and the poor. The law and the poem were born together, and the distance between them—between the statute's exclusions and the sonnet's embrace—is a distance the country has been arguing about ever since.Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has formally rescinded the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” clearing what had been the biggest obstacle to his confirmation. If you were with us last week, this is the resolution of that story. The fund—created by a Justice Department order back in May—would have used taxpayer money to compensate people who claimed to be victims of the prior administration's Justice Department, a group that notably included those convicted in connection with the January 6 Capitol attack. Republican Senator John Cornyn had refused to support Blanche's nomination until the fund was killed, and this week Blanche did exactly that, signing an order declaring the May directive “rescinded” with “no force or effect,” and, as part of the deal, agreeing to limit the related immunity arrangement so it applies only to the IRS and not to other agencies. The significance ties together several threads we've followed all summer. This fund grew out of the same collusive IRS settlement that a federal judge voided as a sham, and it sat at the center of concerns about the Justice Department being used to reward the president's allies. That a senator from the president's own party forced its formal repeal as the price of confirmation is advice-and-consent working as a genuine check—and it means the incoming attorney general takes office having had to publicly dismantle one of the administration's most criticized initiatives before the Senate would trust him with the job.Acting US Attorney General Blanche rescinds ‘anti-weaponization' fund before confirmation vote | ReutersNPR · NBC NewsIn a court filing, Capital One has disclosed for the first time that it closed more than 300 Trump Organization bank accounts back in 2021 after an anti-money-laundering review—the first time a bank has formally tied such concerns to its decision to cut off the president's family business. The context is a lawsuit: the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and Eric Trump sued Capital One in Florida last year, alleging the bank “debanked” them for political reasons, having notified the Trump Organization of the closures in March 2021, just weeks after January 6. Capital One's filing reframes that story entirely. The bank says its compliance team did precisely what federal regulators expect—flagging accounts that raised anti-money-laundering red flags and acting on them. Here's the legal machinery underneath. Under the Bank Secrecy Act and related anti-money-laundering rules, banks are legally obligated to monitor their customers, file suspicious-activity reports, and, when warranted, close accounts; failing to do so can expose a bank to serious regulatory penalties. Importantly, Capital One did not accuse the Trump Organization of actual money laundering—flagging a risk and proving a crime are very different things. The significance is that this is a clean collision between two hot legal debates: the “debanking” complaint that financial institutions are dropping customers for political or ideological reasons, and the reality that banks operate under mandatory AML obligations that require them to shed risky accounts. A court will now have to decide which of those framings fits what Capital One actually did.Capital One says it closed Trump Organization's accounts after anti-money-laundering review | ReutersCNBC · NPRTom Goldstein, the prominent Supreme Court advocate and SCOTUSblog founder we've been following, has launched his appeal—asking the Fourth Circuit to overturn his twelve convictions for tax and mortgage fraud and to undo his six-year prison sentence. Recall the case: a jury found that Goldstein concealed millions from a secret high-stakes poker life, diverted his law firm's fees to cover gambling debts, and lied to mortgage lenders; he was sentenced to 72 months and ordered to pay more than $3 million in restitution. The appeal is a reminder that even a resource-intensive, headline conviction gets a second look, and Goldstein is raising some genuinely lawyerly arguments. The most interesting is venue—the constitutional requirement that a defendant be tried in the right place. His team argues that while prosecutors proved he filled out loan applications in Maryland, they never proved from where he actually transmitted the documents, leaning on a recent Fourth Circuit decision that took venue seriously. He's also challenging the admission of statements he made in media interviews and the wording of the jury instructions. Commentators describe his path as daunting, and it is—appellate courts rarely overturn convictions, and factual findings get real deference. But the significance is that these are exactly the kinds of technical, procedural issues on which serious appeals are built. Goldstein spent his career winning cases at the top of the appellate system; now he's testing whether that same system will scrutinize the government's work in convicting him.US Supreme Court lawyer Tom Goldstein appeals tax conviction | ReutersLaw360 · Bloomberg LawAnd finally, the Justice Department has moved to drop its criminal case against David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist charged with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool—and the reason is striking. We covered Hearn's not-guilty plea back in July, when his lawyers called the prosecution an abuse of power built on a “concocted narrative.” It turns out that characterization may have been closer to the truth than the charge. In a 20-page filing, prosecutors acknowledged that evidence received after Hearn was indicted shows the damage to the pool “was the result of flawed installation by the contractor,” compounded by “the rush to complete the project” before the America 250 celebrations around July 4. In other words: not vandalism—shoddy construction. The U.S. Attorney's office said it only learned of the flawed-installation evidence after a grand jury had already indicted him. The significance goes right to prosecutorial power and its risks. A 67-year-old man was detained for hours and charged with a felony over damage that, by the government's own admission, he didn't cause. The case collapsing is the system correcting itself—but only after Hearn spent weeks as a felony defendant. It's a real-world illustration of a point we keep returning to: the decision to charge is one of the most consequential and least reviewable powers in the legal system, and when it's exercised on a flawed factual premise, the damage to the person charged is done long before the dismissal.US Justice Department drops case against former US Olympian over Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool | ReutersPBS NewsHour · CNN 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: America's First PatentOn July 31, 1790, the United States issued its first patent under the newly enacted Patent Act of 1790. The patent was granted to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for an improved method of producing potash and pearl ash, chemicals widely used in fertilizer, soapmaking, and glass production. President George Washington, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph personally signed the patent—a reminder that, in the nation's earliest years, the federal government itself directly evaluated patent applications.The Patent Act of 1790 was one of Congress's first major efforts to implement the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 authorizes Congress to “promote the progress of science and useful arts” by granting inventors exclusive rights to their discoveries for limited periods. Rather than viewing patents as natural rights, the Framers saw them as legal incentives designed to encourage innovation while ultimately benefiting the public.The original patent system was remarkably small. A board consisting of Jefferson, Randolph, and Secretary of War Henry Knox decided whether an invention was “sufficiently useful and important” to merit protection. As the country industrialized, that system quickly became overwhelmed, leading Congress to create a more formal Patent Office in 1836 with professional examiners and standardized procedures.The first patent issued on this day marked the beginning of what has become one of the world's most influential intellectual property systems. Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants hundreds of thousands of patents each year, and patent law continues to shape industries ranging from pharmaceuticals and biotechnology to software and artificial intelligence.President Donald Trump is pressing Senate Republicans to confirm acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose nomination has stalled because of a dispute over a proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis have withheld their support while demanding written assurances that the Justice Department will not establish the program. The fund emerged from a proposed settlement of Trump's $10 billion lawsuit accusing the Internal Revenue Service of improperly handling his tax records. Critics contend that the program could use taxpayer money to compensate Trump supporters who claim they were unfairly targeted by federal authorities, including people investigated or prosecuted in connection with the January 6 Capitol attack. Trump defended the proposal by arguing that victims of government misconduct deserve compensation and maintained that he would not personally benefit from it. Cornyn and Tillis have also objected to a separate provision that could shield Trump and certain associates from future IRS audits. Blanche reportedly met with the senators as the Justice Department attempted to resolve the disagreement. Even without confirmation, Blanche may be able to remain acting attorney general while his nomination is pending, provided that Trump does not formally withdraw it and the Senate does not reject it.Trump defends ‘anti-weaponization' fund as Blanche nomination stalls | ReutersNew York Attorney General Letitia James has sued prediction-market operator Kalshi, alleging that the company is offering illegal gambling without a state license. Kalshi allows customers to trade contracts tied to the outcomes of sporting events, elections, television programs, and other future events. New York argues that these transactions function as wagers because customers risk money on outcomes they cannot control. State officials also object to Kalshi allowing customers between the ages of 18 and 20 to participate, while New York generally requires mobile sports bettors to be at least 21. The lawsuit seeks to stop the allegedly unlawful activity, recover Kalshi's gains, impose civil penalties worth three times those gains, and obtain restitution for customers. James previously brought similar cases against prediction-market platforms operated by Coinbase and Gemini. Kalshi argues that its contracts are federally regulated derivatives under the exclusive authority of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than gambling products governed by individual states. The CFTC has supported that position and filed an emergency request seeking to prevent New York from enforcing its gambling laws against the company. Courts in several other states have already restricted Kalshi's operations, while a federal judge in New York recently declined to protect the company from state enforcement. The litigation could determine whether prediction markets must comply with state gambling laws, federal commodities regulation, or both.New York Says Kalshi's Prediction Markets Are Illegal GamblingFormer federal health official Anthony Fauci could face a contempt-of-Congress referral after refusing to answer more than 100 questions during a Senate investigation into the government's response to COVID-19. Senator Rand Paul, the Republican chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the panel would consider referring Fauci for prosecution. Federal law makes it a crime for a person summoned by Congress to deliberately refuse to provide relevant testimony or requested documents. Congress cannot prosecute the offense itself, however, so a committee must approve a referral, followed by the full Senate or House, before the Justice Department decides whether to pursue charges. Reuters reported that a Senate referral would likely require 60 votes, meaning some Democratic support would be necessary. Prosecutors would then need to persuade a grand jury that Fauci intentionally refused to answer questions that fell within the committee's legitimate investigation. Fauci would likely argue that the Fifth Amendment allowed him to remain silent because his testimony could expose him to criminal liability. President Joe Biden previously pardoned Fauci for possible federal offenses committed between 2014 and January 2025, but that pardon does not cover conduct occurring after Biden left office. The pardon creates an unsettled legal issue because courts have not clearly decided whether a witness may invoke the Fifth Amendment regarding conduct already covered by a presidential pardon. Even if Congress approves a referral, the Justice Department and a Washington grand jury would still have separate opportunities to decline the case.Could Fauci face criminal charges for refusing Senate COVID questions? | Reuters 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: America's First Representative AssemblyOn July 30, 1619, in a wooden church at Jamestown, twenty-two elected representatives took their seats alongside the governor and his council, and the first representative legislative assembly in what would become the United States came to order. This was the Virginia General Assembly—soon known through its elected chamber as the House of Burgesses—and it marks the beginning of self-government by elected representatives in America.The mechanics were modest and the setting brutal: two burgesses were elected from each of the colony's eleven settlements, and they met in sweltering heat so severe that one burgess died during the six-day session. But the principle was revolutionary. Under instructions from the Virginia Company, Governor George Yeardley had called forth a body in which colonists—not just a distant crown or company—would have a hand in making the laws that governed them. It became the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World, and it planted an idea that would grow over the next century and a half into a full-blown theory of government by consent.The significance of July 30, 1619 is that so much of American constitutional order traces back to this cramped, miserable first session. The House of Burgesses trained generations of colonial leaders in the practice of legislative self-government; it was the venue where figures like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson cut their political teeth; and its example fed directly into the revolutionary conviction that legitimate power flows from the consent of the governed and is exercised through elected representatives. It's a fitting anniversary for a day when one of our stories turns on that very principle—the Senate's constitutional duty to advise and consent on who leads the Justice Department.President Trump and the Justice Department have asked the Supreme Court to throw out the $83 million defamation verdict that writer E. Jean Carroll won against him, arguing that he can't be sued for statements he made while he was president. Some quick context: a Manhattan jury awarded Carroll roughly $83 million in early 2024 over defamatory comments Trump made in 2019 denying her sexual-assault allegation. This is now Trump's second trip to the Supreme Court in the Carroll saga—recall that back in June the justices declined to hear his appeal of a separate $5 million verdict, which we covered here. The new appeal leans heavily on the Court's 2024 presidential-immunity decision, which gave presidents broad immunity for official acts. Trump's lawyers argue that because he made the disputed statements in 2019 while in office, that immunity should shield him, and they accuse the appeals court of “procedural contortions” to avoid the question. The significance is about how far the 2024 immunity ruling stretches. That decision arose in the context of criminal prosecution for official acts; here it's being deployed to wipe out a civil defamation judgment for things a sitting president said to reporters. Whether “official act” immunity reaches a president's public denials about a private, decades-old personal matter is a genuinely consequential question—and the fact that the Justice Department has joined Trump's personal civil appeal is itself a notable signal about how the government is deploying its weight. Trump asks Supreme Court to throw out E. Jean Carroll's $83 million verdict | ReutersWashington Post · CNNTodd Blanche's bid to become attorney general has hit a serious snag: the Senate Judiciary Committee scrapped a planned vote after Republican Senator John Cornyn said he is “not prepared to vote yes.” We've tracked Blanche's nomination through his confirmation hearing, and the math has always been tight—with the recent death of Senator Lindsey Graham, committee Republicans have just one vote to spare, so Cornyn alone could sink it. What's notable is the substance of his objection, because it ties together several threads we've followed all month. Cornyn's concerns center on the administration's roughly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” and the settlement of Trump's lawsuit against the IRS—the very deal a federal judge voided weeks ago as a collusive arrangement, and which would have handed Trump and his associates protections from tax audits unavailable to ordinary taxpayers. In other words, the sticking point isn't Blanche's résumé; it's the integrity of the tax system and whether the Justice Department has been used to engineer special treatment. The committee said the vote is postponed while it works “to secure sufficient support.” The significance is a real-time illustration of advice and consent functioning as a check—not a rubber stamp. A president's nominee for the nation's top law-enforcement job is stalled because a member of his own party wants answers about a tax settlement that courts have already called unlawful. It's the Senate's constitutional role doing exactly what it's designed to do: forcing accountability before handing over power.Trump's attorney general nominee hits snag as senator withholds support | ReutersNPR · Washington PostAnd finally, a story close to home for anyone in this profession: the debut of the new national bar exam has gone badly wrong. This week marked the first-ever administration of the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination—a major overhaul of how aspiring lawyers are licensed—across ten jurisdictions. And in Washington State, it collapsed. Officials canceled the entire first day of testing after network bandwidth and Wi-Fi problems left hundreds of examinees unable to even access the exam; somewhere between 645 and 700 standard-time test-takers were affected. Missouri saw delayed start times, and a Maryland site had a shorter delay. The National Conference of Bar Examiners, which runs the exam, insists the NextGen platform itself performed as intended and pinned the failures on local network and site infrastructure rather than the software. That's cold comfort to the test-takers. Think about what's actually at stake for them: months of full-time study, bar-prep costs, and in many cases a job offer contingent on passing—all thrown into limbo. Washington is offering a make-up exam on September 1, or the option to transfer to the February 2027 sitting or get a refund, and there are already calls for a class action and even for “diploma privilege”—admitting these graduates without an exam. The significance is both practical and symbolic. Practically, hundreds of careers are on hold through no fault of the examinees. Symbolically, the gateway to the legal profession—the gatekeeping ritual that's supposed to certify competence—failed a basic test of its own on its most important day, and it's going to intensify the already-heated debate over whether the bar exam, in any form, is the right way to license lawyers.Tech problems, cancellation mar new US bar exam for some test-takers | ReutersBloomberg Law · Above the Law 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 Hague ConventionOn July 29, 1899, delegates from twenty-six nations signed the first Hague Convention, the product of an international peace conference convened at the initiative of Russia's Tsar Nicholas II. It was one of the founding moments of modern international law—an attempt, at the close of a violent century, to subject the conduct of war and the resolution of disputes between nations to legal rules rather than raw power.The 1899 Convention did two enduring things. First, it began the codification of the laws and customs of war—rules on the treatment of prisoners, the protection of civilians, and limits on certain weapons—laying groundwork that would grow into the modern law of armed conflict and, eventually, the Geneva Conventions. Second, and just as important, it created the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the first standing international institution designed to let states resolve their disputes through neutral arbitration instead of on the battlefield. The idea was radical for its time: that sovereign nations would voluntarily submit their quarrels to a legal process.The Hague system was, of course, imperfect—the twentieth century that followed was the bloodiest in human history, and the conventions did not prevent two world wars. But the significance of July 29, 1899 is that it planted the institutional and conceptual seeds of everything that came after: the League of Nations, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the international criminal tribunals, and the entire architecture of treaties and adjudication that structures relations between states today. It reflects an enduring aspiration—one that runs through so much of what we cover—that disputes are better settled by law than by force. It's a fitting backdrop for a day whose stories, in their own ways, are all about turning conflict over to the legal system rather than settling it by other means.A federal appeals court has revived a proposed class action accusing Chobani of deceiving consumers by marketing some of its Greek yogurt as “zero sugar.” The Seventh Circuit in Chicago ruled that consumers can proceed with claims under state consumer-protection laws, because Chobani Zero Sugar yogurt contains about four grams per serving of allulose, a naturally occurring sweetener. Here's the wrinkle that makes this interesting. Allulose is chemically a sugar, but the body barely metabolizes it, so the FDA lets manufacturers leave it out of the “sugars” lines on the Nutrition Facts panel. Chobani leaned on exactly that, saying its panel accurately shows zero grams of total and added sugar. But the court focused on the big front-of-package promise—”Zero Sugar”—and found persuasive an FDA brief explaining that “total sugars” actually includes all monosaccharides, allulose among them. Under FDA rules, a product generally can't be labeled “zero sugar” or “sugar free” unless it has less than half a gram of sugar per serving. Writing for the court, Judge Thomas Kirsch said it was not implausible that consumers—here, a couple who bought the yogurt at a Costco near Chicago—were “fooled” by that absolute promise. The significance is a reminder that the technically-accurate fine print on the back doesn't necessarily save a bold marketing claim on the front. This is how consumer-protection law polices the gap between what a label shouts and what a product actually contains, and the ruling lets the plaintiffs try to prove that gap misled shoppers.Chobani must face lawsuit over zero-sugar yogurt claim, US appeals court rules | ReutersYahoo Finance · Insurance JournaleBay and three of its former executives have agreed to pay roughly $56 million to settle a civil suit brought by a Massachusetts couple who were the targets of one of the more disturbing corporate harassment campaigns in recent memory. The couple, Ina and David Steiner, publish an e-commerce trade newsletter, and back in 2019 several eBay employees—furious over the Steiners' coverage of the company—orchestrated a campaign to terrorize them: shipping cockroaches, live spiders and fly larvae, and a bloody pig Halloween mask to their home, sending threatening messages, and conducting covert surveillance. It grew out of internal communications in which senior executives discussed taking the couple “down.” The criminal side of this played out years ago, with multiple former employees prosecuted and sentenced. This week's news is the civil resolution: eBay will pay about $46 million to the couple plus millions more in charitable contributions, and the former executives are personally on the hook—two million dollars from former CEO Devin Wenig, and smaller sums from two others. The significance here is corporate accountability, and specifically accountability for retaliation against the press. A powerful company weaponized its resources to punish two journalists for critical coverage—the kind of retaliation that strikes at the heart of a free press—and while the criminal cases addressed the individual foot soldiers, this settlement attaches a very large price tag to the company and the executives at the top. It's a stark example of the civil justice system doing what the criminal system often can't: reaching the institution and its leadership, and making them pay.eBay, former executives to pay $56 million to settle couple's harassment case | ReutersCNN · CNBCAnd finally, prosecutors have offered their most detailed account yet of why they believe activist Charlie Kirk was killed, arguing in a new court filing that the man accused of shooting him targeted Kirk for his political and religious views. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist and ally of President Trump, was shot and killed in September 2025 at a university in Utah; Tyler Robinson, who is 23, is charged in his death. In the filing, prosecutors pointed to Kirk's opposition to gay marriage and transgender rights, and cited a letter from a board member of Kirk's organization describing him as the face of a political and religious movement. They allege Robinson's own lifestyle ran contrary to Kirk's views and that he targeted Kirk because of his “political expression.” Robinson's defense attorney pushed back, arguing that the materials the state is relying on show nothing about whether Robinson actually disagreed with Kirk or what was in his mind. And that disagreement is the legal heart of this. Motive is not, strictly speaking, an element the prosecution must prove to establish murder—but it is powerful evidence, it helps a jury make sense of a killing, and in a serious case it can bear heavily on how the crime is characterized and punished. What we're watching is the perennial challenge of proving why someone did something: the state assembling external evidence to reconstruct a defendant's internal state of mind, and the defense insisting that inference isn't proof. The significance is that a case already saturated with political meaning will now turn, in part, on a genuinely hard legal question—how, and whether, prosecutors can establish motive—and the coming proceedings will test whether their theory holds up under the rules of evidence.Prosecutors say Charlie Kirk was attacked for his politics, cite anti-LGBT views | Reuters 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: Sonia Sotomayor Advances to the Supreme CourtOn July 28, 2009, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, sending her to the full Senate, which confirmed her the following week. With that confirmation she became the first Hispanic justice—and only the third woman—ever to serve on the Court.Her path to the bench was the stuff of American mythology, and it was central to her nomination. Born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, raised in a housing project, diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at seven and losing her father at nine, she went on to Princeton and Yale Law School, then worked as a Manhattan prosecutor before becoming a federal trial judge and later a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. As a district judge, she famously issued the injunction that ended the 1994–95 Major League Baseball strike. Her confirmation fight, though, turned heavily on a single phrase from an earlier speech—her remark that a “wise Latina” might, with the richness of her experiences, sometimes reach a better conclusion than someone without them. Critics called it bias; supporters called it an honest acknowledgment that lived experience shapes judgment.In the years since, Sotomayor has become one of the Court's most forceful liberal voices, known for pointed dissents on race, criminal justice, and—fittingly for today—the very “shadow docket” at the center of our lead story. She has been among the sharpest critics of the Court deciding major questions through emergency orders with little briefing and no argument. The significance of July 28, 2009 is both symbolic and substantive: symbolic, in that a woman from a Bronx housing project reached the pinnacle of the American legal system and expanded who Americans see reflected on their highest court; and substantive, in that she has spent her tenure insisting the Court explain itself and show its work—an insistence that lands with particular weight in a week when the justices are again being asked to make consequential law on the emergency docket.The Trump administration has escalated its fight over mail-in voting all the way to the Supreme Court, asking the justices on an emergency basis to let its executive order take effect nationwide. This is the direct sequel to yesterday's story: after the First Circuit refused on Saturday to lift the injunction blocking key parts of the March order, the Justice Department went straight to the high Court, asking it to put that injunction on hold while the litigation continues. The order directs federal agencies to build voter-eligibility lists and to restrict Postal Service delivery of ballots not tied to those lists; a coalition of 23 states and D.C. argues the President simply lacks authority to impose federal rules on elections that the Constitution assigns to states and to Congress. What's notable here is the vehicle. This is an emergency application—part of what critics call the “shadow docket,” where the Court decides consequential questions quickly, often with little briefing and no full argument. Regular listeners will remember the shadow docket as a recurring concern precisely because it lets the Court make major law in the shadows. The justices have told the states to respond by August 3, so a decision could come fast. The significance is that one of the most consequential election-administration questions in years—decided against the administration twice below—is now in the hands of a Supreme Court being asked to act on an emergency timeline, months before the midterms.Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow mail-in ballot restrictions | ReutersWashington Post · CNBCJohnson & Johnson has announced a $5.5 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming its talc products caused ovarian cancer—a deal that could finally close out more than a decade of litigation. The settlement would cover roughly 69,000 cases consolidated in New Jersey federal court plus related state cases, amounting to about 99.75% of the remaining talc claims. If you were with us last week, the timing is impossible to miss: just days ago, the federal magistrate judge overseeing those 69,000 cases cast serious doubt on whether the plaintiffs could even prove specific causation, ordering them to explain why their claims shouldn't be dismissed. Days later, J&J puts $5.5 billion on the table. That sequence is a lesson in how litigation leverage works—a favorable evidentiary signal can push a defendant toward a global resolution on its own terms, or embolden it, depending on the read. The mechanics matter: the deal needs acceptance by 95% of the ovarian-cancer claimants and approval from the judge overseeing the federal litigation. And notably, J&J isn't conceding anything—its litigation chief called the claims “meritless,” and the company still denies its talc caused cancer, though it pulled talc-based baby powder from U.S. and Canadian shelves back in 2020. The significance is that after years of trials, appeals, and two failed attempts to offload the liability through bankruptcy, J&J is choosing certainty and closure over continued combat—paying billions to make a decade of litigation risk go away, without ever admitting its product was dangerous.Johnson & Johnson announces $5.5 billion settlement of talc lawsuits | ReutersCBS News · Bloomberg LawA major trial has opened in Nashville, where the state of Tennessee is telling a jury that Meta knew its Instagram platform was harming teenagers and buried the evidence to protect its profits. In opening statements for what's expected to be a seven-week trial in state court, Tennessee's lawyers said Meta's own researchers repeatedly flagged that some teens were using the platform compulsively—linked to eating disorders, depression, and self-harm—yet the company declined to disable engagement features like autoplay, notifications, and infinite scroll, which the state says were designed to keep teens hooked and maximize the ads they saw. Meta's lawyer countered that the company has been transparent about the risks teens face and about the dangerous content it works to find and remove. The legal theory here should sound familiar—it echoes the playbook used against Big Tobacco: the argument that a company's own internal research proves it knew about the harm and chose profit anyway. That's powerful evidence if the jury believes it, which is likely why, according to reporting, there's already been a fight over whether Meta's lawyers tried to keep some of that internal research out. This connects to threads we've followed all month, from the multistate suit seeking enormous penalties to the individual bellwether cases. The significance is that these harm-to-teens claims are now being tested in front of an actual jury, and the outcome will shape how Meta and its peers value the risk—and how aggressively other states and plaintiffs press similar cases.Meta disregarded its own research on teen harm, Tennessee tells jury | ReutersAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I use a striking data point—the Miami metro area's cost of living has reportedly now surpassed greater New York City's—to make a case about how we misunderstand what it means to call a state “low tax.” My core argument is that focusing on a single, highly visible tax like the income tax gives you a badly incomplete picture of whether a place is actually affordable, and for whom.Here's the logic. Florida markets itself relentlessly on having no personal income tax, and rankings like the Tax Foundation's competitiveness index put Florida near the top and New York dead last largely on that basis. But I argue that conflates three very different claims: that Florida collects less through income taxes, that households there bear lower total costs, and that residents end up better off. Only the first is clearly true. The costs a state doesn't cover through an income tax don't vanish—they get shifted, recovered through other levies, or pushed into the private market. It's the same principle as a restaurant that offers “free” parking: the cost of that parking is just baked into the price of the food. When Florida forgoes an income tax, residents still pay—through sales and property taxes, fees, sky-high insurance premiums, and services they have to buy privately that other states provide publicly. And because the income tax is the most progressive major revenue source a state has, replacing it with all of that tends to shift the burden down the income ladder.The comparison I keep coming back to is the everyday cost that a public system absorbs in New York but a family pays out of pocket in Florida. New York guarantees every four-year-old a free, full-day pre-K seat; Florida's program funds about 540 instructional hours—roughly three hours a day—leaving working parents to cover the rest. New York's subsidized transit lets many households skip a car entirely. None of these private substitutes—an insurer, a toll road, a childcare provider—charges you less because you earn less, the way an income tax does. So here's the distributional punchline of my piece: Florida's model is a genuinely great deal if you make ten million dollars a year, because avoiding the income tax dwarfs everything else. But for the merely affluent professional making a few hundred thousand—and certainly for middle- and lower-income households—those insurance bills, tuition payments, and housing costs can quietly eat the whole “tax savings.” My bottom line is that any honest discussion of tax competitiveness has to start with comprehensive household-burden metrics across income levels, not a single headline rate—because “low tax” and “affordable” are not the same thing, and treating them as if they were lets officials sell breaks for the wealthy as broad affordability wins.Miami's Cost of Living Shows Income Tax's Limits as a Metric | Bloomberg Tax 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 Executive DepartmentOn July 27, 1789, President George Washington signed the act establishing the Department of Foreign Affairs—the first executive department created under the brand-new Constitution, and the direct ancestor of today's State Department, which was renamed a few weeks later. It's easy to overlook, but this was a foundational moment: the First Congress was building the executive branch essentially from scratch, deciding what federal administration would actually look like in practice.The most consequential part of the debate wasn't the department's diplomatic functions—it was a question that still echoes through constitutional law today: who controls the officials who run these departments? The Constitution says the President appoints principal officers with the Senate's consent, but it is conspicuously silent on who can remove them. As Congress drafted the statute, it confronted this head-on in what historians call the “Decision of 1789.” After intense debate, Congress structured the law to reflect the view that the President alone—without needing the Senate's permission—holds the power to remove the department head. That choice embedded a powerful assumption about presidential control of the executive branch into the very first agency Congress built.The significance of July 27, 1789 reaches all the way to the present. The Decision of 1789 has been cited by the Supreme Court for a century as evidence that the Constitution vests the President with broad removal power—in cases like Myers v. United States, and more recently in the modern fights over the independence of agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the removal of officials at supposedly independent commissions. Every time we argue about whether a president can fire the head of an agency at will, we are arguing about a question the First Congress thought it had answered when it created this very first department. It's a reminder that the architecture of executive power was contested from the founding's opening days—and that those early choices still bind us.A federal appeals court has refused to let the administration implement President Trump's executive order overhauling mail-in voting, keeping the order frozen ahead of November's midterm elections. In a 2-1 decision, the Boston-based First Circuit declined to lift an injunction that Democratic-led states won on June 25, when a lower-court judge found key parts of the order unconstitutional. Here's what the March order actually did. It directed federal officials to build a national “state citizenship list” of eligible voters, and told the Justice Department to investigate officials who mail ballots to people the administration deems ineligible. The constitutional problem is structural: under the Constitution, the authority to set the “times, places and manner” of elections rests with the states and with Congress—not with the President acting alone by executive order. The states argued, and the courts have so far agreed, that the President can't unilaterally rewrite the machinery of federal elections. This fits a pattern we've tracked all month—the SAVE citizenship database fight, the Justice Department's warnings to election officials, the gutting of the Election Assistance Commission. The significance is that the judiciary is repeatedly drawing the same line: however much a president wants to reshape how Americans vote, elections in this country are decentralized by constitutional design, and that design is holding, at least for now, right when it matters most.US appeals court rules Trump cannot implement mail-in voting order | ReutersTom Goldstein—one of the most celebrated Supreme Court advocates of his generation, who argued 44 cases before the Court and co-founded SCOTUSblog—has been sentenced to six years in prison for tax evasion and mortgage fraud. We previewed the sentencing on Friday; now the number is in: 72 months, and the judge revoked his bond and took him into custody on the spot. Recall the conduct the jury found: Goldstein concealed millions in winnings and losses from his secret life as an ultra-high-stakes poker player, diverted his law firm's legal fees into personal accounts to cover gambling debts, and steered money to his creditors so it never surfaced as reportable income. The Justice Department had asked for eight years; the judge landed at six. The significance is the same point I made in my Forbes piece last week, now delivered with a prison term attached: the tax laws reach even the most sophisticated players, but only when the government invests the resources to untangle complex, deliberately obscured finances. Goldstein's case is the rare, resource-intensive prosecution that actually happens—and its severity sends a message to the sliver of high-end taxpayers who assume complexity is a shield. That a lawyer who reached the absolute summit of the profession is now headed to federal prison over how he handled his taxes is a stark bookend to a remarkable career.Star US Supreme Court lawyer Goldstein sentenced for tax crimes | ReutersAnd finally, the same Boston appeals court has rejected the administration's bid to revive its $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers. The First Circuit declined to pause a lower-court ruling from June 8 that struck down the fee, and the reasoning goes to the heart of who gets to impose costs like this. The trial court held that the fee was, in substance, an unlawful tax that Congress never authorized—and taxing is a power the Constitution gives to Congress, not the executive. To put the number in perspective: employers seeking an H-1B visa typically paid somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000 in fees before this; the administration wanted to charge a hundred thousand dollars, as part of a broader effort to discourage companies from hiring foreign workers over Americans. The three-judge panel found the administration hadn't shown it was likely to prove it stayed within its authority. The significance connects directly to the theme running through today's episode: the limits of executive power. Just as the President can't unilaterally rewrite election rules, he can't unilaterally impose what amounts to a six-figure tax on visa applications without Congress. When the executive reaches for a power the Constitution assigns elsewhere—here, the power to tax—the courts have been willing to say no. It's a reminder that even sweeping policy goals have to run through the constitutional plumbing of who is actually allowed to do what.Appeals court rejects Trump bid to halt $100,000 H-1B visa fee ruling | Reuters 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 Scottsboro CaseOn July 24, 1937, the state of Alabama dropped all charges against four of the nine young Black men known to history as the Scottsboro Boys—a small, belated measure of relief in one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American legal history, and a case that helped reshape constitutional criminal procedure. The nine, ranging in age from approximately 13 to 20, had been arrested after riding a freight train through Alabama in 1931 and falsely accused of raping two white women. Within two weeks, in a series of rushed trials before all-white juries, eight of them had been convicted and sentenced to death; the trial of the youngest, Roy Wright, ended in a mistrial when the jury could not agree on whether to impose death or life imprisonment.The extraordinary speed and unfairness of those proceedings produced two landmark Supreme Court decisions that still shape the rights of criminal defendants. In Powell v. Alabama in 1932, the Court held that the defendants had been denied due process because they had not received the timely and meaningful assistance of counsel needed to prepare their defense. The Court's holding was formally limited to capital cases involving indigent defendants incapable of adequately defending themselves, but it became a foundational step toward the broader right to appointed counsel later recognized in Gideon v. Wainwright. Then, in Norris v. Alabama in 1935, the Court overturned Clarence Norris's conviction because Alabama had systematically excluded qualified Black citizens from its jury rolls. Building on earlier equal-protection precedents, the Court made clear that a state could not accomplish through discriminatory administration what the Constitution prohibited it from doing expressly.The Scottsboro cases dragged on for years through retrials, reconvictions despite one accuser's recantation, appeals, and slow, partial releases. On July 24, 1937, Alabama dropped all charges against Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright. Prosecutors expressly concluded that Roberson and Montgomery were not guilty; Williams and Wright were released principally because of their youth and the six years they had already spent imprisoned. The state continued prosecuting or imprisoning the remaining defendants.The significance of the Scottsboro saga is twofold: it exposed nationally how the Jim Crow justice system operated against Black defendants, and it forced the Supreme Court to give practical constitutional force to protections—meaningful representation by counsel and freedom from racially discriminatory jury selection—that we now consider basic. It is a reminder that some of the most important rights in American law were secured through the suffering of people who were themselves never fully given justice.Thomas Goldstein, one of the most prominent Supreme Court advocates of his generation and a co-founder of the widely read SCOTUSblog, is being sentenced today after a jury convicted him of tax evasion and mortgage fraud. Goldstein argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court and built a celebrated appellate practice—but prosecutors showed the jury a hidden second life as an ultra-high-stakes poker player, in games running into the tens of millions of dollars. The jury found him guilty on 12 of 16 counts, including tax evasion, assisting in the preparation of false returns, willfully failing to pay taxes on time, and lying to mortgage lenders. The conduct is a case study in exactly the kind of sophisticated evasion I wrote about in Forbes this week: prosecutors said Goldstein concealed millions in poker winnings and losses, diverted his law firm's legal fees into personal accounts to cover gambling debts, and directed people to pay his creditors so the money never showed up as his income. That's not a wage earner whose taxes are withheld automatically—it's precisely the complex, hard-to-trace arrangement that takes real investigative resources to unwind. The Justice Department has asked for eight years in prison. The significance is a pointed reminder that the tax laws reach even the elite of the legal profession—and that when the government does devote the resources to untangle a sophisticated scheme, the accountability can be severe. A man who spent his career at the pinnacle of the legal system now faces the system's full weight.Star US Supreme Court lawyer Goldstein to be sentenced for tax crimes | ReutersThe Justice Department has dropped its subpoenas of New York Times journalists over their reporting on the Qatari-donated Air Force One—a striking retreat that came after a federal judge tore into nearly every aspect of the government's approach. We've been following this one: the subpoenas were issued July 10, days after the Times published its stories, seeking grand jury testimony and phone records to unmask the reporters' sources. At Thursday's hearing, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian pressed the government hard. He criticized prosecutors for hastily issuing subpoenas that the DOJ's own lawyers admitted were riddled with “inadvertent errors,” and he chided them for asking another judge to gag phone companies from telling the journalists their records had been subpoenaed—days after the department had already publicly confirmed the subpoenas existed. Faced with that skepticism, the government agreed to withdraw them. A Times lawyer called it “a great day for the First Amendment and a great day for the rule of law.” The significance is worth stating precisely. This wasn't a sweeping constitutional ruling establishing a reporter's privilege—the DOJ retreated before the judge had to decide the hard First Amendment question. But it's a concrete example of judicial scrutiny working as a check: when a court forced the government to justify subpoenas aimed at the press, the case collapsed under its own sloppiness and overreach. After a month of friction between the administration and the media, the press got a clear win.US judge to weigh New York Times subpoenas over Trump plane reporting | ReutersAnd finally, the pause on Paramount Skydance's roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery has been extended—a federal judge has now frozen the deal through August 17. When we covered this earlier in the week, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín had issued a short 14-day restraining order at the request of a dozen state attorneys general; now that freeze runs deeper into August, buying the court time to weigh the states' request to block the merger outright. The states' antitrust theory has sharpened. They argue the combination would lessen competition in three specific markets: wide-release theatrical film distribution, top-grossing theatrical distribution, and basic cable licensing—harming movie theaters, cable distributors, and ultimately audiences. Remember the framework: antitrust law lets courts halt mergers that would concentrate too much market power, and a pause like this preserves the status quo so the deal can't close before a judge decides whether it's lawful. The significance is that time is itself a weapon in merger fights. Every week a deal sits frozen adds cost, uncertainty, and risk for the companies, and it gives regulators and challengers leverage. Here it's state attorneys general—not federal antitrust enforcers—driving the challenge, and they've now kept one of the largest media mergers in history on ice for the better part of a month, with the decisive rulings still to come.Paramount-Warner Bros. deal paused through August 17, judge rules | Reuters 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 Shrinks the Supreme CourtOn July 23, 1866, Congress passed the Judicial Circuits Act, and in doing so did something that sounds almost unimaginable today: it shrank the Supreme Court. The Act provided that the Court would gradually contract from ten justices down to seven, as sitting justices died or retired and their seats simply went unfilled. Yesterday we talked about Franklin Roosevelt's failed attempt to enlarge the Court to overpower it; today's anniversary is the mirror image—Congress reducing the Court's size for pointedly political reasons.The politics were about President Andrew Johnson. Johnson, who had ascended to the presidency after Lincoln's assassination, was locked in a bitter struggle with the Radical Republicans in Congress over Reconstruction. Congress did not trust him, and one thing it was determined to deny him was the power to shape the Supreme Court. By legislating that upcoming vacancies would go unfilled until the Court shrank to seven, Congress effectively stripped Johnson of any Supreme Court appointments. It was court-unpacking as a weapon of inter-branch warfare—using Congress's control over the Court's size not to change its rulings directly, but to lock a distrusted president out of influencing it.The size of the Supreme Court has never been fixed by the Constitution—it's set by statute, and it has ranged from six at the founding up to ten and back down over the country's first century. After Johnson left office, Congress promptly passed the Judiciary Act of 1869 and settled the number at nine, where it has remained ever since. The significance of July 23, 1866 is that it's the clearest historical example of Congress manipulating the Court's very size for immediate political advantage—and, paired with the 1937 court-packing fight, it bookends the story of how the number nine came to feel sacrosanct even though it never actually was. The Court's independence, it turns out, has always rested partly on a political truce about not touching its structure.A Manhattan federal judge is set to weigh today whether to throw out the Justice Department's subpoenas to New York Times journalists who reported on security concerns about President Trump flying on a Qatari-donated Air Force One. This is the next chapter of a story we covered when the subpoenas first landed: they were issued July 10 by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney, and U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian has paused their enforcement pending this afternoon's hearing. The two sides want very different things. Prosecutors have asked the judge merely to put the subpoenas on hold for a couple of weeks, saying the investigation's next steps could shape his decision; the Times wants them quashed outright, arguing they're designed to harass and intimidate journalists in violation of the First Amendment. The legal backdrop is genuinely unsettled. There is no absolute reporter's privilege under federal law—prosecutors correctly note the First Amendment doesn't categorically excuse reporters from testifying in criminal investigations—but courts have long been wary of subpoenas that function as fishing expeditions to unmask sources. The significance is that this hearing is a concrete test of where that line falls, and it lands amid a broader pattern we've tracked all month of friction between the administration and the press. However Judge Subramanian rules, it will be an early data point on how much protection newsgathering gets when the government wants to know who talked.US judge to weigh New York Times subpoenas over Trump plane reporting | ReutersThe teenager at the center of a closely watched lawsuit blaming social media for his depression and anxiety has dropped his claims against Meta just days before trial. The plaintiff, a 15-year-old known in court papers as R.K.C., had originally sued four companies—Google's YouTube, Meta's Instagram, Snap's Snapchat, and ByteDance's TikTok—alleging their platforms were engineered to be addictive and harmed his mental health. YouTube, TikTok, and Snap all reached confidential settlements earlier, which would have left Meta as the lone defendant when the case went before a Los Angeles jury on July 27. Instead, R.K.C. withdrew, ending the case. Here's why this matters beyond one teenager. His was a “bellwether” case—one of a small set of representative lawsuits chosen from a huge pool of similar claims and tried first, so both sides can see how juries react and use those signals to gauge settlement values across the whole litigation. When a marquee bellwether evaporates right before trial, it sends a message, though an ambiguous one: it could reflect a quiet settlement, a weakness in this particular plaintiff's proof, or simply strategic repositioning. The significance is that the sprawling social-media-harm litigation against these platforms rolls on, but this particular test balloon won't be inflated—depriving both the companies and the thousands of other plaintiffs of a data point they were watching closely.Teen plaintiff suing Meta over mental health harms drops his claims against company days before trial | ReutersA federal judge has cast serious doubt on roughly 69,000 lawsuits claiming that Johnson & Johnson's talc products caused ovarian cancer, warning the plaintiffs they must come forward with better evidence or risk having their cases dismissed. U.S. Magistrate Judge Rukhsanah Singh in Trenton, New Jersey, zeroed in on a problem at the heart of the litigation: causation. In a mass tort like this, plaintiffs generally have to show not just that a product can cause harm in the abstract—”general causation”—but that it caused this particular plaintiff's disease—”specific causation.” Judge Singh noted that two of the plaintiffs' own expert witnesses, testifying in preparation for a set of bellwether trials, conceded they could not rule out other possible causes of the women's cancers. That's a serious admission, because it goes to whether the experts can offer an opinion that's admissible at all under the rules that make judges the “gatekeepers” of scientific testimony. If you've been listening, this should ring a bell—it's the same expert-gatekeeping battleground we saw in the Tylenol-autism case, just cutting the other direction. Here the judge ordered plaintiffs to explain, by November 19, why their cases shouldn't be tossed for lack of an admissible expert opinion tying J&J's talc to their specific cancers. The significance is that after years of litigation, settlements, and failed bankruptcy maneuvers, the whole edifice of these 69,000 claims may hinge on a question of scientific proof—and the judge just signaled the plaintiffs have a real problem.US judge casts doubt on 69,000 cases alleging J&J talc caused cancer | ReutersAnd finally, in a piece I wrote for Forbes this week, I make an argument that runs underneath a lot of the tax stories we've covered lately: the tax code is only as real as its enforcement. My core claim is that defunding the IRS doesn't actually shrink the tax code—it quietly splits it into two.Here's the framing I start with. Washington has a strange way of talking about tax enforcement. Money to help the IRS collect taxes that are already legally owed gets described as spending, waste, or bureaucratic excess—but when Congress cuts that funding and less revenue comes in, the shortfall gets treated like weather, as if it just happened. I think that's exactly backwards. Congress can write whatever rates, deductions, partnership rules, and anti-abuse provisions it likes, but without skilled auditors and functioning technology, a big chunk of those rules becomes purely aspirational.And crucially, that aspiration isn't evenly distributed. For most wage earners, there's almost no room to maneuver: your income is reported by your employer, your taxes are withheld before you ever see the paycheck, and a computer can flag a mismatch without a human ever looking at your return. But wealthier filers and large businesses often operate through partnerships, closely held entities, cross-border transactions, and complex securities arrangements that take specialized expertise and real time to unwind. So my point is that defunding the IRS doesn't create a smaller tax code—it creates two codes: a statutory, basically inescapable one for people whose income is visible, and a negotiated one for people whose finances are complicated enough to delay, obscure, or contest what they owe. Strip out the enforcement capacity, and the nominal rule stays on the books while its practical effect on the highest earners quietly weakens. That's regressive—a backdoor tax cut for the taxpayers best positioned to resist enforcement.There's a new bill, the Stop CHEATERS Act, that would restore enforcement funding, and I think its sponsors are right about the underlying problem. But I argue they should retire the “fair share” language they've wrapped around it. “Fair share” is subjective—reasonable people can argue forever about whether capital gains should get preferential treatment or whether the top rate is too high or too low, and those are legitimate legislative questions. But that's not the issue here. Congress already wrote the laws; taxpayers are already obligated to follow them. The case for funding the IRS isn't about inventing a new standard of fairness after the fact—it's about consistently administering the standards we already have. By leaning on “fair share,” Democrats risk making basic enforcement sound like a partisan redistribution project when the stronger, harder-to-dismiss argument is simply this: if Congress imposes a tax, the government should be funded well enough to collect it. Anything less isn't restraint or a considered policy choice—it's a quiet exemption for those who can afford to fight.The Tax Code Is Only As Real As Its Enforcement | Forbes 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 Senate Rejects Court-PackingOn July 22, 1937, the United States Senate rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan to reorganize—critics said “pack”—the Supreme Court, voting 70 to 20 to send the bill to a quiet death. It was a stinging defeat for a president at the height of his popularity, delivered by his own party, and it settled a constitutional question that still shapes how we think about the independence of the judiciary.The background was a collision between the New Deal and the Court. Through the mid-1930s, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court had struck down key pieces of Roosevelt's economic program as unconstitutional. Frustrated after his landslide 1936 reelection, FDR proposed legislation that would have let him appoint a new justice for every sitting justice over the age of seventy—which, not coincidentally, would have allowed him to add up to six new justices and swamp the opposition. He framed it as a matter of efficiency and helping overworked elderly judges, but nobody was fooled; it was a naked attempt to change the Court's decisions by changing its membership.The plan backfired, and the reasons are the lesson. Even senators who supported the New Deal recoiled at the precedent—if this president could enlarge the Court to get the rulings he wanted, so could the next one, and the Court's independence would become a fiction. Meanwhile, the Court itself defused the crisis: in the spring of 1937, Justice Owen Roberts began voting to uphold New Deal legislation, the famous “switch in time that saved nine,” which took some of the urgency out of FDR's demand. The significance of July 22, 1937 is that it established a durable, if unwritten, constitutional norm—that the size of the Supreme Court is essentially off-limits as a tool for a president to overpower rulings he dislikes. The number nine isn't in the Constitution, but the bipartisan rebuke of court-packing helped make it feel almost as if it were.An analysis of the closely watched lawsuit by Meta employees over AI-driven layoffs highlights a hard truth: even when workers suspect an algorithm decided their fate, proving it is enormously difficult. To recap, 26 current and former Meta employees sued, alleging the company's internal AI tools flagged them for termination because they have disabilities or took protected medical, parental, or family leave. Their theory is mechanically specific: because tools like the “Metamate” system scored employees partly on data such as keystroke activity, workers who were lawfully out on leave generated fewer data points and were disproportionately ranked as low-value. Meta cut roughly 8,000 people—about ten percent of its workforce—and says humans, not machines, made the decisions. Here's why these cases are so hard to win. Anti-discrimination law generally requires the worker to show the employer's decision was tainted by a protected characteristic, but the employee usually has almost no visibility into how the AI actually worked—the models, the training data, and the weighting are the company's closely held secrets. On top of that, many employees have signed arbitration agreements, funneling their claims out of open court and into a private process that's harder to see into and to appeal. The significance is that this appears to be the first case of its kind against a major U.S. company, and it exposes a growing gap: as employers hand more consequential decisions to opaque algorithms, the legal tools workers have to challenge those decisions—built for an era of human managers—may not be up to the job of proving what the machine did.Analysis: Meta employees' lawsuit shows that if AI fires you, proving it is the hard part | ReutersA split panel of the D.C. Circuit has struck down a long-standing National Labor Relations Board doctrine that protected unions after a business changes hands, ruling that it conflicts with federal labor law. The doctrine at issue is the “successor bar,” and it works like this: when a company is acquired and a new employer takes over, that employer generally cannot challenge or withdraw recognition from the existing union for a reasonable period—about six months—giving the union and workers a window of stability to bargain with their new boss. The court held that this Board-created rule isn't consistent with the National Labor Relations Act. What makes this ruling bigger than one labor doctrine is the tool the court used to get there. The decision applies the Supreme Court's 2024 Loper Bright ruling, which overturned the decades-old Chevron doctrine and ended the requirement that courts defer to a federal agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. Without that deference, the D.C. Circuit felt free to substitute its own reading of the labor law for the NLRB's. This is exactly the dynamic I wrote about in my Bloomberg column last week in the tax context—the death of Chevron doesn't erase statutory ambiguity, it just moves the power to resolve it from agencies to courts. The significance is that we're now watching that shift play out across the administrative state: settled agency doctrines, some decades old, are suddenly vulnerable to being reinterpreted by judges, and here the immediate losers are unions and the workers who counted on a bargaining foothold after a merger.US court says longstanding NLRB rule on post-merger union bargaining is invalid | ReutersA federal judge has temporarily blocked the administration from stripping work authorization from tens of thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants with Temporary Protected Status. U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton in Boston sided with a coalition of immigrant-rights groups and labor unions, halting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from moving ahead with a set of policies while he weighs a longer-term pause; he said he'll rule by August 5. Here's the stakes and the legal frame. A work permit—formally, an employment authorization document—is what lets many immigrants lawfully hold a job while their asylum case or protected status is pending. Yanking it doesn't just threaten deportation down the line; it immediately jeopardizes people's livelihoods and their employers' workforces. The contested policies were designed to implement immigration restrictions Congress enacted last year as part of the administration's signature tax-and-spending law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The plaintiffs argue USCIS is implementing those provisions in ways that exceed what the law allows and skip required procedures. A temporary block like this one preserves the status quo—keeping people employed—while the court decides whether the government followed the rules. The significance connects to a theme we keep returning to: courts serving as a check on how fast and how far the executive can move in reshaping immigration, insisting that even policies rooted in a real act of Congress still have to be implemented lawfully and with proper process.US judge blocks Trump administration from stripping immigrants of work permits | ReutersAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a self-inflicted mess in California: lawmakers scrambling to rework a business tax-credit cap that they apparently didn't realize would kneecap Hollywood film studios. My core argument is that California is directionally right to resist subsidy bidding wars, but wrong to rewrite the economics of credits it has already issued after companies have started relying on them.Here's what happened. Since 2024, California has capped the total tax reduction a business can take from all its credits at $5 million a year. That cap was set to expire after 2026—right as productions were going to start claiming credits under a newly expanded film incentive the state had just touted as a centerpiece of keeping film jobs in California. Instead, a bill called SB 122 extended the $5 million limit through 2029 and then converts it to the greater of $5 million or 70% of taxes owed. The part that really gets me is the admission underneath it: lawmakers passed a $351.7 billion budget without apparently understanding how this cap would interact with the film credit they'd just enlarged. As one assemblymember candidly put it, “I'm not sure who knew what about what.” It looks like the cap was really aimed at large research-and-development credit stockpiles, and film credits just got caught in the crossfire.My argument is that the distinction between prospective and retroactive matters enormously here. It's one thing for California to decide, going forward, that future subsidies will be smaller or conditioned—that's legitimate fiscal discipline, and I don't think Hollywood should get to dictate tax policy just by threatening to decamp to Georgia. But it's another thing entirely to change the timing and practical value of credits after studios have already committed workers, facilities, and financing in reliance on the old rules. When a state does that, it makes itself a less credible counterparty, and it quietly reduces the value of every future incentive it offers, because businesses will start discounting California's promises for legislative risk. So my prescription is targeted: protect the film credits already awarded under the prior rules, keep a real limit on the big accumulated R&D credits that were the actual target, and replace the blunt across-the-board cap with rules tailored to how these very different credits actually work. California doesn't have to choose between fiscal discipline and keeping its word—its tax policy can be skeptical, but its promises should still mean something.California's Business Tax Credit Cap Needs More Targeted Changes | Bloomberg Tax 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 Dodd-Frank ActOn July 21, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the most sweeping overhaul of American financial regulation since the New Deal. It was a direct response to the 2008 financial crisis—the collapse that wiped out trillions in household wealth, toppled storied institutions like Lehman Brothers, and required massive taxpayer bailouts to keep the banking system from failing entirely.Dodd-Frank tried to attack the crisis's root causes on several fronts at once. It created the Financial Stability Oversight Council to watch for systemic risks—the danger that one firm's failure could cascade through the whole economy—and gave regulators new “resolution authority” to wind down failing giants in an orderly way, an attempt to end the problem of banks being “too big to fail.” It imposed the Volcker Rule, restricting banks from making certain speculative bets with depositors' money. It brought the shadowy derivatives market under federal oversight. And, in its most visible legacy, it created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—a new agency dedicated to policing mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products, born largely from an idea championed by then-professor Elizabeth Warren.Dodd-Frank has been contested ever since—fought over in rulemaking, trimmed by later legislation, and litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, including a major case over the constitutionality of the CFPB's structure. But its core significance endures: it represents the country's considered legal judgment that concentrated financial power, left unchecked, poses a systemic danger, and that the answer is robust administrative regulation. It's a fitting anniversary to sit alongside today's news, because so much of what we cover comes back to the same enduring question—how the law should restrain private economic power without strangling the enterprise that power creates.A federal judge has temporarily paused Paramount Skydance's roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, siding for now with a coalition of twelve state attorneys general who sued to stop it. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a fourteen-day temporary restraining order, finding the deal “likely” violates antitrust law. Here's the framework. Antitrust law exists to preserve competition, and one of its central tools is blocking mergers that would concentrate too much market power in a single company. The states, led by California, sued on July 13 arguing that combining these two entertainment giants would create a media behemoth with the power to raise prices across film and television and to squeeze rivals. A temporary restraining order is exactly what it sounds like—a short-term freeze to preserve the status quo while the court takes a harder look; the “likely violates” language signals the states cleared the initial bar of showing they're reasonably likely to succeed. It is not a final ruling that the merger is illegal. The significance is twofold. First, it's a reminder that even after companies strike a deal, they still have to clear the antitrust gauntlet, and state attorneys general—not just federal enforcers—can be the ones holding the gate. Second, the sheer scale here, a hundred-and-ten-billion-dollar combination of major studios and networks, makes this a marquee test of how aggressively courts will scrutinize consolidation in an industry that shapes what Americans watch.Judge orders Paramount to temporarily pause Warner Bros. acquisition | ReutersA federal judge has granted final approval of Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with a class of authors who accused the AI company of misusing their books to train its chatbot Claude—the largest known copyright settlement in U.S. history. The deal works out to roughly $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 books, split among the authors and publishers who hold the rights. The legal backstory is important, because it's more precise than “AI company pays authors.” The now-retired Judge William Alsup, who first handled the case, drew a careful line: he suggested that training AI on lawfully acquired books could qualify as fair use, but found that Anthropic had violated authors' rights by downloading and storing more than seven million pirated books in a “central library”—copies it obtained illegitimately, regardless of whether they were ultimately used for training. In other words, the core wrong the settlement addresses is the piracy—the acquisition and hoarding of stolen copyrighted works—not simply the act of training itself. The settlement drew objections from some authors who argue it's too small, overpays the plaintiffs' attorneys, or wrongly leaves out certain rights holders, and the judge had to weigh those before signing off. The significance is that this sets a real-world price on one flavor of AI's copyright problem. It doesn't resolve the biggest open question—whether training on copyrighted material is itself lawful—but it establishes that how you got the training data matters enormously, and that building your library out of pirated books can cost you well over a billion dollars.US judge approves Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement of copyright lawsuit | ReutersAnd finally, the Justice Department has announced a civil-rights probe into Harvard University, this time over its financial aid programs. The Department's Civil Rights Division says it has opened a “compliance review” to determine whether Harvard's China-based financial aid arrangements discriminate on the basis of national origin by steering aid to foreign—presumably Chinese—students in a way that excludes American citizens. The theory rests on an unusual inversion of civil-rights law. Statutes like Title VI of the Civil Rights Act bar recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on national origin, and they've historically been used to protect racial and ethnic minorities. Here the DOJ is deploying that framework to allege discrimination against American-citizen students. The trigger, according to the Department, was an audit of Harvard's foreign-funding disclosures showing the university has received more than $630 million from sources based in China, some of it allegedly earmarked, through donor restrictions, for aid to particular students. Harvard says it's reviewing the letter and will engage with the government. The significance is that this is the latest salvo in a sustained campaign against Harvard and other elite universities, which have faced probes and funding threats over everything from admissions to campus protests. Whatever the merits of this specific allegation, the pattern is what's notable: the machinery of federal civil-rights enforcement being aimed, repeatedly and pointedly, at a handful of institutions the administration has publicly targeted.US DOJ says it is probing Harvard over financial aid programs | Reuters 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 Declaration of SentimentsOn July 20, 1848, at the close of the two-day Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York, roughly a hundred people signed the Declaration of Sentiments—the founding document of the organized women's rights movement in the United States. Drafted principally by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, it was a deliberate and pointed act of legal argument: Stanton modeled it on the Declaration of Independence, echoing Jefferson's cadences but adding two words that changed everything—”that all men and women are created equal.”The genius of the document was to take the nation's own founding logic and turn it on the exclusion of half the population. It then catalogued, in the form of a bill of particulars against “man” rather than King George, the specific legal disabilities women lived under. Married women had no right to their own property or wages—under the common-law doctrine of coverture, a wife's legal identity was absorbed into her husband's. Women could not vote, were barred from most professions and higher education, had almost no rights to their own children in the event of separation, and were governed by laws they had no voice in making. The Declaration listed these as concrete legal grievances, not vague complaints, framing the denial of women's rights as a violation of the country's stated principles.The most controversial demand was the resolution calling for women's suffrage, which passed only narrowly and with the public support of Frederick Douglass, who attended the convention. The significance of July 20, 1848 is that it launched a legal and political campaign that would take seventy-two years to win the vote, with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and far longer to dismantle coverture and the web of laws built on women's legal subordination. It's a reminder that constitutional principles are not self-executing—that “all men are created equal” had to be argued, expanded, and fought for by the people the original text left out.A federal appeals court has struck down New Jersey's ban on assault firearms and high-capacity magazines, the first time any federal appeals court has invalidated a state assault-weapons ban. Sitting en banc, the Philadelphia-based Third Circuit ruled 10-5 that the state's prohibition on semi-automatic rifles—not just AR-15s, but the whole category—violates the Second Amendment, as does its ban on magazines holding more than ten rounds. The reasoning flows from the Supreme Court's recent framework, which asks whether a gun regulation is consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearms regulation; the majority concluded these bans are not. What makes this a genuinely big deal is the split it creates. Just last week, a different federal appeals court upheld Illinois's ban on semi-automatic weapons—so we now have appeals courts squarely disagreeing on whether these bans are constitutional. That kind of circuit split is precisely the condition that draws the Supreme Court in, and the Court is already poised to take up whether bans on semi-automatic rifles violate the Second Amendment. The significance is that a question affecting roughly a dozen states with similar laws is now barreling toward a definitive answer. For the moment, New Jersey's ban is unenforceable as to these weapons, but the durability of that outcome—and of assault-weapons bans nationwide—now depends on what the Supreme Court does next.US appeals court declares New Jersey's ban on assault rifles unconstitutional | ReutersA federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration cannot rely on a White House budget-office regulation to cancel billions of dollars in grants simply because those grants no longer match its priorities. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston sided with a coalition of Democratic-led states, rejecting the administration's claim that a clause in Office of Management and Budget regulations gave it authority to revoke funding whenever an agency's focus shifts. Here's the underlying principle. When Congress appropriates money for a program and an agency awards grants under it, the government generally can't just take that money back on a whim—grant recipients have relied on it, and the terms for termination are limited. The administration's theory was that an OMB regulation let it terminate grants it deemed “inconsistent with agency priorities,” effectively a roving power to defund causes it disfavors. Judge Talwani found the regulation didn't authorize anything of the kind. The significance connects to a theme we keep returning to: the limits of executive power over money that Congress has already directed. The administration has repeatedly tried to redirect or withhold funds to reshape policy without going through Congress, and courts have repeatedly pushed back. This ruling reinforces that a president's control over federal spending, though real, is bounded—an agency can't retroactively pull grants just because political priorities changed.Trump administration cannot cancel grants for disfavored causes, US judge rules | ReutersA federal judge has declined to block Meta from laying off 26 employees who claim the company's AI tools singled them out for termination because they have disabilities or took medical leave. U.S. District Judge William Orrick in Oakland ruled that the workers hadn't shown the “irreparable harm” needed for an emergency order halting the layoffs, which are set to begin July 22, and that the merits of their novel claims will be decided in private arbitration. The allegations are striking. The plaintiffs—engineers, managers, researchers, and designers suing anonymously—say Meta used a suite of internal AI systems to score and rank employees onto a termination list, including an assistant called “Metamate,” an employee-trained “second brain” that tracked workers' communications, and a productivity score drawn from scanning keystrokes, screen content, emails, and browser history. Meta denies wrongdoing and insists humans, not algorithms, made the layoff decisions. This is a frontier legal question: when an employer uses AI to help decide who gets cut, and those tools allegedly disadvantage people with disabilities or on leave, is that illegal discrimination? The judge's refusal to block the layoffs was procedural—losing a job usually isn't “irreparable” because money damages can fix it—but he pointedly noted the case raises “serious questions” and said he might reconsider based on more evidence about how AI was actually used. The significance is that algorithmic management is colliding with anti-discrimination law, and courts are just beginning to work out who's accountable when the machine does the ranking.US judge won't block Meta from laying off workers who filed AI discrimination lawsuit | ReutersAnd finally, the IRS's top lawyer has been forced out after refusing White House demands that would have drawn him into tax audits of particular taxpayers. Ken Kies, who served as the agency's acting chief counsel and as Treasury's assistant secretary for tax policy, told administration officials their requests would violate a federal law that bars the president, the vice president, and other White House officials from ordering the IRS to conduct or terminate an audit of any specific taxpayer. That statute is a direct legacy of Watergate-era abuses, when presidents tried to sic the tax agency on their enemies, and tax professionals regard it as the single most important safeguard against weaponizing the tax code. Kies apparently stood on that law—and lost his job for it. The story connects directly to one we covered recently: the administration's $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” settlement that would have given the president and his family immunity from IRS audits, which a federal judge struck down as a collusive arrangement with no basis in law. The significance is about the fragile independence of tax administration. The protections that keep audits free from political direction only work if the officials inside the agency are willing to enforce them—and when the person who says “no” to an unlawful demand is pushed out, it sends a chilling message to everyone who remains. Top US tax lawyer forced out after White House clash over tax audits | Reuters 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 National Minimum Drinking Age ActOn July 17, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, the law that effectively set the drinking age at 21 across the entire country. What makes the Act a fixture of law-school classrooms isn't the policy itself—it's the clever, and constitutionally fraught, mechanism Congress used to achieve it.Here's the problem Congress faced. Setting a drinking age is a classic exercise of state police power; the federal government has no general authority to tell states how old someone must be to buy a beer. So Congress didn't order the states to do anything. Instead, it reached for its spending power. The Act directed that any state which failed to raise its drinking age to 21 would lose a percentage of its federal highway funds. States remained technically “free” to keep a lower drinking age—they'd just forfeit a slice of the highway money they depended on. Within a few years, every state had fallen into line.South Dakota challenged the law, and in the 1987 case South Dakota v. Dole, the Supreme Court upheld it. The Court laid out the framework that still governs conditional federal spending: conditions must be unambiguous, related to a federal interest, not otherwise unconstitutional, and—critically—must not be so coercive that they amount to “compulsion” rather than mere “encouragement.” The Court decided that losing about five percent of highway funds was just mild pressure, not coercion. That last piece became enormously important decades later. In the 2012 healthcare decision, NFIB v. Sebelius, the Court for the first time found that a spending condition had crossed the line into unconstitutional coercion, when Congress threatened states with the loss of all their Medicaid funding. The significance of July 17, 1984 is that a law about drinking age quietly established the constitutional playbook for how the federal government leverages its money to steer state policy—and where the limits of that leverage finally lie.A federal appeals court has reinstated the Pentagon's policy requiring journalists to be accompanied by a government escort inside the building, handing the Trump administration a win in its press-access fight with The New York Times. A lower-court judge had blocked the escort requirement in June, but a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit put it back in place. The legal reasoning is worth parsing. The Times argued the escort rule was retaliation against the press in violation of the First Amendment. The panel disagreed—at least for now—finding the Pentagon likely to succeed on its argument that a “generally applicable escort requirement” isn't a “sufficiently adverse action” to support a First Amendment retaliation claim. In other words, because the rule applies to all reporters rather than singling out particular outlets or viewpoints, the court was skeptical it amounts to unconstitutional retaliation. This is an interim ruling on a preliminary question, not a final decision; the Times says it looks forward to litigating the merits on an expedited basis. The significance is part of a broader pattern we've tracked this week—friction between the administration and the press over access and newsgathering. Here the court signaled that neutral, across-the-board restrictions on where reporters can roam are harder to attack than targeted ones, even as the deeper question of press access to the government remains very much alive.US appeals court keeps in place Pentagon's escort policy for journalists | ReutersA federal judge has warned the Justice Department after government lawyers cited a court decision that does not exist—an apparent AI “hallucination”—in an immigration detention case. In the Michigan matter, DOJ lawyers argued that the Sixth Circuit had barred courts from second-guessing an immigration judge's bond decision, and cited a case, Taylor v. Hott, that simply isn't real. Notably, the judge who caught it was appointed by President Trump, and he observed that fabricated AI citations have fueled “a rash of cases” clogging the courts with fake authorities. If this sounds familiar, it should—we covered a nearly identical episode on Monday, when the Eleventh Circuit sanctioned a private lawyer for the same mistake. The rule is the same regardless of who commits it: when you sign a brief, you certify that its legal contentions are grounded in real, existing law, and generative AI tools routinely invent confident, well-formatted citations to cases that were never decided. What makes this one notable is that it's the government's own lawyers doing it, in a case about detaining a human being. The judge declined to impose sanctions but issued a pointed warning that future filings must not contain nonexistent authorities. The significance is that the AI-hallucination problem has reached the Justice Department itself, and the courts' patience—already thin—is not going to extend just because it's the government at the podium.US judge warns Justice Department about AI use in immigration case | ReutersThe Trump administration is reviving the “public charge” rule, a policy that can deny green cards to immigrants deemed likely to rely on public benefits. The rule appeared in the Federal Register on Thursday, will be formally published July 20, and takes effect September 18. Here's the concept. “Public charge” is a very old idea in immigration law—the government has long been able to refuse admission or permanent residency to someone likely to become primarily dependent on government support. The fight is over how broadly to define it. The version being revived, first adopted in 2019, dramatically expanded the definition to sweep in anyone who received a government benefit—things like food stamps, Medicaid, or housing vouchers—for more than twelve months in any three-year period. The Biden administration abandoned that broad approach in 2022 and narrowed the grounds for denial; now the expansive version is back. Immigrant advocates warn of a powerful “chilling effect” beyond the green-card applicants themselves: the fear that using benefits could jeopardize their status leads people—including in mixed-status families with citizen children—to avoid the doctor, skip food assistance, or hesitate to file taxes. The significance is that a technical change to the definition of a single term can reshape the behavior of millions, deterring lawful use of public programs out of fear it will be held against someone later.US to revive rule that could deny green cards to immigrants using public benefits | ReutersAnd finally, DraftKings has sued the city of Philadelphia after receiving a subpoena, arguing that the city's consumer-protection ordinance is preempted by Pennsylvania state law. The dispute is a clean illustration of a recurring structural question: who gets to regulate what. Gambling in Pennsylvania is heavily regulated at the state level, through a comprehensive statutory scheme and a state gaming authority. Philadelphia enacted its own ordinance and issued DraftKings a subpoena as part of an investigation into potential violations. DraftKings' core argument is preemption—the principle that when a higher level of government has occupied a field, a lower one can't layer on conflicting or duplicative rules of its own. The company contends the city ordinance essentially copies Pennsylvania law, and that gambling regulation belongs to the state, not the city, so Philadelphia lacks the authority to investigate and enforce in this space. This is the same preemption logic we've seen play out between the federal government and states—here it's just one rung down, between a state and one of its cities, governed by state law and the limits of municipal power. The significance is both immediate and broad: immediately, it's a bid to quash a subpoena and fend off a city investigation; more broadly, it tests how much room local governments have to police national sports-betting companies when the state has already claimed the field.DraftKings sues Philadelphia after receiving subpoena | Reuters 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 White House Tapes RevealedOn July 16, 1973, before the Senate Watergate Committee and a live national television audience, a former White House aide named Alexander Butterfield answered a question that changed American history. Asked whether there was any kind of recording system in the White House, Butterfield confirmed that President Nixon had installed a secret, voice-activated taping system that recorded his conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office and elsewhere. In a single answer, the entire Watergate investigation pivoted.Until that moment, the inquiry into the Watergate break-in and cover-up had largely been a contest of competing testimony—Nixon's word against that of his former counsel John Dean. The existence of the tapes meant there was now an objective record of what the President had actually said and known. Prosecutors and Congress immediately sought them; Nixon refused to hand them over, asserting executive privilege—the claim that a president's confidential communications are shielded from disclosure. That standoff produced one of the most important separation-of-powers decisions in American law.In United States v. Nixon, decided a year later in July 1974, a unanimous Supreme Court rejected the President's claim of absolute privilege. The Court recognized that executive privilege exists and has real constitutional footing, but held that it is not unqualified—that it must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a criminal proceeding. No person, the decision made clear, not even the president, is above the ordinary processes of the law. Nixon turned over the tapes, one of which captured him plotting to obstruct the investigation, and he resigned days later. The significance of July 16, 1973 is that a single truthful answer under oath set in motion the enforcement of a foundational principle: that presidential power operates within the law, and that the courts, not the president, decide the limits of privilege.Todd Blanche's bid to become attorney general is hanging in the balance after a tense confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Blanche, who has been acting attorney general since President Trump fired Pam Bondi in April and who previously served as Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer, spent hours fielding pointed questions—including a telling moment when he said he “is” the president's lawyer before catching himself and correcting it to “was.” The awkwardness captures the central concern: whether a former personal attorney to the president can run the Justice Department as a neutral servant of the law rather than of the man who appointed him. Senators pressed him on the now-defunct anti-weaponization fund, the handling of the Epstein files, and Trump's pardons for January 6 defendants. The math is what makes this precarious. The recent death of Senator Lindsey Graham left committee Republicans with just one vote to spare, and Senator John Cornyn—a lame duck—has said he isn't sold, meaning Blanche's advancement may rest largely in Cornyn's hands. The significance is about the independence of federal law enforcement: confirming a president's former defense lawyer as attorney general tests whether the Justice Department's prosecutorial power will be insulated from the president's personal interests, and the narrow margin means a single Republican could decide the outcome.Blanche to face Senate grilling in bid to be Trump's attorney general | ReutersThe Senate has confirmed a second Florida state appeals judge who ruled in President Trump's favor in his defamation suit against the Pulitzer Prize Board, giving him a lifetime seat on the federal bench. The vote was 51-46 along party lines to place Chief Judge Jeffrey Kuntz on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Here's the connection that drew scrutiny. Kuntz sat on the Florida appeals court panel that ruled for Trump on a personal-jurisdiction question, allowing his defamation case against the Pulitzer Board to move forward—and Kuntz wrote that panel ruling. He is now the second judge from that same panel to be nominated by Trump and confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship. At his hearing, Kuntz defended his decision not to recuse from the Trump matter. The significance is about judicial independence and the appearance of a quid pro quo. There is nothing unusual about elevating state appellate judges to the federal bench, and a favorable ruling doesn't by itself prove anything improper. But when a president rewards judges who ruled for him personally with lifetime appointments, it raises an uncomfortable question about incentives—whether judges hoping for advancement might feel subtle pressure to favor the person doing the appointing—and that perception, critics argue, can corrode public confidence in an impartial judiciary even where each individual ruling was defensible on the merits.2nd Florida judge who ruled for Trump in Pulitzer case confirmed to federal bench | ReutersAnd finally, the Federal Trade Commission and the Ohio State Bar Association have thrown their support behind an Ohio Supreme Court proposal to loosen the American Bar Association's long-standing grip on who gets to become a lawyer. The proposal would let graduates of non-ABA-accredited law schools sit for the Ohio bar exam and would move toward a state-run accreditation process. Here's the structure worth understanding. In most states, you generally can't take the bar exam unless you graduated from a law school the ABA has accredited—which effectively makes the ABA the national gatekeeper of legal education. The FTC's objection is framed in competition terms: it argues the ABA's accreditation standards “go beyond what is reasonably necessary” to ensure lawyers are prepared, and that restricting the supply of lawyers this way may boost incumbent lawyers' pay while raising costs and reducing access for ordinary people who need legal help. Ohio isn't alone—Florida and Texas have already amended their rules so the ABA no longer has the final say, and Tennessee is weighing a similar move. The significance is a real shift in how the profession polices its own entry. Supporters see it as breaking up a monopoly to expand access to legal careers and legal services; critics worry that weakening a uniform national standard could erode the quality and consistency of legal training. Either way, the ABA's decades-long role as the sole gatekeeper is eroding, state by state.State bar, FTC back Ohio proposal to limit ABA role in lawyer admissions | Reuters 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 Housing Act of 1949On July 15, 1949, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act of 1949, a centerpiece of his “Fair Deal” and one of the most ambitious housing laws in American history. Its stated goal was breathtaking in scope: “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” To get there, the Act poured federal money into public housing construction, expanded federal mortgage insurance, and created the urban renewal program to clear and redevelop so-called “slum” neighborhoods.The Act's legacy is genuinely double-edged, and it's worth telling honestly. On one hand, it expanded homeownership for millions and built hundreds of thousands of units of public housing. On the other, its implementation became one of the great engines of racial segregation in the twentieth century. Urban renewal too often meant bulldozing established Black neighborhoods—critics bitterly renamed it “Negro removal”—and the public housing built in their place was frequently segregated by design and concentrated in already-poor areas. Meanwhile the federal mortgage machinery it fed continued the practice of redlining, steering the benefits of homeownership toward white families and away from Black ones.That mixed legacy is why the Housing Act belongs in a legal-history conversation about civil rights. The same federal government that would, within a few years, order schools desegregated in Brown v. Board of Education was, through its housing policy, actively entrenching residential segregation—and residential segregation is what makes school segregation so durable, because in America where you live largely determines where you go to school. The story of July 15, 1949 is a reminder that the law's effects depend enormously on how it's carried out: a statute promising a decent home for every family became, in practice, a tool that shaped the segregated geography we're still litigating over today.Todd Blanche faced a high-stakes Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today in his bid to become attorney general on a permanent basis. Blanche has been acting attorney general since President Trump fired Pam Bondi in April, and before joining the Justice Department he served as Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer—a background that sits at the center of the concerns about him. The confirmation process exists because the Constitution's Appointments Clause requires the Senate to advise and consent on the nation's top law-enforcement officer, and the attorney general is supposed to serve the United States, not the president personally. That tension drove the questioning: senators pressed Blanche on the Department's $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and its prosecutions of figures perceived as Trump's political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The significance is about the independence of the Justice Department. An attorney general who was recently the president's private defense attorney raises the question of whether federal prosecutorial power will be wielded neutrally or as an instrument of the president's interests. With a pair of undecided Republicans—Senators Cornyn and Tillis—holding real leverage, the hearing was Blanche's chance to reassure a narrowly divided Senate, and most observers still expect him to be confirmed by a slim margin.Blanche to face Senate grilling in bid to be Trump's attorney general | ReutersTwo U.S.-based advocacy groups have sued the Trump administration, arguing that its sanctions targeting the International Criminal Court violate the First Amendment. The groups—Democracy for the Arab World Now and the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide—are challenging the February 2025 executive order under which the administration has sanctioned ICC judges, prosecutors, and Palestinian human rights organizations, and which officials pledged this week to expand. The free-speech theory is the key. The plaintiffs say the sanctions regime is so broad that they have stopped doing constitutionally protected things—filing submissions with the ICC and coordinating advocacy with sanctioned people, like the U.N. special rapporteur for Palestine—out of fear that doing so could expose them to fines or even prison. In First Amendment law, that's a classic “chilling effect”: when a law is vague or sweeping enough that people self-censor protected speech to avoid the risk of penalty, the law itself can be unconstitutional even before anyone is actually punished. There's notable precedent here: a similar Trump order in 2020 was blocked by a judge who found it likely violated the First Amendment, before the Biden administration rescinded it in 2021. The significance is a direct clash between the executive's broad power over foreign affairs and sanctions on one side, and Americans' right to speak, associate, and petition on the other. Three ICC judges have separately sued over the same sanctions, so this order is now being attacked on multiple fronts.Trump's ICC order violates free speech, advocacy groups say in lawsuit | ReutersA federal appeals court has ended more than sixty years of federal oversight of the Concordia Parish School Board in Louisiana, lifting one of the desegregation orders that dates back to the Civil Rights era. The Fifth Circuit's decision hands a win to the Trump administration, which has pushed to wind down these long-running cases—a striking reversal for a Justice Department that spent decades on the other side, fighting to enforce them. Here's the legal framework. After Brown v. Board of Education, hundreds of Southern school districts were placed under federal court supervision and ordered to dismantle segregation. A district can be released from that oversight when a court finds it has achieved “unitary status”—meaning it has eliminated the vestiges of segregation, to the extent practicable, in areas like student assignment, faculty hiring, facilities, and discipline. The dispute in cases like this one is whether that's really been accomplished. Louisiana officials argue the orders are relics of a bygone era and no longer needed. Civil rights advocates and some parents counter that the vestiges persist—in racial disparities in student discipline, access to advanced academic programs, and teacher hiring—and that lifting oversight removes a crucial tool for addressing them. The significance is part of a broader push to close out Civil Rights-era decrees, and it raises a hard question: whether these districts have genuinely outgrown the need for supervision, or whether ending it prematurely risks letting old patterns quietly reassert themselves.Appeals court ends US oversight of Louisiana school system related to desegregation mandate | Reuters 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 Sedition Act of 1798On July 14, 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act, the most notorious of the four laws known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to write, print, utter, or publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government of the United States, the Congress, or the President—with the intent to defame them or bring them into disrepute. In plain terms, it criminalized criticism of the government.The context was a Federalist administration, under President John Adams, gripped by fear of France and of domestic dissent, and eager to silence the opposition press aligned with Thomas Jefferson's Republicans. And that's exactly how it was used. Federal prosecutors went after Republican newspaper editors and even a sitting congressman, securing convictions for the crime of harsh political speech. Notably, the Act was written to expire in 1801—conveniently, the moment Adams's term would end—so that it could be wielded against his critics but would not outlive his own hold on power.The reaction was fierce and consequential. Jefferson and James Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions arguing the Act was unconstitutional, and the ensuing backlash helped sweep Jefferson into the presidency in 1800; once in office, he pardoned those convicted under it. The Sedition Act was never tested at the Supreme Court, but history rendered its verdict. More than a century and a half later, in New York Times v. Sullivan, the Court looked back and declared that the Act's assault on free expression had been repudiated “in the court of history,” using it as a touchstone for modern First Amendment law. The lesson of July 14, 1798 endures: laws that punish criticism of the government are almost always tools of the powerful against their critics—and a free press is most necessary precisely when the state would prefer it silent.Federal prosecutors have issued subpoenas seeking to compel four New York Times journalists to testify before a Manhattan grand jury, part of a leak investigation into the paper's reporting on security concerns surrounding President Trump's flight on the new Qatari-donated Air Force One. Federal agents delivered some of the subpoenas to the reporters' homes. Here's the legal terrain. There is no absolute federal reporter's privilege—the Supreme Court held decades ago that the First Amendment doesn't categorically shield journalists from grand jury subpoenas—but the Justice Department has long operated under internal guidelines that made going after reporters a last resort. Those guardrails matter here, because in 2025 Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded the Biden-era policy that had sharply limited subpoenas against journalists, restoring broader authority to pursue them. The Times says it will fight, and can ask a court to quash the subpoenas as overbroad, issued in bad faith, or violating the First Amendment. The significance is the pressure this puts on newsgathering: when the government can subpoena reporters to unmask their sources, sources stop talking, and the kind of national-security reporting at issue here gets harder to do. Press-freedom groups warn this administration has reached for subpoenas and search warrants against journalists—at the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal—more freely than its predecessors.Explainer: Can prosecutors compel New York Times journalists to testify in leak probe? | ReutersA federal judge has voided President Trump's roughly $1.78 billion settlement with the IRS, delivering a scathing rebuke and referring his lawyers for possible discipline. The backstory is unusual. Trump sued his own administration in January over the leak of his tax returns, and by late May had reached a deal with the IRS to create an “anti-weaponization” fund and to “forever bar” the government from any action related to his past tax returns—protection extending to his family and businesses. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams found the whole thing was a setup. The core legal defect is the absence of what courts call adverseness. Federal courts can only decide genuine “cases or controversies”—real disputes between opposing parties. Here, Judge Williams wrote, “there was never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail,” because Trump was effectively suing himself, with his own Justice Department on the other side agreeing to lose. She found the case was brought for an improper purpose: to get a court's stamp of legitimacy on a settlement with no basis in law or fact. She sanctioned Trump's attorneys and referred one, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar, and suggested Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche should face discipline too. The significance is a court refusing to be used as a rubber stamp—insisting that its legitimacy can't be borrowed to bless a collusive deal dressed up as litigation.US judge voids Trump's settlement with IRS | ReutersA federal appeals court has revived more than 500 private lawsuits against Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, alleging that acetaminophen use during pregnancy caused autism and ADHD in children—and here it's worth being clear about the science before the law. There is no firm scientific evidence that Tylenol causes autism or ADHD. The most rigorous recent research, including a large Swedish sibling-comparison study of millions of children, found no causal link once you control for genetic and environmental factors shared within families; mainstream medical bodies continue to regard acetaminophen as one of the safer pain and fever options in pregnancy, and untreated high fevers carry their own real risks. So this ruling is not a finding that Tylenol is dangerous. What the Second Circuit actually decided was narrower and procedural: that the trial judge had wrongly excluded the plaintiffs' expert witnesses. Under the rules governing expert testimony, judges act as “gatekeepers,” admitting expert opinion only if it rests on reliable methodology. The district court had tossed the plaintiffs' experts as unreliable; the appeals court, per Judge Guido Calabresi, said their methods reflected approaches other scientists use and amounted to “acceptable interpretations of scientific evidence where scientists may, and in fact do, disagree.” Crucially, the court stressed it was not deciding whether Tylenol actually causes these conditions. The significance is about who weighs contested science—the ruling lets juries, not just judges, hear the dispute, which is a real win for the plaintiffs procedurally even though the underlying causation case remains, on the current evidence, weak.US appeals court revives private lawsuits linking Tylenol to autism, ADHD | ReutersAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on a counterintuitive idea: that big corporate taxpayers may come to miss the boring, predictable world of administrative tax law now that the Supreme Court has overruled Chevron deference. My argument, in short, is that a weaker IRS and Treasury is not the unalloyed win a lot of multinationals assume it is.Here's the setup. For forty years, under Chevron, courts deferred to a federal agency's reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. With Chevron gone, courts no longer have to defer to Treasury's reading of the tax code just because the statute is vague and the agency has expertise. A lot of corporate taxpayers cheered that—less agency power sounds like more freedom. But my point is that killing Chevron did nothing to remove the underlying ambiguity in the tax code; it just moved the job of resolving that ambiguity to a different desk. And there are only two other desks it can land on, and I don't love either one for a company that wants predictability.The first desk belongs to the courts. If Treasury can't issue as many binding, prospective rules, then more of these questions get resolved through litigation—case by case, on particular records, often years after the transactions are done. Courts are built to handle controversies, not to administer a global corporate tax system. The Coca-Cola transfer-pricing fight is the stress test I point to: a company may win a great refund that way, but you can't organize a multinational's affairs around the hope that every ambiguous question turns into a bespoke judicial adventure. The second desk belongs to Congress, which is the more democratically satisfying answer—Congress writes the code and is politically accountable. But in practice Congress moves slowly and episodically, usually only when tax changes ride along on some bigger budget deal. By the time Congress fixes an international tax problem, the business model that created it has been reorganized twice and pivoted to something involving AI.So the core of my argument is that corporate taxpayers need to distinguish between a useful litigation win and a stable legal environment—those two things don't always travel together. A bad but clear rule can be modeled and planned around; an ambiguous rule, as I put it, isn't really a rule, it's a threat in the shape of a Treasury notice. My prescription is that Congress should make clearer, more deliberate delegations where technical administration is unavoidable—transfer pricing, international tax, anti-abuse rules—and that Treasury should do a post-Chevron audit of its own regulations to flag where the code is asking too much of administration and too little of legislation. Because the real choice here isn't between IRS power and taxpayer freedom. It's between prospective administration and retroactive improvisation—and multinationals may get their wish, see the IRS diminished, and then find themselves stuck with rules everyone knows are broken but no one can fix.Big Corporate Taxpayers Need More Clarity in a Post-Chevron World | Bloomberg Tax 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 Northwest OrdinanceOn July 13, 1787, the Confederation Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance, one of the most important laws in American history—and one passed under the Articles of Confederation, before the Constitution even existed. Its formal subject was dry: how to govern the vast territory north and west of the Ohio River. But in answering that question, it set precedents that shaped the entire future of the nation.The Ordinance did several remarkable things at once. It created an orderly process by which frontier territories would move through stages of self-government and eventually be admitted to the Union as new states—fully equal to the original thirteen, not as colonies or dependencies. That single principle, that new territory would become co-equal states rather than subordinate possessions, distinguished the American project from every empire that had come before. The Ordinance also guaranteed a set of rights to settlers in the territory: freedom of religion, the right to trial by jury, habeas corpus, and proportionate representation—a bill of rights in miniature, adopted before the Bill of Rights.And in its most consequential provision, Article 6, the Ordinance banned slavery throughout the Northwest Territory—the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. It was the first time the national government prohibited slavery in a defined territory, drawing a line that would harden over the decades into the divide between free states and slave states, and setting up the bitter fights over the expansion of slavery that culminated in the Civil War. The significance of July 13, 1787 is that a Congress often dismissed as weak and ineffectual produced a statute of enduring genius—a template for national growth, an early charter of liberties, and a foundational stand, however partial, against slavery.Apple has sued OpenAI in federal court in Northern California, accusing the AI company of a systematic scheme to steal its trade secrets in order to break into consumer hardware. It's a striking reversal for two companies that struck a high-profile partnership back in 2024. Apple's complaint alleges misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of contract, claiming OpenAI leaned on former Apple employees—more than 400 now work there—along with aggressive recruiting and supplier relationships to vacuum up confidential information. Apple points a finger at OpenAI's hardware chief, a former Apple vice president, alleging he told job candidates still employed at Apple to bring “actual parts” to interviews for “show and tell,” and that another departing employee downloaded dozens of files on unreleased products. Trade-secret law protects confidential business information that gives a company a competitive edge, and the case will turn on whether OpenAI crossed the line from lawfully hiring talent—people are allowed to change jobs and use their general skills—into unlawfully exploiting Apple's protected secrets. Given the two firms' size and the stakes in the AI hardware race, this is shaping up to be a marquee tech dispute.Apple sues OpenAI alleging misappropriation of trade secrets, court records show | ReutersA federal judge has ruled that disabled Justice Department immigration lawyers can keep working from home while they press a lawsuit challenging the department's return-to-office mandate. Two attorney-advisers at the immigration courts won a preliminary injunction from Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles in the Eastern District of Virginia, temporarily halting the no-telework policy as applied to them. Their claim rests on the Rehabilitation Act, the federal statute requiring the government, as an employer, to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities—here, remote work they say is necessary to protect their health. The administration's broad directive ordering federal workers back to the office full-time collided with that individualized duty. A preliminary injunction isn't a final ruling; it means the plaintiffs showed they're likely to win and would suffer irreparable harm without relief. The significance is the tension it spotlights: a government-wide, one-size-fits-all workplace policy still has to bend to statutory disability-accommodation rights, and this ruling suggests courts will enforce that limit even against the executive's management of its own workforce.US judge says DOJ lawyers can work from home pending lawsuit over telework policy | ReutersThe administration extended work permits for hundreds of thousands of immigrants with Temporary Protected Status from Haiti and six other countries just hours before they were set to expire. It's worth being precise about what actually changed. TPS is a humanitarian designation that lets people from countries in crisis live and work here legally. Last month the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to end TPS for Haitians and Syrians—but what was extended here is narrower: the validity of the employment-authorization documents that workers and employers rely on for I-9 and E-Verify purposes. Haitians got two extra weeks, to July 24; those from Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan, and Myanmar got one. The underlying TPS designations remain in legal limbo, awaiting district-court orders expected at the end of July. The significance is both humanitarian and practical: the reprieve came as some employers had already begun terminating these workers, and it underscores how much uncertainty TPS holders are living under—their ability to keep a job now measured in days and weeks while the courts sort out their status.US extends work permits for Haitians, other immigrants with Temporary Protected Status | ReutersAnd finally, a federal appeals court has sanctioned a lawyer for filing a brief riddled with fake, AI-generated case citations—the latest entry in a fast-growing genre. The Eleventh Circuit rebuked the attorney with a line destined for law-review footnotes: “Whatever the merits of artificial intelligence, it is no substitute for actual intelligence.” The problem is by now familiar: generative AI tools will, with total confidence, invent case names, citations, and quotations that do not exist—”hallucinations”—and lawyers who paste that output into filings without checking are presenting fictional law to a court. That breaches a basic professional duty. Under Rule 11 and the courts' inherent authority, attorneys must certify that their legal contentions are grounded in real, existing law, and courts have been escalating the consequences—reimbursed fees, fines, and public reprimands—as the same mistake keeps recurring despite repeated warnings. The significance isn't that AI is banned from law practice; it plainly isn't. It's that the tool doesn't dilute the lawyer's responsibility one bit. You can use AI to draft, but you still have to verify, because when you sign a brief you vouch for every citation in it—and “the computer made it up” is not a defense.US appeals court rebukes lawyer over fake, hallucinated case citations | Reuters 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 Scopes “Monkey Trial” OpensOn July 10, 1925, the trial of John T. Scopes opened in the sweltering courthouse of Dayton, Tennessee. Scopes, a young high school teacher, stood accused of violating the state's Butler Act, which made it a crime to teach human evolution in public schools. The case became one of the most famous trials in American history—less because of what happened to Scopes, who was a willing test defendant recruited by the ACLU, than because of the collision it staged between two national figures and two worldviews.On one side was William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and champion of the anti-evolution cause, who argued for the prosecution. On the other was Clarence Darrow, the era's most celebrated defense attorney, who took the case to defend academic freedom and the teaching of science. The trial's most dramatic moment came when Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible and cross-examined him mercilessly on its literal interpretation. Scopes was convicted and fined $100—a verdict later overturned on a technicality—so in the narrow legal sense, the anti-evolution side won.But the significance of Scopes lies elsewhere. It was one of the first trials broadcast live on national radio, a spectacle that turned a local misdemeanor into a referendum on faith, science, education, and the reach of the state into the classroom. It sharpened the enduring constitutional questions—about what government may compel or forbid teachers to teach—that would return decades later in cases like Epperson v. Arkansas, which finally struck down anti-evolution laws under the First Amendment. Scopes is a reminder that some trials matter less for their judgments than for the arguments they force a country to have out loud.The Justice Department has sued Maryland, alleging that the state's sanctuary policies unlawfully obstruct federal immigration enforcement. The suit targets Maryland's Community Trust Act, which limits how state and local officials may cooperate with federal immigration authorities—for example, by declining to honor routine detainer requests to hand people over. The government's core theory is preemption: it argues that under the Supremacy Clause, states can't erect policies that interfere with federal immigration law. Maryland and Attorney General Anthony Brown will counter that states have no obligation to affirmatively help enforce federal law—a principle known as anti-commandeering. This is the twenty-first such suit the administration has filed against sanctuary jurisdictions, part of a coordinated campaign, and it teed up the recurring constitutional question of where federal supremacy ends and a state's right to withhold its own resources begins.DOJ sues Maryland, alleges state policies interfere with immigration crackdown | ReutersProposed rule changes would require greater public disclosure when federal grand juries refuse to indict—an unusually pointed reform prompted by a string of rejected charges. Grand juries almost never decline to indict; the old line is that a prosecutor could get one to “indict a ham sandwich.” Yet over the past year, grand juries in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington rejected charges in politically sensitive cases, including a failed effort to indict six sitting members of Congress. In response, the federal court in Chicago adopted a rule filing a redacted version of the foreperson's rejection form on the public docket, and D.C.'s chief judge ordered that the judiciary be notified whenever a grand jury turns the administration down. Because grand jury proceedings are ordinarily secret, “no true bill” outcomes usually vanish without a trace. The significance is transparency: these measures would let the public see how often the government tries to charge people and fails—turning the grand jury's quiet power to say no into something visible.Proposed rules call for DOJ disclosure when grand juries reject indictments | ReutersThe elite law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett is heading into a rare legal-malpractice trial in Florida next week, defending against claims seeking more than $200 million. The case comes from former Patriot National CEO Steven Mariano, who alleges the firm botched its legal work on a corporate stock transaction more than a decade ago; Simpson Thacher denies liability and argues that market forces, not its advice, caused the losses. What makes this notable is simply that it's going to a jury at all. Malpractice claims against top-tier firms are almost always settled quietly or dismissed before trial, because both sides have strong incentives to avoid airing the details of a soured client relationship in open court. A verdict here could ripple outward—shaping how firms handle risk, how professional-liability insurers price transactional work, and how future clients frame malpractice claims against their own lawyers.Simpson Thacher prepares for rare malpractice trial in Florida next week | ReutersAnd finally, President Trump has removed the last sitting members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the bipartisan federal agency that helps states administer elections. All three commissioners were pushed out at once—the two Democratic members fired by email, the Republican member asked by phone to resign—leaving the four-seat commission entirely empty. That vacancy is the whole point: with no commissioners, the EAC cannot take official action, and because replacements require Senate confirmation, the agency could be sidelined for months heading into the midterms. The EAC isn't a powerhouse—it sets voluntary voting-system guidelines and distributes election funding—but it's a piece of the federal election infrastructure, and emptying it entirely is unprecedented. Voter-advocacy groups and Democratic election officials called the move reckless, and it raises the same structural question running through this week's news: how much a president may reshape or disable the machinery that oversees elections in the run-up to a vote.Trump terminates Election Assistance Commission members | Reuters 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 Fourteenth Amendment Is RatifiedOn July 9, 1868, South Carolina and Louisiana became the final two states needed to push the Fourteenth Amendment over the three-quarters threshold, and with their votes the amendment was ratified into the Constitution. It is, by almost any measure, the most consequential of the Reconstruction amendments and arguably the most important addition to the Constitution since the Bill of Rights.The amendment was written to answer the central question left open by the Civil War and the abolition of slavery: what did freedom actually mean, and who was entitled to it? Its first section does an enormous amount of work in a single sentence. It establishes birthright citizenship—declaring that all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens of both the nation and their state. It then forbids any state from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens, from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, and from denying any person the equal protection of the laws. Those three clauses—privileges or immunities, due process, and equal protection—became the constitutional text on which vast stretches of modern American law are built.The historical purpose was direct. The framers of the amendment, led in the House by John Bingham, wanted to overrule Dred Scott, which had held that Black Americans could not be citizens, and to constitutionalize the civil rights protections Congress had already tried to enact by statute—putting them beyond the reach of any future hostile Congress or Southern legislature. They understood that emancipation without citizenship and equal protection would be a hollow victory, and they wrote a guarantee that applied against the states, not just the federal government.The significance of July 9, 1868 is hard to overstate, because so much of what we argue about today runs directly through this text. The Equal Protection Clause is the basis of Brown v. Board of Education and school desegregation, of Loving v. Virginia striking down bans on interracial marriage, and of Obergefell recognizing marriage equality. The Due Process Clause became the vehicle for incorporating most of the Bill of Rights against the states, so that free speech, free exercise, and protections for the criminally accused bind state governments too. And the Citizenship Clause is the reason that birthright citizenship is a constitutional guarantee rather than a policy preference—as the Supreme Court reaffirmed just this past term. When you hear debates about who counts as a citizen, what process the government owes a person before it takes something from them, or whether a law treats people equally, you are hearing an argument about the amendment ratified on this date.A federal judge in Florida has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to keep giving four Republican-led states—Florida, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio—access to a federal database those states use to check whether registered voters are citizens. The order, from U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II in Pensacola, lets the states continue using the system while the underlying legal fight plays out.The database is called SAVE—Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements—a federal system historically used to verify immigration status for benefits. After a revamp last year, it became far more powerful for election purposes: users could search many records at once, and it exposed individuals' Social Security numbers. Several Republican-led states began comparing their voter rolls against SAVE and canceling the registrations of people the database flagged as noncitizens. The problem is what happens when the database is wrong or out of date—people who are in fact citizens can get flagged and purged.That risk is exactly why this ruling sits in tension with another one. Just weeks earlier, on June 22, a different federal judge in Washington, D.C., restricted broader use of the database, warning that relying on it could result in eligible voters being wrongly stripped from the rolls. So you now have two federal courts pointing in different directions—one worried about wrongful purges and limiting the database's use, and one ordering DHS to keep the spigot open for these four states. When trial courts split like this, the disagreement typically has to be resolved higher up, and it means the rules can differ depending on which state and which courtroom you're standing in.The significance is that this is a live fight over the machinery of voter-roll maintenance heading into a midterm election year. There's a genuine and legitimate interest in keeping noncitizens off the voter rolls—but there's an equally real risk that a blunt, error-prone matching process disenfranchises actual citizens who then have to fight to get back on. This ruling tilts toward giving states the verification tool; the D.C. ruling tilts toward protecting against wrongful removals. Watch the appellate courts, because the boundary between list maintenance and unlawful voter purging is about to get drawn more sharply.US judge orders four states be given access to citizenship data for voter checks | ReutersIn a closely related development, the Justice Department has sent letters to all fifty states warning that state and local election officials could face criminal prosecution if they allow noncitizens to remain on their voter rolls. The letters, from Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Department's Civil Rights Division, give officials just five days to respond with a plan to comply. The federal government does have statutes on the books aimed at protecting the integrity of elections and barring noncitizens from voting, and the letters invoke several of them. But the ordinary way these laws work is that you prosecute a person who actually votes illegally, or who knowingly facilitates fraud. What's unusual here is the target: the letters put state and local election administrators—the people who maintain the rolls—on notice that they personally could be charged. That reframes routine election administration as potential criminal exposure for the officials doing it.Think about the position this puts an election official in. Maintaining accurate voter rolls is genuinely hard—people move, die, naturalize, and occasionally register in error—and every state already has processes for it. Now imagine being told by the U.S. Department of Justice that if the federal government later decides your rolls were inadequate, you could be a criminal defendant, and you have five days to send in a compliance plan. Even if few or no prosecutions ever materialize, the threat itself is designed to change behavior—to push officials toward more aggressive purging out of fear of personal liability. Critics call that coercion; the Department frames it as enforcement.The significance is about federal pressure on the decentralized American election system. Elections in this country are run by states and localities, deliberately, so that no single national authority controls the vote. Democratic officials in states like Michigan pushed back hard, noting they've already taken extensive steps to ensure only eligible voters can vote. The letters, arriving alongside the SAVE database fight, are part of a coordinated push ahead of the midterms, and they raise a serious question about the line between legitimate federal enforcement of election laws and using the threat of prosecution to lean on the officials who administer them.US Justice Department tells state officials they could be prosecuted over noncitizen voting | ReutersAnd in a very different kind of case, a former Olympic canoe racer, David Hearn, pleaded not guilty in D.C. Superior Court to a felony charge of deliberately damaging the recently renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Hearn, who is 67 and competed in three Summer Olympics, entered his plea through an attorney at his first court appearance, and his lawyers have described the prosecution as an abuse of power built on what they call a “concocted narrative.”The Reflecting Pool sits on the National Mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and had just undergone a roughly $16 million renovation. Hearn has said he was stopped by National Guard troops and U.S. Park Police and detained for about five hours after pausing at the pool during a 64-mile bike ride in June. He was later indicted on a single felony count of property destruction. The top federal prosecutor for D.C., U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, said six other people were arrested on misdemeanor charges connected to damage at the same site.The legal question worth watching is the gap between the charge and the conduct. Property-destruction law generally requires proof that the defendant intentionally caused the damage, and a felony charge usually turns on the dollar value of that damage. Hearn's defense is essentially that the government has manufactured intent and seriousness out of an innocent encounter—that a man pausing on a bike ride has been turned into a felony defendant. The judge apparently agreed there was little flight or danger risk: Hearn was released without court supervision pending an August 5 status hearing, which tells you something about how the court currently views the threat he poses.The significance here is less about one damaged pool and more about the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Deciding whom to charge, and whether to charge a felony versus a misdemeanor versus nothing at all, is one of the most powerful and least reviewable choices in the legal system. When critics call a prosecution politically motivated or an abuse of power, they're pointing at that discretion. Whether this case is a legitimate property-crime prosecution (it isn't) or an overreach (it is) is exactly what the coming proceedings will test—and it's a useful reminder that the same charging power that holds genuine wrongdoers accountable can also be aimed in ways that raise real fairness concerns.Former US Olympian pleads not guilty in Reflecting Pool vandalism case | Reuters 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: Vermont Bans SlaveryOn July 8, 1777, delegates meeting in Windsor adopted the Constitution of the Vermont Republic—and in doing so, Vermont became the first place in North America to write the prohibition of slavery into its founding law. At a moment when the newly declared United States tolerated and protected human bondage, a small, unrecognized republic on the frontier put a very different principle on paper.The relevant language was striking for its era. The Vermont constitution declared that all people are born equally free and independent, and it provided that no adult could be held as a servant, slave, or apprentice against their will—specifically, no man over twenty-one and no woman over eighteen. It was not a complete abolition; the age limits meant the document did not immediately free everyone, and enforcement in practice was uneven and incomplete for years afterward. But as a matter of constitutional text, it was the first time on this continent that a government's foundational law declared slavery inconsistent with the very idea of being born free.The context matters. In 1777, Vermont was not yet a state—it wouldn't join the Union until 1791—and it existed in a kind of legal limbo, claimed by both New York and New Hampshire and recognized by neither. That outsider status may have given its drafters room to be bolder than their contemporaries. While the framers of the national government were negotiating the compromises that would embed slavery in American law for another four generations—the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, the twenty-year protection of the slave trade—Vermont's drafters wrote the opposite conviction into their first article.The significance of July 8, 1777 is partly symbolic and partly practical. Symbolically, it established that abolition was not some later invention imposed on a reluctant founding generation, but a principle that existed at the founding itself, chosen by people who could see the contradiction between declaring all men free and holding some in bondage. Practically, Vermont's provision became an early data point in the long argument that would run through the Northwest Ordinance, the gradual emancipation statutes of the northern states, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, and finally the Thirteenth Amendment. It's a reminder that constitutional law is not just handed down from the most powerful actors—that sometimes the boldest legal principles come from the margins, from a place that wasn't even sure it counted as a state, writing down what it believed the law ought to be.A former Milwaukee County judge, Hannah Dugan, has been sentenced in federal court after being convicted of obstructing an immigration arrest outside her courtroom—a case that became a flashpoint in the fight over the Trump administration's use of courthouses to stage immigration enforcement. Dugan, who is 67 and was an elected circuit court judge, was found guilty of obstructing a federal proceeding, though a jury acquitted her of a lesser concealment charge.Federal immigration agents came to Dugan's courthouse to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican man who was scheduled to appear before her on misdemeanor assault charges. Prosecutors said Dugan directed him out through a non-public “jury door” in an effort to help him avoid the agents waiting in the public hallway. It didn't work—Flores-Ruiz walked through a public hallway with his attorney anyway, and agents arrested him outside after a brief foot chase. But the government charged Dugan criminally for what she did inside the courthouse, and a federal jury convicted her in December.Think about the competing principles colliding here. On one side is the idea that no one, not even a judge, gets to physically obstruct federal law enforcement carrying out its duties. On the other is a real institutional worry that animated a lot of the coverage: if immigration agents stake out courthouses, people with pending cases—victims, witnesses, defendants—may stop showing up at all, which grinds the ordinary work of the state courts to a halt. Dugan's defenders framed her actions as protecting the functioning of her courtroom; prosecutors framed them as obstruction of a federal operation. The jury sided with the government on the core charge.At sentencing, the two sides were far apart. Federal prosecutors declined to recommend a specific term but argued the guidelines called for fifteen to twenty-one months in prison. Dugan's lawyers disputed that calculation and asked U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman for time served—no prison at all. The significance of the case goes well beyond one judge. It's a marker of how aggressively the administration is willing to pursue anyone perceived to interfere with immigration enforcement, up to and including a sitting judge, and it sends a message to state and local officials everywhere about the personal legal risk of getting between federal agents and their targets.Ex-Wisconsin judge to be sentenced for obstructing immigration arrest | ReutersBayer is moving to bring an end to the sprawling federal litigation over its Roundup weedkiller, following a significant win at the Supreme Court. Late last month, the Court ruled 7-2 in Bayer's favor, and the company is now trying to convert that decision into the dismissal of the failure-to-warn claims that have driven nearly a decade of lawsuits.Thousands of plaintiffs have sued Bayer alleging that Roundup, and specifically its active ingredient glyphosate, caused their non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and that the company violated state law by failing to warn them of that cancer risk. Bayer's winning argument was about federal preemption—the principle that when federal and state law conflict, federal law wins. Bayer argued that because the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded glyphosate poses no cancer risk and requires no cancer warning on the label, plaintiffs can't use state failure-to-warn law to demand a warning the federal regulator affirmatively says isn't needed. The Supreme Court agreed, overturning a $1.25 million Missouri verdict in the process.Consider why this is such a powerful tool for Bayer. A failure-to-warn claim says, in essence, “you should have told me this was dangerous.” But if the federal agency in charge has studied the product and decided no warning is warranted, then a state jury ordering the company to warn anyway would effectively be overriding the federal regulator. Preemption resolves that conflict in favor of the federal standard. The practical effect is that the single most common theory in the Roundup litigation—failure to warn—is now largely off the table in the cases this ruling reaches.The significance is real but, importantly, not total. This should let Bayer dismiss current warning-based claims and block future ones, which is exactly why the company is now pressing courts to wind down the federal litigation, and it's pairing that push with a proposed $7.25 billion class-action settlement to sweep in remaining Roundup users. But the decision doesn't make every claim disappear. Plaintiffs may still pursue theories that don't depend on a failure to warn—like defective design—and the settlement obligations remain. So this is a milestone in Bayer's long campaign to contain its liability, not the final word. It's also a notable example of how federal regulatory findings can become a shield against state tort law, a doctrine with implications well beyond weedkiller.Bayer seeks end to federal Roundup litigation after Supreme Court win | ReutersFederal judges are sounding skeptical of a California law that bans employers from forcing workers to attend so-called “captive audience” meetings—mandatory gatherings where a company shares its views on political or religious matters, most often its opposition to unionizing. The law has already been blocked by a district court, and the signs from the bench suggest that skepticism may carry through on appeal.Here's what a captive audience meeting is and why it's contested. When a union organizing drive is underway, employers have long held mandatory meetings where attendance is required and workers listen to management make the case against unionizing. Unions call these coercive; employers call them protected speech. California's SB 399 tried to ban compelling attendance at meetings covering “political matters,” a category defined broadly enough to include unionization. Judge Daniel Calabretta of the Eastern District of California blocked the law, and his reasoning is the crux of the whole fight.He gave two independent grounds, and it's worth separating them. The first is federal preemption—the same principle at work in the Bayer story. Calabretta found that the National Labor Relations Act, which governs labor relations nationwide, occupies this field and preempts California's attempt to regulate it under the Machinists and Garmon preemption doctrines. The second ground is the First Amendment: he held that the law was a content-based restriction on employer speech, singling out “political” and “religious” topics, and that it couldn't survive strict scrutiny—the most demanding test in constitutional law, which almost nothing passes. In his view, banning all speech on those topics in mandatory meetings swept far too broadly.The significance here is that this is a collision between the labor movement's priorities and employers' free-speech claims, and right now the free-speech and preemption arguments are winning in court. A number of states have passed captive-audience bans, so how the Ninth Circuit ultimately rules—California and Attorney General Rob Bonta are expected to appeal—will shape whether this entire category of worker-protection law survives. It's a reminder that even popular labor legislation has to run a gauntlet of federal preemption and the First Amendment, and that employer speech, including anti-union speech, gets substantial constitutional protection.US judges leery of California ban on workplace captive-audience meetings | Reuters 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: Sandra Day O'Connor Nominated to the Supreme CourtOn July 7, 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced that he was nominating Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court of the United States. If confirmed, she would become the first woman ever to serve on the Court in its then-191-year history. The Senate confirmed her later that summer by a vote of 99 to 0, and she took her seat in September 1981.O'Connor's path to the Court was, in its own way, a commentary on the barriers women faced in the legal profession. She had graduated near the top of her class at Stanford Law School in 1952—ahead of, among others, William Rehnquist, who would one day be her Chief Justice—and yet law firms in California would not hire her as a lawyer. One offered her a job as a legal secretary. She built her career instead in public service and in Arizona politics, eventually rising to become the majority leader of the Arizona state senate, the first woman in the country to hold such a post, before moving to the bench as a state judge. When Reagan, who had promised during his campaign to appoint a woman to the Court, chose her, he was reaching past the federal appellate judiciary—which had almost no women on it—into state government.On the Court, O'Connor became famous as a pragmatic, case-by-case decision-maker who resisted sweeping rules, and for roughly a quarter century she sat at the ideological center, casting decisive votes on abortion, affirmative action, campaign finance, religion, and the limits of federal power. Her approach frustrated those who wanted bright-line doctrines from either side, but it made her, for a generation, arguably the most powerful jurist in the country—the swing vote whose reasoning lower courts and litigants had to anticipate.Her nomination matters in legal history not only because it broke a barrier that had stood since 1789, but because of what came after it. Once one woman had sat on the Court and served with distinction, the question was no longer whether a woman could do the job but why it had taken so long. O'Connor herself was characteristically understated about the symbolism, insisting that she wanted to be judged on the quality of her arguments rather than her place in history. But the two are not really separable. The fact that a brilliant lawyer could be turned away from every firm that interviewed her, and then go on to become the deciding vote on the highest court in the land, is a reminder of how much talent the profession wasted for how long—and of how quickly a barrier that seems permanent can fall once someone is finally allowed through it.Meta has disclosed that four states are seeking as much as $1.4 trillion in penalties heading into an August trial over claims that the company deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict young users. The figure—close to Meta's entire market value of around $1.5 trillion—came out in a court filing in which Meta argued the number is wildly excessive and, in its words, “has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement.”California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey are among the states suing Meta, alleging that the company engineered features to keep teenagers compulsively engaged—infinite scroll, autoplay, manipulative notifications—while publicly downplaying the harm to young users' mental health. The case is set for trial in Oakland in August. The eye-popping penalty number comes from how state consumer-protection laws are structured: they typically set a fixed statutory fine per violation, and the states arrive at $1.4 trillion by multiplying that per-violation fine by an enormous number of alleged violations, one for roughly every affected young user, across years of conduct.Think about how that math works and why it produces such a staggering figure. If a law says you owe, say, a few thousand dollars per violation, that sounds modest—until the “violations” are counted in the tens or hundreds of millions because each affected teenager, each exposure, is its own violation. Statutes written to punish a corner store for mislabeling a product start to generate astronomical numbers when applied to a platform that touches nearly every teenager in a state. That's the tension at the heart of this filing: the states say they're simply applying the law as written, and Meta says applying it that way produces a number no legislature could possibly have intended.The significance here isn't really the trillion-dollar headline, which almost no one expects to be the actual outcome. It's what the fight over the number reveals. Penalty calculations like this are leverage—they shape settlement negotiations and signal how seriously a court might treat the underlying conduct. The case is one of the most important tests yet of whether decades-old consumer-protection statutes can be turned against the design choices of social media platforms, and whether “we built it to be addictive” can be treated as a deceptive or unfair business practice. However the penalty question resolves, the theory of liability is the thing to watch.Meta says US states are seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties in August youth safety trial | ReutersA coalition of twenty-two Democratic state attorneys general has come out against the Trump administration's plan to impose tariffs of up to 12.5% on 59 countries and the European Union, tariffs the administration justifies as a response to trade in goods made with forced labor. The attorneys general, led by California's Rob Bonta, call the levies unlawful and describe them as a pretext to resurrect tariff authority the Supreme Court has already rejected.Tariffs are taxes on imports, and the Constitution gives the power to levy taxes primarily to Congress. Presidents can impose tariffs, but only when Congress has delegated them that authority through a specific statute, and each of those statutes comes with its own conditions and limits. Earlier tariffs from this administration were struck down when courts found the President had stretched his delegated power past what the law allowed. Now the administration is invoking forced-labor concerns as the legal basis for a new round. The Democratic attorneys general argue that this is the same overreach in a new costume—that dressing tariffs up as a human-rights measure doesn't cure the underlying problem, which is that the President is claiming a taxing power Congress never handed him.Consider the practical reach of what's proposed. The attorneys general say these tariffs would hit roughly 99% of imports. A tariff, whatever its stated purpose, is ultimately paid by importers and passed along to consumers in higher prices. So the debate isn't only an abstract argument about the separation of powers—it's about who gets to decide to raise the cost of nearly everything Americans buy from abroad, and whether that decision belongs to one person in the executive branch or to Congress. The forced-labor rationale is genuinely important on its own terms; forced labor in global supply chains is a real and serious problem. But the attorneys general are making a structural point: even a good goal doesn't authorize a power the law doesn't grant.The significance is that this is another front in an ongoing constitutional struggle over how far presidential trade power extends. The attorneys general are signaling they will litigate, and the courts have already shown, in striking down the earlier tariffs, that they are willing to police the boundary. Watch for whether this dispute follows the same path to the Supreme Court, because the answer will shape not just this set of tariffs but how much unilateral economic power any president can claim by pointing to a sufficiently sympathetic justification.Democratic AGs oppose Trump plan to impose tariffs on forced labor concerns | ReutersThe U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has abandoned an unusual set of trademark applications it had filed to register the phrase “Board of Peace” on behalf of President Trump, walking away from the filings after sharp criticism from congressional Democrats and questions about whether the agency had any legal authority to file them in the first place. The government filed an express abandonment of the applications, ending what one member of Congress called an unlawful venture.A trademark protects a brand—a word or logo used to identify the source of goods or services in commerce. Normally, a person or company files their own application, or has their lawyer file it for them. What happened here is that the Director of the Patent and Trademark Office, the head of the very agency that examines and grants trademarks, filed applications to register “Board of Peace” on the President's behalf. And that raised an immediate legal problem: the Lanham Act, the federal trademark statute, generally forbids filing an application on behalf of another person unless you are that person's attorney—and the Director specifically was not acting as Trump's lawyer.Think about why that rule exists and why the arrangement looked so troubling. The agency that decides who gets a trademark is supposed to be a neutral referee. When the head of that agency personally files an application for the President, the referee has stepped onto the field to play for one team. Even setting aside the specific statutory bar, it collapses the distinction between the government official who grants rights and the private party who receives them. Critics questioned not just the legality but the transparency of the whole exercise—who authorized it, on what authority, and why the trademark office was branding a presidential initiative at all.The significance is less about the phrase “Board of Peace” and more about the guardrails around a powerful administrative agency. Trademark law has technical rules about who may file and on whose behalf, and those rules are part of what keeps the system credible. The abandonment—prompted by oversight from the House Judiciary Committee's Democrats—shows those guardrails still functioning: an irregular filing was flagged, its legal basis questioned, and the agency backed down before a court had to intervene. It's a small episode in the scheme of things, but a clean illustration of how ordinary statutory limits and legislative oversight can check an official who reaches beyond his role.US trademark office abandons ‘Board of Peace' branding rights applications | ReutersIn my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on the administration's threat to hit countries that have digital services taxes with 100% tariffs. My argument, in short, is that this is an ill-advised response—it isn't really a defense of the U.S. tax system at all, but an attempt to use consumer-funded trade pain to shield big tech from foreign tax bills.Let me set up the problem. A digital services tax, or DST, is a levy some foreign governments impose on the local digital revenue of companies like Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, or Netflix. These firms can earn enormous revenue from users in a country without ever having the kind of physical presence that the traditional international tax system was built to tax. Netflix can stream into a jurisdiction, pull revenue out of it, and never owe local tax. So foreign governments invented DSTs to capture some of that. The U.S. response, apparently, is to threaten tariffs on that country's completely unrelated goods until the tax goes away. The logic is that if Google has to pay France a modest tax on its digital revenue, someone in Cleveland might have to pay more for their champagne.I want to be fair to both sides here, because I actually think both have a point. DSTs genuinely deserve criticism—they're blunt instruments that tax gross revenue rather than profit, which means they can overtax low-margin business, and they're often designed with revenue thresholds conveniently set to catch every big U.S. tech firm while sparing domestic companies. So the U.S. complaint that these taxes are tailored to skim revenue from American firms is not baseless. But foreign governments also have a legitimate grievance: the old international tax rules really do struggle to tax digital businesses that earn a fortune from local users without setting foot in the country.Here's where I think the tariff response falls apart. A blanket 100% tariff doesn't fix any of a DST's design flaws. It doesn't determine where digital value is actually created, it doesn't allocate taxing rights, and it doesn't even fall on the foreign government. Tariffs are paid by importers, and most of that cost gets passed along to consumers. With last year's tariffs, as much as ninety percent of the economic burden landed on domestic firms and consumers. So think about how strange this is as tax policy: the companies facing the foreign tax are the largest and richest technology firms in the world, but the companies and consumers who'd actually feel the tariff are unrelated domestic players. No one is literally cutting Meta a reimbursement check, but the effect is the same—American consumers and importers become the leverage used to protect Silicon Valley from foreign tax exposure.And the bilateral approach has a nasty structural problem. The administration seems emboldened by the Canada episode—Canada moved to collect its DST, the U.S. threatened trade consequences, and Canada backed down. The apparent lesson the administration drew is that a big enough threat can make any foreign tax disappear. But if the U.S. treats tariff threats as a standing veto over other countries' tax policy, then every DST becomes a bilateral confrontation—France, Spain, Italy, the UK, one hostage negotiation after another—and it invites everyone else to adopt the same playbook the moment U.S. firms need something from them.So what I argue for instead is a binding, multilateral framework, and I lay out three pieces it would need. First, countries with DSTs agree to repeal them once a replacement is in place—the goal is to swap the ad hoc levies for something coherent, not stack a new rule on top of them. Second, market jurisdictions get, and help design, a predictable formula for their share of taxing rights over digital multinationals—something administrable and tied to a defensible theory of where digital profits are earned. And third, the U.S. keeps its powder dry: retaliation stays in reserve for countries that refuse the framework or discriminate against U.S. firms, applied with due process and proportionality, not as a one-size-fits-all tariff bazooka every time a foreign tax annoys Silicon Valley. Until we build that kind of system, the DST fight is just going to keep coming back.US Tariff Threat Is an Ill-Advised Digital Services Tax Reaction | Bloomberg Tax 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 Execution of Sir Thomas MoreOn July 6, 1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded at Tower Hill in London, convicted of high treason against King Henry VIII. More had been one of the most powerful men in England—a lawyer, a scholar, a former Lord Chancellor, the King's own friend—and he went to the scaffold because he would not say the words the King demanded.The dispute was, at its heart, about supremacy. Henry VIII had broken with Rome and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, and Parliament had passed the Act of Supremacy and an Act of Succession requiring subjects to swear an oath acknowledging the King's new status and the legitimacy of his marriage to Anne Boleyn. More refused to take the oath. Crucially, he did not denounce the King. He said nothing at all. He believed that by staying silent he stayed within the law—that under the old maxim, silence gives consent, and no court could convict a man for what he had not said.The Crown answered that theory with new law. The Treason Act of 1534, which took effect in early 1535, made it treason to “maliciously” deprive the King or Queen of their “dignity, title, or name”—and the government argued that More's conspicuous silence about the King's supremacy was itself a denial of it. More was tried on July 1, 1535, before a panel that included Anne Boleyn's father, brother, and uncle. The decisive testimony came from Richard Rich, the solicitor general, who claimed More had privately rejected the King's title in conversation in the Tower. More insisted the testimony was perjured. The jury deliberated for about fifteen minutes and found him guilty. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered; the King, in what passed for mercy, commuted the sentence to beheading.More's case endures in the legal imagination because it sits at the fault line between law as an instrument of power and law as a limit on power. More was a formidable lawyer who tried to use the law's own rules—the presumption that silence is not a crime, the requirement of proof—to protect his conscience, and the state simply rewrote the rules and manufactured the proof. His famous last words, that he died “the King's good servant, but God's first,” draw the line between obedience to the state and obedience to something the state cannot command. Four centuries later, we still cite More when we argue about compelled speech, about the right to remain silent, about loyalty oaths, and about what a person owes a government that has turned the machinery of law against him. He is a patron saint of lawyers precisely because he lost—because his trial shows how thin the protection of law can be when those in power decide they would rather have a conviction than a fair one.A federal appeals court has ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot detain migrants for more than ninety days without giving them a chance to seek release at a bond hearing. In a 2-1 decision, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—one of the most conservative in the country—sided against the administration, a ruling that could affect thousands of people held in detention in states like Texas and Louisiana.When the government seeks to deport someone, that process can take months or even years, and in the meantime the government often detains the person. The legal question is whether the government can simply hold someone indefinitely while the case grinds on, or whether at some point that person is entitled to a hearing where a neutral decision-maker asks whether they actually need to be locked up—whether they're a flight risk or a danger, or whether they can safely be released on bond while they wait. The administration argued that certain migrants are subject to “mandatory detention” with no such hearing at all. The Fifth Circuit said that after ninety days, that position runs into constitutional trouble.Imagine being held in a jail cell for months, not because a judge decided you were dangerous, but because a statute was read to mean nobody ever has to ask the question. The core idea the court is protecting is an old one: the government generally cannot deprive a person of physical liberty without some individualized process, some moment where a human being reviews your particular case. A bond hearing is that moment. It doesn't guarantee release—it guarantees that someone with authority has to look at you and decide.The Department of Homeland Security said it disagreed with the ruling and remained confident in its legal position on mandatory detention, which signals a likely appeal, possibly to the Supreme Court. But for now, the decision draws a line: prolonged civil detention without any bond hearing is constitutionally suspect, and the length of confinement matters. The ruling is significant not only for the thousands of detainees it directly affects, but because it comes from a court that rarely rules against this administration—a reminder that even sympathetic judges have limits when the question is indefinite detention without a hearing.Appeals court bars mandatory detention for migrants past 90 days without bond hearing | Fox NewsCourt Blocks Immigration Detention Without HearingsThe Supreme Court has refused to hear Donald Trump's appeal seeking to overturn the jury verdict finding him liable for abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll. With the Court declining to take the case, the 2023 verdict and the roughly five-million-dollar judgment against him stand.In 2023, a civil jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a New York department store in the mid-1990s and later defamed her by branding her account a lie. He was ordered to pay her about five million dollars. Trump appealed and lost in the lower courts, then asked the Supreme Court to step in. Last week the Court denied that request. When the Supreme Court denies review—what lawyers call denying “certiorari”—it isn't endorsing the verdict or ruling on the merits. It's simply declining to hear the case, which leaves the lower court's decision in force. But the practical effect is the same as a loss: the judgment is final, and there are no more appeals to pursue.It helps to separate two things people often blur together. This is a civil case, not a criminal one. Carroll didn't send anyone to prison; she sued for money and for the harm to her reputation, and a jury of ordinary citizens weighed the evidence and believed her. The Supreme Court's role at this stage isn't to re-try the facts—juries find facts, and appellate courts generally don't second-guess them. The question the Court was asked was narrower and more legal, and the Court decided it wasn't worth their time to review.The significance here is partly about accountability and partly about the ordinariness of the outcome. A private citizen brought a claim, a jury sided with her, the appellate courts affirmed, and the highest court in the country let that stand—the system working exactly as it's supposed to, regardless of the defendant's power. It's also a marker of the limits of that power: the office does not come with a trapdoor out of a civil judgment. The verdict is now as final as verdicts get.Supreme Court rejects Trump effort to overturn E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse and defamation verdict | NBC NewsThe Supreme Court's next term, beginning in October, is already set to feature major cases involving gun rights, voting rules, LGBT rights, immigration detention, and corporate disputes. One of the highest-profile cases concerns whether states and local governments may ban assault-style rifles such as AR-15s, with challenges coming from Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois. Gun rights advocates argue that these weapons are commonly owned and protected by the Second Amendment, while government officials describe them as military-style firearms that pose serious public safety risks.The Court will also hear a voting rights dispute over Arizona rules that would impose stricter proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration and allow removal of suspected noncitizens from voter rolls. A lower court blocked parts of that law after finding that they conflicted with federal voter registration protections. Another case involves whether certain immigrants with criminal convictions can be held for long periods during deportation proceedings without receiving bond hearings. The Trump administration is asking the Court to uphold that detention policy, while a lower court found that prolonged detention without a hearing can violate due process. The Court will also consider a religious rights case from Colorado involving Catholic groups that want an exemption from nondiscrimination rules tied to a state preschool funding program. That case adds to the Court's ongoing disputes over how to balance religious liberty claims against LGBT anti-discrimination protections. The term will also include business-related cases involving ExxonMobil and Suncor, Apple and Epic Games, and PepsiCo.US Supreme Court to hear gun, LGBT, voting rights cases in next term | Reuters 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: Civil Rights Act of 1964On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. It was one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history, and it fundamentally transformed the legal landscape by banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public accommodations, employment, education, and programs receiving federal funding.The Civil Rights Act was the product of the Civil Rights Movement—years of courageous activism by Black Americans and their allies who marched, protested, and demanded that the law recognize their equal humanity and their constitutional rights. The movement included iconic figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, John Lewis, and countless others whose names we'll never know but whose courage changed America.The Act made it illegal for hotels, restaurants, theaters, and other public places to refuse service based on race. It made employment discrimination illegal. It empowered the federal government to withhold funding from schools and institutions that discriminated. It created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate and remedy workplace discrimination.Before the Civil Rights Act, the law itself endorsed discrimination. Southern states had explicit “Jim Crow” laws that required racial segregation. “Whites only” signs hung on businesses, schools, water fountains, and bathrooms. The law said Black Americans couldn't use the same facilities as white Americans. The Civil Rights Act said that's unconstitutional and illegal. It didn't end racism—racism persisted and persists today—but it transformed the law from a tool of discrimination into a tool of protection. The Act represented a moral and legal turning point. It affirmed that the Constitution's promise of equal protection applies to everyone, regardless of race. It showed that the law can change when people demand justice. It demonstrated that the Civil Rights Movement's sacrifice—the beatings, the arrests, the deaths, the long struggle—could actually transform American law and create a more just society.The Civil Rights Act remains one of the most important achievements in American legal history. Every civil rights protection we have today—protection against employment discrimination, housing discrimination, educational discrimination—traces back to that law signed on July 2, 1964. It's a reminder that legal change comes from struggle, from people willing to demand their rights, and from a government finally willing to recognize the dignity and equality of all its citizens.The Supreme Court's use of its “shadow docket”—an informal process for issuing emergency decisions with minimal explanation—has expanded dramatically, and the justices are sharply divided over whether this is appropriate.The Supreme Court has a formal process for cases: parties file briefs, the Court hears oral arguments, justices deliberate, and then the Court issues a written opinion explaining its reasoning. This is the public docket. But the Supreme Court also has an emergency process called the “shadow docket” for last-minute requests for emergency relief. For example, if someone is about to be executed and files an emergency request for a stay, the Court needs to decide quickly. Traditionally, the shadow docket was used only for these genuine emergencies. But in recent years, particularly under the current Supreme Court, the shadow docket has been used for major constitutional decisions. The Court will issue orders on the shadow docket with little or no explanation, effectively deciding important cases without full briefing, oral arguments, or written opinions.Imagine if a school made major policy changes through emergency procedures meant only for fire drills, without explaining the policy or letting people comment on it. That's what's happening with the Supreme Court's shadow docket. Conservative justices defend the practice, saying the Court needs flexibility to respond to emerging issues. Liberal justices are furious, arguing that major constitutional decisions require full briefing and transparent reasoning. They point out that decisions on the shadow docket often don't explain the Court's reasoning, making it impossible for lower courts to apply the law or for Americans to understand their constitutional rights. The shadow docket has been used for decisions affecting voting rights, abortion, immigration, and religious freedom—major constitutional questions that deserve full public deliberation.The shadow docket allows the Supreme Court to reshape constitutional law without public explanation or accountability. It enables the conservative majority to implement a constitutional agenda without transparent reasoning. It divides even the justices—a sign that this practice is controversial even at the highest level. The shadow docket represents a concerning shift toward less transparent, less democratic judicial decision-making on matters of profound constitutional importance.US Supreme Court supercharges its ‘shadow docket,' dividing the justices | ReutersThe Minnesota Attorney General has shut down its unit dedicated to reviewing and overturning wrongful convictions, citing budget constraints. The decision has shocked criminal justice advocates who view wrongful conviction review as a core function of government. Here's the context: Innocent people sometimes go to prison. Witnesses misidentify them. Evidence is planted or fabricated. Police coerce false confessions. Lawyers provide inadequate representation. DNA evidence may later prove innocence. Many states have created units—often within the Attorney General's office—dedicated to reviewing cases where there's evidence of wrongful conviction and seeking to overturn convictions when appropriate. These units have freed hundreds of innocent people from prison. In Minnesota, this unit reviewed cases, worked with innocence organizations, and petitioned courts to overturn convictions when evidence showed innocence. Now that unit is being shut down.If you discovered you had been wrongly convicted and imprisoned for a crime you didn't commit, you would want the government to help free you. You would want the justice system to correct its own mistakes. Wrongful conviction units exist to do exactly that—to correct serious errors in the criminal justice system. When the government shuts down its wrongful conviction unit, it's saying it will no longer systematically look for innocent people who have been wrongly imprisoned. Think of the human cost. People serving decades in prison for crimes they didn't commit may never have their convictions reviewed. Their appeals for help will go unanswered. The government agency that should be most interested in justice—the Attorney General—has decided it can't afford to help innocent prisoners.This decision signals a deprioritization of wrongful convictions and prisoner justice. It means innocent people will remain in prison because the state won't investigate their claims. It undermines public faith in the criminal justice system. It suggests that budget concerns are more important than freeing innocent people. Criminal justice advocates worry this is part of a broader pattern: reduced funding for public defenders, reduced funding for innocence organizations, and now elimination of the state's own wrongful conviction review unit. The decision raises a fundamental question: Do we actually care about justice, or do we only care about convictions?Minnesota attorney general shuts unit reviewing wrongful convictions, cites Trump funding cut | ReutersA federal judge has blocked the U.S. Postal Service from implementing restrictions that would have made mail-in voting more difficult. The ruling is a significant victory for voting rights advocates.The Postal Service proposed new restrictions on how mail-in ballots could be delivered. These restrictions would have required mail-in voters to meet stricter deadlines, reduced ballot processing times, and imposed other requirements that voting rights groups argued would disenfranchise voters, particularly voters in rural areas and voters with disabilities who rely on mail-in voting. Voting rights advocates sued, arguing that the restrictions would violate the right to vote. The federal judge agreed and blocked the restrictions.The right to vote is fundamental to democracy. Mail-in voting is a way many Americans exercise that right—people who are elderly, disabled, working on election day, or living in areas far from polling places depend on mail-in voting. When the government imposes restrictions that make mail-in voting harder, it's making it harder for people to vote. The Postal Service argued it needed to implement restrictions for operational reasons. The judge said operational concerns can't be used to interfere with voting rights. If the Postal Service needs to adjust its operations, it has to do so in ways that don't undermine the right to vote.This decision protects mail-in voting access at a time when voting rights are under increasing attack. It affirms that the right to vote can't be sacrificed for bureaucratic convenience. It signals that courts will step in if government agencies try to restrict voting access. As more Americans rely on mail-in voting, protecting mail-in voting access is essential to protecting voting rights. The decision reflects a judicial recognition that voting is a fundamental right and that restrictions on voting deserve strict scrutiny, not deference to government agencies.Judge blocks US Postal Service's proposed restrictions on mail-in voting | Reuters 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: Revenue Act of 1862On this day in legal history, July 1, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Revenue Act of 1862, one of the most important financing measures of the Civil War. The Union war effort required enormous amounts of money, and Congress could no longer rely only on tariffs, loans, and traditional sources of federal revenue. The act created the Office of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the direct predecessor of today's Internal Revenue Service.This new office gave the federal government an administrative structure for assessing and collecting taxes across the country. The law also expanded the federal government's role in the financial lives of ordinary Americans. It imposed a 3% tax on annual incomes between $600 and $10,000 and a 5% tax on incomes above $10,000. Although modest by modern standards, this was a major shift in American tax law because it treated income itself as a source of federal revenue.The act also included taxes on goods, licenses, businesses, and other transactions, helping create a broader national tax system. Its purpose was practical and urgent: to raise the money needed to preserve the Union. But its legal significance went beyond the battlefield. The Revenue Act of 1862 helped normalize the idea that the federal government could collect taxes directly from individuals. The Civil War income tax was later allowed to expire, but the machinery of federal tax administration had been built.Decades later, the Sixteenth Amendment would give Congress clearer constitutional authority to impose a national income tax. July 1, 1862, therefore marks a turning point in the legal history of federal taxation and the growth of national administrative power.The Supreme Court ruled that President Trump's executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship is invalid. In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court held that children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented or only temporarily present still meet the requirements of the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause. Roberts wrote that the Constitution makes those children citizens at birth because they are born on U.S. soil and are subject to U.S. law.The executive order, signed on January 20, 2025, never took effect because federal courts blocked it while lawsuits moved forward. Earlier, the Supreme Court had limited the power of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions, but the legal challenges to the order continued through class-based and case-specific proceedings.The Court's majority relied heavily on the history of birthright citizenship, including English common law, the purpose of the 14th Amendment after Dred Scott, and the 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Roberts rejected the administration's argument that citizenship should depend on whether a child's parents had permanent allegiance or domicile in the United States.Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that the order was invalid, but he based his reasoning on federal statute rather than the Constitution. Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented in different ways, arguing that the majority misread the 14th Amendment's history or failed to address important limits on birthright citizenship.Supreme Court strikes down Trump's order ending birthright citizenship | SCOTUSblogThe Supreme Court ruled that Idaho and West Virginia may enforce laws limiting girls' and women's school sports teams to athletes the states classify as biologically female. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the main opinion, saying the laws do not violate Title IX or the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.The Court was unanimous that the challenged laws do not violate Title IX, but the justices split over the constitutional issue, especially as applied to Becky Pepper-Jackson, the West Virginia student at the center of one case. Kavanaugh reasoned that Title IX permits schools to have separate teams based on sex and that, when the law was enacted, “sex” referred to biological sex. He also said states have important interests in safety and competitive fairness, and that courts should not be required to create individualized exceptions for athletes who have taken puberty blockers or hormones. The decision reversed lower-court rulings that had blocked Idaho and West Virginia from enforcing their bans.Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority and wrote separately to emphasize his view that sex is binary and biological. Justice Neil Gorsuch also wrote separately, focusing on the idea that Title IX, as a funding statute, must give schools clear notice of any conditions attached to federal money. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, agreed that West Virginia's law did not violate Title IX but dissented on the constitutional question. Sotomayor argued that the Court should have allowed more factual development on whether Pepper-Jackson, who had not gone through male puberty, was actually similarly situated to cisgender girls for athletic purposes.Court rules that states can exclude transgender athletes from girls' and women's sports teams | SCOTUSblogThe Supreme Court declined to hear Cathy Harris's appeal after lower courts allowed President Trump to remove her from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. Harris, a Democratic member and former chair of the board, had challenged her firing under a law that limited removal of board members to cases of inefficiency, neglect, or misconduct. The Court's refusal came one day after it ruled 6-3 that similar removal protections for Federal Trade Commission members were unconstitutional. Because Merit Systems Protection Board members had nearly identical protections, Harris's case was strongly affected by that new ruling.The same appeals court decision that rejected Harris's claim also upheld Trump's firing of Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board. The Merit Systems Protection Board is especially important because it hears appeals from federal employees who have been disciplined or fired. Harris warned that the decision weakens the board and threatens the independence of the civil service system. Her removal had temporarily left the three-member board without enough members to decide certain cases, though a later Senate confirmation restored a quorum. The ruling may also affect other lawsuits brought by officials Trump removed from independent agencies. More broadly, the decision gives the White House greater authority over agencies that were originally designed to have some protection from direct political control.After FTC ruling, US Supreme Court turns away labor board member fired by Trump | Reuters 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: 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