Episodi

  • The NAACP’s Suit Over xAI’s Turbines Survives, a Judicial Council Presses a Dallas Judge in a Fitness Inquiry & What Illinois’ Swipe-Fee Fight Teaches About Tech Regulation

    The NAACP’s Suit Over xAI’s Turbines Survives, a Judicial Council Presses a Dallas Judge in a Fitness Inquiry & What Illinois’ Swipe-Fee Fight Teaches About Tech Regulation
    Oct 22 2026
    This Day in Legal History: Moritz v. CommissionerOn October 22, 1970, the U.S. Tax Court denied a deduction claimed by Charles Moritz, a never-married man from Denver who worked as a book editor and paid a caregiver to look after his elderly mother so he could keep working. The tax code at the time allowed a deduction for those caregiving costs to women, widowers, divorced men, and men whose wives were incapacitated. A man who had never married didn’t qualify. Moritz, representing himself, argued that the rule was unfair. The Tax Court said the statute was clear and rejected his constitutional argument.The case came across the desk of Martin Ginsburg, a tax lawyer, who showed it to his wife, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a law professor at Rutgers. The Ginsburgs took the appeal together. In 1972, the Tenth Circuit ruled for Moritz, holding that denying the deduction based solely on sex violated equal protection. Their brief in Moritz became the template for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brief in Reed v. Reed, where the Supreme Court for the first time struck down a law for discriminating on the basis of sex.The significance of October 22, 1970 is that one of the most important lines of constitutional law in the twentieth century started with a small tax deduction and a self-represented taxpayer. As a tax professor, I’ll admit I love that. It’s a reminder that the tax code isn’t just about revenue; how it defines families, workers, and caregivers reflects and shapes who the law treats as equal.The administration has asked the Supreme Court to let it resume building border barriers across the Big Bend region of Texas. On October 2, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone halted construction across the roughly 500-mile Big Bend project area, along with the use of legal waivers for the project, while a lawsuit by environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, moves forward. Here’s the legal background. A 1996 law lets the Secretary of Homeland Security waive environmental and other laws to speed construction of barriers in areas of high illegal entry. Past administrations have used those waivers to bypass dozens of laws, and courts have generally upheld them. The challengers here argue the waiver authority doesn’t fit Big Bend, a remote, rugged region that includes a national park and has relatively few crossings. Judge Cardone found that construction on this scale required clear authorization from Congress, an argument related to the major questions doctrine, which says courts expect Congress to speak clearly before agencies take actions of vast economic or political significance. Solicitor General D. John Sauer called the injunction “baseless” and argued that the government’s border security interests outweigh what he described as aesthetic, recreational, and cultural harms. The administration also says leaving a gap in Big Bend could funnel crossings into the region once the rest of the border is walled off, and it says it won’t build a large wall inside the national park itself. Notably, the government is asking the Court not only for emergency relief but to effectively overrule the district judge’s decision now, without waiting for the case to work its way up. That’s an aggressive use of the emergency docket. It’s also a reversal of the usual pattern in which the major questions doctrine is used against the government’s regulatory programs. Here, the challengers are invoking it against an executive construction project.Trump asks US Supreme Court to allow Big Bend border wall construction | Reuters · CBS News · Marfa Public RadioStates are preparing to keep a close eye on the Justice Department’s election monitors. The department plans to send about 1,000 monitors to all 50 states on Election Day, roughly triple the number at the last midterm and the largest observation effort in its history. NPR reports the department has already notified counties including seven in Texas, King County in Washington, Miami-Dade in Florida, and Hennepin and Ramsey counties in Minnesota. Some states are responding by monitoring the monitors. In Minnesota’s August primary, about 40 state employees, working in pairs, followed Justice Department lawyers as they traveled through two counties. California has started a similar program. Several states have issued guidance to poll workers explaining the limits on federal observers’ authority. Here’s the legal framework. The Justice Department has sent election monitors for decades, mainly to enforce civil rights laws like the Voting Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act by watching for discrimination or inaccessible polling places. But monitors generally have no special legal right to enter polling places unless a court has ordered federal observers under the Voting Rights Act or the state allows it. Otherwise, access is governed by state law, and some state laws let election officials keep them outside. Monitors don...
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    8 min
  • The NAACP’s Suit Over xAI’s Turbines Survives, a Judicial Council Presses a Dallas Judge in a Fitness Inquiry & What Illinois’ Swipe-Fee Fight Teaches About Tech Regulation

    The NAACP’s Suit Over xAI’s Turbines Survives, a Judicial Council Presses a Dallas Judge in a Fitness Inquiry & What Illinois’ Swipe-Fee Fight Teaches About Tech Regulation
    Oct 21 2026
    This Day in Legal History: Abrams v. United StatesOn October 21, 1919, the Supreme Court heard argument in Abrams v. United States. Jacob Abrams and several other Russian immigrants had thrown leaflets from a Manhattan building criticizing American military intervention in Russia and calling for a general strike. They were convicted under the Sedition Act of 1918 and sentenced to as much as twenty years in prison. That November, the Court upheld their convictions, 7 to 2.The case is remembered for its dissent. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, joined by Justice Louis Brandeis, argued that the government may punish speech only when it presents a clear and imminent danger, not because it is unpopular or distasteful. He wrote that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” the line that gave us the phrase “the marketplace of ideas.” Earlier that same year, Holmes had written the Court’s opinion upholding a conviction in Schenck v. United States. In Abrams, he moved toward a much more protective view of speech.The significance of October 21, 1919 is that Holmes’s dissent became, over the following half century, the foundation of modern First Amendment law, culminating in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. It’s also a reminder that the idea of a market, where outcomes come from competition rather than decree, has shaped how American law thinks about speech as much as commerce. And today’s column is about what happens when the law tries to dictate how a market’s plumbing must work.A federal judge in Mississippi has refused to let the Environmental Protection Agency end a lawsuit the NAACP brought against Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, xAI. The NAACP and its Mississippi chapter allege that xAI and a subsidiary built and ran gas-fired turbines in Southaven, Mississippi, without the permits the Clean Air Act requires. Those turbines supply power to xAI’s Colossus 2 data center just across the state line in Memphis. Residents in the area, many in predominantly Black neighborhoods, have raised concerns about air pollution. The NAACP sued under the Clean Air Act’s citizen-suit provision, which lets private parties enforce the law when the government doesn’t. The Justice Department, on behalf of the EPA, moved to intervene and argued that the agency could dismiss the case because federal regulators have primary authority to enforce the statute. U.S. District Judge Debra Brown agreed the EPA could join the case but held it couldn’t end the case on its own. Here’s why that matters. Citizen suits exist precisely because Congress didn’t want enforcement of environmental laws to depend entirely on the government’s willingness to act. The statute gives the government a way to take the lead: it can preempt a citizen suit by diligently prosecuting its own enforcement action. But the court’s ruling means the government can’t simply step in and shut down a private suit while not enforcing the law itself. If the EPA could do that, the citizen-suit provision would offer little protection exactly when it’s most needed. The ruling doesn’t decide whether xAI violated the law. That’s still to come. But it ensures the community’s claims will be heard. It also follows a pattern we’ve seen this fall, from the grant-conditioning cases to the agency-dismantling cases: courts insisting that the government’s preferences don’t automatically override the procedures Congress put in place.US judge rejects Trump administration bid to block NAACP lawsuit against Musk’s xAI | Reuters · Earthjustice · Lawyer MonthlyNow a sensitive story about how the federal judiciary polices itself. U.S. District Judge Ada Brown of the Northern District of Texas, in Dallas, has been temporarily removed from hearing cases after a judicial investigation found a “reasonable basis” to conclude she may have a mental condition interfering with her ability to do her job. That’s not a medical diagnosis, and Judge Brown has rejected the suggestion. The investigation pointed to concerns about her workload: she had recused herself from more than 40 cases since June, and a recent report identified 78 undecided motions on her docket. On September 29, the Fifth Circuit’s judicial council reassigned her existing cases and barred her from receiving new ones for three months or until further notice. It also ordered her to undergo an independent psychiatric evaluation. Judge Brown has said she won’t participate further in the proceedings, and the council is now urging her to reengage. Here’s the legal framework. Federal judges have life tenure under Article III and can be removed only by impeachment. That protects judicial independence, but it also means there’s no ordinary way to handle a judge who can’t do the job. The Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 provides a limited process: a circuit’s judicial council can investigate...
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    8 min
  • Trump Threatens California Election Officials With Jail, Mahmoud Khalil Petitions the Supreme Court & HUD’s Fair Housing Overhaul Stays Blocked

    Trump Threatens California Election Officials With Jail, Mahmoud Khalil Petitions the Supreme Court & HUD’s Fair Housing Overhaul Stays Blocked
    Oct 20 2026
    This Day in Legal History: The Saturday Night MassacreOn the night of October 20, 1973, President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. Cox had refused to accept a compromise that would have given him summaries of the White House tapes instead of the tapes themselves. Richardson had promised the Senate during his confirmation that Cox would be independent, and he resigned rather than fire him. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to do it. Ruckelshaus also refused and resigned. Solicitor General Robert Bork, now acting attorney general, carried out the order.That night Cox issued the statement quoted at the top of today’s episode. The public reaction was immediate and enormous. Within days, Nixon agreed to turn over subpoenaed tapes, a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, was appointed with stronger protections, and the House began impeachment inquiries. A federal court later found that Cox’s firing had violated the Justice Department’s own regulations. Less than a year later, Nixon resigned.The significance of October 20, 1973 is the principle that the Justice Department’s power to investigate and prosecute is not supposed to be wielded as the President’s personal instrument, and that the officials who hold that power have duties to the law that can require them to refuse. That principle is very much at issue in our first story today.The President has threatened California election officials with prison over how they handle mail ballots. Here’s the sequence. Days ago, the Justice Department gave California 48 hours to review a list of roughly 20,000 voters the administration says are probably noncitizens, or face legal action. Los Angeles County said it couldn’t comply because the administration hadn’t explained how the list was made. The Justice Department then sent a letter, signed by acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, warning county officials that if they count mail ballots from people on that list, they could be liable as “abettors” of a federal crime. The President posted the letter on social media and wrote that the officials “will all go to jail for a long period of time.” The Justice Department has also sued California to block the state from counting those ballots. California’s secretary of state said the administration’s efforts to access voter data and purge rolls “serve only to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections.” There are several serious legal problems with the threat. First, the accuracy of the list. We covered last month how the federal SAVE database has wrongly flagged real citizens, including findings in one Texas county that 10 to 21 percent of those flagged were citizens. Election officials who reject ballots based on an unexplained list risk disenfranchising eligible voters, which can itself violate federal and state law. Second, aiding-and-abetting liability requires intent to help someone commit a crime. An official following state procedures for verifying and counting ballots isn’t acting with that intent. Third, federal law limits systematic voter-roll removals in the 90 days before a federal election, precisely to prevent last-minute purges. Fourth, recall that a federal judge in Miami ruled earlier this month that the federal law criminalizing noncitizen voting is unconstitutional, though that ruling binds only that case. And finally, there’s the question raised by today’s legal-history segment: when the President publicly promises prison for specific officials, it becomes harder to see a prosecution as an independent decision by the Justice Department rather than a political one.Trump threatens California officials with imprisonment over stance on mail ballots | Reuters · Newsweek · The Business StandardMahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist and former Columbia University graduate student, has asked the Supreme Court to hear his case. Immigration authorities arrested Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, in March 2025 over his pro-Palestinian activism. A federal judge in New Jersey later ordered him released, finding he had a strong claim that he was being detained to punish his speech. This year, the Third Circuit reversed 2 to 1, holding that federal immigration law stripped the district court of jurisdiction to order his release, and that challenges like his must go through the immigration courts first, with review later in the court of appeals. Khalil’s petition argues that federal courts have always had the power to hear a claim that the executive is detaining someone unconstitutionally, and to order that person freed. That’s the writ of habeas corpus, which the Constitution says can’t be suspended except in cases of rebellion or invasion. His lawyers argue that if immigration law can route these claims away from district courts, then someone can be locked up for months for ...
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    8 min
  • A Cyberattack Halts Bankruptcy Court Notices, a Judge Won’t Let the CFTC Undo Its Gemini Deal & Tesla Defeats Self-Driving Class Actions

    A Cyberattack Halts Bankruptcy Court Notices, a Judge Won’t Let the CFTC Undo Its Gemini Deal & Tesla Defeats Self-Driving Class Actions
    Oct 19 2026
    This Day in Legal History: Black MondayOn October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 508 points, or 22.6 percent, in a single day. It is still the largest one-day percentage drop in the index’s history. Markets around the world fell with it. Trading systems were overwhelmed, order books backed up, and for hours many investors had no way to know what prices they were actually getting.The legal and regulatory response shaped the markets we have today. A presidential task force known as the Brady Commission found that the stock market and the futures market, regulated by two different agencies, the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, had acted as one market during the crash but were overseen as two. Computer-driven trading strategies in one had fed selling in the other. Among the reforms that followed were “circuit breakers,” coordinated trading halts that pause markets when prices fall too far too fast, along with closer coordination between the SEC and the CFTC.The significance of October 19, 1987 is the idea that market regulation has to match how markets actually work, and that fragmented oversight can fail when stress hits. The CFTC, which grew in importance after the crash, is in our second story today, which is about whether a regulator can simply change its mind about a case it already settled.A cybersecurity incident has halted the system that sends out notices for every federal bankruptcy court in the country. The federal judiciary disclosed the incident Thursday. It affects the Bankruptcy Noticing Center, which produces and mails or emails the official notices in bankruptcy cases, along with its website and the National Creditor Registration Service. The system is run for the judiciary by BAE Systems Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of the British defense contractor. BAE says the incident is isolated to that system and that it has taken immediate steps to address it. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts is coordinating with the affected courts. There’s no announced restoration date, and the reports so far don’t say what caused the incident or whether any data was accessed. Here’s why this matters more than it might sound. Bankruptcy runs on notice. When a debtor files, creditors must be told so they can file claims, object, and attend the meeting of creditors. The automatic stay that stops collection efforts, the deadlines to object to a discharge, and the bar dates for filing claims all depend on people receiving proper notice. Due process requires notice reasonably calculated to reach the people whose rights are affected; that’s the core holding of the Supreme Court’s 1950 decision in Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank. If notices aren’t going out, deadlines may need to be extended, and orders entered without proper notice could later be challenged. There’s also a privacy dimension. Bankruptcy filings contain sensitive personal and financial information, so if data was exposed, the harm could go beyond delay. This is the second time in recent weeks we’ve covered a cyber incident hitting the legal system, after the breaches at Quinn Emanuel and McDermott. Courts, like law firms, are attractive targets, and increasingly depend on outside contractors to keep critical systems running.US federal bankruptcy court operations disrupted by cybersecurity incident | Reuters · U.S. Courts · Law.comA federal judge in Manhattan has refused to undo a settlement that both sides now want to erase. In January 2025, the crypto exchange Gemini agreed to pay $5 million to settle a Commodity Futures Trading Commission lawsuit alleging it made misleading statements to the agency about a bitcoin futures product. In May of this year, after an internal review, the CFTC concluded the case should never have been brought, and the agency and Gemini jointly asked the court to vacate the settlement. U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein said no. He held that the CFTC’s change of position wasn’t enough to undo a final judgment, and he rejected Gemini’s argument that regulators had pressured it into settling, noting that Gemini fought the case for more than three years before agreeing to it. So the penalty stays paid, and the permanent injunction barring Gemini from making false or misleading statements to the CFTC remains in place. Here’s the legal principle. A court-approved settlement becomes a judgment of the court, and the federal rules allow a judgment to be reopened only for specific reasons, like fraud, mistake, newly discovered evidence, or significantly changed circumstances, and courts apply those exceptions narrowly. The reason is finality. If a judgment could be wiped out whenever an agency’s leadership or priorities change, no settlement with the government would be reliable, and every new administration could revisit its predecessor’s cases. That’s the idea behind the Latin maxim in today’s opening quote: there must be an end to litigation. It...
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    8 min
  • SCOTUS Again Backs Republicans on Political Ad Rates, a Judge Lets the Contractor DEI Order Stand & Eight States Sue OpenAI Over ChatGPT and Kids

    SCOTUS Again Backs Republicans on Political Ad Rates, a Judge Lets the Contractor DEI Order Stand & Eight States Sue OpenAI Over ChatGPT and Kids
    Oct 15 2026
    This Day in Legal History: The Clayton Antitrust ActOn October 15, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Clayton Antitrust Act. The Sherman Act of 1890 had banned contracts in restraint of trade and monopolization, but in broad language that left courts to decide case by case what was illegal. Clayton filled in specifics. It prohibited price discrimination that would substantially lessen competition, exclusive-dealing and tying arrangements with the same effect, interlocking boards of directors among competitors, and mergers whose effect “may be substantially to lessen competition.” That last provision, Section 7, is still the main federal merger law today. The Federal Trade Commission was created the same year to help enforce it.Clayton also took on a problem the Sherman Act had created for workers. Courts had used the Sherman Act against labor unions, treating strikes and boycotts as illegal combinations in restraint of trade. Clayton declared that “the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce,” the line in today’s opening quote, and tried to shield ordinary union activity from antitrust suits and injunctions. Courts read those protections narrowly for years, and it took later laws, like the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, to make them work.The significance of October 15, 1914 is that it established a lasting principle of American regulation: that some sellers can’t charge different prices to different customers when it distorts competition. Our first story today is about a very different pricing rule, one that requires broadcasters to give political candidates their lowest ad rates, and about who else gets to claim that discount.The Supreme Court has sided with Republicans for the second time in a fight over discounted TV ad rates. Federal law requires broadcasters to sell political candidates airtime at the “lowest unit charge,” the same discounted rate a station gives its best commercial advertisers, in the weeks before an election. In March, the Federal Communications Commission, which has a 2-to-1 Republican majority, changed its guidance to extend that discount to party committees, not just candidates. Republican committees, which have a cash advantage this cycle, stand to benefit most. Democrats challenged the change. The Fourth Circuit had ordered the FCC to rule on the Democratic challenge before the November 3 election, which would have let the courts decide the question quickly. In an unsigned order Wednesday, the Supreme Court paused that deadline, accepting the FCC’s argument that it would suffer “irreparable harm” otherwise. Justices Sotomayor and Jackson would have denied the request. In September, the Court had already ruled the challenge was premature. The practical effect is that the dispute is frozen until after the election, and in the meantime the FCC’s guidance stays in place. One complication: according to NBC News, some broadcasters have already been declining to give committees the discounted rate, because they’re unsure the guidance is lawful. So committees may not actually get the discount everywhere, but they also won’t get a ruling to settle it before voters go to the polls. This fits a broader pattern of Supreme Court decisions this year expanding what political parties can do. In June, the Court’s conservative majority struck down longstanding limits on how much parties can coordinate spending with their candidates. Discounted airtime for party committees makes that coordinated spending go further. As with the voting cases we’ve covered all fall, the timing of a court’s decision can matter as much as what it decides.US Supreme Court again backs Republicans in clash over political ad rates | Reuters · Roll Call · NBC NewsA federal judge in Baltimore has declined to block the President’s executive order targeting diversity programs at federal contractors. The order, issued in March, requires contractors to disavow “racially discriminatory DEI activities” and certify in writing that they comply. Contractors that don’t comply can lose contracts and be investigated under the False Claims Act, which brings the risk of triple damages. Groups representing university faculty and minority business owners sued, arguing that the order effectively treats all diversity efforts as illegal discrimination and chills protected speech. U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson disagreed with that reading. He held that the order “only prohibits contractors from engaging in conduct that is already prohibited by federal law,” namely intentional discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity, and so the challengers hadn’t shown it was too broad. Here’s what’s interesting about the ruling: both sides can find something to like in it. The administration keeps its order in place. But the plaintiffs’ lawyers at Democracy Forward pointed out that the judge’s reasoning makes clear the order doesn’t broadly prohibit ...
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    8 min
  • Qualcomm Beats Arm but Wins $2, Anthropic Asks the Full D.C. Circuit to Rehear Its Pentagon Case & CVS Pays $315M Over Opioid Prescriptions

    Qualcomm Beats Arm but Wins $2, Anthropic Asks the Full D.C. Circuit to Rehear Its Pentagon Case & CVS Pays $315M Over Opioid Prescriptions
    Oct 14 2026
    This Day in Legal History: The Death of the Great DissenterOn October 14, 1911, Justice John Marshall Harlan died after nearly 34 years on the Supreme Court. Harlan was an unlikely civil rights hero. He was a Kentuckian from a slaveholding family who had opposed the Thirteenth Amendment before the war’s aftermath changed his views. On the Court, he became known as the “Great Dissenter” for standing alone, again and again, against the majority’s narrowing of the Reconstruction Amendments.His most famous dissent came in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, when the Court upheld Louisiana’s law segregating railroad cars under the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Harlan was the only justice to disagree. He wrote that the Constitution is “color-blind” and “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” and he predicted the decision would prove as harmful as Dred Scott. Thirteen years earlier, in the Civil Rights Cases, he had also dissented alone when the Court struck down the federal ban on racial discrimination in public accommodations.The significance of October 14, 1911 is what happened to Harlan’s dissents after his death. Brown v. Board of Education rejected Plessy in 1954, and Congress revived the public-accommodations protections in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dissents don’t decide the case in front of the court, but they can shape the law that comes after. That’s worth keeping in mind for our second story, where a 2-1 appellate decision with a dissent is now headed toward review by the full court.A federal jury in Delaware found that chip-design company Arm breached its license agreement with Qualcomm and intentionally interfered with Qualcomm’s business relationship with Meta. Then it awarded Qualcomm nominal damages of $2. Both companies are claiming victory. Qualcomm says the jury found Arm failed to honor its commitments and acted to disrupt its business. Arm says the jury ruled for it on four separate claims and awarded only a dollar on each of the two claims Qualcomm won, which it says shows Arm acted in good faith. Some background: Arm licenses the instruction-set architecture that most of the world’s smartphone chips are built on. Qualcomm holds an architectural license, which lets it design its own custom processors around Arm’s architecture. These companies have been fighting for years. In the first trial, two years ago, a jury rejected Arm’s claim that Qualcomm breached its license after acquiring the chip startup Nuvia. This second trial was Qualcomm’s case against Arm. The legal point worth explaining is nominal damages. In contract law, proving a breach doesn’t automatically get you money. You also have to prove that the breach caused you a measurable loss, and how big that loss was. When a jury finds that a breach happened but the plaintiff didn’t prove actual damages, it can award a token amount, often a dollar, to recognize that the plaintiff’s rights were violated. So a $2 verdict tells you the jury believed Arm did something wrong but wasn’t persuaded Qualcomm proved it lost money as a result. A finding of liability can still matter: it may support other relief like an injunction, affect leverage in licensing negotiations, and help in future disputes between the same parties. But as a matter of damages, Qualcomm won the argument and lost the payout. The markets agreed it was close to a draw: Arm shares slipped about one percent, and Qualcomm’s rose about the same.Qualcomm says jury found Arm breached license agreement | Reuters · CNBC · Yahoo FinanceThe AI company Anthropic has asked the full D.C. Circuit to rehear its challenge to the Pentagon’s decision to label it a “supply chain risk.” That designation bars the Defense Department and its contractors from using Anthropic’s Claude models for Pentagon work. The fight began in February, when the President ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology, and the Defense Secretary made the formal designation in March. Anthropic has said the blacklisting has cost it billions of dollars in lost business. In September, a three-judge D.C. Circuit panel upheld the designation, 2 to 1. The majority said the Pentagon acted reasonably after Anthropic refused to allow its AI to be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance, and it rejected Anthropic’s claim that the designation was retaliation for the company’s public views on AI safety. Anthropic is now asking for rehearing en banc, meaning by all the active judges on the court rather than the three-judge panel. Its argument is that the panel turned a law aimed at hostile foreign actors into one that “presumptively reaches every government contractor,” and that the Pentagon acted with no process before the designation despite strong evidence of retaliation for speech. There are two important questions here. One is statutory: how broadly the government’s supply-chain-risk authority reaches, and whether...
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    8 min
  • Federal Agents Search Ilhan Omar’s Home, a Judge Is “Furious” Over Felled Trees at a D.C. Golf Course & Protecting Trump Accounts From Fraud

    Federal Agents Search Ilhan Omar’s Home, a Judge Is “Furious” Over Felled Trees at a D.C. Golf Course & Protecting Trump Accounts From Fraud
    Oct 13 2026
    This Day in Legal History: In re TurnerOn October 13, 1867, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, sitting as a circuit judge in Baltimore, decided In re Turner. Maryland had abolished slavery in its 1864 constitution, but former enslavers quickly found a workaround: a state apprenticeship law that let courts bind Black children to white employers, often their former masters, without their parents’ consent. White children could not be bound under the same terms. Elizabeth Turner was one of those children, and with help from the Freedmen’s Bureau, her case came before Chase on a petition for habeas corpus.Chase ordered her released. He held that the arrangement was involuntary servitude prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment, and that the law’s racial distinctions violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed all citizens the equal benefit of the laws. In a now famous line, he declared that Black Americans were citizens of the United States on the same footing as white Americans. Within a year, the vast majority of Black child apprentices in Maryland had been released, although some state courts kept applying the voided law for several more years.The significance of October 13, 1867 is the idea that citizenship is not something the government can treat differently depending on who you are, and that federal courts will step in when a state uses ordinary-looking legal machinery to undo constitutional rights. Questions about citizenship, and about how the government treats people it views as political adversaries, are at the center of our first story today.Federal agents searched Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home in Washington early Monday. Homeland Security Investigations, the criminal investigations arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, executed a court-authorized search warrant obtained by the Justice Department, which said the search was part of an ongoing criminal investigation. According to sources cited in the reporting, the investigation concerns immigration paperwork filled out by Omar’s late father when she was a child, after the family came to the United States from Somalia. Omar is a naturalized U.S. citizen. This was not a deportation action. Her office called the search “an outrageous abuse of power” and an escalation in the “weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies,” and said she has done nothing wrong. House Democratic leaders called it “deeply disturbing.” The President said he had nothing to do with it, but that officials were looking “very carefully” at Omar. A few legal points. First, a search warrant means a federal judge found probable cause to believe evidence of a crime would be found at the location. That’s a real threshold, but it’s a low one, and it isn’t a finding that anyone is guilty. No charges have been reported. Second, if the investigation centers on paperwork prepared by her father when she was a child, there are serious questions about intent and about the statute of limitations for decades-old filings. The Supreme Court held in Maslenjak v. United States in 2017 that the government can’t strip someone’s citizenship over a false statement in the naturalization process unless the falsehood actually mattered to the decision to grant citizenship. Third, the timing is unusual. Justice Department policy has long discouraged overt investigative steps against a candidate close to an election, to avoid influencing the outcome. Taking this step against a sitting member of Congress less than a month before voting will draw scrutiny regardless of what the evidence shows.US launches immigration raid on Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s home, Fox News reports | Reuters · CBS News · AxiosA federal judge in Washington sharply rebuked Justice Department lawyers after crews cut down hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Links, a century-old public golf course on federal land managed by the National Park Service. The President announced plans last year to overhaul the course, and the Interior Department says the work will restore its historic character and open up views of nearby monuments. The DC Preservation League sued in February, arguing the project violates environmental and preservation laws. Back in May, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes had required the government to give advance notice of any substantive construction work. Then, over a weekend, crews felled roughly 430 to 500 trees, depending on the report, without notifying the preservation group. At a hearing Monday, the judge said she was “furious” and called the removal “inexcusable.” She asked the government’s lawyers, “On what universe did anyone in your office think this was acceptable?” She said the failure to give notice had “cost the government all of its credibility” in the case. She temporarily halted all tree cutting, including routine maintenance, and said she wants sworn testimony from an Interior Department deputy chief of staff ...
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    8 min
  • DOJ Opens an Antitrust Probe of TV Networks Over Pool Coverage, Lisa Cook Faces a White House Hearing & a Judge Tosses an AI-Drafted Complaint

    DOJ Opens an Antitrust Probe of TV Networks Over Pool Coverage, Lisa Cook Faces a White House Hearing & a Judge Tosses an AI-Drafted Complaint
    Oct 12 2026
    This Day in Legal History: The Alex Jones VerdictOn October 12, 2022, a jury in Waterbury, Connecticut, ordered Alex Jones and his company to pay about $965 million to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and to an FBI agent who responded that day. For years, Jones had told his audience the massacre, in which 20 children and six educators were killed, was a hoax staged by “crisis actors.” His followers harassed and threatened grieving parents, some of whom had to move repeatedly to escape them. The judge later added hundreds of millions more in punitive damages and fees.Jones had already lost the case on liability. The court entered a default judgment against him because he repeatedly failed to turn over evidence, so the jury’s job was to decide damages. The verdict, together with an earlier Texas award, became one of the largest defamation judgments in American history, and Jones’s media company later went through bankruptcy.The significance of October 12, 2022 is a reminder of where the First Amendment’s protection ends. American law protects an enormous range of speech, including harsh, offensive, and mistaken speech about public matters. It does not protect knowingly false statements of fact that destroy private people’s reputations. That boundary, between what the government and the courts can’t touch and what they can, is at the center of our first story today, about whether the government can use antitrust law to second-guess how news organizations decided to cover the President.The Justice Department is investigating whether five TV networks, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News, violated antitrust law when they briefly stopped providing shared “pool” coverage of the President. The New York Times first reported the investigation. Here’s the background. On September 19, the White House barred reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico over their coverage, a ban we’ve followed closely. In response, the networks that rotate responsibility for the White House TV pool, the shared camera crew whose footage all outlets can use, suspended pool coverage for several days. They resumed after a federal judge temporarily blocked the ban. Now the Antitrust Division has demanded the networks’ communications about the pool. A Justice Department spokesperson said the networks “proudly boycotted” covering White House events and that group boycotts by commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act. Here’s the legal problem with that theory. It’s true that competitors agreeing not to deal with someone can be an antitrust violation. But the Supreme Court has drawn a line between economic boycotts and boycotts that are a form of expression. In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware in 1982, the Court held that a boycott aimed at political and social goals is protected by the First Amendment. The networks’ decision about whether and how to cover an event is an editorial judgment, which is about as protected as speech gets. And the pool exists because the White House limits access; it’s a cooperative arrangement for gathering news, not a scheme to fix prices or divide markets. One leading First Amendment group called the investigation “nonsensical.” There’s also the context: the Justice Department is defending the press ban in court, and Trump ally Laura Loomer publicly urged an antitrust challenge two weeks ago. Coming alongside subpoenas to Times reporters and the seizure of a Washington Post reporter’s laptop, critics see this as using enforcement power to pressure the press. The investigation is at an early stage, and no charges have been brought.Justice Department probes TV networks over Trump pool coverage, New York Times reports | Reuters · CBS News · CNNFederal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook’s lawyers say a White House hearing on whether she can be removed will show she committed no mortgage fraud, if the hearing is anything close to objective. The President first tried to fire Cook in August 2025, claiming she made misrepresentations on mortgage documents before she joined the Fed. She has denied wrongdoing, arguing the apparent discrepancies were either accurate at the time or inadvertent, and that she disclosed the relevant facts to her lenders. In June, the Supreme Court ruled she could keep serving while her challenge proceeds, without deciding whether the allegations are true. Now the President has created a three-person “committee of inquiry” to hold a hearing at the White House on November 5. Cook can submit a written statement beforehand, the committee can question her or let Justice Department lawyers do so, and it will then report to the President whether there’s legal cause to remove her. Here’s why the process matters. The Federal Reserve Act says governors can be removed only “for cause.” That protection is what keeps monetary policy insulated from day-to-day political pressure, and courts have generally read “for ...
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    8 min