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  • The EEOC Fights to Keep Its Law-Firm DEI Records Secret, Disney Takes On the FCC & What Sen. Kelly's AI Tax Bill Would Actually Tax

    The EEOC Fights to Keep Its Law-Firm DEI Records Secret, Disney Takes On the FCC & What Sen. Kelly's AI Tax Bill Would Actually Tax
    2026/10/07
    This Day in Legal History: The Stamp Act CongressOn October 7, 1765, twenty-seven delegates from nine of the thirteen American colonies met in New York City for what became known as the Stamp Act Congress. Parliament had passed the Stamp Act that spring, requiring colonists to buy stamped paper for newspapers, legal documents, licenses, and even playing cards. It was the first direct tax Parliament had imposed on the colonies, and the colonies responded with their first organized, intercolonial political meeting.On October 19, the delegates adopted the Declaration of Rights and Grievances. Its argument was legal, not just political. The colonists claimed the rights of Englishmen, including the principle that they could be taxed only by their own representatives. Because they had no representatives in Parliament, they argued, only their colonial assemblies could tax them. The declaration also objected to the use of admiralty courts, which sat without juries, to enforce the act, insisting that trial by jury was a right of every British subject.The significance of October 7, 1765 is that it put the connection between a tax and its legitimacy at the center of American political thought. “No taxation without representation” is about who gets to impose a tax. My column today is about a related question that comes up every time a legislature designs a new tax: what exactly is being taxed, and does the thing being measured have anything to do with the reason for the tax?The administration is asking a federal court to let the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission keep secret the records of its investigation last year into diversity practices at major law firms. Some background. In March 2025, the EEOC’s then-acting chair, Andrea Lucas, sent letters to 20 of the country’s largest firms, including Skadden, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, Debevoise, and Hogan Lovells, warning that their diversity and inclusion policies might violate Title VII. By April, the EEOC announced agreements with four firms: Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Simpson Thacher, and A&O Shearman. It never disclosed the terms. Those four were among nine firms that together pledged nearly $1 billion in free legal work for causes the White House supports. Public Citizen and two law professors sued for the records. In a filing on Monday, the government said the EEOC can neither confirm nor deny whether any of the firms received a formal charge of discrimination. The legal basis is real. Title VII prohibits the EEOC from making charges of discrimination public and restricts disclosure of information it gathers in investigations, and federal records law lets agencies withhold information that another statute protects. Those confidentiality rules exist so that employers and workers can cooperate with investigations without public exposure. The tension is that this wasn’t a routine investigation of one employer. It was a public campaign by a federal agency against an entire sector of the legal profession, announced in press releases and resolved with agreements whose terms are still unknown. The challengers argue the public is entitled to know what the government demanded and what firms agreed to, especially when the result was hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono commitments to the administration’s priorities. The court will have to decide whether a confidentiality rule designed for individual discrimination charges can shield the details of a campaign aimed at an entire profession.US seeks to keep law firm DEI probe records secret | Reuters · Hoodline · HCAMagA federal judge in Washington held a two-hour hearing on Disney’s request to block the Federal Communications Commission’s early review of the broadcast licenses for ABC’s eight owned-and-operated TV stations. Earlier this year, FCC Chair Brendan Carr ordered those stations to file license-renewal applications years ahead of schedule. They weren’t due until October 2028 at the earliest. Disney and ABC sued in August, calling the move an “extraordinary assault on free speech” and alleging the agency was trying to punish the network for refusing to bend to White House pressure. At the hearing, Disney’s lawyer said the government is seeking to censor and control ABC’s broadcasts. U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan didn’t rule. She asked for more written arguments, from the government by October 9 and from Disney by October 14, so a decision isn’t likely before mid-October. Here’s the legal setup. Broadcasters operate under federal licenses, and the FCC renews them based on whether a station serves the “public interest.” That standard gives the agency real authority, and the Supreme Court has long allowed more regulation of broadcasting than of print or the internet because the airwaves are a limited public resource. But the First Amendment still applies. The FCC can’t use its licensing power to punish a broadcaster for the content of its news coverage ...
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    8 分
  • SCOTUS Opens Its Term With Boulder's Climate Case, the Harvard Funding Fight Hits the First Circuit & Poland Charges Google Over Publisher Payments

    SCOTUS Opens Its Term With Boulder's Climate Case, the Harvard Funding Fight Hits the First Circuit & Poland Charges Google Over Publisher Payments
    2026/10/05
    This Day in Legal History: Earl Warren Takes the Center ChairOn October 5, 1953, which was the first Monday in October and the opening day of the Supreme Court’s term, Earl Warren was sworn in as the 14th Chief Justice of the United States. Chief Justice Fred Vinson had died of a heart attack less than a month earlier. To make sure the Court opened its term with a full bench, President Eisenhower gave Warren, then governor of California, a recess appointment. Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon attended the ceremony. The Senate confirmed Warren the following March, and he took the oath again.The timing mattered. Brown v. Board of Education had already been argued once and was set for reargument that term. Warren spent months building a unanimous Court, and in May 1954 he delivered the opinion holding that racially segregated public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause. Over the next sixteen years, the Warren Court reshaped American law: one person, one vote in the reapportionment cases; the right to counsel in Gideon v. Wainwright; the Miranda warnings; and major expansions of free speech and the rights of criminal defendants.The significance of October 5, 1953 is a reminder of how much depends on who sits on the Court when a term opens. A recess appointment made to fill a seat for opening day put in the center chair the justice who would lead one of the most consequential eras in the Court’s history. And today, exactly 73 years later, is again the first Monday in October, with the Court opening a new term and hearing its first case: our lead story.The Supreme Court opens its new term today by hearing arguments in one of the most important climate cases it has taken up: Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. In 2018, the city and county of Boulder sued Suncor and ExxonMobil in Colorado state court under state law, alleging that the companies deceived the public about the role of their products in climate change and seeking compensation for local harms like wildfire, heat, and flooding costs. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled 5 to 2 last year that the case could go forward. The oil companies’ argument is preemption. They say that climate change is caused by greenhouse gas emissions from every country on earth, that the Clean Air Act and the federal structure govern interstate and international air pollution, and that a single state can’t use its own tort law to effectively regulate a global problem or impose liability for emissions far outside its borders. Boulder’s answer is that it isn’t regulating emissions at all. It’s suing over deception, a classic state-law claim, and nothing in federal law clearly displaces that. The Court also asked the parties to address threshold questions about whether it has jurisdiction to hear the case at this stage. Two things raise the stakes. First, nearly 60 similar suits by states and cities around the country turn on how the Court resolves this question. A broad ruling for the companies could end most of them; a ruling for Boulder would send them toward trial. Second, as we covered last week, Justice Alito has recused himself, so only eight justices are sitting. If they split 4 to 4, the Colorado ruling would stand, but without setting any national precedent, and the same fight would return in another case. A decision is expected by mid-2027.US Supreme Court weighs bid by oil companies to avoid climate lawsuit | Reuters · Earthjustice · Harvard Environmental & Energy Law ProgramThe administration is asking the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston to revive its effort to terminate roughly $2.2 billion in federal research grants to Harvard University. The background: in April 2025, the administration sent Harvard a list of demands, including ending its diversity programs and bringing in outside auditors to monitor academic departments for “viewpoint diversity.” Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, refused, saying no government should dictate what private universities can teach. Within hours, the administration froze Harvard’s grants, citing the university’s alleged failure to address harassment of Jewish students, and it eventually terminated them. A federal district judge ruled for Harvard in an 84-page decision, finding that the administration used antisemitism as “a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault” on the country’s leading universities. That’s a First Amendment retaliation finding: the government can’t cut off a benefit to punish someone for protected speech or for refusing to give up academic independence. On appeal, the Justice Department makes two kinds of arguments. On the merits, it says the government isn’t required to keep funding universities that show “deliberate indifference” to antisemitism. It also argues the case was in the wrong court entirely. Under the Tucker Act, contract claims seeking money from the federal government belong in the Court of Federal ...
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    7 分
  • Tennessee Calls Its Failed Execution a "Tragedy," a Judge Strikes Down the Federal Noncitizen-Voting Crime & New Mexico Seeks Up to $40B From Meta

    Tennessee Calls Its Failed Execution a "Tragedy," a Judge Strikes Down the Federal Noncitizen-Voting Crime & New Mexico Seeks Up to $40B From Meta
    2026/10/02
    This Day in Legal History: Thurgood Marshall Joins the CourtOn October 2, 1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren swore in Thurgood Marshall as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, the first Black justice in the Court’s history. President Lyndon Johnson had nominated him to replace Justice Tom Clark, and the Senate confirmed him that August by a vote of 69 to 11.Marshall arrived at the Court having already changed it from the other side of the bench. As chief counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29 of them, including Brown v. Board of Education. He had also served as a federal appeals judge and as Solicitor General. Few justices have come to the Court with a record of argument that shaped as much of the law they were about to apply.In nearly 24 years on the Court, Marshall was a consistent voice for equal protection and for the rights of criminal defendants. He was also among the Court’s most persistent opponents of capital punishment. In Furman v. Georgia in 1972 he concluded the death penalty was unconstitutional in all circumstances, and after the Court allowed executions to resume he dissented from death sentences for the rest of his tenure. That position is worth recalling today, because our first story is about what happens when the state’s attempt to carry out a death sentence fails.We have an update on the story we covered yesterday. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has called the failed execution of Christa Pike “a tragedy,” saying no one wanted it to happen and that it was “deeply disturbing” that it happened in his state. As a reminder, Pike was convicted of the 1995 murder of a fellow Job Corps student, committed when Pike was 18. On Wednesday night, after the Supreme Court lifted a last-minute stay, officials administered two doses of pentobarbital. She lost consciousness but kept a steady heartbeat, and she was taken to a hospital for emergency treatment. Lee has suspended the remaining execution scheduled for this year and ordered a third-party review. The new detail is that, according to reporting from JURIST and the Washington Post, this is the second botched execution in Tennessee this year. That matters legally. Under Baze v. Rees and Glossip v. Gross, an inmate challenging an execution method generally has to show a substantial risk of severe pain and identify a feasible alternative. Courts have often treated a single mishap as an isolated accident that doesn’t prove the method is unconstitutional. Two failures in one year is harder to call isolated, and it gives lawyers for other death-row prisoners evidence that the state’s protocol itself is unreliable.Tennessee has been here before: in 2022, Governor Lee paused executions after the state was found not to have properly tested its lethal-injection drugs. For Pike herself, the hardest question remains whether the state may try again. The 1947 case of Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber allowed a second attempt after a failed electrocution, but that was a narrow, divided decision from a very different era. Pike’s lawyers will argue a second attempt would be cruel and unusual, and they’ll keep pressing the claim that evidence of her childhood abuse was never properly considered at sentencing. Expect the third-party review, and whatever it finds about the drugs and procedures, to be central evidence in that litigation.Tennessee governor calls failed Christa Pike execution a ‘tragedy’ | Reuters · JURIST · Washington PostA federal judge in Miami has held that the 1996 federal law making it a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections is unconstitutional. Two weeks ago we covered the novel defense strategy behind this: several noncitizens charged under the law argued that Congress never had the power to pass it. At that point one Miami judge had rejected the argument. Now U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz has accepted it, dismissing the case against Chelsea Cox, a Jamaican national living in Florida charged with voting illegally in the 2020 election. His reasoning rests on the structure of the Constitution. Article I and the Seventeenth Amendment tie voter eligibility in federal elections to the qualifications each state sets for its own legislature. The Elections Clause gives Congress power over the “times, places and manner” of federal elections, but the Supreme Court said in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council in 2013 that this doesn’t include power to set who is qualified to vote. On that view, deciding who may vote belongs to the states, and Congress can’t criminalize voting by people the Constitution leaves the states to regulate. The Justice Department’s answer, as we discussed, is that the law is really an exercise of Congress’s broad immigration power, not an election rule. Judge Leibowitz didn’t accept that framing. A few points of perspective. This appears to be the first time any federal court has found the 1996 ...
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    8 分
  • SCOTUS Takes Up Mandatory Immigration Detention, the Forced-Labor Tariffs Go to Trade Court & Tennessee's Failed Execution

    SCOTUS Takes Up Mandatory Immigration Detention, the Forced-Labor Tariffs Go to Trade Court & Tennessee's Failed Execution
    2026/10/01
    This Day in Legal History: The Nuremberg VerdictsOn October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg delivered its sentences on the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany. Of the 22 defendants, 19 were convicted and three were acquitted. Twelve were sentenced to death, three to life imprisonment, and four to prison terms of 10 to 20 years. Hermann Göring killed himself the night before his scheduled execution. Martin Bormann, tried in absentia, was never found to face his sentence. The other death sentences were carried out on October 16.The legal achievement of Nuremberg was the decision to hold a trial at all. The Allies could have simply executed the Nazi leadership; some officials argued for exactly that. Instead, at the urging of figures like U.S. Justice Robert Jackson, who left the Supreme Court to serve as chief prosecutor, they built a court, allowed defense counsel, admitted evidence, and let the outcome turn on proof. The acquittals mattered as much as the convictions: they showed the tribunal was deciding cases, not ratifying a foregone conclusion. Nuremberg also established principles that still anchor international law, most importantly that “following orders” is not a defense to crimes against humanity, and that individuals, not just states, can be held criminally responsible for aggression and atrocities.The significance of October 1, 1946 is the idea in today’s opening quote, from Jackson’s opening statement: that even when dealing with the worst crimes imaginable, the state submits to legal process rather than acting on raw power. That idea, that the government must work through courts and procedure, especially when it is detaining, removing, or putting people to death, runs through every story we cover today.The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether the administration can detain millions of immigrants for the entire length of their deportation proceedings without a bond hearing. In July 2025, the Department of Homeland Security issued guidance saying that immigrants who entered the country illegally are subject to mandatory detention with no bond hearing while their cases proceed, a process that can take months or years. The legal fight is about which section of the immigration statute applies. The law has one provision that requires detention for “applicants for admission,” historically understood to mean people arriving at the border. A separate provision governs people already living in the country and generally lets them ask an immigration judge for release on bond. The administration’s new position is that anyone who entered without inspection remains an “applicant for admission” no matter how long they’ve lived here, which would move them into the mandatory-detention category. The case the Court took involves Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a Brazilian national who authorities say entered illegally two decades ago and applied for asylum in 2016. The Second Circuit ruled against the government. And according to the reporting, appeals judges in nine of the eleven federal circuits to consider the question have concluded that detention without a bond hearing violates federal law. That makes the administration’s position an outlier among the lower courts, which is part of why the Supreme Court stepped in. The stakes are very large. A bond hearing doesn’t guarantee release; it just means a judge decides whether a person is a flight risk or a danger. If the Court sides with the administration, millions of long-term residents could be held without that individualized review for the length of their cases. The Court will hear it in the term that opens Monday.US Supreme Court to hear clash over Trump’s immigration detention policy | Reuters · Yahoo News · National Immigration ForumThe U.S. Court of International Trade heard arguments in a challenge to the President’s “forced labor” tariffs, and opponents say the case is a test of whether he can rebuild the tariff power the Supreme Court took away in February. Imposed in late July, the tariffs range from 10% to 12.5% on goods from 60 trading partners, including the European Union and China, and they cover more than 99% of goods imported into the United States. The stated justification is that those countries have failed to stop imports made with forced labor. Four small businesses and 25 Democratic-led states sued, and their three cases were consolidated before a three-judge panel with appointees of Presidents Trump, Obama, and Biden. Their argument is that the trade statute the administration relied on requires country-specific findings of unfair trade practices, reached through a real investigation. In their telling, “forced labor” is a pretext: a label stretched over nearly all imports from 60 countries to recreate the broad, global tariff authority the Supreme Court rejected when it struck down the emergency-powers tariffs. The legal question is how closely courts will examine...
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    8 分
  • SCOTUS Revives Third-Country Deportations, Jack Smith Faces the Senate & Why California's Wealth-Tax Critics Miss the Mark

    SCOTUS Revives Third-Country Deportations, Jack Smith Faces the Senate & Why California's Wealth-Tax Critics Miss the Mark
    2026/09/30
    This Day in Legal History: The Integration of Ole MissOn September 30, 1962, James Meredith, a Black Air Force veteran, was escorted onto the campus of the University of Mississippi by federal marshals to enroll under a federal court order. The university had rejected him for no reason other than his race. The Fifth Circuit ordered him admitted, and Justice Hugo Black refused to let that order be delayed. Mississippi’s governor, Ross Barnett, personally blocked Meredith’s registration anyway. The federal appeals court held him in contempt.After nightfall on the 30th, a crowd of students, locals, and segregationists attacked the roughly 120 marshals guarding Meredith. That night President Kennedy went on national television to explain why the federal government would enforce the order, the address today’s opening quote comes from. The riot killed two people, including a French journalist, and injured hundreds. It took thousands of federal troops to end it. The next morning, Meredith registered.Listeners may remember we covered Little Rock earlier this month. Ole Miss is the same principle five years later: a federal court order is binding, even on a state determined to resist it, and the federal government will enforce it. The Constitution’s guarantees mean what courts say they mean, and a governor doesn’t get to veto them. That idea of judicial orders as binding law, not suggestions, has come up again and again on this show this month.The Supreme Court has let the administration resume deporting migrants to so-called third countries: nations that aren’t named in their removal orders and that many of them have no connection to. In a brief order, with the three liberal justices objecting, the Court paused a February ruling by a federal district judge. That ruling required immigration authorities to give people more due process before sending them to a third country, and a federal appeals court had largely upheld it earlier this month. The administration says it has used the policy to deport tens of thousands of people to Mexico and to countries in Africa and Latin America, often after their home countries refused to take them back. The legal issue is notice and an opportunity to be heard. The challengers argue that if the government plans to send someone to a country where they may face persecution or torture, due process and the Convention Against Torture require that the person be told where they’re going and get a real chance to object first. The government’s position is that it has broad authority over removals and that lower courts overstepped. The Court also agreed to hear the case in full in December, and it asked the parties to brief several questions: whether the lower courts had jurisdiction at all, whether they could order nationwide relief, and whether the policy violates due process or the torture convention. Those first two questions matter well beyond immigration, because they go to the reach of federal judges’ power over executive policy. For now, the deportations resume while those questions are decided. As with the SAVE voter-verification order last week, the emergency docket has put the risk of error on the people affected while the case is pending.Supreme Court lets Trump resume third-country deportations | Reuters · NPR · CBS NewsFormer special counsel Jack Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing its Republican chairman, Chuck Grassley, titled an oversight hearing into Smith’s “abuse of authority.” Smith brought the two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump: one over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and one over his handling of classified documents after his first term. Both cases were dismissed after Trump won the 2024 election. Grassley accused Smith of “rampant abuse of authority and political targeting” funded by taxpayers. Smith defended the investigations as based on evidence and Justice Department policy, not politics. He told senators he would not be silenced by “continued threats of prosecution,” and he condemned the firing and vilification of the agents and prosecutors who worked for him. Live coverage also reported him saying his investigation had shown, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Trump engaged in serious crimes. Here’s the legal significance. A special counsel operates under Justice Department regulations designed to give some independence in politically sensitive investigations. When a former prosecutor faces open talk of prosecution for his own charging decisions, and his former staff are fired, the concern is less about Smith himself than about future prosecutors. Every prosecutor considering a case against a powerful person will now know that the charging decision itself can bring personal and professional consequences. Congress does have legitimate oversight power over the Justice Department. But oversight turning into retaliation is exactly what Justice Department independence norms ...
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    8 分
  • A Judge Blocks Trump From Using Counterterrorism Grants as Election Leverage, Alito Recuses From a Big Climate Case & Florida Asks a Court to Freeze OpenAI's Model Development

    A Judge Blocks Trump From Using Counterterrorism Grants as Election Leverage, Alito Recuses From a Big Climate Case & Florida Asks a Court to Freeze OpenAI's Model Development
    2026/09/29
    This Day in Legal History: Congress Creates the U.S. ArmyOn September 29, 1789—the very last day of the First Congress’s inaugural session—the House and Senate passed the act that formally established the United States Army under the new Constitution. President Washington had pressed hard for it, reminding Congress that the militia provisions inherited from the Articles of Confederation were inadequate and that the nation needed a standing military establishment placed on a proper constitutional footing.The legal significance lies less in the creation of a fighting force than in how that force was subordinated. The Constitution had already divided military power deliberately: Congress alone can raise and fund armies and declare war, while the President serves as Commander-in-Chief. The 1789 Act operationalized that division, embedding the bedrock American principle of civilian control of the military—that the armed forces answer to elected civilian authority and operate within, not above, the rule of law. The Framers were deeply wary of standing armies and concentrated power; their answer was not to forbid a military, but to fracture control over it between the branches so no single actor could wield it unchecked.The significance of September 29, 1789 is that principle—power channeled through congressional authorization and constitutional limits rather than executive will alone. And that is precisely the thread running through our lead story today: a dispute over whether the executive branch can wield federal money as a lever to force its policy preferences on the states, or whether it may only do what Congress has actually authorized. The names change over 237 years; the fundamental question—who gets to exercise power, and with whose permission—does not.A federal judge has blocked the administration from tying federal counterterrorism grants to whether states adopt its preferred election-administration changes—the latest in a long string of election-related defeats we’ve tracked this month. Here’s what the administration did: the Department of Homeland Security announced it would withhold 20% of funding under grant programs meant to help state and local governments prepare for terrorist attacks and other threats, unless those governments adopted election measures the administration favored. U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, in a 24-page opinion, sided with counties and cities in Texas, Ohio, and Tennessee that sued, holding that federal agencies simply lacked authority from Congress to attach those conditions to the grants. Let me put this in its constitutional frame, because it’s a classic. The federal government routinely attaches strings to the money it gives states—that’s the spending power, and it’s legitimate within limits. But the Supreme Court set boundaries in cases like South Dakota v. Dole and, more forcefully, in the NFIB v. Sebelius healthcare decision: conditions must be clearly stated, must relate to the purpose of the funding, and can’t be so coercive that they amount to a “gun to the head.” Conditioning anti-terrorism preparedness money on unrelated election changes runs into two of those problems at once—the germaneness requirement, since election administration has nothing to do with counterterrorism, and the basic separation-of-powers point that an agency can’t invent conditions Congress never authorized. That last point is what Judge Ali hung his ruling on, and it’s the same principle that decided the homelessness and mail-ballot cases: agencies have only the power Congress gives them. The significance is that this is now a consistent, rulings-deep pattern—court after court telling the executive it cannot use funding leverage, or agency fiat, to seize control over how states run their elections. On the anniversary of a law about channeling power through congressional authorization, it’s a fitting rebuke.Judge blocks Trump from tying anti-terrorism grants to election changes | Reuters · PBS News · US NewsIn a notable reversal, Justice Samuel Alito has recused himself from a major climate-change case the Supreme Court is set to hear next week—and the move opens up real questions about both judicial ethics and the case’s outcome. The case involves Boulder, Colorado, and its county, which sued Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy seeking damages for the local harms of climate change; it’s set for argument October 5. Environmental groups had pushed for Alito to step aside because he owns stock in oil-and-gas companies—ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66, among others—that, while not parties to this particular suit, plainly have interests riding on how the Court treats climate liability. Here’s why the reversal is striking. Back in May, a Court spokeswoman said Alito would not recuse, on the theory that he had no financial interest in any actual party to the case. Now he’s stepping aside anyway. This goes to the heart of the judicial-ethics ...
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    9 分
  • A New Mexico Jury Finds Meta Misled Millions Over Cambridge Analytica, TikTok Pays Alabama to Dodge the First Teen-Harms Trial & SCOTUS Revives the SAVE Voter Checks

    A New Mexico Jury Finds Meta Misled Millions Over Cambridge Analytica, TikTok Pays Alabama to Dodge the First Teen-Harms Trial & SCOTUS Revives the SAVE Voter Checks
    2026/09/28
    This Day in Legal History: The Black Sox IndictmentOn September 28, 1920, a Chicago grand jury indicted eight members of the Chicago White Sox for conspiring to throw the 1919 World Series in exchange for money from a gambling syndicate. That morning, pitcher Eddie Cicotte and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson had reportedly confessed. The scandal—forever after known as the “Black Sox”—remains one of the most famous intersections of crime, sport, and law in American history, and its legal legacy is more instructive than the folklore suggests.Here’s the twist that every law student should sit with. The eight players went to trial on criminal conspiracy charges, and in 1921, a jury acquitted all of them. But the very next day, baseball’s newly installed commissioner, federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, banned all eight from organized baseball for life—famously declaring that regardless of any jury verdict, no player who fixes games or consorts with gamblers would ever play professional baseball again. So you have a stark divergence: the criminal-justice system, applying its high beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard, found them not guilty, while a private governing body, applying its own rules and lower burden of proof, imposed the harshest sanction it could.The significance of September 28, 1920 is that lesson in parallel systems of accountability. Being cleared in a court of law is not the same as being cleared everywhere—private institutions, licensing bodies, and employers routinely impose their own consequences under their own standards, and they’re generally entitled to. It’s a theme that runs straight through today’s episode, where we’ll see companies held to account not by criminal courts but by state consumer-protection laws and civil juries—the many rooms, beyond the criminal courthouse, in which accountability actually happens.A jury in Santa Fe has found that Meta misled New Mexico residents about how it protected their data—and the potential penalties are genuinely staggering. This case traces back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal: the 2018 revelation that the political consulting firm, tied to the 2016 Trump campaign, harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app without their consent. New Mexico’s attorney general sued in 2021, and after a two-week trial, the jury found that 26 of 29 statements Meta made were misleading, adding up to tens of millions of violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act—affecting essentially the entire population of the state, more than two million people. Here’s where it gets eye-popping. The judge, not the jury, will now set penalties, and New Mexico is seeking the statutory maximum of $5,000 per violation. Do the math on tens of millions of violations and you get a theoretical exposure reaching into the billions—some coverage has floated figures over $200 billion, though the actual number the judge lands on will almost certainly be far lower, because courts have discretion and because due-process principles cap grossly excessive aggregate statutory penalties. That’s the real legal drama here: the collision between per-violation statutory damages, designed for individual harms, and mass digital conduct affecting millions, where mechanical multiplication produces astronomical, arguably unconstitutional numbers. The significance is twofold. First, it’s a powerful demonstration of state consumer-protection law as a weapon against Big Tech—New Mexico didn’t need a federal privacy statute, it used its own deceptive-practices act. And second, it feeds directly into the trend we keep tracking: after years of Cambridge Analytica settlements, a jury has now actually found Meta liable to a state’s entire population for deceiving them about privacy. Meta says it disagrees and will keep fighting.Meta misled consumers in case over Cambridge Analytica scandal, New Mexico jury says | Reuters · PBS News · EngadgetTikTok has settled with Alabama for at least $100 million—and up to $300 million if certain conditions are met—just days before what would have been the first state trial in the country over the platform’s alleged harms to teenagers. This is a significant development in a fight we’ve followed closely. At least 27 other states and D.C. have sued TikTok on similar theories: that it deliberately designed its platform to be addictive to children and misled the public about how safe it is. Alabama’s case was set to go before a Montgomery jury this Monday, in a trial expected to run two to three weeks and to pry open TikTok’s internal workings—which is exactly the kind of exposure that tends to concentrate a company’s mind on settling. And this settlement is notable not just for the money but for the injunctive relief, because the platform changes are substantial: overnight access restrictions for teen users between midnight and 6 a.m., limits on messaging and ...
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    8 分
  • Reporters Turned Away From the White House Despite a Court Order, the ABA Fights for Its Accreditation Power & New York Calls Polymarket Illegal Gambling

    Reporters Turned Away From the White House Despite a Court Order, the ABA Fights for Its Accreditation Power & New York Calls Polymarket Illegal Gambling
    2026/09/25
    This Day in Legal History: Congress Proposes the Bill of RightsOn September 25, 1789, the First Congress agreed on twelve proposed amendments to the newly ratified Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. Ten of those twelve would be ratified by the states in December 1791, and we know them today as the Bill of Rights. It was the fulfillment of a promise—many states had ratified the Constitution only on the understanding that a bill of rights protecting individual liberties would swiftly follow.The amendments are the beating heart of American individual liberty. The First Amendment’s protections for speech, press, religion, and assembly; the Fourth Amendment’s shield against unreasonable searches; the Fifth and Sixth Amendments’ guarantees of due process and fair trials; the Eighth’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. What’s remarkable is how the meaning of these spare, elegant clauses has been fought over and elaborated for more than two centuries—the words are fixed, but their application to new circumstances is a never-ending project. It’s worth remembering, too, that two of the original twelve weren’t ratified in 1789: one concerning congressional apportionment, and one on congressional pay—and that pay amendment was finally ratified in 1992, more than 200 years later, as the 27th Amendment.The significance of September 25, 1789 is that it created the framework of enumerated rights that Americans invoke against their government every single day—and never more directly than in today’s lead story, which is, at bottom, a First Amendment fight over freedom of the press playing out at the doors of the White House. On the anniversary of the day those freedoms were proposed, we watch a court try to enforce them in real time.We have a remarkable follow-up to a story we covered earlier this week: the White House barred reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from entering—just hours after a federal judge ordered their access restored and deemed the ban likely unconstitutional. Let me lay out the sequence, because it’s striking. Recall those three outlets sued after President Trump banned them over what he called their “negative stories.” This week, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ruled for the outlets, temporarily blocking the ban for 14 days and finding it likely unconstitutional—a clear First Amendment win. And then, hours later, when reporters from those outlets tried to enter the White House grounds, Secret Service officers turned some of them away and even confiscated a Politico reporter’s credentials. The outlets rushed back to court, requesting an immediate hearing, and by the end of the day the White House began readmitting the journalists. Now, here’s the legal significance, and it’s serious, because this brushes up against one of the gravest issues in our legal system: compliance with court orders. When a court issues an injunction, parties are legally bound to obey it—full stop. The rule of law depends on the understanding that when a judge rules, even the most powerful actors, including the executive branch, comply. When there’s a gap—even a few hours—between a court order and the government’s compliance with it, that’s not a small administrative hiccup; it raises the specter of defiance of the judiciary, which strikes at the foundation of the separation of powers. Now, the charitable read is that this was a logistical lag—word hadn’t reached the officers at the gate—and the fact that access was restored by day’s end supports that. But it happened against a backdrop of rising concern about executive compliance with court orders generally. The significance is that the First Amendment merits question—can a President ban outlets for critical coverage—now sits alongside an even more fundamental one: whether court orders enforcing those rights will be promptly obeyed. On the anniversary of the Bill of Rights, that’s a sobering pairing.Politico denied access to White House after judge’s order, news outlet says | Reuters · Washington Post · CNBCThe American Bar Association is fighting to hold onto one of its most consequential powers: its role as the federally recognized accreditor of the nation’s law schools. This week, the ABA’s legal-education council was set to meet with a federal advisory committee to defend that role, after the Department of Education recommended in August that the government withdraw recognition of the ABA as the official law-school accreditor. Let me explain why this is a big deal, because accreditation is quiet but enormously powerful. In most states, you have to graduate from an ABA-accredited law school to even sit for the bar exam—so the ABA’s accreditation standards effectively shape what every law school in America must teach, how it must operate, and who can ultimately enter the profession. That’s a tremendous amount of gatekeeping authority concentrated in a private ...
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