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  • Meta Whistleblower Testifies "Profits Won," Judge Strikes Ghost-Gun Rule SCOTUS Upheld & Trump's Law-Firm Privilege Claim

    Meta Whistleblower Testifies "Profits Won," Judge Strikes Ghost-Gun Rule SCOTUS Upheld & Trump's Law-Firm Privilege Claim
    2026/08/19
    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. ...
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    10 分
  • 29 States Put Meta on Trial, DOJ Probes William & Mary Scholarships & Why the Public Deserves a Stake in AI

    29 States Put Meta on Trial, DOJ Probes William & Mary Scholarships & Why the Public Deserves a Stake in AI
    2026/08/18
    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 ...
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    10 分
  • Tupac Murder Trial Opens, AG Blanche Backs Pirro Against Trump & Judge Clears End to Somali TPS

    Tupac Murder Trial Opens, AG Blanche Backs Pirro Against Trump & Judge Clears End to Somali TPS
    2026/08/17
    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 ...
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    8 分
  • Court Upholds Trump's De Minimis Tariff Repeal, SCOTUS Takes Immigrant Detention Fees Case & a Courtroom AI "Prompt Injection"

    Court Upholds Trump's De Minimis Tariff Repeal, SCOTUS Takes Immigrant Detention Fees Case & a Courtroom AI "Prompt Injection"
    2026/08/14
    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 ...
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    7 分
  • Motley Rice's $67M Meta Fee, Trump Media Sued Over Paid Truth Social Access & Palestinian Students Sue Columbia

    Motley Rice's $67M Meta Fee, Trump Media Sued Over Paid Truth Social Access & Palestinian Students Sue Columbia
    2026/08/13
    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 ...
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    8 分
  • Fifth Circuit Voids Surprise-Billing Formula, Judge Blocks USPS Mail-In Limits & White House Pushes New Reflecting Pool Charges

    Fifth Circuit Voids Surprise-Billing Formula, Judge Blocks USPS Mail-In Limits & White House Pushes New Reflecting Pool Charges
    2026/08/12
    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 ...
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    8 分
  • Mangione Heads to Trial, Trump Says Weaponization Fund Is "Up to Blanche" & Social Media Suits Advance

    Mangione Heads to Trial, Trump Says Weaponization Fund Is "Up to Blanche" & Social Media Suits Advance
    2026/08/11
    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 ...
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    10 分
  • Senate Confirms Todd Blanche as AG in 50-49 Squeaker, Alito Stays on SCOTUS & NJ's $2.5B PFAS Settlement

    Senate Confirms Todd Blanche as AG in 50-49 Squeaker, Alito Stays on SCOTUS & NJ's $2.5B PFAS Settlement
    2026/08/10
    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 ...
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