Tag: Law

Florida’s Attempt to Muzzle the Press Could Hurt Fox News the Most

The threat of litigation in countries without the United States’ high level of press protection can have a subtle but profound chilling effect on journalism and accountability. Australian legal commentators, for example, noted that the #MeToo movement faltered in that country after figures like actor Geoffrey Rush began suing the women who accused them of […]

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Why Are Police Seizing People’s Cars on Memphis?

Of all the excuses for running late to work, “the cops took my car” likely won’t get you very far. But for Memphis, Tennessee, residents at the mercy of police who can legally seize their possessions without ever charging them with a crime, it wouldn’t always be without merit. CC Off English In the majority […]

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Why Are Police Seizing People’s Cars in Memphis?

Of all the excuses for running late to work, “the cops took my car” likely won’t get you very far. But for Memphis, Tennessee, residents at the mercy of police who can legally seize their possessions without ever charging them with a crime, it wouldn’t always be without merit. CC Off English In the majority […]

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The Trump Indictment Is Bringing Out the Worst in People. Here’s a List of Them.

Like most former presidents, Donald Trump has been spending his time playing golf, thinking about his legacy, and, of course, practicing his perp walk. With an indictment from the Manhattan district attorney reportedly just days away, Mar-a-Lago’s leading potential felon “welcomes the idea of being paraded by the authorities before a throng of reporters and […]

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Will the Supreme Court Let Jack Daniel’s Go to the Dogs?

“Well, I mean, you say that, but you know, you make fun of a lot of marks: Doggie Walker, Dos Perros, Smella R. Paw, Canine Cola, Mountain Drool. Are all of these companies taking themselves too seriously?” Kagan asked. “I think there are a lot of products that take them too seriously,” Cooper claimed. “You […]

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Lindsey Graham Has Some Good Advice for Donald Trump, for Once

The Supreme Court, for its part, hasn’t been too friendly to Donald Trump over the years, Sure, it’s ruled in favor of some of his policies, such as the Muslim travel ban. It’s occasionally handed him a mixed legal victory when blocking Congress’s efforts to scrutinize him more closely. But there are few signs, if […]

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Amy Coney Barrett Could Be the Deciding Vote That Affirms the Navajo Nation’s Water Rights

In an exchange with Shay Dvoretzky, who argued on behalf of the Navajo Nation, she also noted that the tribe’s request was narrower than its critics had suggested and didn’t involve mandates to build pipelines, as some of her colleagues had suggested. “That’s really just about intervening in litigation to assert those on the Navajo’s […]

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The Next Frontier for Abortion Rights Is State Supreme Courts

Every state in the Union has its own constitution, and many of them include a list of protected rights similar to the Bill of Rights for the federal Constitution. While some of these rights simply reflect those protected at the national level, some state constitutions go even further than their federal counterpart to protect certain […]

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Sorry, Clarence Thomas, but Supreme Court Ethics Reform Is on the Table

Despite the pervasive polarization which, inevitably, colors debates about Supreme Court ethics, there is reason to expect that some Republican lawmakers could sign on to an effort for a meaningful code of conduct bill. As I noted in my January 26 article, in 2022, Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John Kennedy each signed letters questioning […]

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Why We’re Barreling Toward a Legal War Between the States

Another source of friction is the laws red states are passing to prevent health insurance companies from covering gender-affirming care anywhere in the U.S. One strategy used by states like Florida is to put an excessive statute of limitations and liability on doctors and health care providers who provide gender-affirming care or coverage. Their goal […]

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Shanquella Robinson’s Family Demands Action in Letter to President Biden

(Left) Latavia McGee (Right) Shanquella RobinsonScreenshot: Facebook The family of Shanquella Robinson, a woman killed while on a trip in Mexico in November, are demanding that Mexican and US officials move as swiftly to resolve her case as they did in the recent Matamoros kidnapping. Their attorneys have written a letter to President Biden asking […]

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The Supreme Court Conservatives’ Favorite New Weapon for Kneecapping the Administrative State

Another option for the justices was to move away from Chevron deference. Under that doctrine, which was crystallized in the case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, federal courts will generally defer to federal agencies when those agencies reasonably interpret the federal statutes that give them their authority. The Chevron court reasoned that the specialized […]

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Texas Man Sues Three Women for $1 Million for Helping His Ex-Wife Get an Abortion

The law grinds slowly. Politics, however, like Niagara Falls, never stops. So what are the politics of this? It likely has a marginally positive impact for Trump in a GOP presidential primary. It gives him another target, something else to whine about. I doubt his opponents will really be able to attack him over it; […]

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Trump Will Probably Be Forced to Listen to the Revolting Access Hollywood Tape in Court

The law grinds slowly. Politics, however, like Niagara Falls, never stops. So what are the politics of this? It likely has a marginally positive impact for Trump in a GOP presidential primary. It gives him another target, something else to whine about. I doubt his opponents will really be able to attack him over it; […]

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Industry Knew About Gas Stoves’ Air Pollution Problems in Early 1970s

At the end of December 2022, when Americans were getting ready to spend hours indoors with family and friends — often in their kitchens, preparing holiday meals on the stovetop — a new study reignited a decades-old debate. The peer-reviewed research by the environmental think tank RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute), the University of Sydney, and the […]

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A List of Every Senate Democrat Who Voted With Republicans to Overrule D.C.’s Criminal Reforms

With the Senate now joining the House in the rejection, and Biden presumably set to finish the task, the rule of a government overseeing 700,000 residents has been wholly subverted by the federal government. Not only is this a complete federal takeover of local government rule (one that seldom happens in any other community in […]

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Navajo Nation Is Taking on Three States and the Federal Government for the Right to Colorado River Water

The Navajo Nation was not among those five tribes. Instead, the federal government asserted a claim on their behalf to water rights from the Little Colorado River, a tributary of the main waterway, over the tribe’s objection at the time. The Supreme Court did not address those specific claims in its labyrinthine decision and largely […]

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NFL Coach Brian Flores Sued The League For Discrimination. Now The Case Is Going To Court

Minnesota Vikings new defensive coordinator Brian Flores speaks an NFL football news conference, Wednesday, Fe. 15, 2023, in Eagan, Minn.Photo: Elizabeth Flores (AP) A federal judge has dismissed the option of arbitration when it comes to NFL Coach Brian Flores’ lawsuit against the league and three teams from a year ago. He stated that the […]

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Artificial Intelligence Meets Its Worst Enemy: the U.S. Copyright Office

I asked ChatGPT, the most famous of these chatbots, whether it counted as artificial intelligence. “As an A.I. language model, ChatGPT is indeed a form of artificial intelligence,” it insisted. “However, it is important to note that ChatGPT is not a fully autonomous, self-aware entity in the way that we might commonly imagine artificial intelligence.” […]

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The Supreme Court Really Doesn’t Like Biden’s Student Debt Relief Plan

Justice Neil Gorsuch also raised a similar point. “What I think [the states] argue that is missing is costs to other persons in terms of fairness, for example, people who have paid their loans, people who don’t plan their lives around not seeking loans, and people who are not eligible for loans in the first […]

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The Broken Promise of “College for Everyone”

The biggest impact, however, was on students. As it turned out, college often didn’t pay for itself. And for many borrowers, the debt they took on grew larger over time rather than smaller, due to compounding interest. As a result, millions of the Americans who followed the rules and did what they were told ended […]

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The Supreme Court Might Not Crack Down on Big Tech After All

Twitter and its co-defendants took a more narrow view of JASTA’s language. It is generally indisputable that ISIS grew in size and scope in its early stages with the help of social media. But the tech companies denied any specific advance knowledge of the attack in Istanbul, which they argued meant they couldn’t have “knowingly […]

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The Internet Had a Weird Day at the Supreme Court

That interpretation persuaded judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where a three-judge panel sided with Google in deference to precedent in 2021 but also expressed misgivings about the law’s scope. They are hardly alone. As I noted in October, a growing number of Democrats and Republicans have criticized Section 230 in recent years […]

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Steven Donziger May Get Another Day in Court

The ruling was catastrophic for Donziger, who has denied any wrongdoing. Kaplan’s findings led to Donziger’s disbarment in New York and the District of Columbia. When federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York declined to prosecute Donziger for any alleged offenses, Kaplan hired a private law firm to prosecute him on six counts […]

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St. Louis Man Wrongfully Imprisoned for Three Decades Will Not Receive Reparations

Lamar Johnson, center looks toward friends and family members as his attorneys celebrate on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023, after St. Louis Circuit Judge David Mason vacated his murder conviction during a hearing in St. Louis, Mo. Johnson served nearly 28 years of a life sentence for a killing that he has always said he didn’t […]

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No Reparations for St. Louis Man Wrongfully Imprisoned for Three Decades

Lamar Johnson, center looks toward friends and family members as his attorneys celebrate on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023, after St. Louis Circuit Judge David Mason vacated his murder conviction during a hearing in St. Louis, Mo. Johnson served nearly 28 years of a life sentence for a killing that he has always said he didn’t […]

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The Supreme Court Will Decide the Line Between Free Speech and Violent Threats

This debate is a familiar one for most of the current justices. In 2014, the court agreed to hear Elonis v. United States, a case in which the defendant was prosecuted for posting self-written rap lyrics on Facebook. His lyrics, which were laden with violent imagery and references to First Amendment protections for violent speech, […]

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100 and Counting: Biden’s Pace for Confirming Federal Judges Exceeds Trump’s

Committee questioning of judicial nominees can be contentious to downright toxic, as was the case last year when Republican Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz tried unsuccessfully to paint Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as soft on pedophiles. Despite the high-profile attacks on Judge Jackson’s character, many of Biden’s judicial nominees have been confirmed with GOP […]

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The Second Amendment’s Legal Landscape Is Getting Weirder

The Fifth Circuit’s ruling in United States v. Nahimi, which restored the right to own a gun to people with domestic-violence restraining orders, underscored the problems raised by the history-and-tradition test. Local police in Texas searched the home of Zackey Nahimi after he became the leading suspect in a two-month series of reckless shootings in […]

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