Law

San Francisco district judge says Congress did not authorize large-scale staffing cuts and restructuring of agencies

“Ozturk is free to return to her home in Massachusetts ... because, frankly, I don’t find that she poses any risk of flight,” the judge ruled.

Lower courts prevented the administration from immediately ending a Biden-era program that granted temporary status to people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

The Trump administration secured a key victory in federal court this week as a judge allowed Elon Musk and DOGE to continue firing workers and closing down field offices at the Social Security Administration (SSA).

Move comes after US president withdraws nomination of Ed Martin, GOP loyalist who supported January 6 pardons

Chief Justice John Roberts stressed the importance of judicial independence during public remarks Wednesday, noting that the judiciary’s role as a co-equal branch of government is central to the nation’s political system.

The announcement, which comes six months after the final votes were cast, ends the final unresolved contest from the 2024 election.

The US Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to enforce his ban on transgender troops serving in the military while challenges to the policy make their way through the courts.

The president and those around him just had to brag — and Howell turned their own words against them.

US district judge Beryl Howell says order violates first, fifth and sixth amendments and permanently blocks it

The broadcaster, a target of president’s sweeping cuts to US media agencies, could be back on air as soon as next week

A Donald Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas ruled that the president unlawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act and blocked the administration from quickly deporting some alleged members of a Venezuelan gang.

Summary

Wilkie Farr rolls over à la Skadden, with no EO issued.

Trump's lawyers are petitioning the Court to restrict the Temporary Restraining Orders (TROs) imposed by the lower courts to the named plaintiffs only, which they frame as a "modest" request. This is absurd. The subject of the TRO is a policy change, and it's the policy itself that's likely illegal. TROs are supposed to preserve the status quo while litigation proceeds. Grandfathering a handful of litigants in while letting the change go through in no way preserves the status quo. Striking down the power of lower courts to issue so-called "universal injunctions" would likely be an Equal Protection violation, or it would at least flood the lower courts with tens of thousands of plaintiffs individually filing cases to get the same relief.

From a few days back, but I'm surprised this didn't hit harder on the news. Perkins Coie was the law firm contracted to do oppo research on Trump during his 2016 campaign, which sourced the infamous Steele Dossier from FusionGPS. The EO strips the firm of all its contracts, directs EEOC to investigate their (past!) DEI initiatives and hiring, forces all contractors to inform the government if they do any business with Perkins Coie (even as part of other contracts), blacklists every employee from ever being hired by the government, strips them of their security clearances, prohibits Federal employees from interacting with anyone from Perkins on official business, and even bans employees from setting foot in any Federal building! It also threatens other large law firms.

https://boiefiling.fincen.gov/

Useful for keeping track of the numerous lawsuits against the T Admin.

A helpful infographic design

The Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention got wild yesterday. As wild as a gathering of right-wing lawyers can get, anyway. Actually, I guess the wildest a gathering of right-wing lawyers can get was January 6, so this was just slightly less than the wildest a gathering of right-wing lawyers can get.

Swift’s long battle is well-known in the industry. But an article on the Harvard Law Today site from a few months back adds an important detail to this story that I have not seen reported anywhere else. It draws on comments made by Gary R. Greenstein, a “technology transactions partner” at Wilson Sonsini, one of the top US law firms. It concerns a common legal requirement in contracts to wait a certain number of years before artists are allowed to re-record an album:

Sept 17 (Reuters) - Every football player knows that plays don’t always go the way they’re diagrammed on the coach’s whiteboard. To win, sometimes you need a back-up plan.

Federal Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the controversial jurist who tossed out the classified documents criminal case against Donald Trump in July, failed to disclose her attendance at a May 2023 banquet funded by a conservative law school.

Opening statements before District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia start later today. The BBC notes that the Justice Department plans to argue that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, illegally operates a monopoly in the online advertising market. However, Alphabet denies the allegations, claiming that its success is due to the “effectiveness” of its services.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held, opens new tab that a 1957 law barring people from possessing spring-release pocketknives commonly known as “switchblades” violated the right to keep and bear arms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.

Democrats were able to get President Joe Biden to step aside after a pressure campaign. But it’s much more difficult to force out a federal judge.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240822141004/https://www.justsecurity.org/98741/fisa-defensive-searches/

Last spring, New York City police officers stopped a 19-year-old on the subway during her commute. She was eligible for a free transfer from the bus to the subway, but the transfer failed to register at the turnstile, so she and a friend entered through the platform emergency exit door.

"The ban on fake reviews includes AI-generated reviews and real people that have no experience with the product being reviewed.... Buying reviews, whether positive or negative, is also banned in any form. So-called “insider” reviews are prohibited by employees of a given company.... The new rule will become effective 60 days after it’s published in the Federal Register.... "

After a doctor suffered a fatal allergic reaction at a Disney World restaurant, Disney is trying to get her widower's wrongful death lawsuit tossed by pointing to the fine print of a Disney+ trial he signed up for years earlier.

"First, it determined that under the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Carpenter v. United States, individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location data implicated by geofence warrants.... Second, the court found that even though investigators seek warrants for geofence location data, these searches are inherently unconstitutional.... "

The hardline approach Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito takes usually gets him what he wants.

Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch contended that the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment, “serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges” to “dictate this Nation’s homelessness policy.” Instead, he suggested, such a task should fall to the American people.

In a major ruling, the Supreme Court on Friday cut back sharply on the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer and ruled that courts should rely on their own interpretion of ambiguous laws.

Considering I made the post Yesterday about the Thursday & Friday rulings, I felt obliged to share that they added another additional day of opinions (July 1st).

...the state Supreme Court ruled against allowing what would have been the nation’s first taxpayer-funded, state-sponsored religious public charter school.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16749379

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240607122602/https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/american-immigration-council-analysis-presidents-212f-proclamation-and-interim-final-rule

The Supreme Court on Thursday reinstated a lawsuit by the National Rifle Association, alleging that a New York official violated the group’s First Amendment rights when she urged banks and insurance companies not to do business with it in the wake of the 2018 shooting at a Florida high school. In a unanimous decision by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the justices agreed that the NRA had made out a case that Maria Vullo, then the head of New York’s Department of Financial Services, had gone too far in her efforts to get companies and banks to cut ties with the NRA, crossing over the line from efforts to persuade the companies and banks – which would be permitted – to attempts to coerce them, which are not.

Article on the Culley v Marshall case that recently got announced by SCOTUS. The Gorsuch concurrence hints that a 5-4 majority of the court might want to reel in the practice of civil asset forfeiture.

Found this old article thought it might be interesting for anyone else who recreationally listens to SCOTUS oral arguments.

Law360 (February 28, 2024, 1:40 AM EST) -- FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried asked a Manhattan federal judge late Tuesday for a sentence that releases him "promptly" after his conviction for stealing billions from customers of the now-collapsed crypto exchange, arguing that federal sentencing guidelines recommend no more than six-and-a-half years in prison.

The FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when its agents rifled through the contents of more than 700 safe-deposit boxes in the aftermath of a March 2021 raid

The woman, whose name Phoenix New Times is withholding to protect her privacy, is one of more than 450 people in Phoenix who have been charged with manifestation of prostitution over the past eight years. The ordinance, which has been called unconstitutional by the ACLU of Arizona, allows the act of flagging down a car or wearing provocative clothing to be used as grounds to cite someone.

In Proclamation 10467 of October 6, 2022 (Granting Pardon for the Offense of Simple Possession of Marijuana), I exercised my authority under the Constitution to pardon individuals who committed or were convicted of the offense of simple possession of marijuana in violation of the Controlled Substances Act and section 48–904.01(d)(1) of the Code of the District of Columbia (D.C. Code). As I have said before, convictions for simple possession of marijuana have imposed needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities. Through this proclamation, consistent with the grant of Proclamation 10467, I am pardoning additional individuals who may continue to experience the unnecessary collateral consequences of a conviction for simple possession of marijuana, attempted simple possession of marijuana, or use of marijuana. Therefore, acting pursuant to the grant of authority in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution of the United States, I, Joseph R. Biden Jr., do hereby grant a full, complete, and unconditional pardon to all current United States citizens and lawful permanent residents who, on or before the date of this proclamation, committed or were convicted of the offense of simple possession of marijuana, attempted simple possession of marijuana, or use of marijuana, regardless of whether they have been charged with or prosecuted for these offenses on or before the date of this proclamation, in violation of:

Charlotte, North Carolina’s NBC affiliate, WCNC, tells it like it is. Although it puts quotes around a couple of phrases, it at least uses those phrases in the headline and subhead. “It is like highway robbery” says the headline. In the subhead: “policing for profit.”

The US supreme court on Friday declined to decide Donald Trump’s immunity claim in his 2020 election subversion criminal case before his arguments are settled in a lower court.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Manhattan on Thursday, less than a week after he was socked with a $148 million damage award for defaming two Atlanta election workers.

In a landmark decision, the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that former president Donald Trump is disqualified from appearing on the state’s primary ballot next year.

[A]round 2000, chatter that Thomas was dissatisfied about money circulated through conservative legal circles and on Capitol Hill, according to interviews with prominent attorneys, former members of Congress and Thomas’ friends. “It was clear he was unhappy with his financial situation and his salary,” one friend said.

Manhattan’s billionaire condo buyers would lose the ability to keep their identities secret in real estate deals if a measure before Governor Kathy Hochul becomes law.

The Virginia Court of Appeals overruled a man’s misdemeanor conviction for fleeing from police after ruling the Lynchburg police officer who attempted to make the arrest didn’t get close enough to the suspect to have a realistic chance of grabbing him.

This looks to be the first instance of a set of fake electors from the 2020 presidential election being charged with a crime. Eight felony counts for each fake elector.

Amy Howe does a good job documenting the remaining cases at https://amylhowe.com/2023/06/15/the-20-remaining-cases/