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Minimum Competence
Hosted by Andrew and Gina Leahey · EN
Minimum Competence is your daily companion for legal news, designed to bring you up to speed on the day’s major legal stories during your commute home. Each episode is short, clear, and informative—just enough to make you minimally competent on the key developments in law, policy, and regulation. Whether you’re a lawyer, law student, journalist, or just legal-curious, you’ll get a smart summary without the fluff. A full transcript of each episode is available via the companion newsletter at www.minimumcomp.com.
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Trump Asks SCOTUS to Toss E. Jean Carroll's $83M Verdict, Blanche AG Vote Stalls, Bar Exam Chaos
2w ago00:06:40Tap to summarizeThis Day in Legal History: America’s First Representative AssemblyOn July 30, 1619, in a wooden church at Jamestown, twenty-two elected representatives took their seats alongside the governor and his council, and the first representative legislative assembly in what would become the United States came to order. This was the Virginia General Assembly—soon known through its elected chamber as the House of Burgesses—and it marks the beginning of self-government by elected representatives in America.The mechanics were modest and the setting brutal: two burgesses were elected from each of the colony’s eleven settlements, and they met in sweltering heat so severe that one burgess died during the six-day session. But the principle was revolutionary. Under instructions from the Virginia Company, Governor George Yeardley had called forth a body in which colonists—not just a distant crown or company—would have a hand in making the laws that governed them. It became the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World, and it planted an idea that would grow over the next century and a half into a full-blown theory of government by consent.The significance of July 30, 1619 is that so much of American constitutional order traces back to this cramped, miserable first session. The House of Burgesses trained generations of colonial leaders in the practice of legislative self-government; it was the venue where figures like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson cut their political teeth; and its example fed directly into the revolutionary conviction that legitimate power flows from the consent of the governed and is exercised through elected representatives. It’s a fitting anniversary for a day when one of our stories turns on that very principle—the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise and consent on who leads the Justice Department.President Trump and the Justice Department have asked the Supreme Court to throw out the $83 million defamation verdict that writer E. Jean Carroll won against him, arguing that he can’t be sued for statements he made while he was president. Some quick context: a Manhattan jury awarded Carroll roughly $83 million in early 2024 over defamatory comments Trump made in 2019 denying her sexual-assault allegation. This is now Trump’s second trip to the Supreme Court in the Carroll saga—recall that back in June the justices declined to hear his appeal of a separate $5 million verdict, which we covered here. The new appeal leans heavily on the Court’s 2024 presidential-immunity decision, which gave presidents broad immunity for official acts. Trump’s lawyers argue that because he made the disputed statements in 2019 while in office, that immunity should shield him, and they accuse the appeals court of “procedural contortions” to avoid the question. The significance is about how far the 2024 immunity ruling stretches. That decision arose in the context of criminal prosecution for official acts; here it’s being deployed to wipe out a civil defamation judgment for things a sitting president said to reporters. Whether “official act” immunity reaches a president’s public denials about a private, decades-old personal matter is a genuinely consequential question—and the fact that the Justice Department has joined Trump’s personal civil appeal is itself a notable signal about how the government is deploying its weight. Trump asks Supreme Court to throw out E. Jean Carroll’s $83 million verdict | ReutersWashington Post · CNNTodd Blanche’s bid to become attorney general has hit a serious snag: the Senate Judiciary Committee scrapped a planned vote after Republican Senator John Cornyn said he is “not prepared to vote yes.” We’ve tracked Blanche’s nomination through his confirmation hearing, and the math has always been tight—with the recent death of Senator Lindsey Graham, committee Republicans have just one vote to spare, so Cornyn alone could sink it. What’s notable is the substance of his objection, because it ties together several threads we’ve followed all month. Cornyn’s concerns center on the administration’s roughly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” and the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS—the very deal a federal judge voided weeks ago as a collusive arrangement, and which would have handed Trump and his associates protections from tax audits unavailable to ordinary taxpayers. In other words, the sticking point isn’t Blanche’s résumé; it’s the integrity of the tax system and whether the Justice Department has been used to engineer special treatment. The committee said the vote is postponed while it works “to secure sufficient support.” The significance is a real-time illustration of advice and consent functioning as a check—not a rubber stamp. A president’s nominee for the nation’s top law-enforcement job is stalled because a member of his own party wants answers about a tax settlement that courts have already called unlawful. It’s the Senate’s constitutional role doing exactly what it’s designed to do: forcing accountability before handing over power.Trump’s attorney general nominee hits snag as senator withholds support | ReutersNPR · Washington PostAnd finally, a story close to home for anyone in this profession: the debut of the new national bar exam has gone badly wrong. This week marked the first-ever administration of the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination—a major overhaul of how aspiring lawyers are licensed—across ten jurisdictions. And in Washington State, it collapsed. Officials canceled the entire first day of testing after network bandwidth and Wi-Fi problems left hundreds of examinees unable to even access the exam; somewhere between 645 and 700 standard-time test-takers were affected. Missouri saw delayed start times, and a Maryland site had a shorter delay. The National Conference of Bar Examiners, which runs the exam, insists the NextGen platform itself performed as intended and pinned the failures on local network and site infrastructure rather than the software. That’s cold comfort to the test-takers. Think about what’s actually at stake for them: months of full-time study, bar-prep costs, and in many cases a job offer contingent on passing—all thrown into limbo. Washington is offering a make-up exam on September 1, or the option to transfer to the February 2027 sitting or get a refund, and there are already calls for a class action and even for “diploma privilege”—admitting these graduates without an exam. The significance is both practical and symbolic. Practically, hundreds of careers are on hold through no fault of the examinees. Symbolically, the gateway to the legal profession—the gatekeeping ritual that’s supposed to certify competence—failed a basic test of its own on its most important day, and it’s going to intensify the already-heated debate over whether the bar exam, in any form, is the right way to license lawyers.Tech problems, cancellation mar new US bar exam for some test-takers | ReutersBloomberg Law · Above the Law This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe
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Chobani Zero-Sugar Class Action, eBay $56M Stalking Settlement, Charlie Kirk Case
2w ago00:07:11Tap to summarizeThis Day in Legal History: The First Hague ConventionOn July 29, 1899, delegates from twenty-six nations signed the first Hague Convention, the product of an international peace conference convened at the initiative of Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II. It was one of the founding moments of modern international law—an attempt, at the close of a violent century, to subject the conduct of war and the resolution of disputes between nations to legal rules rather than raw power.The 1899 Convention did two enduring things. First, it began the codification of the laws and customs of war—rules on the treatment of prisoners, the protection of civilians, and limits on certain weapons—laying groundwork that would grow into the modern law of armed conflict and, eventually, the Geneva Conventions. Second, and just as important, it created the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the first standing international institution designed to let states resolve their disputes through neutral arbitration instead of on the battlefield. The idea was radical for its time: that sovereign nations would voluntarily submit their quarrels to a legal process.The Hague system was, of course, imperfect—the twentieth century that followed was the bloodiest in human history, and the conventions did not prevent two world wars. But the significance of July 29, 1899 is that it planted the institutional and conceptual seeds of everything that came after: the League of Nations, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the international criminal tribunals, and the entire architecture of treaties and adjudication that structures relations between states today. It reflects an enduring aspiration—one that runs through so much of what we cover—that disputes are better settled by law than by force. It’s a fitting backdrop for a day whose stories, in their own ways, are all about turning conflict over to the legal system rather than settling it by other means.A federal appeals court has revived a proposed class action accusing Chobani of deceiving consumers by marketing some of its Greek yogurt as “zero sugar.” The Seventh Circuit in Chicago ruled that consumers can proceed with claims under state consumer-protection laws, because Chobani Zero Sugar yogurt contains about four grams per serving of allulose, a naturally occurring sweetener. Here’s the wrinkle that makes this interesting. Allulose is chemically a sugar, but the body barely metabolizes it, so the FDA lets manufacturers leave it out of the “sugars” lines on the Nutrition Facts panel. Chobani leaned on exactly that, saying its panel accurately shows zero grams of total and added sugar. But the court focused on the big front-of-package promise—”Zero Sugar”—and found persuasive an FDA brief explaining that “total sugars” actually includes all monosaccharides, allulose among them. Under FDA rules, a product generally can’t be labeled “zero sugar” or “sugar free” unless it has less than half a gram of sugar per serving. Writing for the court, Judge Thomas Kirsch said it was not implausible that consumers—here, a couple who bought the yogurt at a Costco near Chicago—were “fooled” by that absolute promise. The significance is a reminder that the technically-accurate fine print on the back doesn’t necessarily save a bold marketing claim on the front. This is how consumer-protection law polices the gap between what a label shouts and what a product actually contains, and the ruling lets the plaintiffs try to prove that gap misled shoppers.Chobani must face lawsuit over zero-sugar yogurt claim, US appeals court rules | ReutersYahoo Finance · Insurance JournaleBay and three of its former executives have agreed to pay roughly $56 million to settle a civil suit brought by a Massachusetts couple who were the targets of one of the more disturbing corporate harassment campaigns in recent memory. The couple, Ina and David Steiner, publish an e-commerce trade newsletter, and back in 2019 several eBay employees—furious over the Steiners’ coverage of the company—orchestrated a campaign to terrorize them: shipping cockroaches, live spiders and fly larvae, and a bloody pig Halloween mask to their home, sending threatening messages, and conducting covert surveillance. It grew out of internal communications in which senior executives discussed taking the couple “down.” The criminal side of this played out years ago, with multiple former employees prosecuted and sentenced. This week’s news is the civil resolution: eBay will pay about $46 million to the couple plus millions more in charitable contributions, and the former executives are personally on the hook—two million dollars from former CEO Devin Wenig, and smaller sums from two others. The significance here is corporate accountability, and specifically accountability for retaliation against the press. A powerful company weaponized its resources to punish two journalists for critical coverage—the kind of retaliation that strikes at the heart of a free press—and while the criminal cases addressed the individual foot soldiers, this settlement attaches a very large price tag to the company and the executives at the top. It’s a stark example of the civil justice system doing what the criminal system often can’t: reaching the institution and its leadership, and making them pay.eBay, former executives to pay $56 million to settle couple’s harassment case | ReutersCNN · CNBCAnd finally, prosecutors have offered their most detailed account yet of why they believe activist Charlie Kirk was killed, arguing in a new court filing that the man accused of shooting him targeted Kirk for his political and religious views. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist and ally of President Trump, was shot and killed in September 2025 at a university in Utah; Tyler Robinson, who is 23, is charged in his death. In the filing, prosecutors pointed to Kirk’s opposition to gay marriage and transgender rights, and cited a letter from a board member of Kirk’s organization describing him as the face of a political and religious movement. They allege Robinson’s own lifestyle ran contrary to Kirk’s views and that he targeted Kirk because of his “political expression.” Robinson’s defense attorney pushed back, arguing that the materials the state is relying on show nothing about whether Robinson actually disagreed with Kirk or what was in his mind. And that disagreement is the legal heart of this. Motive is not, strictly speaking, an element the prosecution must prove to establish murder—but it is powerful evidence, it helps a jury make sense of a killing, and in a serious case it can bear heavily on how the crime is characterized and punished. What we’re watching is the perennial challenge of proving why someone did something: the state assembling external evidence to reconstruct a defendant’s internal state of mind, and the defense insisting that inference isn’t proof. The significance is that a case already saturated with political meaning will now turn, in part, on a genuinely hard legal question—how, and whether, prosecutors can establish motive—and the coming proceedings will test whether their theory holds up under the rules of evidence.Prosecutors say Charlie Kirk was attacked for his politics, cite anti-LGBT views | Reuters This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe
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SCOTUS Mail-In Voting, J&J's $5.5B Talc Deal & Meta on Trial
3w ago00:09:37Tap to summarizeThis Day in Legal History: Sonia Sotomayor Advances to the Supreme CourtOn July 28, 2009, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, sending her to the full Senate, which confirmed her the following week. With that confirmation she became the first Hispanic justice—and only the third woman—ever to serve on the Court.Her path to the bench was the stuff of American mythology, and it was central to her nomination. Born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, raised in a housing project, diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at seven and losing her father at nine, she went on to Princeton and Yale Law School, then worked as a Manhattan prosecutor before becoming a federal trial judge and later a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. As a district judge, she famously issued the injunction that ended the 1994–95 Major League Baseball strike. Her confirmation fight, though, turned heavily on a single phrase from an earlier speech—her remark that a “wise Latina” might, with the richness of her experiences, sometimes reach a better conclusion than someone without them. Critics called it bias; supporters called it an honest acknowledgment that lived experience shapes judgment.In the years since, Sotomayor has become one of the Court’s most forceful liberal voices, known for pointed dissents on race, criminal justice, and—fittingly for today—the very “shadow docket” at the center of our lead story. She has been among the sharpest critics of the Court deciding major questions through emergency orders with little briefing and no argument. The significance of July 28, 2009 is both symbolic and substantive: symbolic, in that a woman from a Bronx housing project reached the pinnacle of the American legal system and expanded who Americans see reflected on their highest court; and substantive, in that she has spent her tenure insisting the Court explain itself and show its work—an insistence that lands with particular weight in a week when the justices are again being asked to make consequential law on the emergency docket.The Trump administration has escalated its fight over mail-in voting all the way to the Supreme Court, asking the justices on an emergency basis to let its executive order take effect nationwide. This is the direct sequel to yesterday’s story: after the First Circuit refused on Saturday to lift the injunction blocking key parts of the March order, the Justice Department went straight to the high Court, asking it to put that injunction on hold while the litigation continues. The order directs federal agencies to build voter-eligibility lists and to restrict Postal Service delivery of ballots not tied to those lists; a coalition of 23 states and D.C. argues the President simply lacks authority to impose federal rules on elections that the Constitution assigns to states and to Congress. What’s notable here is the vehicle. This is an emergency application—part of what critics call the “shadow docket,” where the Court decides consequential questions quickly, often with little briefing and no full argument. Regular listeners will remember the shadow docket as a recurring concern precisely because it lets the Court make major law in the shadows. The justices have told the states to respond by August 3, so a decision could come fast. The significance is that one of the most consequential election-administration questions in years—decided against the administration twice below—is now in the hands of a Supreme Court being asked to act on an emergency timeline, months before the midterms.Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow mail-in ballot restrictions | ReutersWashington Post · CNBCJohnson & Johnson has announced a $5.5 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming its talc products caused ovarian cancer—a deal that could finally close out more than a decade of litigation. The settlement would cover roughly 69,000 cases consolidated in New Jersey federal court plus related state cases, amounting to about 99.75% of the remaining talc claims. If you were with us last week, the timing is impossible to miss: just days ago, the federal magistrate judge overseeing those 69,000 cases cast serious doubt on whether the plaintiffs could even prove specific causation, ordering them to explain why their claims shouldn’t be dismissed. Days later, J&J puts $5.5 billion on the table. That sequence is a lesson in how litigation leverage works—a favorable evidentiary signal can push a defendant toward a global resolution on its own terms, or embolden it, depending on the read. The mechanics matter: the deal needs acceptance by 95% of the ovarian-cancer claimants and approval from the judge overseeing the federal litigation. And notably, J&J isn’t conceding anything—its litigation chief called the claims “meritless,” and the company still denies its talc caused cancer, though it pulled talc-based baby powder from U.S. and Canadian shelves back in 2020. The significance is that after years of trials, appeals, and two failed attempts to offload the liability through bankruptcy, J&J is choosing certainty and closure over continued combat—paying billions to make a decade of litigation risk go away, without ever admitting its product was dangerous.Johnson & Johnson announces $5.5 billion settlement of talc lawsuits | ReutersCBS News · Bloomberg LawA major trial has opened in Nashville, where the state of Tennessee is telling a jury that Meta knew its Instagram platform was harming teenagers and buried the evidence to protect its profits. In opening statements for what’s expected to be a seven-week trial in state court, Tennessee’s lawyers said Meta’s own researchers repeatedly flagged that some teens were using the platform compulsively—linked to eating disorders, depression, and self-harm—yet the company declined to disable engagement features like autoplay, notifications, and infinite scroll, which the state says were designed to keep teens hooked and maximize the ads they saw. Meta’s lawyer countered that the company has been transparent about the risks teens face and about the dangerous content it works to find and remove. The legal theory here should sound familiar—it echoes the playbook used against Big Tobacco: the argument that a company’s own internal research proves it knew about the harm and chose profit anyway. That’s powerful evidence if the jury believes it, which is likely why, according to reporting, there’s already been a fight over whether Meta’s lawyers tried to keep some of that internal research out. This connects to threads we’ve followed all month, from the multistate suit seeking enormous penalties to the individual bellwether cases. The significance is that these harm-to-teens claims are now being tested in front of an actual jury, and the outcome will shape how Meta and its peers value the risk—and how aggressively other states and plaintiffs press similar cases.Meta disregarded its own research on teen harm, Tennessee tells jury | ReutersAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I use a striking data point—the Miami metro area’s cost of living has reportedly now surpassed greater New York City’s—to make a case about how we misunderstand what it means to call a state “low tax.” My core argument is that focusing on a single, highly visible tax like the income tax gives you a badly incomplete picture of whether a place is actually affordable, and for whom.Here’s the logic. Florida markets itself relentlessly on having no personal income tax, and rankings like the Tax Foundation’s competitiveness index put Florida near the top and New York dead last largely on that basis. But I argue that conflates three very different claims: that Florida collects less through income taxes, that households there bear lower total costs, and that residents end up better off. Only the first is clearly true. The costs a state doesn’t cover through an income tax don’t vanish—they get shifted, recovered through other levies, or pushed into the private market. It’s the same principle as a restaurant that offers “free” parking: the cost of that parking is just baked into the price of the food. When Florida forgoes an income tax, residents still pay—through sales and property taxes, fees, sky-high insurance premiums, and services they have to buy privately that other states provide publicly. And because the income tax is the most progressive major revenue source a state has, replacing it with all of that tends to shift the burden down the income ladder.The comparison I keep coming back to is the everyday cost that a public system absorbs in New York but a family pays out of pocket in Florida. New York guarantees every four-year-old a free, full-day pre-K seat; Florida’s program funds about 540 instructional hours—roughly three hours a day—leaving working ...
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Legal News for Weds 7/22 - Meta AI Layoff Suit Chugs Along, Court Voids NLRB Union-Preserving Rule, Judge Saves Immigrant TPS Permits and CA Film Tax Credits Catching Strays
3w ago00:08:59Tap to summarizeThis Day in Legal History: The Senate Rejects Court-PackingOn July 22, 1937, the United States Senate rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to reorganize—critics said “pack”—the Supreme Court, voting 70 to 20 to send the bill to a quiet death. It was a stinging defeat for a president at the height of his popularity, delivered by his own party, and it settled a constitutional question that still shapes how we think about the independence of the judiciary.The background was a collision between the New Deal and the Court. Through the mid-1930s, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court had struck down key pieces of Roosevelt’s economic program as unconstitutional. Frustrated after his landslide 1936 reelection, FDR proposed legislation that would have let him appoint a new justice for every sitting justice over the age of seventy—which, not coincidentally, would have allowed him to add up to six new justices and swamp the opposition. He framed it as a matter of efficiency and helping overworked elderly judges, but nobody was fooled; it was a naked attempt to change the Court’s decisions by changing its membership.The plan backfired, and the reasons are the lesson. Even senators who supported the New Deal recoiled at the precedent—if this president could enlarge the Court to get the rulings he wanted, so could the next one, and the Court’s independence would become a fiction. Meanwhile, the Court itself defused the crisis: in the spring of 1937, Justice Owen Roberts began voting to uphold New Deal legislation, the famous “switch in time that saved nine,” which took some of the urgency out of FDR’s demand. The significance of July 22, 1937 is that it established a durable, if unwritten, constitutional norm—that the size of the Supreme Court is essentially off-limits as a tool for a president to overpower rulings he dislikes. The number nine isn’t in the Constitution, but the bipartisan rebuke of court-packing helped make it feel almost as if it were.An analysis of the closely watched lawsuit by Meta employees over AI-driven layoffs highlights a hard truth: even when workers suspect an algorithm decided their fate, proving it is enormously difficult. To recap, 26 current and former Meta employees sued, alleging the company’s internal AI tools flagged them for termination because they have disabilities or took protected medical, parental, or family leave. Their theory is mechanically specific: because tools like the “Metamate” system scored employees partly on data such as keystroke activity, workers who were lawfully out on leave generated fewer data points and were disproportionately ranked as low-value. Meta cut roughly 8,000 people—about ten percent of its workforce—and says humans, not machines, made the decisions. Here’s why these cases are so hard to win. Anti-discrimination law generally requires the worker to show the employer’s decision was tainted by a protected characteristic, but the employee usually has almost no visibility into how the AI actually worked—the models, the training data, and the weighting are the company’s closely held secrets. On top of that, many employees have signed arbitration agreements, funneling their claims out of open court and into a private process that’s harder to see into and to appeal. The significance is that this appears to be the first case of its kind against a major U.S. company, and it exposes a growing gap: as employers hand more consequential decisions to opaque algorithms, the legal tools workers have to challenge those decisions—built for an era of human managers—may not be up to the job of proving what the machine did.Analysis: Meta employees’ lawsuit shows that if AI fires you, proving it is the hard part | ReutersA split panel of the D.C. Circuit has struck down a long-standing National Labor Relations Board doctrine that protected unions after a business changes hands, ruling that it conflicts with federal labor law. The doctrine at issue is the “successor bar,” and it works like this: when a company is acquired and a new employer takes over, that employer generally cannot challenge or withdraw recognition from the existing union for a reasonable period—about six months—giving the union and workers a window of stability to bargain with their new boss. The court held that this Board-created rule isn’t consistent with the National Labor Relations Act. What makes this ruling bigger than one labor doctrine is the tool the court used to get there. The decision applies the Supreme Court’s 2024 Loper Bright ruling, which overturned the decades-old Chevron doctrine and ended the requirement that courts defer to a federal agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. Without that deference, the D.C. Circuit felt free to substitute its own reading of the labor law for the NLRB’s. This is exactly the dynamic I wrote about in my Bloomberg column last week in the tax context—the death of Chevron doesn’t erase statutory ambiguity, it just moves the power to resolve it from agencies to courts. The significance is that we’re now watching that shift play out across the administrative state: settled agency doctrines, some decades old, are suddenly vulnerable to being reinterpreted by judges, and here the immediate losers are unions and the workers who counted on a bargaining foothold after a merger.US court says longstanding NLRB rule on post-merger union bargaining is invalid | ReutersA federal judge has temporarily blocked the administration from stripping work authorization from tens of thousands of asylum seekers and immigrants with Temporary Protected Status. U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton in Boston sided with a coalition of immigrant-rights groups and labor unions, halting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from moving ahead with a set of policies while he weighs a longer-term pause; he said he’ll rule by August 5. Here’s the stakes and the legal frame. A work permit—formally, an employment authorization document—is what lets many immigrants lawfully hold a job while their asylum case or protected status is pending. Yanking it doesn’t just threaten deportation down the line; it immediately jeopardizes people’s livelihoods and their employers’ workforces. The contested policies were designed to implement immigration restrictions Congress enacted last year as part of the administration’s signature tax-and-spending law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The plaintiffs argue USCIS is implementing those provisions in ways that exceed what the law allows and skip required procedures. A temporary block like this one preserves the status quo—keeping people employed—while the court decides whether the government followed the rules. The significance connects to a theme we keep returning to: courts serving as a check on how fast and how far the executive can move in reshaping immigration, insisting that even policies rooted in a real act of Congress still have to be implemented lawfully and with proper process.US judge blocks Trump administration from stripping immigrants of work permits | ReutersAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a self-inflicted mess in California: lawmakers scrambling to rework a business tax-credit cap that they apparently didn’t realize would kneecap Hollywood film studios. My core argument is that California is directionally right to resist subsidy bidding wars, but wrong to rewrite the economics of credits it has already issued after companies have started relying on them.Here’s what happened. Since 2024, California has capped the total tax reduction a business can take from all its credits at $5 million a year. That cap was set to expire after 2026—right as productions were going to start claiming credits under a newly expanded film incentive the state had just touted as a centerpiece of keeping film jobs in California. Instead, a bill called SB 122 extended the $5 million limit through 2029 and then converts it to the greater of $5 million or 70% of taxes owed. The part that really gets me is the admission underneath it: lawmakers passed a $351.7 billion budget without apparently understanding how this cap would interact with the film credit they’d just enlarged. As one assemblymember candidly put it, “I’m not sure who knew what about what.” It looks like the cap was really aimed at large research-and-development credit stockpiles, and film credits just got caught in the crossfire.My argument is that the distinction between prospective and retroactive matters enormously here. It’s one thing for California to decide, going forward, that future subsidies will be smaller or conditioned—that’s legitimate fiscal discipline, and I don’t think Hollywood should get to dictate tax policy just by threatening to decamp to Georgia. But it’s another thing entirely to change the timing and practical value of credits after studios have already committed workers, facilities, and financing in reliance on the old rules. When a state does that, it makes itself a less credible counterparty, and it quietly reduces the value of every future incentive it offers, because businesses will start discounting California’s promises for legislative risk. So my prescription is targeted: protect the film credits already awarded under the prior rules, keep a real limit on the big accumulated R&D credits that were the actual target, and replace the ...
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Legal News for Tues 7/21 - Paramount WB Merger Frozen, Anthropic $1.5b Copyright Settlement for Piracy, DOJ Launches Probe into Harvard
4w ago00:06:54Tap to summarizeThis Day in Legal History: The Dodd-Frank ActOn July 21, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the most sweeping overhaul of American financial regulation since the New Deal. It was a direct response to the 2008 financial crisis—the collapse that wiped out trillions in household wealth, toppled storied institutions like Lehman Brothers, and required massive taxpayer bailouts to keep the banking system from failing entirely.Dodd-Frank tried to attack the crisis’s root causes on several fronts at once. It created the Financial Stability Oversight Council to watch for systemic risks—the danger that one firm’s failure could cascade through the whole economy—and gave regulators new “resolution authority” to wind down failing giants in an orderly way, an attempt to end the problem of banks being “too big to fail.” It imposed the Volcker Rule, restricting banks from making certain speculative bets with depositors’ money. It brought the shadowy derivatives market under federal oversight. And, in its most visible legacy, it created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—a new agency dedicated to policing mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products, born largely from an idea championed by then-professor Elizabeth Warren.Dodd-Frank has been contested ever since—fought over in rulemaking, trimmed by later legislation, and litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, including a major case over the constitutionality of the CFPB’s structure. But its core significance endures: it represents the country’s considered legal judgment that concentrated financial power, left unchecked, poses a systemic danger, and that the answer is robust administrative regulation. It’s a fitting anniversary to sit alongside today’s news, because so much of what we cover comes back to the same enduring question—how the law should restrain private economic power without strangling the enterprise that power creates.A federal judge has temporarily paused Paramount Skydance’s roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, siding for now with a coalition of twelve state attorneys general who sued to stop it. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a fourteen-day temporary restraining order, finding the deal “likely” violates antitrust law. Here’s the framework. Antitrust law exists to preserve competition, and one of its central tools is blocking mergers that would concentrate too much market power in a single company. The states, led by California, sued on July 13 arguing that combining these two entertainment giants would create a media behemoth with the power to raise prices across film and television and to squeeze rivals. A temporary restraining order is exactly what it sounds like—a short-term freeze to preserve the status quo while the court takes a harder look; the “likely violates” language signals the states cleared the initial bar of showing they’re reasonably likely to succeed. It is not a final ruling that the merger is illegal. The significance is twofold. First, it’s a reminder that even after companies strike a deal, they still have to clear the antitrust gauntlet, and state attorneys general—not just federal enforcers—can be the ones holding the gate. Second, the sheer scale here, a hundred-and-ten-billion-dollar combination of major studios and networks, makes this a marquee test of how aggressively courts will scrutinize consolidation in an industry that shapes what Americans watch.Judge orders Paramount to temporarily pause Warner Bros. acquisition | ReutersA federal judge has granted final approval of Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with a class of authors who accused the AI company of misusing their books to train its chatbot Claude—the largest known copyright settlement in U.S. history. The deal works out to roughly $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 books, split among the authors and publishers who hold the rights. The legal backstory is important, because it’s more precise than “AI company pays authors.” The now-retired Judge William Alsup, who first handled the case, drew a careful line: he suggested that training AI on lawfully acquired books could qualify as fair use, but found that Anthropic had violated authors’ rights by downloading and storing more than seven million pirated books in a “central library”—copies it obtained illegitimately, regardless of whether they were ultimately used for training. In other words, the core wrong the settlement addresses is the piracy—the acquisition and hoarding of stolen copyrighted works—not simply the act of training itself. The settlement drew objections from some authors who argue it’s too small, overpays the plaintiffs’ attorneys, or wrongly leaves out certain rights holders, and the judge had to weigh those before signing off. The significance is that this sets a real-world price on one flavor of AI’s copyright problem. It doesn’t resolve the biggest open question—whether training on copyrighted material is itself lawful—but it establishes that how you got the training data matters enormously, and that building your library out of pirated books can cost you well over a billion dollars.US judge approves Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement of copyright lawsuit | ReutersAnd finally, the Justice Department has announced a civil-rights probe into Harvard University, this time over its financial aid programs. The Department’s Civil Rights Division says it has opened a “compliance review” to determine whether Harvard’s China-based financial aid arrangements discriminate on the basis of national origin by steering aid to foreign—presumably Chinese—students in a way that excludes American citizens. The theory rests on an unusual inversion of civil-rights law. Statutes like Title VI of the Civil Rights Act bar recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on national origin, and they’ve historically been used to protect racial and ethnic minorities. Here the DOJ is deploying that framework to allege discrimination against American-citizen students. The trigger, according to the Department, was an audit of Harvard’s foreign-funding disclosures showing the university has received more than $630 million from sources based in China, some of it allegedly earmarked, through donor restrictions, for aid to particular students. Harvard says it’s reviewing the letter and will engage with the government. The significance is that this is the latest salvo in a sustained campaign against Harvard and other elite universities, which have faced probes and funding threats over everything from admissions to campus protests. Whatever the merits of this specific allegation, the pattern is what’s notable: the machinery of federal civil-rights enforcement being aimed, repeatedly and pointedly, at a handful of institutions the administration has publicly targeted.US DOJ says it is probing Harvard over financial aid programs | Reuters This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe
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Legal News for Mon 7/20 - NJ Assault Weapons Ban Struck Down, Judge Stops Admin from Clawing Back Grants, Meta Greenlight to AI-Fire and IRS Top Attorney Out
4w ago00:07:39Tap to summarizeThis Day in Legal History: The Declaration of SentimentsOn July 20, 1848, at the close of the two-day Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York, roughly a hundred people signed the Declaration of Sentiments—the founding document of the organized women’s rights movement in the United States. Drafted principally by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, it was a deliberate and pointed act of legal argument: Stanton modeled it on the Declaration of Independence, echoing Jefferson’s cadences but adding two words that changed everything—”that all men and women are created equal.”The genius of the document was to take the nation’s own founding logic and turn it on the exclusion of half the population. It then catalogued, in the form of a bill of particulars against “man” rather than King George, the specific legal disabilities women lived under. Married women had no right to their own property or wages—under the common-law doctrine of coverture, a wife’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s. Women could not vote, were barred from most professions and higher education, had almost no rights to their own children in the event of separation, and were governed by laws they had no voice in making. The Declaration listed these as concrete legal grievances, not vague complaints, framing the denial of women’s rights as a violation of the country’s stated principles.The most controversial demand was the resolution calling for women’s suffrage, which passed only narrowly and with the public support of Frederick Douglass, who attended the convention. The significance of July 20, 1848 is that it launched a legal and political campaign that would take seventy-two years to win the vote, with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and far longer to dismantle coverture and the web of laws built on women’s legal subordination. It’s a reminder that constitutional principles are not self-executing—that “all men are created equal” had to be argued, expanded, and fought for by the people the original text left out.A federal appeals court has struck down New Jersey’s ban on assault firearms and high-capacity magazines, the first time any federal appeals court has invalidated a state assault-weapons ban. Sitting en banc, the Philadelphia-based Third Circuit ruled 10-5 that the state’s prohibition on semi-automatic rifles—not just AR-15s, but the whole category—violates the Second Amendment, as does its ban on magazines holding more than ten rounds. The reasoning flows from the Supreme Court’s recent framework, which asks whether a gun regulation is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation; the majority concluded these bans are not. What makes this a genuinely big deal is the split it creates. Just last week, a different federal appeals court upheld Illinois’s ban on semi-automatic weapons—so we now have appeals courts squarely disagreeing on whether these bans are constitutional. That kind of circuit split is precisely the condition that draws the Supreme Court in, and the Court is already poised to take up whether bans on semi-automatic rifles violate the Second Amendment. The significance is that a question affecting roughly a dozen states with similar laws is now barreling toward a definitive answer. For the moment, New Jersey’s ban is unenforceable as to these weapons, but the durability of that outcome—and of assault-weapons bans nationwide—now depends on what the Supreme Court does next.US appeals court declares New Jersey’s ban on assault rifles unconstitutional | ReutersA federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration cannot rely on a White House budget-office regulation to cancel billions of dollars in grants simply because those grants no longer match its priorities. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston sided with a coalition of Democratic-led states, rejecting the administration’s claim that a clause in Office of Management and Budget regulations gave it authority to revoke funding whenever an agency’s focus shifts. Here’s the underlying principle. When Congress appropriates money for a program and an agency awards grants under it, the government generally can’t just take that money back on a whim—grant recipients have relied on it, and the terms for termination are limited. The administration’s theory was that an OMB regulation let it terminate grants it deemed “inconsistent with agency priorities,” effectively a roving power to defund causes it disfavors. Judge Talwani found the regulation didn’t authorize anything of the kind. The significance connects to a theme we keep returning to: the limits of executive power over money that Congress has already directed. The administration has repeatedly tried to redirect or withhold funds to reshape policy without going through Congress, and courts have repeatedly pushed back. This ruling reinforces that a president’s control over federal spending, though real, is bounded—an agency can’t retroactively pull grants just because political priorities changed.Trump administration cannot cancel grants for disfavored causes, US judge rules | ReutersA federal judge has declined to block Meta from laying off 26 employees who claim the company’s AI tools singled them out for termination because they have disabilities or took medical leave. U.S. District Judge William Orrick in Oakland ruled that the workers hadn’t shown the “irreparable harm” needed for an emergency order halting the layoffs, which are set to begin July 22, and that the merits of their novel claims will be decided in private arbitration. The allegations are striking. The plaintiffs—engineers, managers, researchers, and designers suing anonymously—say Meta used a suite of internal AI systems to score and rank employees onto a termination list, including an assistant called “Metamate,” an employee-trained “second brain” that tracked workers’ communications, and a productivity score drawn from scanning keystrokes, screen content, emails, and browser history. Meta denies wrongdoing and insists humans, not algorithms, made the layoff decisions. This is a frontier legal question: when an employer uses AI to help decide who gets cut, and those tools allegedly disadvantage people with disabilities or on leave, is that illegal discrimination? The judge’s refusal to block the layoffs was procedural—losing a job usually isn’t “irreparable” because money damages can fix it—but he pointedly noted the case raises “serious questions” and said he might reconsider based on more evidence about how AI was actually used. The significance is that algorithmic management is colliding with anti-discrimination law, and courts are just beginning to work out who’s accountable when the machine does the ranking.US judge won’t block Meta from laying off workers who filed AI discrimination lawsuit | ReutersAnd finally, the IRS’s top lawyer has been forced out after refusing White House demands that would have drawn him into tax audits of particular taxpayers. Ken Kies, who served as the agency’s acting chief counsel and as Treasury’s assistant secretary for tax policy, told administration officials their requests would violate a federal law that bars the president, the vice president, and other White House officials from ordering the IRS to conduct or terminate an audit of any specific taxpayer. That statute is a direct legacy of Watergate-era abuses, when presidents tried to sic the tax agency on their enemies, and tax professionals regard it as the single most important safeguard against weaponizing the tax code. Kies apparently stood on that law—and lost his job for it. The story connects directly to one we covered recently: the administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” settlement that would have given the president and his family immunity from IRS audits, which a federal judge struck down as a collusive arrangement with no basis in law. The significance is about the fragile independence of tax administration. The protections that keep audits free from political direction only work if the officials inside the agency are willing to enforce them—and when the person who says “no” to an unlawful demand is pushed out, it sends a chilling message to everyone who remains. Top US tax lawyer forced out after White House clash over tax audits | Reuters This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe
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Legal News for Fri 7/17 - Appeals Court Restores Journalist Escort Policy at Pentagon, Judge Scolds DOJ Over Hallucinated Case, "Public Charge" Green Card Rule and DraftKings vs. Philadelphia
4w ago00:07:22Tap to summarizeThis Day in Legal History: The National Minimum Drinking Age ActOn July 17, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, the law that effectively set the drinking age at 21 across the entire country. What makes the Act a fixture of law-school classrooms isn’t the policy itself—it’s the clever, and constitutionally fraught, mechanism Congress used to achieve it.Here’s the problem Congress faced. Setting a drinking age is a classic exercise of state police power; the federal government has no general authority to tell states how old someone must be to buy a beer. So Congress didn’t order the states to do anything. Instead, it reached for its spending power. The Act directed that any state which failed to raise its drinking age to 21 would lose a percentage of its federal highway funds. States remained technically “free” to keep a lower drinking age—they’d just forfeit a slice of the highway money they depended on. Within a few years, every state had fallen into line.South Dakota challenged the law, and in the 1987 case South Dakota v. Dole, the Supreme Court upheld it. The Court laid out the framework that still governs conditional federal spending: conditions must be unambiguous, related to a federal interest, not otherwise unconstitutional, and—critically—must not be so coercive that they amount to “compulsion” rather than mere “encouragement.” The Court decided that losing about five percent of highway funds was just mild pressure, not coercion. That last piece became enormously important decades later. In the 2012 healthcare decision, NFIB v. Sebelius, the Court for the first time found that a spending condition had crossed the line into unconstitutional coercion, when Congress threatened states with the loss of all their Medicaid funding. The significance of July 17, 1984 is that a law about drinking age quietly established the constitutional playbook for how the federal government leverages its money to steer state policy—and where the limits of that leverage finally lie.A federal appeals court has reinstated the Pentagon’s policy requiring journalists to be accompanied by a government escort inside the building, handing the Trump administration a win in its press-access fight with The New York Times. A lower-court judge had blocked the escort requirement in June, but a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit put it back in place. The legal reasoning is worth parsing. The Times argued the escort rule was retaliation against the press in violation of the First Amendment. The panel disagreed—at least for now—finding the Pentagon likely to succeed on its argument that a “generally applicable escort requirement” isn’t a “sufficiently adverse action” to support a First Amendment retaliation claim. In other words, because the rule applies to all reporters rather than singling out particular outlets or viewpoints, the court was skeptical it amounts to unconstitutional retaliation. This is an interim ruling on a preliminary question, not a final decision; the Times says it looks forward to litigating the merits on an expedited basis. The significance is part of a broader pattern we’ve tracked this week—friction between the administration and the press over access and newsgathering. Here the court signaled that neutral, across-the-board restrictions on where reporters can roam are harder to attack than targeted ones, even as the deeper question of press access to the government remains very much alive.US appeals court keeps in place Pentagon’s escort policy for journalists | ReutersA federal judge has warned the Justice Department after government lawyers cited a court decision that does not exist—an apparent AI “hallucination”—in an immigration detention case. In the Michigan matter, DOJ lawyers argued that the Sixth Circuit had barred courts from second-guessing an immigration judge’s bond decision, and cited a case, Taylor v. Hott, that simply isn’t real. Notably, the judge who caught it was appointed by President Trump, and he observed that fabricated AI citations have fueled “a rash of cases” clogging the courts with fake authorities. If this sounds familiar, it should—we covered a nearly identical episode on Monday, when the Eleventh Circuit sanctioned a private lawyer for the same mistake. The rule is the same regardless of who commits it: when you sign a brief, you certify that its legal contentions are grounded in real, existing law, and generative AI tools routinely invent confident, well-formatted citations to cases that were never decided. What makes this one notable is that it’s the government’s own lawyers doing it, in a case about detaining a human being. The judge declined to impose sanctions but issued a pointed warning that future filings must not contain nonexistent authorities. The significance is that the AI-hallucination problem has reached the Justice Department itself, and the courts’ patience—already thin—is not going to extend just because it’s the government at the podium.US judge warns Justice Department about AI use in immigration case | ReutersThe Trump administration is reviving the “public charge” rule, a policy that can deny green cards to immigrants deemed likely to rely on public benefits. The rule appeared in the Federal Register on Thursday, will be formally published July 20, and takes effect September 18. Here’s the concept. “Public charge” is a very old idea in immigration law—the government has long been able to refuse admission or permanent residency to someone likely to become primarily dependent on government support. The fight is over how broadly to define it. The version being revived, first adopted in 2019, dramatically expanded the definition to sweep in anyone who received a government benefit—things like food stamps, Medicaid, or housing vouchers—for more than twelve months in any three-year period. The Biden administration abandoned that broad approach in 2022 and narrowed the grounds for denial; now the expansive version is back. Immigrant advocates warn of a powerful “chilling effect” beyond the green-card applicants themselves: the fear that using benefits could jeopardize their status leads people—including in mixed-status families with citizen children—to avoid the doctor, skip food assistance, or hesitate to file taxes. The significance is that a technical change to the definition of a single term can reshape the behavior of millions, deterring lawful use of public programs out of fear it will be held against someone later.US to revive rule that could deny green cards to immigrants using public benefits | ReutersAnd finally, DraftKings has sued the city of Philadelphia after receiving a subpoena, arguing that the city’s consumer-protection ordinance is preempted by Pennsylvania state law. The dispute is a clean illustration of a recurring structural question: who gets to regulate what. Gambling in Pennsylvania is heavily regulated at the state level, through a comprehensive statutory scheme and a state gaming authority. Philadelphia enacted its own ordinance and issued DraftKings a subpoena as part of an investigation into potential violations. DraftKings’ core argument is preemption—the principle that when a higher level of government has occupied a field, a lower one can’t layer on conflicting or duplicative rules of its own. The company contends the city ordinance essentially copies Pennsylvania law, and that gambling regulation belongs to the state, not the city, so Philadelphia lacks the authority to investigate and enforce in this space. This is the same preemption logic we’ve seen play out between the federal government and states—here it’s just one rung down, between a state and one of its cities, governed by state law and the limits of municipal power. The significance is both immediate and broad: immediately, it’s a bid to quash a subpoena and fend off a city investigation; more broadly, it tests how much room local governments have to police national sports-betting companies when the state has already claimed the field.DraftKings sues Philadelphia after receiving subpoena | Reuters This is a public episode. 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Legal News for Thurs 7/16 - Trump's Personal Lawyer Blanche Grilled, Second Pro-Trump FL Judge Gets Appointed to Fed Bench, FTC Backs Curbing ABA Role
Jul 1600:06:13Tap to summarizeThis Day in Legal History: The White House Tapes RevealedOn July 16, 1973, before the Senate Watergate Committee and a live national television audience, a former White House aide named Alexander Butterfield answered a question that changed American history. Asked whether there was any kind of recording system in the White House, Butterfield confirmed that President Nixon had installed a secret, voice-activated taping system that recorded his conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office and elsewhere. In a single answer, the entire Watergate investigation pivoted.Until that moment, the inquiry into the Watergate break-in and cover-up had largely been a contest of competing testimony—Nixon’s word against that of his former counsel John Dean. The existence of the tapes meant there was now an objective record of what the President had actually said and known. Prosecutors and Congress immediately sought them; Nixon refused to hand them over, asserting executive privilege—the claim that a president’s confidential communications are shielded from disclosure. That standoff produced one of the most important separation-of-powers decisions in American law.In United States v. Nixon, decided a year later in July 1974, a unanimous Supreme Court rejected the President’s claim of absolute privilege. The Court recognized that executive privilege exists and has real constitutional footing, but held that it is not unqualified—that it must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a criminal proceeding. No person, the decision made clear, not even the president, is above the ordinary processes of the law. Nixon turned over the tapes, one of which captured him plotting to obstruct the investigation, and he resigned days later. The significance of July 16, 1973 is that a single truthful answer under oath set in motion the enforcement of a foundational principle: that presidential power operates within the law, and that the courts, not the president, decide the limits of privilege.Todd Blanche’s bid to become attorney general is hanging in the balance after a tense confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Blanche, who has been acting attorney general since President Trump fired Pam Bondi in April and who previously served as Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer, spent hours fielding pointed questions—including a telling moment when he said he “is” the president’s lawyer before catching himself and correcting it to “was.” The awkwardness captures the central concern: whether a former personal attorney to the president can run the Justice Department as a neutral servant of the law rather than of the man who appointed him. Senators pressed him on the now-defunct anti-weaponization fund, the handling of the Epstein files, and Trump’s pardons for January 6 defendants. The math is what makes this precarious. The recent death of Senator Lindsey Graham left committee Republicans with just one vote to spare, and Senator John Cornyn—a lame duck—has said he isn’t sold, meaning Blanche’s advancement may rest largely in Cornyn’s hands. The significance is about the independence of federal law enforcement: confirming a president’s former defense lawyer as attorney general tests whether the Justice Department’s prosecutorial power will be insulated from the president’s personal interests, and the narrow margin means a single Republican could decide the outcome.Blanche to face Senate grilling in bid to be Trump’s attorney general | ReutersThe Senate has confirmed a second Florida state appeals judge who ruled in President Trump’s favor in his defamation suit against the Pulitzer Prize Board, giving him a lifetime seat on the federal bench. The vote was 51-46 along party lines to place Chief Judge Jeffrey Kuntz on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Here’s the connection that drew scrutiny. Kuntz sat on the Florida appeals court panel that ruled for Trump on a personal-jurisdiction question, allowing his defamation case against the Pulitzer Board to move forward—and Kuntz wrote that panel ruling. He is now the second judge from that same panel to be nominated by Trump and confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship. At his hearing, Kuntz defended his decision not to recuse from the Trump matter. The significance is about judicial independence and the appearance of a quid pro quo. There is nothing unusual about elevating state appellate judges to the federal bench, and a favorable ruling doesn’t by itself prove anything improper. But when a president rewards judges who ruled for him personally with lifetime appointments, it raises an uncomfortable question about incentives—whether judges hoping for advancement might feel subtle pressure to favor the person doing the appointing—and that perception, critics argue, can corrode public confidence in an impartial judiciary even where each individual ruling was defensible on the merits.2nd Florida judge who ruled for Trump in Pulitzer case confirmed to federal bench | ReutersAnd finally, the Federal Trade Commission and the Ohio State Bar Association have thrown their support behind an Ohio Supreme Court proposal to loosen the American Bar Association’s long-standing grip on who gets to become a lawyer. The proposal would let graduates of non-ABA-accredited law schools sit for the Ohio bar exam and would move toward a state-run accreditation process. Here’s the structure worth understanding. In most states, you generally can’t take the bar exam unless you graduated from a law school the ABA has accredited—which effectively makes the ABA the national gatekeeper of legal education. The FTC’s objection is framed in competition terms: it argues the ABA’s accreditation standards “go beyond what is reasonably necessary” to ensure lawyers are prepared, and that restricting the supply of lawyers this way may boost incumbent lawyers’ pay while raising costs and reducing access for ordinary people who need legal help. Ohio isn’t alone—Florida and Texas have already amended their rules so the ABA no longer has the final say, and Tennessee is weighing a similar move. The significance is a real shift in how the profession polices its own entry. Supporters see it as breaking up a monopoly to expand access to legal careers and legal services; critics worry that weakening a uniform national standard could erode the quality and consistency of legal training. Either way, the ABA’s decades-long role as the sole gatekeeper is eroding, state by state.State bar, FTC back Ohio proposal to limit ABA role in lawyer admissions | Reuters This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe
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Legal News for Weds 7/15 - Blanche BS AG Hearing, Free Speech Challenge to Trump ICC Sanctions on Judges etc., and End of Fed Oversight for LA School District
Jul 1500:06:16Tap to summarizeThis Day in Legal History: The Housing Act of 1949On July 15, 1949, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act of 1949, a centerpiece of his “Fair Deal” and one of the most ambitious housing laws in American history. Its stated goal was breathtaking in scope: “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.” To get there, the Act poured federal money into public housing construction, expanded federal mortgage insurance, and created the urban renewal program to clear and redevelop so-called “slum” neighborhoods.The Act’s legacy is genuinely double-edged, and it’s worth telling honestly. On one hand, it expanded homeownership for millions and built hundreds of thousands of units of public housing. On the other, its implementation became one of the great engines of racial segregation in the twentieth century. Urban renewal too often meant bulldozing established Black neighborhoods—critics bitterly renamed it “Negro removal”—and the public housing built in their place was frequently segregated by design and concentrated in already-poor areas. Meanwhile the federal mortgage machinery it fed continued the practice of redlining, steering the benefits of homeownership toward white families and away from Black ones.That mixed legacy is why the Housing Act belongs in a legal-history conversation about civil rights. The same federal government that would, within a few years, order schools desegregated in Brown v. Board of Education was, through its housing policy, actively entrenching residential segregation—and residential segregation is what makes school segregation so durable, because in America where you live largely determines where you go to school. The story of July 15, 1949 is a reminder that the law’s effects depend enormously on how it’s carried out: a statute promising a decent home for every family became, in practice, a tool that shaped the segregated geography we’re still litigating over today.Todd Blanche faced a high-stakes Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today in his bid to become attorney general on a permanent basis. Blanche has been acting attorney general since President Trump fired Pam Bondi in April, and before joining the Justice Department he served as Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer—a background that sits at the center of the concerns about him. The confirmation process exists because the Constitution’s Appointments Clause requires the Senate to advise and consent on the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, and the attorney general is supposed to serve the United States, not the president personally. That tension drove the questioning: senators pressed Blanche on the Department’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and its prosecutions of figures perceived as Trump’s political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The significance is about the independence of the Justice Department. An attorney general who was recently the president’s private defense attorney raises the question of whether federal prosecutorial power will be wielded neutrally or as an instrument of the president’s interests. With a pair of undecided Republicans—Senators Cornyn and Tillis—holding real leverage, the hearing was Blanche’s chance to reassure a narrowly divided Senate, and most observers still expect him to be confirmed by a slim margin.Blanche to face Senate grilling in bid to be Trump’s attorney general | ReutersTwo U.S.-based advocacy groups have sued the Trump administration, arguing that its sanctions targeting the International Criminal Court violate the First Amendment. The groups—Democracy for the Arab World Now and the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide—are challenging the February 2025 executive order under which the administration has sanctioned ICC judges, prosecutors, and Palestinian human rights organizations, and which officials pledged this week to expand. The free-speech theory is the key. The plaintiffs say the sanctions regime is so broad that they have stopped doing constitutionally protected things—filing submissions with the ICC and coordinating advocacy with sanctioned people, like the U.N. special rapporteur for Palestine—out of fear that doing so could expose them to fines or even prison. In First Amendment law, that’s a classic “chilling effect”: when a law is vague or sweeping enough that people self-censor protected speech to avoid the risk of penalty, the law itself can be unconstitutional even before anyone is actually punished. There’s notable precedent here: a similar Trump order in 2020 was blocked by a judge who found it likely violated the First Amendment, before the Biden administration rescinded it in 2021. The significance is a direct clash between the executive’s broad power over foreign affairs and sanctions on one side, and Americans’ right to speak, associate, and petition on the other. Three ICC judges have separately sued over the same sanctions, so this order is now being attacked on multiple fronts.Trump’s ICC order violates free speech, advocacy groups say in lawsuit | ReutersA federal appeals court has ended more than sixty years of federal oversight of the Concordia Parish School Board in Louisiana, lifting one of the desegregation orders that dates back to the Civil Rights era. The Fifth Circuit’s decision hands a win to the Trump administration, which has pushed to wind down these long-running cases—a striking reversal for a Justice Department that spent decades on the other side, fighting to enforce them. Here’s the legal framework. After Brown v. Board of Education, hundreds of Southern school districts were placed under federal court supervision and ordered to dismantle segregation. A district can be released from that oversight when a court finds it has achieved “unitary status”—meaning it has eliminated the vestiges of segregation, to the extent practicable, in areas like student assignment, faculty hiring, facilities, and discipline. The dispute in cases like this one is whether that’s really been accomplished. Louisiana officials argue the orders are relics of a bygone era and no longer needed. Civil rights advocates and some parents counter that the vestiges persist—in racial disparities in student discipline, access to advanced academic programs, and teacher hiring—and that lifting oversight removes a crucial tool for addressing them. The significance is part of a broader push to close out Civil Rights-era decrees, and it raises a hard question: whether these districts have genuinely outgrown the need for supervision, or whether ending it prematurely risks letting old patterns quietly reassert themselves.Appeals court ends US oversight of Louisiana school system related to desegregation mandate | Reuters This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe
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Legal News for Tues 7/14 - Subpoenas for Times Reporters, Trump's IRS Deal Void, More Tylenol Autism Nonsense and Big Companies May Yet Miss Chevron Deference
Jul 1400:09:08Tap to summarizeThis Day in Legal History: The Sedition Act of 1798On July 14, 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act, the most notorious of the four laws known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act made it a federal crime to write, print, utter, or publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government of the United States, the Congress, or the President—with the intent to defame them or bring them into disrepute. In plain terms, it criminalized criticism of the government.The context was a Federalist administration, under President John Adams, gripped by fear of France and of domestic dissent, and eager to silence the opposition press aligned with Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans. And that’s exactly how it was used. Federal prosecutors went after Republican newspaper editors and even a sitting congressman, securing convictions for the crime of harsh political speech. Notably, the Act was written to expire in 1801—conveniently, the moment Adams’s term would end—so that it could be wielded against his critics but would not outlive his own hold on power.The reaction was fierce and consequential. Jefferson and James Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions arguing the Act was unconstitutional, and the ensuing backlash helped sweep Jefferson into the presidency in 1800; once in office, he pardoned those convicted under it. The Sedition Act was never tested at the Supreme Court, but history rendered its verdict. More than a century and a half later, in New York Times v. Sullivan, the Court looked back and declared that the Act’s assault on free expression had been repudiated “in the court of history,” using it as a touchstone for modern First Amendment law. The lesson of July 14, 1798 endures: laws that punish criticism of the government are almost always tools of the powerful against their critics—and a free press is most necessary precisely when the state would prefer it silent.Federal prosecutors have issued subpoenas seeking to compel four New York Times journalists to testify before a Manhattan grand jury, part of a leak investigation into the paper’s reporting on security concerns surrounding President Trump’s flight on the new Qatari-donated Air Force One. Federal agents delivered some of the subpoenas to the reporters’ homes. Here’s the legal terrain. There is no absolute federal reporter’s privilege—the Supreme Court held decades ago that the First Amendment doesn’t categorically shield journalists from grand jury subpoenas—but the Justice Department has long operated under internal guidelines that made going after reporters a last resort. Those guardrails matter here, because in 2025 Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded the Biden-era policy that had sharply limited subpoenas against journalists, restoring broader authority to pursue them. The Times says it will fight, and can ask a court to quash the subpoenas as overbroad, issued in bad faith, or violating the First Amendment. The significance is the pressure this puts on newsgathering: when the government can subpoena reporters to unmask their sources, sources stop talking, and the kind of national-security reporting at issue here gets harder to do. Press-freedom groups warn this administration has reached for subpoenas and search warrants against journalists—at the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal—more freely than its predecessors.Explainer: Can prosecutors compel New York Times journalists to testify in leak probe? | ReutersA federal judge has voided President Trump’s roughly $1.78 billion settlement with the IRS, delivering a scathing rebuke and referring his lawyers for possible discipline. The backstory is unusual. Trump sued his own administration in January over the leak of his tax returns, and by late May had reached a deal with the IRS to create an “anti-weaponization” fund and to “forever bar” the government from any action related to his past tax returns—protection extending to his family and businesses. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams found the whole thing was a setup. The core legal defect is the absence of what courts call adverseness. Federal courts can only decide genuine “cases or controversies”—real disputes between opposing parties. Here, Judge Williams wrote, “there was never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail,” because Trump was effectively suing himself, with his own Justice Department on the other side agreeing to lose. She found the case was brought for an improper purpose: to get a court’s stamp of legitimacy on a settlement with no basis in law or fact. She sanctioned Trump’s attorneys and referred one, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar, and suggested Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche should face discipline too. The significance is a court refusing to be used as a rubber stamp—insisting that its legitimacy can’t be borrowed to bless a collusive deal dressed up as litigation.US judge voids Trump’s settlement with IRS | ReutersA federal appeals court has revived more than 500 private lawsuits against Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, alleging that acetaminophen use during pregnancy caused autism and ADHD in children—and here it’s worth being clear about the science before the law. There is no firm scientific evidence that Tylenol causes autism or ADHD. The most rigorous recent research, including a large Swedish sibling-comparison study of millions of children, found no causal link once you control for genetic and environmental factors shared within families; mainstream medical bodies continue to regard acetaminophen as one of the safer pain and fever options in pregnancy, and untreated high fevers carry their own real risks. So this ruling is not a finding that Tylenol is dangerous. What the Second Circuit actually decided was narrower and procedural: that the trial judge had wrongly excluded the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses. Under the rules governing expert testimony, judges act as “gatekeepers,” admitting expert opinion only if it rests on reliable methodology. The district court had tossed the plaintiffs’ experts as unreliable; the appeals court, per Judge Guido Calabresi, said their methods reflected approaches other scientists use and amounted to “acceptable interpretations of scientific evidence where scientists may, and in fact do, disagree.” Crucially, the court stressed it was not deciding whether Tylenol actually causes these conditions. The significance is about who weighs contested science—the ruling lets juries, not just judges, hear the dispute, which is a real win for the plaintiffs procedurally even though the underlying causation case remains, on the current evidence, weak.US appeals court revives private lawsuits linking Tylenol to autism, ADHD | ReutersAnd finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on a counterintuitive idea: that big corporate taxpayers may come to miss the boring, predictable world of administrative tax law now that the Supreme Court has overruled Chevron deference. My argument, in short, is that a weaker IRS and Treasury is not the unalloyed win a lot of multinationals assume it is.Here’s the setup. For forty years, under Chevron, courts deferred to a federal agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. With Chevron gone, courts no longer have to defer to Treasury’s reading of the tax code just because the statute is vague and the agency has expertise. A lot of corporate taxpayers cheered that—less agency power sounds like more freedom. But my point is that killing Chevron did nothing to remove the underlying ambiguity in the tax code; it just moved the job of resolving that ambiguity to a different desk. And there are only two other desks it can land on, and I don’t love either one for a company that wants predictability.The first desk belongs to the courts. If Treasury can’t issue as many binding, prospective rules, then more of these questions get resolved through litigation—case by case, on particular records, often years after the transactions are done. Courts are built to handle controversies, not to administer a global corporate tax system. The Coca-Cola transfer-pricing fight is the stress test I point to: a company may win a great refund that way, but you can’t organize a multinational’s affairs around the hope that every ambiguous question turns into a bespoke judicial adventure. The second desk belongs to Congress, which is the more democratically satisfying answer—Congress writes the code and is politically accountable. But in practice Congress moves slowly and episodically, usually only when tax changes ride along on some bigger budget deal. By the time Congress fixes an international tax problem, the business model that created it has been reorganized twice and pivoted to something involving AI.So the core of my argument is that corporate taxpayers need to distinguish between a useful litigation win and a stable legal environment—those two things don’t always travel together. A bad but clear rule can be modeled and planned around; an ambiguous rule, as I put it, isn’t really a rule, it’s a threat in the shape of a Treasury notice. My prescription is that Congress should make clearer, more deliberate delegations where technical administration is unavoidable—transfer pricing, international tax, anti-abuse rules—and that Treasury should do a post-Chevron audit of its own regulations to ...
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