Minimum Competence

Andrew and Gina Leahey
  • 4.8 (12)
  • Daily News
  • Updated Daily

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. www.minimumcomp.com

  1. 15h ago

    Legal News for Weds 6/3 - 2 Live Crew Sets BK and Copyright Precedent, Trump's Weak AI EO, Senate Seats a "Not Qualified" Judge in Montana

    This Day in Legal History: The National Defense Act of 1916 On this day in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Defense Act, the law that quietly built the legal scaffolding for how the United States deploys soldiers, both abroad and at home, for the next century-plus. The Act roughly tripled the size of the regular Army, formally created the National Guard as a federalized reserve force out of the patchwork of state militias that had existed since the founding, and established the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at colleges and universities. The legal hook is the dual-status structure that the Act created and that we still use today: the National Guard belongs simultaneously to its state and to the federal government, normally takes orders from the governor, but can be “federalized” by the President under specific statutory authorities and pulled out of state command for federal missions. That structure has driven a long line of constitutional fights about the limits of presidential authority to call up the Guard, about whether and when the Insurrection Act applies, and about how the Posse Comitatus Act constrains the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement. June 3 is not a day most people associate with American military law, but the 1916 statute is doing quiet work behind every modern headline about troops at a border, troops in a city, or troops in a hurricane. The Eleventh Circuit on Tuesday handed down a ruling that strips hip-hop group 2 Live Crew of the copyrights it thought it had successfully clawed back to five of its albums, including “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” because one member’s bankruptcy from the 1990s swept his future termination rights into the bankruptcy estate. Federal copyright law has a wonderfully democratic provision in Section 203: an author who signed away a copyright can, 35 years later, send a termination notice and take it back, regardless of what the original contract said. The catch the Eleventh Circuit identified is Section 541 of the Bankruptcy Code, which scoops up almost everything you own into the bankruptcy estate when you file — including, the court said, the right to send that termination notice years later, even though the right cannot be sold or contracted away in any other context. The practical consequence for 2 Live Crew is that member Mark Ross, who performed as Brother Marquis, had unwittingly transferred his future termination interests to his bankruptcy trustee when he filed Chapter 7 years earlier, so when the group’s heirs and surviving members later tried to take the copyrights back from Lil’ Joe Records in 2020, they were one vote short of the majority the statute requires. The case, Lil’ Joe Records v. Christopher Won Jr. et al., No. 24-13978, is described in the opinion as “a question of first impression at the intersection of copyright and bankruptcy” — which is lawyer-speak for “we just made up the rule, and now it’s the rule.” Expect every copyright-termination case where any author has ever filed for bankruptcy to cite this decision for the next decade. 11th Circ. Reverses 2 Live Crew’s Copyright Clawback Win | Law360 President Trump on Tuesday quietly signed a finalized version of the AI cybersecurity executive order that he had abruptly scrapped during a planned signing ceremony on May 21, and the final version is notably narrower than the one that was on the table a month ago. The new order asks Treasury, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and other federal agencies to design a voluntary framework under which developers of so-called frontier AI models — the largest and most general-purpose systems — would share their models with the federal government for up to 30 days before public release so the government can scan for security vulnerabilities. The legal posture is worth pausing on: this is a voluntary framework, not a regulation, which means it lives in the same constitutional space as a chamber-of-commerce best-practices document rather than as a binding rule subject to APA notice and comment. That structure is partly a workaround for the fact that there is no federal statute giving any agency authority to mandate pre-release safety testing of AI models, and partly a response to industry pressure: Trump explained on May 21 that he scrapped the earlier 90-day version because he thought it could be “a blocker” to U.S. leadership in AI. Whether developers actually opt in is the open question, and the order is structured so that participation will likely depend on a mix of national-security pressure, federal procurement leverage, and quiet diplomacy with the major labs. Expect the first real fight to be over what counts as a “frontier” model, and who decides. Finalized Trump Order Seeks Early Cyber Tests Of AI Models | Law360 The U.S. Senate on Tuesday confirmed Katie Lane to be a federal district judge in Montana, making her the first judicial nominee of Trump’s second term to be confirmed despite a “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary. The ABA’s role here is informal but historically important: since 1953 the Standing Committee has rated federal judicial nominees as “well qualified,” “qualified,” or “not qualified” based on professional competence, integrity, and judicial temperament, and the rating has carried real weight with senators of both parties — until it didn’t. The Trump administration formally cut ties with the ABA review process during the first term, on the theory that the ABA’s ratings reflected an ideological bias against conservative nominees, and the second administration has been even more open about ignoring “not qualified” ratings as a matter of policy. The legal stakes of this are modest in any individual case — a “not qualified” judge serves the same lifetime appointment with the same constitutional power as a “well qualified” one — but cumulatively the practice changes the relationship between the bar and the bench in a way that is hard to undo, and it nudges the federal judiciary in a direction that depends almost entirely on the political branches’ definitions of professional fitness. Lane, who is now confirmed, will join the District of Montana, a small but busy bench. Watch this space: there are several more nominees in the pipeline with similar ratings. US Senate confirms Trump judicial nominee deemed ‘not qualified’ by ABA | 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

    6 min

  2. 1d ago

    Legal News for Tues 6/2 - FL Sues ChatGPT, SCOTUS Lets Texas Two-Step Stand, IKEA Shoppers Sue for Tariff Refunds

    This Day in Legal History: The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 On this day in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, also called the Snyder Act, declaring that all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States were U.S. citizens. It is one of those laws that sounds, in retrospect, like it cannot possibly have been necessary — and yet it was. For most of the country’s first 150 years, the federal government treated Native people as members of separate sovereign nations whose status under American law was, at best, ambiguous. Earlier vehicles for citizenship — the Fourteenth Amendment, the Dawes Act, military service in World War I — had reached only some Native people, and a string of Supreme Court decisions had taken the position that being born inside the United States to a member of a tribe did not, on its own, make a person a citizen. The Snyder Act fixed that with a single sentence. What it did not fix was voting: many states continued to bar Native citizens from the ballot for decades afterward, on a variety of pretexts that were eventually struck down one by one. The Act also did not affect tribal citizenship — Native people are dual citizens of their tribe and the United States, which is part of why federal Indian law continues to occupy a separate doctrinal universe. June 2 is a quietly important date on the calendar of American citizenship, and a reminder that the seemingly obvious questions of who counts as an American have, for long stretches of our history, not been obvious at all. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced Monday that his office has filed a civil lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, arguing that the company is misleading parents about the safety of ChatGPT and pointing to incidents in which young users were allegedly nudged toward violence by the chatbot. The complaint follows a criminal investigation Uthmeier’s office opened in April, after a deadly mass shooting at Florida State University in 2025 that the AG says ChatGPT helped facilitate. Florida is asking for civil penalties and an order forcing OpenAI to redesign the product, including adding meaningful parental controls. The legal angle here is essentially a state consumer-protection theory: a state attorney general claiming that the company’s marketing of a product as safe-for-kids is deceptive, and that the company is therefore on the hook under the state’s unfair-trade laws. Whether that survives a motion to dismiss is going to depend a lot on whether the court treats ChatGPT as a “product” in the traditional sense — software has, for decades, gotten more leeway than physical products under product-liability law, and Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act has historically immunized platforms for what users post. The new wrinkle is that generative AI doesn’t fit neatly into either bucket — ChatGPT produces its own output rather than hosting somebody else’s — and several courts are now beginning to grapple with that distinction. Expect this case to be one of the early test cases for how AI companies get sued in the U.S. Florida AG Sues OpenAI, Says ChatGPT Spurs Violence | Law360 The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal from asbestos victims who had challenged a corporate bankruptcy tactic known as the “Texas Two-Step” — leaving in place a Fourth Circuit ruling that lets companies use the maneuver to corral mass-tort claims into bankruptcy court. The Two-Step works like this: a healthy company splits itself into two using a Texas state-law provision that allows divisional mergers, dumps its asbestos or talc or opioid liabilities into the newly created spinoff, and then puts only the spinoff into Chapter 11. The result is that injury claimants get herded into a bankruptcy proceeding where their leverage is sharply limited, even though the parent company that actually caused the harm is still solvent and operating. The case the Supreme Court turned away involved Bestwall, a spinoff of Georgia-Pacific that has been in Chapter 11 since 2017. The Third Circuit threw out a similar Johnson & Johnson talc-unit bankruptcy in 2023 on the ground that the spinoff wasn’t actually in financial distress, but the Fourth Circuit went the other way in this case, and the Supreme Court’s denial of review leaves that split standing for now. The bigger picture: a powerful settlement-shaping tool stays on the menu for corporate defendants facing waves of mass-tort litigation, and the next big talc, opioid, or asbestos defendant looking to manage a docket of claims now knows the Two-Step is at least available in the Fourth Circuit. Justices Won’t Hear Challenge To ‘Texas Two-Step’ Ch. 11 | Law360 A group of IKEA customers filed a proposed class action against the Swedish retailer Monday in U.S. federal court, arguing that they overpaid for furniture during the period when President Trump’s import tariffs were in effect — tariffs that the Supreme Court has since struck down — and that they are entitled to a share of the refunds the company will now collect from the federal government. It is one of the first big consumer-side cases to follow the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling, and the legal theory is novel: importers paid the tariffs, then passed those costs through to consumers in the form of higher sticker prices, and now that the government is sending refunds back to importers, the customers who effectively bore the cost are asking for a piece of that money. Some major shippers like FedEx and UPS have already publicly committed to passing tariff refunds back to their customers; IKEA, the suit alleges, has not. Whether the claim survives depends largely on whether the court is willing to treat the relationship between retailer and customer as something like a constructive trust or unjust enrichment, rather than an arm’s-length sale at a final price. If even one of these cases succeeds, expect copycat suits against every other large importer that quietly built tariff costs into retail prices over the last several years. IKEA customers sue for share of Trump tariff refunds | 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

    6 min
  3. Legal News for Mon 6/1 - Hallucinations in Uber MDL, 7th Circuit Says no Email Service to China, Roundup MDL Fight Continues and Trump's IRS Deal Scrutinized

    2d ago

    Legal News for Mon 6/1 - Hallucinations in Uber MDL, 7th Circuit Says no Email Service to China, Roundup MDL Fight Continues and Trump's IRS Deal Scrutinized

    This Day in Legal History: The First Act of Congress On this day in 1789, President George Washington signed the first statute ever enacted by Congress under the new Constitution — “An Act to Regulate the Time and Manner of Administering Certain Oaths,” codified at 1 Stat. 23. The substance was modest: the law prescribed the form of the oath that members of Congress, federal judges, and executive officers were to take to support the Constitution, and gave the states a window in which to swear in their own officials. But the symbolism was enormous. It was the first time the new federal government did the thing governments actually do, which is to pass a law and require people to obey it, and the choice of subject was telling. Before Congress regulated commerce, levied taxes, or built courts, it bound its own officers to the Constitution by oath. The oath clauses in Article II and Article VI have been doing quiet doctrinal work ever since: they ground the Supremacy Clause, they undergird Marbury’s claim that judges are bound to follow the Constitution as supreme law, and they sit at the center of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3 disqualification debate that the Supreme Court took up in Trump v. Anderson just two years ago. The Oath Act of 1789 is not the kind of statute that gets quoted on bar exams, but it is the original instance of Congress speaking in legal form, and everything the federal government has done since rests on top of it. Uber went after one of its own bellwether plaintiffs Friday in the sprawling multidistrict litigation over alleged passenger sexual assaults, asking U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa J. Cisneros in the Northern District of California to impose sanctions on plaintiff B.L. and her counsel at Wagstaff Law Firm for what Uber called “pervasive bad faith” in discovery. The headline accusation, made by Kirkland & Ellis’s Michael Vives for Uber, is that B.L.’s privilege log cites cases that don’t exist — what Vives suggested may be “hallucinated case law” generated by an AI tool — and Vives floated that as an independent basis for sanctions on top of the alleged document withholding, redactions, and undisclosed witnesses Uber catalogued in its April motion. he legal vehicle here is Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37, which gives a federal court a tiered menu of sanctions for discovery misconduct — fees and costs at the low end, adverse-inference instructions and claim preclusion at the high end — and Uber is asking the court to throw B.L.’s case out of the next bellwether wave entirely. Judge Cisneros noticed during the hearing that what struck her about the briefing was the pattern, not any single incident; she pointed to one example where the plaintiff identified a person as a “friend” and only later produced a fuller set of text messages showing the person was actually a therapist. The judge ordered the plaintiff to file a sur-reply by Thursday before ruling, which means a sanctions order is now teed up. The case sits within In re Uber Technologies, Inc., Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation (MDL No. 3084) before Judge Charles R. Breyer, and any sanctions ruling will set the tone for how the rest of the bellwether pool conducts discovery. If the hallucinated-caselaw piece sticks, this also becomes one of the first real Rule 11 / Rule 37 hybrid sanctions vehicles for generative AI misuse in the MDL context — and the bar will be reading it closely. ‘Pervasive Bad Faith’: Uber Targets Sex Assault MDL Plaintiff | Law360 The Seventh Circuit on Friday told the Northern District of Illinois that the now-standard practice of serving Chinese e-commerce defendants by email in “Schedule A” trademark cases doesn’t fly under the Hague Service Convention — at least not when the convention applies, which is a question the district court has to actually answer first. The dispute came up in Kangol LLC v. Hangzhou Chuanyue Silk Import & Export Co., No. 25-2205, where the hat-maker Kangol sued more than twenty Chinese vendors for trademark infringement and identified them on a sealed “Schedule A” exhibit attached to the complaint — the same procedural pattern that drives the enormous Schedule A docket in Chicago’s federal court. Kangol got a default judgment after serving the defendants by email, but one defendant, Hangzhou Chuanyue, appeared and moved to vacate, arguing that the Hague Convention prohibits email service in China and that the convention applies because Hangzhou’s address is discoverable. The legal hook is Article 10(a) of the Hague Service Convention, which permits service “by postal channels” only when the destination state has not objected — and China has affirmatively objected to Article 10(a), full stop. The Seventh Circuit, citing the Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Water Splash, Inc. v. Menon, held that whether or not email counts as a “postal channel,” Article 10(a) is unavailable in China, so email service in this case was improper if the convention applied at all. The panel — Judges Thomas Kirsch, Candace Jackson-Akiwumi, and Doris Pryor — reversed the denial of Hangzhou’s motion to vacate and sent the case back for the threshold question the district court skipped: did Kangol make reasonably diligent efforts to find Hangzhou’s address, which would have triggered the convention. The practical fallout will reach hundreds, possibly thousands, of pending Schedule A cases in Chicago that rely on email service as a matter of course, and plaintiff firms in this space will be scrambling to redo their service strategy. 7th Circ. Revives Chinese IP Defendants’ Email Service Case | Law360 The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation on Thursday transferred Randall King’s proposed class action — the vehicle for a proposed $7.25 billion Roundup settlement with Monsanto — into the Northern District of California MDL before Judge Vince Chhabria, despite vehement objections from absent class members who want the case to stay in Missouri state court. The case-within-a-case is unusual: the King action was filed and preliminarily settled in Missouri state court, then a group of objectors (represented by Keller Postman) removed it to federal court under the Class Action Fairness Act, and the JPML then tagged it for transfer to the consolidated Roundup MDL. The legal hook here is 28 U.S.C. § 1407, the JPML’s transfer authority — paired with CAFA’s removal rules, which the settling plaintiffs argue were misused because the objectors aren’t “defendants” within the meaning of § 1453 and so cannot remove. The objectors counter that the $7.25 billion deal “launders a liability-management scheme through the courts” by funneling claims of Roundup cancer victims through a Missouri state-court class that an MDL judge would never approve, and they want federal-court scrutiny under Rule 23 and the standards Judge Chhabria has spent years developing in the Roundup litigation. Monsanto, for its part, is on the objectors’ side of the venue question — at least tactically — telling Law360 that the case should go back to Missouri state court and it will move to oppose the transfer order. The whole fight is also tied up with the Supreme Court’s pending decision in a separate Monsanto case that will determine whether the deal survives at all, because the proposed $7.25 billion is structured around what the Court does there. Whichever way this remand/transfer fight comes out, it is going to be cited in every future class-settlement-jurisdiction tug-of-war for the rest of the decade. $7.25B Roundup Deal Sent To Calif. MDL | Law360 A U.S. district judge in Florida said Saturday she will take a closer look at the settlement the Trump administration has reached with itself — or more precisely, with President Trump in his personal capacity — over a long-running IRS lawsuit, scheduling further proceedings to examine whether the deal can stand. The procedural posture is what makes this one interesting: the case involves a federal agency under the President’s control settling claims with the President personally, which raises immediate questions about whether anyone is actually adverse to anyone, and whether the resulting consent decree or stipulation can carry the legal weight a normal settlement does. The legal mechanism the judge appears to be invoking is the federal court’s inherent supervisory authority over consent decrees and settlements involving the federal government, an authority that runs through cases like Local No. 93 v. City of Cleveland and that the Tunney Act formalizes for antitrust settlements — though here there is no Tunney Act, just the general principle that a federal court doesn’t have to rubber-stamp a settlement when there are serious questions about whether the United States was actually represented in the negotiation. The hearing on the issue was set for late May in Miami, with the judge reportedly skeptical that the deal can be approved without further factual development. The political stakes are obvious, but the legal stakes are arguably bigger: if the court can refuse to approve the settlement on the ground that the executive branch was not adverse to itself in any meaningful way, it would create a precedent that constrains every future administration’s ability to make its own personal litigation go away through agency action. Expect this one to generate appellate motion practice within weeks. US judge orders review of Trump’s IRS lawsuit settlement | 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

    8 min

  4. 5d ago

    Legal News for Fri 5/29 - SCOTUS Mississippi Batson Claim, Fertitta Buys Caesars, HHS NSA Arbitration Revamp and WABC Calls out FCC

    This Day in Legal History: Rhode Island Ratifies the Constitution, 1790 On this day in 1790, Rhode Island became the thirteenth and final original state to ratify the United States Constitution, doing so by a margin of 34 to 32 at a convention in Newport. Rhode Island’s hesitation had been considerable: the state refused to send delegates to the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, and twice rejected ratification in popular referenda — a curiously democratic method for refusing to join a constitutional union founded in part on the premise that pure direct democracy is dangerous. The state’s small-farmer and debtor classes, the same constituencies that had backed the paper-money policies that horrified Madison, were deeply suspicious of a strong federal government that would constrain state-issued currency, ban impairment of debt contracts (Article I, Section 10), and override state-level debtor protections. Ratification finally came under the gun: Congress, frustrated by the foot-dragging, was openly threatening to treat Rhode Island as a foreign nation for tariff purposes, which would have devastated the Providence merchants. The convention’s narrow margin reflected a hostile deal more than a meeting of constitutional minds. Importantly, Rhode Island’s ratification was conditioned on a lengthy list of proposed amendments — many of them mirroring the Bill of Rights that James Madison had already shepherded through Congress in September 1789 and that would be ratified in December 1791. With Rhode Island in, the original Union was at last complete, and the practical question of whether the new federal government could function with one stubborn holdout fell away. The episode is a useful reminder that the constitutional founding was not so much a singular moment as a slow, contested, occasionally coerced bargain — one that ended in Newport on a humid Saturday in May. The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday handed down a narrow 5-4 ruling in Pitchford v. Cain, reviving a Mississippi death row inmate’s challenge to the prosecutor’s race-based use of peremptory strikes at his 2006 capital trial. Justice Kavanaugh, writing for a majority that included Chief Justice Roberts plus Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, held that the Mississippi Supreme Court unreasonably applied Batson v. Kentucky’s three-step framework for challenges to peremptory strikes. The Court found the trial judge accepted the prosecutor’s race-neutral explanations without giving defense counsel a meaningful opportunity to argue that those reasons were pretextual, and the state appellate court compounded the error by treating that omission as a waiver. The prosecutor, Doug Evans, used four of his twelve strikes to remove four of the five Black prospective jurors, leaving a jury of eleven white jurors and one Black juror in a Mississippi county that was then roughly 40 percent Black. The Court leaned heavily on its 2019 Flowers v. Mississippi decision, which involved the same prosecutor and the same trial judge and had already found Evans’s pattern of striking Black jurors discriminatory. Federal habeas relief was appropriate because the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act’s deferential “no fair-minded jurist could agree” standard cannot rescue a state-court ruling that simply skips Batson’s third step. Justice Gorsuch dissented, joined by Justices Alito, Thomas, and Barrett, arguing the record showed counsel chose silence rather than being denied an opportunity. The case now returns to the Fifth Circuit for further proceedings. Justices Revive Mississippi Death Row Inmate’s Batson Claim | Law360 Caesars Entertainment agreed Thursday to be acquired by Tilman Fertitta’s privately-held Fertitta Entertainment in an all-cash deal valued at roughly $17.6 billion, including the assumption of approximately $11.9 billion of Caesars’ outstanding debt. Shareholders will receive $31 per share, a 49 percent premium over Caesars’ unaffected share price as of February 25, and the company will be delisted from Nasdaq upon closing. The agreement includes a go-shop period running through approximately July 11 — a Delaware deal-protection mechanism that lets the target board solicit competing bids without triggering a termination fee, and that helps insulate the sale process from a Revlon-flavored fiduciary-duty challenge by signaling the board actively tested the market after signing. Latham & Watkins and Skadden are representing Caesars (the latter on antitrust), White & Case is advising Fertitta, and Freshfields is counseling the Carano family, which holds a roughly 5 percent stake and will roll part of its equity into the combined entity. The combined company would control more than 60 casino resorts and over 200 retail sports betting locations under the William Hill brand. Antitrust review will be the inflection point given the overlap on the Las Vegas Strip — where Caesars operates eight properties — and across digital betting. Funding will come from Fertitta equity and committed debt financing arranged by a syndicate of ten banks. 4 Firms Steer Fertitta’s $17.6B Caesars Entertainment Buy | Law360 The Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday finalized a long-awaited overhaul of the federal Independent Dispute Resolution process under the No Surprises Act of 2021, the statute that pulls most out-of-network billing fights out of the patient’s hands and into a baseball-style arbitration between provider and payer. The headline change slashes the per-party administrative fee from $115 to $15 per case, undoing a sharp 2023 hike that providers had successfully challenged in the Eastern District of Texas as having been adopted without notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act. The rule also expands batching, so economically similar items and services can be bundled into a single arbitration, which the agency says will cut transaction costs and ease the chronic IDR backlog. HHS is also rolling out a centralized federal dispute portal and a payer registry intended to fix the persistent problem of providers being unable to identify which entity is actually on the hook in any given case. Reactions from physician and radiology groups have been mixed, with broad support for the fee cut but lingering concern that the qualifying payment amount methodology — the benchmark arbitrators must consider — still tilts the field toward insurers. APA Section 706 challenges to portions of the earlier IDR framework remain pending in the Fifth Circuit. US HHS finalizes rule to streamline dispute resolution under No Surprises Act | Reuters ABC’s New York affiliate WABC-TV filed an objection with the FCC on Thursday, calling Chairman Brendan Carr’s April order requiring early license renewals for all eight ABC-owned stations an “unconstitutional” act of viewpoint-based retaliation barred by the First Amendment. WABC submitted its renewal under protest, arguing the agency has not demanded simultaneous early renewals from a commonly owned station group in more than fifty years and that the Media Bureau’s stated rationale — possible violations of the Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC’s nondiscrimination rules — is pretext for punishing disfavored editorial speech. The doctrinal hook is the Bantam Books line of cases through last term’s NRA v. Vullo, which holds that government officials cannot use the implicit threat of regulatory sanction to coerce private intermediaries into suppressing protected expression. The order followed a separate FCC inquiry into whether “The View” has been violating the agency’s equal-time rule for political candidates, and came against the backdrop of repeated White House demands that Disney fire Jimmy Kimmel. Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez has openly urged Disney not to “flinch.” On the same day, the FCC issued a broader notice warning all broadcasters that licenses could be reviewed early if stations are deemed to be failing their statutory public-interest obligation — a posture that drops the question of broadcast licensing back into Red Lion-era First Amendment territory. FCC Targeting ABC Licenses To Punish Speech, Station Says | Law360 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

    8 min

  5. 6d ago

    Legal News for Thurs 5/28 - Dutch Takeover Law and AkzoNobel, Feds Threaten Sanctuary-city Airports, Immigration Judge Free Speech Fight and Standing post-hobbs

    This Day in Legal History: The Indian Removal Act of 1830 On this day May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the federal government to “negotiate” the relocation of Native American tribes east of the Mississippi to lands in what is now Oklahoma. On its face the statute framed displacement as voluntary, treaty-based, and compensated; in practice it became the legal scaffolding for the forced expulsion of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations, culminating in the Trail of Tears. The bill passed the House by just five votes, with Davy Crockett among its most prominent dissenters. The years that immediately followed produced the Marshall Court’s foundational Indian law trilogy — Johnson v. M’Intosh, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, and Worcester v. Georgia — the last of which Jackson famously (and probably apocryphally) refused to enforce. The doctrinal residue of the Removal era is still in force today: tribes remain “domestic dependent nations,” Congress still claims a “plenary power” over them, and the Supreme Court is still relitigating what reservation boundaries actually mean — most recently in McGirt v. Oklahoma in 2020 and Haaland v. Brackeen in 2023. The 1830 Act was not the beginning of dispossession in North America, but it was the moment Congress took ownership of the policy and dressed it in the language of statute. Whatever else May 28 marks on the calendar, in legal history it marks the day removal became American law. Dutch coatings giant AkzoNobel, the maker of Dulux paint, told Sherwin-Williams and Nippon Paint Wednesday that their €12.5 billion ($14.6 billion) joint takeover proposal is not a “superior proposal” and that the board would stay the course on its already-agreed merger with Axalta Coating Systems. The rejected offer, made at €73 per share, would have carved AkzoNobel up — Nippon taking the decorative paints business, Sherwin-Williams taking industrial coatings — and was the second pass after an earlier bid that the board had swatted away in April. AkzoNobel’s reasons read like a Dutch corporate-law primer: the offer “did not come close to adequately reflecting” long-term value, the deal-certainty risk around regulatory clearances was too high, and the “interests of AkzoNobel stakeholders” were not adequately safeguarded. That last word is the legal tell. Under Dutch law, a listed company’s board is not bound by anything resembling Delaware’s Revlon duty to maximize shareholder value in a sale; it answers to a stakeholder model that explicitly weighs employees, creditors, suppliers, and the long-term interests of the enterprise alongside the shareholders. That gives a Dutch board far more room to reject a premium cash bid than a comparable U.S. target would have, especially with a friendly all-stock merger of equals (the Axalta deal) already on the table. The combined AkzoNobel-Axalta entity, announced last November and worth roughly $25 billion, plans to list on the NYSE with dual HQs in Amsterdam and Philadelphia and Dutch tax residency — a structure that itself preserves the Dutch governance model post-close. The CMA in the U.K. has already opened a public comment period on the Axalta deal, and antitrust review is likely the live front to watch from here. AkzoNobel Snubs €12.5B Sherwin-Williams, Nippon Paint Bid | Law360 The Trump administration is preparing to halt federal immigration and customs processing at airports located in jurisdictions it deems “sanctuary cities” or “sanctuary states,”, according to a report Reuters published. The mechanism, if implemented, would have Customs and Border Protection officers stop staffing inbound international arrival processing — meaning international passengers landing at, say, San Francisco, Boston, or Seattle would be unable to clear customs at those airports and would have to be diverted. The legal architecture here is unusual because CBP staffing decisions sit at the discretionary end of federal administrative law: the agency has wide latitude to deploy officers where it wants, and there is no statutory entitlement for any particular city to host a federal port of entry. That said, a decision to use that discretion as punishment for a state or municipality’s refusal to honor ICE detainers would invite a familiar set of challenges — South Dakota v. Dole-style coercion arguments dressed up as preemption, anti-commandeering claims under Murphy v. NCAA and Printz v. United States, and APA challenges under State Farm to whatever administrative record the agency assembles. Several of the targeted jurisdictions have already won injunctions in earlier rounds of sanctuary-city funding fights, including against the prior conditioning of Byrne JAG grants on detainer compliance. The political move is obvious; the legal move is less so, and the administration will need to articulate a non-pretextual reason for the staffing change if it wants to survive arbitrary-and-capricious review. Whether airlines, airport authorities, or the states themselves will have standing to sue — and what kind of irreparable harm a redirected flight inflicts — is going to be the first set of questions a court has to answer. US draws up plans to halt immigration, customs processing at ‘sanctuary city’ airports | Reuters The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the Fourth Circuit’s decision reviving the National Association of Immigration Judges’ First Amendment challenge to a federal rule restricting what sitting immigration judges may say publicly about the agency that employs them. The per curiam opinion’s holding is narrow but striking: the Fourth Circuit, the justices said, committed an abuse of discretion by reviving the suit on a theory neither party briefed, a “drastic departure from the principle of party presentation” laid out in cases like United States v. Sineneng-Smith. The party-presentation principle is one of those background structural rules that doesn’t get a lot of airtime — the basic idea is that federal courts are passive instruments that decide the cases the parties bring them, not the cases judges wish the parties had brought — but here it became outcome-determinative. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, wrote separately to say the Fourth Circuit was also wrong on the merits because it ignored Elgin v. Department of the Treasury, the 2012 decision holding that the Civil Service Reform Act’s administrative-channeling regime is the exclusive route for covered federal employees to challenge adverse employment actions, even constitutional ones. The practical effect is that the immigration judges’ union now has to litigate its First Amendment claim through the Merit Systems Protection Board and then the Federal Circuit rather than in district court, and the case bounces back to the Fourth Circuit to redo the analysis on whatever ground the parties did actually raise. The Court also denied a cross-petition from the union. The case is Margolin v. National Association of Immigration Judges, No. 25-767; the merits cross-petition was No. 25-1009. Justices Order Redo In Immigration Judges’ Free Speech Suit | Law360 A Sixth Circuit panel on Tuesday affirmed the dismissal of an attempt by Right to Life of Michigan and a group of parents to block enforcement of Proposal 3, the 2022 Michigan ballot initiative that wrote a fundamental right to reproductive freedom into Article I, Section 28 of the state constitution. The panel did not reach the merits — the case stopped at standing — and the opinion, written by Judge John K. Bush, is a clean illustration of how high the Article III standing bar is for pre-enforcement challenges of this kind. Standing requires the plaintiff to show an injury that is fairly traceable to the defendant’s conduct and likely to be redressed by a favorable decision, and the parents here couldn’t make the traceability link work: their theory was that the amendment might allow schools or other actors to help minors obtain contraception or abortion care without parental consent, but the complaint identified no specific enforcement action by Governor Whitmer, Attorney General Nessel, or Secretary of State Benson that was causing or threatening any such injury. The panel reiterated the Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife framework and quoted approvingly the rule that a “general allegation” that an executive officer is “generally responsible for executing” state law does not, by itself, establish standing to sue that officer. The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ attempt to bootstrap standing off the AG’s and governor’s authority to enforce Michigan’s consumer protection and civil rights statutes, calling those allegations too speculative. This is going to be the template for the next several rounds of post-Dobbs challenges to state constitutional reproductive-rights amendments: the merits questions about scope and federal preemption will keep coming, but plaintiffs are going to need a concrete enforcement target to even get a hearing. 6th Circ. Rejects Mich. Reproductive Rights Challenge | Law360 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

    8 min

  6. May 27

    Legal News for Weds 5/27 - Biden Sues DOJ Over Interview Audio, Trump "Litigation Safari" Brief, Billionaire Lindberg Gets 12 Years, CO Tightens Debt-buyer Rules

    This Day in Legal History: Black Monday and the End of the NIRA On May 27, 1935 — a day quickly dubbed “Black Monday” by the press — the United States Supreme Court delivered three unanimous decisions that gutted central pieces of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in a single morning. The most consequential was A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, in which the Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act. The case grew out of the prosecution of a Brooklyn kosher poultry slaughterhouse for violating the “Live Poultry Code,” one of the hundreds of industry codes drafted by trade groups and given the force of federal law by the National Recovery Administration. The Court held that the NIRA’s code-making scheme was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to private actors and the executive, and that the federal government’s Commerce Clause authority did not reach the intrastate sale of poultry to local butchers. Justice Cardozo, concurring, famously described the statute as “delegation running riot.” The same day, in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the Court cabined the President’s power to remove members of independent regulatory commissions, a holding that would shape the constitutional status of agencies like the FTC, SEC, and FCC for the next ninety years. And in Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford, the Court invalidated the Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act as an uncompensated taking from secured creditors. Roosevelt was, by all accounts, furious — and Black Monday became the proximate cause of his 1937 court-packing plan, which failed in Congress but is generally credited with prompting the “switch in time” that produced the more deferential commerce-clause and administrative-law jurisprudence of Jones & Laughlin Steel and the decades that followed. The nondelegation doctrine the Court announced in Schechter has, famously, not been used to strike down a federal statute since — though it has been the subject of growing interest from the current Court’s conservative majority, which makes the ninety-first anniversary of Black Monday more than just a historical footnote. Former President Joe Biden has sued the Department of Justice to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts from his interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, the prosecutor who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents and declined to bring charges. According to the filing, Biden argues that releasing the recordings would skirt federal law restricting disclosure of materials gathered in a special counsel probe, and would effectively turn protected investigative material into political fodder. The suit follows a 2024 Freedom of Information Act action by the conservative Heritage Foundation seeking the same recordings, and comes against the backdrop of repeated efforts by the current administration to make Hur-era material public — efforts the Biden team has argued are intended to embarrass the former president rather than to serve any legitimate investigative or oversight function. The transcripts of the Hur interviews were released back in 2024, but the audio itself has been the subject of executive privilege fights ever since. Worth watching for what the court does with the privilege claims, and for how the Special Counsel regulations are treated now that there is an ex-president on each side of these disputes. Former President Biden sues DOJ over release of interview audio | Reuters The Trump administration is asking a California federal judge to throw out an expanded challenge to its sweeping reorganization of the federal workforce, calling the litigation a “litigation safari.” In a Friday motion to dismiss filed in AFGE v. Trump, the administration urged Judge Susan Illston to toss a supplemental complaint that broadened the case to cover, among other things, the downsizing of FEMA and a set of forward-looking workforce planning documents the administration issued last October. The original suit, filed in April 2025 by a coalition including the American Federation of Government Employees, SEIU, and the cities of Chicago, Baltimore, and San Francisco, challenged layoffs and reorganizations at more than twenty federal agencies. Judge Illston enjoined the workforce plans last May, but the Supreme Court stayed her injunction in July, and she has since declined to dismiss the case outright. The administration’s argument is essentially jurisdictional: that the October planning documents are too tentative to constitute “final agency action,” that there is no specific DHS order behind the FEMA contract lapses the plaintiffs point to, and that individual FEMA terminations must run through the administrative civil-service process rather than land in district court. The “litigation safari” framing — that the plaintiffs are simply “roving the executive branch to explore various employment issues” — is rhetorically catchy but glosses over the more interesting underlying question: how cleanly the Administrative Procedure Act’s “final agency action” requirement maps onto a coordinated, rolling, and openly cross-agency reorganization. A ruling on the dismissal motion is expected later this summer. Trump Admin Looks To Ax Expanded Suit Over Staffing Cuts - Law360 Billionaire insurance magnate Greg Lindberg was sentenced in the Western District of North Carolina to twelve years in federal prison across two separate criminal cases — eighty-seven months on charges that he tried to bribe the state’s insurance commissioner, and 144 months on wire-fraud charges arising from a $2 billion scheme in which prosecutors said he treated the insurance companies he controlled as a personal piggy bank. The sentences will run concurrently. Judge Max Cogburn also entered a preliminary restitution order of $1.6 billion based on a court-appointed special master’s recommendation, which Lindberg’s defense team described as the largest restitution award in state history. Prosecutors said the scheme harmed more than two hundred thousand victims, most of them elderly annuity holders, at least twenty thousand of whom died before any promised payouts arrived. The bribery case has its own complicated history — Lindberg was first convicted in 2020, had that conviction vacated by the Fourth Circuit in 2022 over faulty jury instructions, and was reconvicted on retrial in 2024. He pleaded guilty to the separate wire-fraud and money-laundering counts in November 2024. Judge Cogburn credited Lindberg’s “extraordinary cooperation” with prosecutors and the special master, but also noted, with what reads like real exasperation in the transcript, that Lindberg has continued to file pro se civil lawsuits against the insurance companies he once owned and that the case illustrates how much of our regulatory apparatus can be “bought and sold like sacks of potatoes.” The government had sought roughly fourteen and a half years; Lindberg had asked for four. ‘Regretful’ Billionaire Gets 12 Years For $2B Fraud, Bribery - Law360 The Colorado Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a debt buyer suing a consumer must attach to its complaint a non-affidavit writing that actually shows the buyer owns that consumer’s debt — not just a generic bill of sale showing that the buyer purchased some bundle of receivables from the original creditor. The case, Wright v. Portfolio Recovery Associates, involved a $671.29 Victoria’s Secret credit-card balance that Comenity Bank had sold to Portfolio Recovery in 2018. Portfolio Recovery’s complaint attached a bill of sale and an affidavit identifying the last four digits of Wright’s account number, and the lower courts found that sufficient under Colorado’s Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The Colorado Supreme Court, in the first opinion authored by recently appointed Justice Susan Blanco, reversed and held the affidavit could not cure a complaint that didn’t first satisfy the statute’s non-affidavit-writing requirement. The practical consequence is significant: the four largest debt buyers alone filed close to forty thousand cases in Colorado county courts between 2013 and 2015, accounting for around eight percent of the state’s county-court civil docket, and many of those complaints have historically relied on exactly the kind of generic bill-of-sale-plus-affidavit packaging the court just rejected. Consumer advocates argue the ruling will help consumers — most of whom never had any relationship with the debt buyer — understand and respond to the suits filed against them; the debt-buying industry will, in the near term, need to retool its pleading practices statewide. Colo. Justices Say Debt Buyer Must Show It Owns The Debt - Law360 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

    8 min

  7. May 26

    Legal News for Tues 5/26 - Bipartisan Support for Transportation Bill, DOJ Pushes Ballroom Project for "Security" Purposes, and Taxing Cloud Dependent Software

    This Day in Legal History: Andrew Johnson Impeachment Trial Ends On May 26, 1868, the United States Senate ended the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, bringing one of the most dramatic constitutional confrontations in American history to a close. Johnson had been impeached by the House of Representatives earlier that year after clashing repeatedly with Congress over Reconstruction. At the center of the dispute was the future of the defeated South and the legal status of formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. Johnson favored a more lenient approach toward former Confederate states, while the Republican-controlled Congress sought stronger protections for freedmen and stricter conditions for reentry. The immediate trigger for impeachment was Johnson’s attempt to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, which Congress argued violated the Tenure of Office Act. The Senate had already voted on one article of impeachment on May 16, and Johnson survived by a single vote. Ten days later, on May 26, the Senate voted on two more articles, with the result again falling one vote short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction. The final vote of 35 to 19 meant Johnson would remain in office. After that result, the Senate adjourned as a court of impeachment and the trial came to an end. The acquittal did not make Johnson politically strong, but it preserved the principle that removing a president required more than intense political disagreement. The trial also tested the separation of powers during a period when Congress and the presidency were fighting over who would control Reconstruction. In later years, the Tenure of Office Act was repealed, and its constitutionality remained deeply suspect. Johnson’s impeachment became a lasting example of how legal rules, political conflict, and constitutional design can collide in moments of national crisis. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has advanced a major five-year transportation funding bill that would send about $580 billion toward roads, bridges, transit, rail projects, and highway safety programs. The measure, called the BUILD America 250 Act, passed the committee by a 62-2 vote after a lengthy markup and now heads to the full House. The bill is meant to replace the current surface transportation law, which was part of the 2021 infrastructure package and is set to expire at the end of September. Supporters from both parties framed the proposal as a way to keep infrastructure funding moving while giving states flexibility and speeding up project delivery. One of the most closely watched additions is a rail safety package inspired by the 2023 Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. That section would require at least two crew members on many trains, add inspection requirements, regulate defect detectors, and place limits on certain hazardous-material trains. Rail labor groups and the White House have backed stronger rules, while the major railroads argue the proposal is driven more by politics and labor demands than by the causes of the East Palestine crash. The bill would also create a first federal regulatory structure for autonomous commercial vehicles, including automated trucks, buses, and other larger vehicles. Industry supporters say that framework would help the United States compete globally in autonomous transportation, while transit labor leaders say the bill includes important human-oversight protections to keep workers involved and improve safety. Another contested provision would impose a new annual federal registration fee on electric vehicle owners, starting at $130 and later rising to $150, to help support the Highway Trust Fund. Backers say EV drivers should contribute to road funding because they do not pay federal gas taxes. Electric vehicle advocates, however, call the fee punitive and argue it would discourage EV adoption without meaningfully solving the trust fund’s long-term funding gap. What’s In The House Surface Transportation Funding Bill? - Law360 The Justice Department has asked a federal court to lift an injunction blocking work on President Donald Trump’s ballroom project, arguing that a recent shooting outside the White House shows why stronger security is needed. In a short filing Sunday, DOJ said the incident highlights the need for high-level security upgrades at the White House, including the ballroom, and again sought dismissal of the lawsuit challenging the project. The case was brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has opposed the project and previously refused to withdraw its suit after an alleged foiled attack connected to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April. DOJ had already cited that earlier incident in asking the court to end the case. According to the Secret Service, the person who fired at a White House checkpoint on Saturday was shot by officers and later died at a hospital. The filing ties the shooting to the government’s broader argument that the project is important for national security. US Justice Department seeks to lift injunction on ballroom project after shooting | Reuters My column for Bloomberg this week argues that Tennessee’s recent decision in SAP America, Inc. v. Gerregano shows how poorly traditional state tax categories fit modern software. The court treated SAP’s software licenses as nontaxable intangible property, while allowing Tennessee to tax cloud hosting and cloud-based services delivered electronically into the state. That split made sense because SAP’s products were cleanly separated into licenses, hosting, and cloud services. But the column argues that most modern software is not so tidy. Even products that seem local often rely on remote tools for logins, updates, syncing, storage, analytics, customer support, or payment processing. As AI becomes built into ordinary software, the line between software and cloud-based service will become even harder to draw. The column focuses on the “true-object” test, which asks what the customer is really buying when a transaction has multiple elements. That test works when the taxable and nontaxable pieces are visible and separately priced, but it becomes much harder to apply when remote processing is hidden inside a product the customer experiences simply as software. The piece argues that states should adopt a software-specific safe harbor rather than treating every remote feature as taxable cloud access. Under that approach, software would be presumed to remain software when remote functions are limited to things like authentication, updates, syncing, security, or modest product enhancements. A state could rebut that presumption if the customer is really buying hosted processing, managed infrastructure, AI model access, inference, or other platform-level functionality. The point is not to abandon the true-object test, but to give it a clearer threshold for hybrid software. Without that guardrail, AI could give states an easy but flawed path to reclassify almost any software product with a remote model feature as taxable cloud access. 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

    7 min
  8. Legal News for Fri 5/22 - Bad Spaniels at 9th Circuit, Meta Mental School Health Settlement, OpenAI Law Firm Associations

    May 22

    Legal News for Fri 5/22 - Bad Spaniels at 9th Circuit, Meta Mental School Health Settlement, OpenAI Law Firm Associations

    This Day in Legal History: Truman Doctrine On May 22, 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed legislation authorizing American aid to Greece and Turkey, giving legal force to what became known as the Truman Doctrine. The law provided economic and military assistance to both countries at a moment when U.S. leaders feared that instability in the eastern Mediterranean could expand Soviet influence. Greece was in the middle of a civil war, while Turkey faced pressure over control of strategic territory and access between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Britain had previously played the leading role in supporting Greece and Turkey, but after World War II it told the United States it could no longer bear that burden. Truman responded by asking Congress to approve aid, arguing that the United States had to support “free peoples” resisting outside pressure or armed minority movements. By signing the bill, Truman transformed that broad statement of foreign policy into statutory authority backed by federal money. Legally, the act mattered because it showed how Cold War policy would often be made: the president would identify a global threat, and Congress would authorize funds and tools to respond. It also helped normalize large peacetime commitments abroad, a sharp change from earlier American reluctance to enter long-term foreign entanglements. The statute became an early foundation for the national security state that grew through later aid programs, alliances, intelligence activities, and military commitments. The Truman Doctrine also raised enduring questions about the balance of power between Congress and the president in foreign affairs. Congress approved the aid, but the broader doctrine gave presidents a flexible language for intervention that could be invoked well beyond Greece and Turkey. In that sense, May 22, 1947, was not just a date in diplomatic history; it was a legal turning point in how the United States authorized, funded, and justified its Cold War role in the world. A Ninth Circuit panel appeared uncertain about whether Jack Daniel’s proved enough to win its trademark dilution-by-tarnishment claim against VIP Products over the “Bad Spaniels” dog toy. The judges focused especially on whether Jack Daniel’s had shown that anything beyond the words “Jack Daniel’s” was famous enough to qualify for dilution protection. Judge Andrew Hurwitz pressed Jack Daniel’s counsel on whether the company could rely on the fame of its name to protect broader elements of its label and bottle design. Jack Daniel’s argued that the court should consider the full context of the toy, including its bottle-like appearance and bathroom-humor references. VIP, by contrast, argued that the analysis should be limited to the famous mark itself and the allegedly diluting mark, not the entire product presentation. The case began after VIP made a dog toy parodying a Jack Daniel’s bottle with poop-themed jokes, prompting years of litigation over trademark infringement, dilution, parody, and free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court previously ruled that VIP could not use the Rogers test because the toy used another company’s trademark-like features to identify VIP’s own product. On remand, the district court rejected Jack Daniel’s infringement claim but again found dilution by tarnishment, which VIP appealed. VIP also raised a First Amendment challenge to the federal tarnishment law, though both VIP and the federal government suggested the Ninth Circuit could decide the case without reaching that constitutional issue. The Justice Department intervened to defend the law’s constitutionality while also acknowledging that waiver or insufficient proof could let the panel avoid the First Amendment question. 9th Circ. Questions Jack Daniel’s’ TM Win Over ‘Bad Spaniels’ - Law360 Meta has settled a closely watched lawsuit brought by Breathitt County School District in Kentucky over costs allegedly tied to youth mental health harms from social media. The case was important because it was the first school-district case against social media companies scheduled for trial on these claims. Breathitt had accused Meta, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok of designing platforms that kept young users engaged in harmful ways and contributed to anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other student mental health problems. The district sought more than $60 million, including money for a 15-year mental health program and an order requiring changes to allegedly addictive platform features. Meta’s settlement follows earlier settlements by YouTube, Snap, and TikTok, meaning Breathitt’s case is now fully resolved. The case was a bellwether, meaning it was chosen as a test case to help courts and parties evaluate similar lawsuits. About 1,200 school districts are pursuing related claims, and thousands of other social-media addiction lawsuits are pending in California state and federal courts. Meta said it resolved the case amicably and pointed to teen-safety tools such as Teen Accounts and parental controls. Lawyers for the school district said they remain focused on claims brought by the other districts. The settlement avoids a June 15 trial that could have shaped settlement talks and strategy across the broader litigation. Other major school systems, including Los Angeles and New York City, have filed similar lawsuits, while DeKalb County, Georgia, has claimed billions in future mental health costs. Meta settles first US case over school costs tied to youth mental health, court filing shows | Reuters OpenAI has expanded its group of outside law firms as it faces major litigation, complex business deals, and a possible future IPO. Reuters reports that the company, recently valued at $852 billion, now works with more than a dozen large U.S. law firms. OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman, and lawyers from Wachtell Lipton and Morrison & Foerster recently defeated Elon Musk’s lawsuit claiming that OpenAI had departed from its original nonprofit mission. That ruling removed one potential obstacle to a possible IPO, which sources have said could happen as soon as September. Wachtell has also handled major OpenAI transactions since ChatGPT launched, including large fundraising deals involving Microsoft, Nvidia, and other investors. Wachtell is a central player for OpenAI in both deal work and litigation. The firm is defending OpenAI in a lawsuit from Musk’s xAI alleging that OpenAI and Apple monopolized markets involving smartphones and generative AI chatbots. In a separate xAI trade secrets case, OpenAI hired Munger, Tolles & Olson. Latham & Watkins has worked on OpenAI deals, including a $4 billion credit line, and is also helping defend the company in copyright lawsuits brought by authors, comedians, and news organizations. OpenAI is arguing in those copyright cases that using material to train AI systems is protected by fair use. Wilson Sonsini is defending OpenAI in a case claiming ChatGPT engaged in unauthorized practice of law, an allegation OpenAI rejects by arguing that ChatGPT is not a lawyer and does not practice law. OpenAI grows stable of law firms for high-stakes lawsuits, deals | 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

    7 min
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About

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. www.minimumcomp.com

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  • Creator
    Andrew and Gina Leahey
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    841
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Andrew Leahey
  • Show Website
    Minimum Competence

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