This Day in Legal History: Magna Carta Sealed at Runnymede On this day in 1215, in a meadow at Runnymede on the south bank of the Thames, King John of England affixed his seal to a document the rebellious English barons had drafted, in which the king conceded a series of limits on his own royal authority. We call it Magna Carta — the Great Charter. The immediate political context was a baronial revolt against John’s tax exactions for his disastrous French wars, and most of the sixty-three chapters as drafted in 1215 are concerned with the highly specific grievances of a feudal aristocracy: scutage, wardship, the inheritance fees of widows, the freedom of the church, the standardization of weights and measures in the king’s markets. The two chapters that the centuries have remembered are 39 and 40. Chapter 39 says that no free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. Chapter 40 says that to no one will the king sell, deny, or delay right or justice. The Charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III within ten weeks of sealing — the pope held that John, as a vassal of the Holy See, could not be bound by a treaty extracted under duress — and the country immediately collapsed into the First Barons’ War. But John died in October 1216, his nine-year-old son Henry III’s regents reissued the Charter as a tactical concession the next month, it was reissued again in 1217 and 1225, and by the late thirteenth century the 1225 version had been confirmed by successive kings as a foundational statute of the realm. Edward Coke, writing in the seventeenth century, transformed Chapter 39’s “law of the land” into the doctrine of due process, and the founding generation of the American Republic picked up Coke’s reading and wrote it directly into the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The phrase “due process of law” in those amendments is the most consequential American inheritance from the Runnymede document. The principle the barons were trying to extract from a beleaguered king — that the law constrains the sovereign too — is the substrate on which everything we recognize as constitutionalism is built. Eight hundred and eleven years on, the principle is still the work. The Rhode Island travel-ban lawsuit we covered on June 8 took a sharp turn on Friday. Chief Judge John J. McConnell, Jr., of the District of Rhode Island held a status conference in Dorcas International Institute v. USCIS at which he was openly frustrated with the Justice Department for failing to immediately implement his June 5 vacatur of the four USCIS benefit-freeze policies for nationals of the thirty-nine travel-ban countries. The judge’s message, in plain terms, was that vacatur under the Administrative Procedure Act is self-executing — the moment the order was entered, the policies ceased to exist, and the agency was obligated to resume processing affirmative benefits, asylum claims, and adjudicator-instruction reviews on the prior pre-freeze basis. The Trump administration, after the hearing, told the court it would comply, restart adjudications, and clear the backlog. It also did what defendants typically do when they have lost on the merits and lost again on compliance: it filed a notice of appeal with the First Circuit and asked the appellate court to stay the vacatur pending appeal. That is the live question now. The First Circuit’s stay analysis runs through the standard Nken v. Holder factors — likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm, the balance of equities, and the public interest — and the administration’s strongest argument on each is going to be familiar: the executive needs administrative breathing room to implement a travel ban, mass restoration of adjudications creates national-security risk, the harm to applicants is reversible if their adjudications are paused for a few more weeks. The plaintiffs’ strongest counterarguments are also familiar: the policies were unlawful when adopted and the agency had no business adopting them, the harm to applicants from continued delay is concrete and accruing daily, and the First Circuit is not in the business of staying vacaturs of unlawful agency action in order to let the agency continue acting unlawfully. Watch the First Circuit’s calendar this week. The stay motion is the next inflection point. Trump officials agree to resume asylum processing after being scolded by judge | The Washington Post Google filed suit on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against a China-based cybercrime network it calls the “Outsider Enterprise,” alleging that the network’s members used Google’s Gemini large-language model to generate the code, copy, and templates for a phishing-as-a-service platform that has built more than nine thousand fraudulent websites and sent two and a half million scam text messages in the two weeks ending June 1 alone. The complaint is significant for two reasons. First, it is, to Google’s knowledge, the first time the company has affirmatively sued threat actors for using its own generative-AI product as the input to a scaled criminal operation, as distinct from the more usual posture of suing scammers who impersonate Google brands. The legal theories are a mix of Lanham Act false-designation-of-origin and trademark-infringement counts, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act counts based on Outsider’s unauthorized access to Google services, breach-of-contract counts on the Gemini terms of service, and a RICO count. Second, the factual record will be a road map for the next decade of AI-misuse litigation. The complaint describes Telegram channels in which Outsider members trade prompts that get Gemini to write phishing code, a library of two hundred and ninety prebuilt templates impersonating brands ranging from the U.S. Postal Service to state DMVs to E-ZPass, and an FBI estimate that the broader campaign Outsider participates in has stolen roughly 3.87 million card numbers and caused $1.9 billion in losses since July 2023. The remedy Google is seeking is a permanent injunction shutting the operation down, plus domain seizures and account terminations across Google’s services and at major U.S. carriers, which Google says it has been coordinating with the FBI, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The deeper legal question the case may end up clarifying is whether and to what extent platforms can use private civil suits as the front-line enforcement mechanism against AI-augmented criminal activity that the public criminal-justice system has had trouble keeping up with. Google sues Chinese cybercrime ring that weaponized Gemini AI for phishing scams | TechCrunch A federal district judge in Washington on Friday issued a preliminary injunction barring the Trump administration from continuing to implement Executive Order 14253, the order under which the National Park Service had been scrubbing exhibits, signage, and online materials at sites administered by the Department of the Interior. The judge gave the administration three weeks to restore the materials it had already removed. The order at issue, signed in March, directed federal cultural agencies to identify and remove content that, in the executive’s view, reflected “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” or “partisan” framing. In the months that followed, the National Park Service had taken down or altered displays addressing slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, climate change, and the histories of Native American dispossession at sites including the Stonewall National Monument, Independence Hall, and the Manzanar National Historic Site. The case is American Historical Association v. Department of the Interior, brought by historians’ professional associations and a coalition of plaintiffs that includes affected park employees and visitor-experience contractors. The legal theory pleaded was multi-strand: First Amendment viewpoint discrimination as applied to government speech that has taken on a public-forum character, Administrative Procedure Act challenges on the ground that the agency failed to provide a reasoned basis for the removals and failed to consider statutory commands under the Organic Act of 1916, and a Federal Records Act challenge to the destruction of materials that constituted federal records. The judge held that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the First Amendment claim and the APA claim, found irreparable harm in the ongoing loss of public access to the underlying historical materials, and found that the public interest was best served by restoration. The administration is widely expected to appeal to the D.C. Circuit. In the meantime, the three-week restoration clock is running. Judge blocks Trump national parks order, calling it “censorship” | The Washington Post 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
