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. 4d ago

    Charlie Kirk's Family Eyes a Suit Against UVU, Noncitizen-Voting Defendants Challenge the Law Itself & the CLARITY Act Crashes in the Senate

    This Day in Legal History: The First Peacetime Draft On September 16, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act, establishing the first peacetime military draft in American history. With France fallen and Britain under siege, the country was bracing for a war it had not yet entered, and the Act required men in a broad age range to register for potential conscription. Within a month, the first registration was underway; within two, the first draftees were entering service. The law sits at the heart of one of constitutional law’s most fundamental questions: the scope of federal power over the individual. Congress’s authority to raise armies is explicit in the Constitution, and the Supreme Court had already upheld conscription during World War I in the Selective Draft Law Cases of 1918, rejecting arguments that a compelled draft amounted to involuntary servitude barred by the 13th Amendment. But doing it in peacetime was new, and it sharpened the debate over how far the national government could reach into a citizen’s life absent a declared war. The significance of September 16, 1940 echoes for decades. The draft it created would swell to power the American war effort, and the Selective Service system it established would endure through Korea and Vietnam—where it became the flashpoint for some of the most important First Amendment cases in our history, like United States v. O’Brien, the draft-card burning case that gave us the modern test for regulating symbolic speech. It’s a fitting anniversary for today, because our second story is, at its core, about that same enduring question—the limits of federal power to reach and prosecute individuals—just in the context of elections and immigration rather than war. The family of Charlie Kirk plans to sue Utah Valley University over alleged security failures at the campus event where the conservative activist was shot and killed last September. According to the reporting, the family’s lawyers have signaled their intent to bring a claim centered on the university’s alleged failure to provide adequate security for the event. Let me walk through the legal terrain here, because it’s more complicated than a typical negligence case. The core theory would be premises liability and negligent security—the idea that an entity hosting an event owes a duty of reasonable care to protect attendees from foreseeable harm, including, in some circumstances, third-party violence. Plaintiffs in these cases have to show the harm was foreseeable and that reasonable security measures would have prevented it. But there’s a major hurdle when the defendant is a public university: sovereign immunity. Utah Valley University is a state institution, and states and their arms are generally shielded from suit except to the extent they’ve waived that immunity, typically through a state tort claims act that caps damages and imposes strict notice deadlines and procedural requirements. So before this ever reaches a jury on the merits, the family will have to navigate Utah’s governmental immunity framework—and those statutes often sharply limit both whether you can sue a public entity for this kind of failure and how much you can recover. The significance is that this opens a second legal front around the Kirk killing—the criminal case against Tyler Robinson, which we covered when a judge sent it to a death-penalty trial, and now a potential civil suit against the institution that hosted the event. It also raises a question that every university and venue in the country is now asking: what is the legal duty to secure a high-profile, controversial public event, and who bears the liability when security fails? Family of Charlie Kirk plans suit against Utah university over alleged security failures | Reuters · ABC News · The Salt Lake Tribune In a genuinely clever piece of criminal-defense lawyering, several noncitizens charged with illegally voting in U.S. elections are now challenging the constitutionality of the very law being used to prosecute them. Five defendants in separate federal cases in Miami and Madison, Wisconsin, have argued—for the first time in court—that the 1996 statute they’re charged under is unconstitutional. That law was part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, and it criminalizes voting by noncitizens in federal elections. The challenge lands in the middle of the administration’s aggressive push to prosecute what it claims is widespread illegal voting by noncitizens—a claim, worth noting, that study after study has found to be exceedingly rare. Here’s the legal chess match. The defendants are attacking Congress’s authority to criminalize this conduct at all. The Justice Department’s counter is twofold: first, that the Supreme Court has recognized Congress’s power to protect election integrity—pointing to laws like the one criminalizing voting twice in the same election; and second, and more cleverly, that this statute isn’t really an election-regulation law but an immigration law, and Congress’s authority over immigration is about as broad as it gets. That framing matters enormously, because if the statute is grounded in the immigration power rather than the elections power, it stands on much firmer constitutional footing. The results so far are mixed—a judge in Miami already denied one such motion, siding with the DOJ. But a ruling for the defendants, which could come before the November 3 midterms, would raise serious questions about the federal government’s authority to bring these cases at all. The significance is that this is a constitutional test of the legal foundation beneath the entire noncitizen-voting prosecution campaign—and it’s being litigated on the clock, right up against an election. Noncitizens accused of illegal US voting challenge Trump’s authority to prosecute them | Reuters · US News · Yahoo News And finally, in a major blow to the crypto industry, the Senate’s landmark crypto market-structure bill—the CLARITY Act—has failed. Now, one note before we dig in: some early coverage framed the day’s vote as the Senate moving to “advance” the bill, but the actual outcome was a defeat. This was a cloture vote—the procedural step to cut off debate and move to a final vote—and it needed 60 votes to succeed. It got 49, against 50 no votes. That’s not just short of 60; it’s short of a simple majority, which tells you how far the bill was from passing. The no votes included all Democrats plus four Republicans—Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Jerry Moran, and Thom Tillis. Here’s what the bill would have done and why it matters. The CLARITY Act was designed to create the first comprehensive federal framework for crypto markets—crucially, by sorting out the long-running turf war between the SEC and the CFTC over who regulates what. That question—is a given crypto token a “security” regulated by the SEC, or a “commodity” regulated by the CFTC?—has bedeviled the industry for years, and legal uncertainty has been its biggest complaint. So why did it fail? Reporting indicates the sticking point was ethics provisions covering senior public officials—Democrats wanted stronger conflict-of-interest rules, an issue with obvious resonance given the current administration’s own crypto ventures, and negotiators couldn’t bridge the gap despite incorporating more than 120 Democratic requests. The significance is substantial. This effectively ends comprehensive crypto market-structure legislation in the Senate for 2026, after the industry spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying for it. Crypto remains in the regulatory limbo it’s been fighting to escape—governed by enforcement actions and case-by-case litigation rather than a clear statutory framework—and the “is it a security or a commodity” question stays exactly where it’s been: unresolved. US Senate vote fails to advance landmark crypto bill | Reuters · CNBC · NPR 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

  2. 5d ago

    Supreme Court Blocks Trump's Mail-Ballot Restrictions, Musk's X Drops Apple but Keeps Suing OpenAI & Why Breaking Up the Big Four Won't Fix Auditor Misconduct

    This Day in Legal History: The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing On September 15, 1963, members of the Ku Klux Klan planted dynamite beneath the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama—a hub of the civil rights movement—and detonated it on a Sunday morning. The blast killed four young Black girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair. It was an act of racial terrorism aimed at the heart of a community, and it became one of the galvanizing atrocities of the civil rights era. The legal aftermath is a study in the agonizing slowness of justice. Though the FBI identified suspects within a few years, no one was prosecuted at the time—an all-too-familiar failure of Southern justice to hold white supremacists accountable for violence against Black Americans. It took fourteen years for the first conviction: Robert Chambliss, found guilty of murder in 1977. And it took until the twenty-first century for the rest—the FBI reopened the case in 1997, leading to the convictions of Thomas Blanton in 2001 and Bobby Frank Cherry in 2002, nearly forty years after the crime. A fourth suspect died before he could be charged. The significance of September 15, 1963 for the law is twofold. The bombing helped build the political will that produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the deaths of those four girls were not in vain in the sense that they hardened the nation’s resolve to write equality into law. And the decades-long road to conviction is a sobering lesson about accountability: that justice delayed is a profound injustice, but also that the law’s memory can be long, and that consequences can reach the responsible actors even many years after the fact. That last idea—that accountability shouldn’t expire just because time has passed or the guilty have moved on—runs, in a much quieter register, straight through my column today. In a significant loss for the administration, the Supreme Court has refused to let the U.S. Postal Service impose its new mail-ballot restrictions for this November’s midterm elections—effectively ending, for this cycle, a fight we’ve been tracking for weeks. Recall the sequence: an executive effort to have the Postal Service dictate new requirements on how states handle mail-in ballots; a Boston federal judge, Indira Talwani, blocking it as likely unlawful because the Postal Service has no authority to control mail-in voting; the administration racing to the Supreme Court on the emergency docket; and then, just yesterday, a second judge blocking it too. Now the Supreme Court has spoken, and it kept the injunction in place, finding the administration was unlikely to succeed on the merits. The most telling part is Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence. He didn’t fully close the door on the government’s statutory argument—he wrote there’s “at least a fair prospect” the rule falls within the Postal Service’s authority—but he said that imposing this rule in the middle of the 2026 election would be arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. That’s the Purcell principle in spirit: courts are extremely wary of changing election rules right before an election, because doing so breeds chaos and confusion for voters and administrators. So the practical outcome is clear: the old rules govern this midterm, and the mail-ballot restrictions are off the table for now. The significance is that the judiciary—including a conservative justice—drew a hard line against reshaping the mechanics of a national election, on the fly, weeks before people vote. The merits question may return in calmer times, but the attempt to change the rules mid-election has failed. In loss for Trump, US Supreme Court won’t let Postal Service restrict mail ballots | Reuters · NPR · CNBC Elon Musk’s X Corp and his AI venture—now operating as SpaceXAI—have dropped Apple from the antitrust lawsuit they filed last year, while vowing to press on against their real target: OpenAI. The suit, filed in federal court in Texas, accused Apple of illegally conspiring with OpenAI to monopolize the markets for smartphones and generative-AI chatbots, essentially by baking ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence on iPhones and freezing out rival chatbots like Musk’s Grok. In a court filing, Musk’s companies moved to dismiss the claims against Apple—without explaining why, and without saying whether a settlement was reached—but they made clear the case against OpenAI continues. Here’s the legal meat. The core theory is an exclusive-dealing and monopolization claim: the allegation that a dominant platform, Apple, and a dominant AI provider, OpenAI, struck a deal that unlawfully forecloses competitors from a critical distribution channel. That’s a serious antitrust argument in the abstract—exclusive arrangements by dominant firms can violate the Sherman Act if they lock rivals out of the market. But it sits inside a very tangled rivalry: Musk co-founded OpenAI, is now its bitter competitor and litigation adversary on multiple fronts, and runs a competing chatbot. Dropping Apple while keeping OpenAI in the case tells you where Musk sees leverage—and possibly that Apple, facing its own separate antitrust battles, found a way to resolve its piece. The significance is that this is a live front in the biggest question in tech antitrust right now: as AI gets embedded into the dominant platforms we all use, who controls the gateways, and do those integration deals help consumers or unlawfully entrench the incumbents? That fight is very much still on—just now aimed squarely at OpenAI. Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI resolve antitrust lawsuit against Apple | Reuters · CNBC · The Wrap And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on a question that’s playing out in Australia but has direct lessons for the U.S.: what to actually do about misconduct at the Big Four accounting firms. Australia is considering breaking up its Big Four—separating audit from consulting—in the wake of a KPMG scandal, and my argument is that structural separation, while fine, is only part of the answer, and policymakers shouldn’t mistake it for a cure-all. Here’s the core of the problem. KPMG Australia is accused of using confidential information from one client to win audit business from others. And here’s the key insight: splitting off the consulting arm wouldn’t stop that. An audit-only firm still holds confidential information its competitors don’t have, and it can still be tempted to weaponize that information to win the next audit client. In fact, we’ve seen exactly this in the U.S.—back in 2019, the SEC settled with KPMG’s U.S. firm over a partner who tried to use improperly obtained information about regulatory inspections to win audit business. Spinning off consulting wouldn’t have prevented it, because the misconduct arose from competition inside the audit sector itself. So what do I actually propose? Two things. First, target how firms compete for business: require real controls on who can access confidential client and regulatory information, mandate independent review of major sales pitches by someone whose pay isn’t tied to winning the contract, and let regulators spot-check bids. Second—and this is the part I care most about—fix who pays. Right now, a partner can win business improperly, collect the bonus, and leave the firm years before anyone notices. When the penalty finally lands, it’s paid by the current partners, people who may have had nothing to do with it, while the wrongdoer keeps the spoils. Australia has moved to increase individual penalties, which is good, but penalties aren’t the same as clawing back the money. I argue firms should structure partner compensation so that pay tied to misconduct stays recoverable for a set period—even after the partner walks out the door. The deeper principle, and you’ll recognize it from today’s legal-history segment, is that accountability shouldn’t expire just because time has passed or the guilty party has moved on. Breaking up the Big Four might change what firms sell. But we also need to change how they win business—and who pays when the lines are crossed. KPMG Australia Scandal Shows Misconduct Rules Need Strengthening | Bloomberg Tax 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

  3. 6d ago

    Arizona Sues L'Oréal Over Hair-Relaxer Cancer Risks, a Second Judge Blocks the Mail-In Voting Rule, the "Loyalty Question" Falls & a ChatGPT Brief Backfires

    We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com This Day in Legal History: Theodore Roosevelt Sworn In On September 14, 1901, President William McKinley died in Buffalo, New York, eight days after being shot by an assassin at the Pan-American Exposition. That same afternoon, in the parlor of a private home, 42-year-old Vice President Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office—administered by U.S. District Judge John R. Hazel—and became the youngest person ever to hold the presidency. The moment is a landmark in the constitutional law of presidential succession. The Constitution provided that the powers of the presidency “devolve” on the vice president upon the president’s death, but in 1901 the mechanics were still governed as much by precedent as by clear rule. Roosevelt’s swift, orderly assumption of office—taking the oath the very day McKinley died, before a federal judge, with the cabinet present—reinforced the norm of immediate, seamless succession that the country would rely on again and again. It wouldn’t be until the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, that the Constitution spelled out in detail how succession, vice-presidential vacancies, and presidential disability actually work. The significance of September 14, 1901 is twofold. It launched a presidency that would reshape American law—Roosevelt the trust-buster, whose antitrust campaign against the great monopolies gave real teeth to the Sherman Act, and Roosevelt the conservationist and regulator, who helped build the modern administrative state with agencies to police food, drugs, and railroads. And it stands as an early, sturdy example of the peaceful, lawful transfer of power in a moment of national trauma. Roosevelt’s own credo, captured in today’s opening quote, that no one stands above the law and no one below it, is a fitting frame for a day of stories about the reach of the law—over a corporation, over the executive branch’s power to run elections and hire its workforce, and over a lawyer’s duty to the court. Arizona has become the first U.S. state to sue L’Oréal over cancer risks allegedly linked to chemical hair relaxers, accusing the company of concealing evidence that the products could cause cancer in women. Attorney General Kristin Mayes filed the suit in state court, alleging L’Oréal violated Arizona’s consumer-protection laws by marketing hair relaxers—products used predominantly by Black women—for decades without warning about the risks of ovarian and uterine cancer. The complaint is pointed about the equity dimension, accusing the company of exploiting, in its words, “centuries of social pressures and discriminatory beauty standards” affecting people of African descent while prioritizing profit over safety. Here’s the legal architecture worth understanding. This is a state enforcement action, which is a different animal from the private suits: Arizona isn’t just seeking damages for injured individuals, it’s invoking the state’s consumer-protection authority and asking a court to force L’Oréal to stop selling the products unless it warns of the cancer risk. That failure-to-warn and deceptive-marketing theory is the same family of claim we saw in the Texas TikTok case last week—the state as enforcer, alleging the company misrepresented safety. The backdrop is enormous: L’Oréal already faces more than 12,000 personal-injury suits consolidated in federal multidistrict litigation in Chicago, a wave that took off after a 2022 National Institutes of Health study found women who frequently used these products were more than twice as likely to develop uterine cancer. The significance is that a state attorney general has now entered the fray with the distinct leverage of consumer-protection law—penalties, injunctions, and the state’s investigative muscle—and Arizona being first often means it won’t be last. Arizona accuses L’Oréal of concealing cancer risks linked to hair relaxers | Reuters · CNBC · Courthouse News A second federal judge has now blocked the administration’s mail-in voting restrictions—and the timing could hardly be sharper, with ballots for the November 3 midterms already starting to go out. Washington-based U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, granted the Democratic Party a preliminary injunction against the new U.S. Postal Service rule that would tighten how mail-in ballots can be sent, finding bluntly that “no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the rule.” That’s a classic administrative-law holding: an agency has only the authority Congress actually gave it, and when it acts beyond that statutory grant, courts will stop it. Judge Nichols is the second judge to block the rule—Boston-based Judge Indira Talwani had earlier found it likely unlawful and unconstitutional. And all of this is unfolding while the Supreme Court is still weighing the administration’s emergency request to overturn that separate order, which we covered when the administration ran back to the justices two weeks ago. So step back and look at the board: two district judges have now independently blocked the rule, one of them a Trump appointee, and the Supreme Court is simultaneously being asked to clear the way for it—all as actual ballots hit actual mailboxes. The significance is that the judiciary keeps rejecting the administration’s attempts to reshape election mechanics from the executive branch, increasingly on the straightforward ground that the executive is claiming powers Congress never granted. But with the emergency docket still live and the election underway, the rules governing how millions of people vote remain genuinely unsettled at the worst possible moment. Trump’s mail-in voting restrictions blocked by a second judge | Reuters · NBC News · SCOTUSblog A federal judge has struck down the administration’s “loyalty question”—the requirement that applicants for career federal jobs write essays explaining how they’d help advance President Trump’s policies and executive orders. U.S. District Judge George O’Toole in Boston sided with three unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, halting the question on the grounds that it likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act and infringed on First Amendment speech rights. To see why this matters, you have to understand the century-old bargain at the heart of the federal civil service. Since the Pendleton Act of 1883—passed after a disappointed office-seeker assassinated President Garfield—the United States has hired most of its federal workforce based on merit, not political loyalty, precisely to prevent a spoils system where government jobs are handed out as rewards for partisan fealty. The loyalty question, which OPM had folded into a “Merit Hiring Plan” and which reportedly appeared in more than 70,000 job postings, cut directly against that principle by asking nonpartisan civil servants to profess support for a particular president’s agenda. The judge’s First Amendment point is crucial: the government generally cannot condition public employment on an applicant’s political beliefs or compel them to endorse a political viewpoint—that’s the doctrine running from cases like Elrod v. Burns and Rutan, which limit political patronage in government hiring. The significance is that this is a judicial defense of the merit-based civil service against politicization—a ruling that the machinery of government is supposed to serve the public and the law, not the personal policy agenda of whoever currently occupies the White House. US judge blocks Trump administration’s ‘loyalty’ question for job applicants | Reuters · US News · HuffPost And finally, a story that lands squarely in our ongoing series on legal AI gone wrong—and this one is about as serious as it gets, because a man’s life sentence hung in the balance. The New Mexico Supreme Court has fined a defense attorney, Stephen Aarons, $5,000 and held him in contempt after his brief in a murder appeal cited police testimony and witnesses that ChatGPT simply made up. Aarons was appealing the conviction of Oscar Renee Sandoval, who was sentenced to life in prison. He told the court he fed a transcript and case materials into ChatGPT, expecting it would produce what he called “a bulletproof summary”—and instead it fabricated evidence, including invented details like a claim that the shooter wore dark pants and a white shirt. The court didn’t just fine him; it said he’d shown “a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client,” and it’s referring him to the disciplinary board. Now, we have covered a parade of these cases—the sanctioned lawyers, the fake citations—but this one is different in a way that should genuinely alarm every lawyer listening. This isn’t a contract dispute or a routine motion; it’s a criminal appeal, where the fabricated material goes to the reliability of a conviction that put a human being away for life. It’s the intersection of two things we’ve hammered on: the professional-responsibility duty of candor and competence—Rule 11, and the basic obligation to verify what you file—and the specific, documented unreliability of generative AI. And recall that just last week we covered Harvey, the $15.5 billion legal-AI company, buying a “guardrails” firm precisely to constrain this behavior. This case is why that matters. The significance is a hard, unavoidable lesson: AI is a tool, and the lawyer—not the tool—remains responsible for every wo

  4. Sep 11

    Texas Holds TikTok Liable Over Child Safety, 41% of Lawyers Say the Job Harmed Their Mental Health & California's New Kids-Online Laws

    We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com This Day in Legal History: September 11 and the Law Twenty-five years ago today, on September 11, 2001, coordinated terrorist attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and changed the United States in ways we are still reckoning with. Beyond the staggering human loss, September 11 set off one of the most profound transformations of American law in modern history—a rapid, sweeping reordering of the balance between security and liberty. The legal architecture came fast. Within a week, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force, a few dozen words that became the legal basis for two decades of military operations across the globe. In October, the USA PATRIOT Act dramatically expanded the government’s surveillance and investigative powers. The years that followed brought the military detention of “enemy combatants,” the prison at Guantanamo Bay, enhanced interrogation, expanded FISA surveillance, and a string of Supreme Court cases—Hamdi, Hamdan, Boumediene—in which the Court wrestled, haltingly, with whether and how the Constitution’s protections reach detainees in the war on terror. Those decisions reaffirmed a principle that had been under enormous pressure: that even in a national emergency, the executive is not beyond the reach of judicial review, and that habeas corpus and due process do not simply vanish because the government invokes security. The significance of September 11 for the law is that it forced the hardest version of a permanent question: how much liberty a free society should trade for safety, and who decides. Benjamin Franklin’s famous warning, in today’s opening quote, became the rallying cry for civil libertarians in the years after—and the debates it frames, over surveillance, detention, and executive power in the name of security, run directly into stories we still cover on this show. On this solemn anniversary, we remember those who were lost, and we note that the legal choices made in grief and fear have long half-lives. The law written on and after that day is still very much with us. A Texas judge has ruled that TikTok misled users about child safety—making Texas, according to the coverage, the first state in the country to establish liability against the platform for deceiving parents. Judge Cory Liu found that TikTok violated Texas’s consumer-protection law by misrepresenting how it filtered content for minors, and specifically whether its “Restricted Mode” feature actually shielded children from inappropriate material. The damning detail is internal: Texas showed that TikTok publicly promised to remove content that violated its Community Guidelines, but internally classified some of that material merely as “hard to find” rather than “do not allow”—meaning the content stayed on the platform, reachable by kids, despite the company’s public assurances. The judge found that “Restricted Mode” didn’t work as advertised and that TikTok intentionally misled the public about shielding adolescents from graphic depictions of drugs, alcohol, nudity, and violence. Here’s the legal significance. This isn’t the addictive-design theory we’ve seen in the Meta cases; it’s a more traditional and, in some ways, more straightforward claim—deceptive trade practices. The state isn’t arguing TikTok’s product is inherently harmful so much as that TikTok lied about how safe it was. That’s a powerful and well-established theory, and the gap between a company’s public safety marketing and its internal content classifications is exactly the kind of evidence that proves deception. Coming right on the heels of TikTok’s $400 million federal children’s-privacy settlement, this ruling signals that the platform faces a widening front of legal exposure over kids—and that “we said it was safe” can become “we lied about safety” in a courtroom. Texas judge rules TikTok misled users on child safety feature | Reuters · National Law Review · The Star Now a story that hits close to home for everyone in this profession, and one I want to handle with care. The largest study of lawyer mental health ever conducted—a survey of roughly 37,000 licensed attorneys by the American Bar Association and Krill Strategies—found that 41% of lawyers say their time in the profession has damaged their mental health. The rest of the numbers are sobering: nearly half screened positive for high burnout, about 27% said they’ve considered leaving the profession because of mental health, burnout, or stress, and roughly 42% screened positive for risky drinking. This isn’t a surprise so much as a quantification, at real scale, of something the profession has long known and long struggled to talk about honestly. The legal field’s structural features—the billable-hour pressure, the adversarial nature of the work, the always-on client demands, the stigma around admitting you’re struggling—combine into a genuine occupational-health problem. And there’s a professional-responsibility dimension too: a lawyer in crisis is at higher risk of the kind of errors and ethical lapses that harm clients, which is part of why bar associations increasingly treat well-being not as a soft issue but as a competence issue. The significance is that the data is now too large and too clear to dismiss, and it’s pushing firms and bar regulators to treat lawyer well-being as a structural problem rather than a personal failing. Legal profession is detrimental to mental health, say 41% of lawyers | Reuters · American Bar Association · USA Herald And finally, California has enacted what Governor Newsom calls the strongest child-safety tech laws in the nation—a package of measures aimed squarely at social media and AI chatbots. Among the bills Newsom signed: one barring children under 16 from exposure to the “behaviorally addictive” features of social media platforms, and another banning toys that contain AI companion chatbots. The centerpiece is a law known as “Adam’s Law,” named for Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who died by suicide last year after months of interactions with an AI chatbot that, according to his parents, validated his suicidal thoughts. That law imposes time limits for minors and requires platforms to build in mental-health resources. Here’s the legal landscape these laws enter. California has been the most aggressive state in the country on kids’ online safety, and its prior efforts have repeatedly drawn First Amendment challenges—tech-industry groups argue that regulating “addictive feeds” or compelling platforms to restructure what minors see is a form of compelled speech or an unconstitutional restriction on protected expression, and courts have partially blocked earlier versions. So expect these laws to be litigated. But the AI-chatbot provisions break genuinely new ground: regulating companion chatbots, especially after a death linked to one, puts California at the frontier of a question the law has barely begun to answer—what duties does an AI that talks to a vulnerable teenager owe that teenager? The significance is that this is the legislative counterpart to all the litigation we’ve tracked—the Meta settlement, the TikTok rulings—and it reflects a growing, bipartisan conviction that the law has to catch up to what these technologies are doing to kids. Whether these specific measures survive the inevitable constitutional challenges is the next chapter. California enacts new curbs on social media for children | Reuters · NBC News · CalMatters A quick and sincere note, because two of today’s stories touch on mental health and suicide: if you’re struggling, you’re not alone, and help is available. In the U.S., you can call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time. And for the lawyers reading, every state bar runs a confidential Lawyer Assistance Program—reaching out is a sign of strength, not weakness. 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

  5. Sep 10

    Court Tosses NESE Pipeline Permit, Chemours' $455M North Carolina PFAS Deal & Legal-AI's Harvey Hits $15.5 Billion

    We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com This Day in Legal History: Elias Howe and the Sewing Machine War On September 10, 1846, Elias Howe received U.S. Patent No. 4,750 for his lockstitch sewing machine—an invention that would revolutionize the manufacture of clothing and, less famously, trigger one of the most instructive intellectual-property battles in American legal history. Howe had the patent, but he struggled to commercialize it, and while he was away trying to raise money in England, others—most notably Isaac Singer—began building and selling sewing machines that incorporated his patented lockstitch. When Howe returned and demanded royalties, the result was years of litigation known as the “Sewing Machine War.” Multiple manufacturers held patents on different essential components; no one could build a complete, marketable machine without infringing someone else’s patent. It was the classic “patent thicket”—a tangle of overlapping rights that threatened to strangle the very innovation the patent system was supposed to encourage. The significance of September 10, 1846 is what the combatants did to escape that thicket. In 1856, the major players formed the Sewing Machine Combination—the first patent pool in American history. They agreed to cross-license their patents, put them into a common pool, and share royalties, with Howe collecting a fee on every machine sold in the United States. It let the industry actually function, and it made Howe enormously wealthy. But it also previewed a tension we still wrestle with in patent and antitrust law: patent pools can unlock innovation by clearing a thicket, or they can become vehicles for collusion that lock out competitors. It’s a fitting anniversary for a day when our last story is about a company racing to dominate the cutting edge of legal technology—a reminder that the law governing who owns an invention, and how those rights get bundled, has been shaping which innovations reach the public for nearly two centuries. A federal appeals court has vacated a critical permit for Williams Companies’ long-delayed NESE natural gas pipeline—the Northeast Supply Enhancement project—dealing a significant setback to a roughly $1 billion project running from Pennsylvania through New Jersey to New York. The Third Circuit sided with environmental groups and threw out the water-quality certification that New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection had issued last November. The legal mechanism here is a powerful one that a lot of people don’t know about: Section 401 of the Clean Water Act gives states the authority to certify—or refuse to certify—that a federally approved project will comply with the state’s own water-quality standards. That state certification is effectively a veto point; without it, a federally licensed pipeline can’t proceed. The court didn’t rule that the pipeline is unlawful. It ruled, on administrative-law grounds, that NJDEP failed to adequately explain how the project would meet water-quality standards—particularly given that constructing an underwater segment across Raritan Bay would require dredging the bay floor and stirring up sediment laced with toxic contaminants like mercury and PCBs. That’s the principle of “reasoned decisionmaking”: an agency has to show its work, and when it doesn’t, a court will vacate the decision and send it back. The significance is twofold. For the pipeline, it’s a serious delay but not a death sentence—the case goes back to the state agency to try again with better reasoning. More broadly, it’s a reminder of how much leverage states retain over federal energy infrastructure through the Clean Water Act, and how the boring requirement that agencies explain themselves can stop a billion-dollar project in its tracks. US court vacates key NJ permit for Williams NESE gas pipe from Pennsylvania to New York | Reuters · Natural Gas Intelligence · New Jersey Monitor Chemours, DuPont, and Corteva have agreed to pay $455 million to settle “forever chemicals” claims brought by North Carolina and eleven local governments—the latest multimillion-dollar resolution in the sprawling PFAS litigation we’ve been tracking. The settlement covers contamination tied to Chemours’ Fayetteville Works plant, a notorious site linked to PFAS pollution of the Cape Fear River, as well as broader claims including contamination from AFFF firefighting foam. The money will be paid out over 15 years, and the companies will split it according to a 2021 allocation agreement: Chemours covers half, with DuPont and Corteva dividing the rest. If that corporate cast sounds familiar, it should—these are the same three companies, Chemours having been spun off from DuPont, that just last month agreed to a $2.5 billion PFAS settlement with New Jersey. PFAS, you’ll recall, are the synthetic “forever chemicals” that essentially never break down and have been linked to serious health harms; states are pursuing these companies under natural-resource-damage and contamination theories for poisoning their water and land. The significance is the steady, state-by-state accumulation of PFAS liability. New Jersey got $2.5 billion; North Carolina gets $455 million; and there are many more states with claims. For the companies, these settlements are a way to convert open-ended, unpredictable litigation risk into defined, scheduled payments. For everyone watching, it’s a running tally of the cost of decades of chemical contamination—a bill that, fittingly for a “forever chemical,” will be paid out for years to come. Chemours, DuPont, Corteva settle North Carolina ‘forever chemicals’ claims for $455 million | Reuters · Yahoo Finance · Seeking Alpha And finally, a number that captures just how fast AI is reshaping the practice of law: Harvey, the legal-AI startup, has raised another $550 million and now carries a valuation of about $15.5 billion—up from $11 billion just six months ago. The company has now raised more than $1.5 billion in total, its revenue has reportedly topped $400 million, and its reach is staggering: Harvey says it’s installed at roughly 80% of the 100 highest-ranked U.S. law firms and counts half the Fortune 10 among its customers. This is the legal profession’s AI gold rush in a single data point—a legal-tech “decacorn” nearly doubling its value in nine months. And there’s a detail in this round that’s especially telling for the themes we keep returning to. Alongside the funding, Harvey acquired a company called Guardrails AI—a security platform that specializes in testing and constraining the behavior of AI agents. Think about what that signals. We’ve covered, again and again, the dangers of legal AI gone wrong: the fake hallucinated citations, the sanctioned lawyers, even the prompt-injection attack on a court. Now the market leader is spending money to buy “guardrails”—literally acquiring the capacity to test whether its AI behaves. That’s an implicit acknowledgment that for AI to be trusted in law, where a wrong answer can cost someone their case or their liberty, reliability isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the whole ballgame. The significance is that the integration of AI into legal work is now moving at venture-capital speed, with the biggest firms already aboard—and the central unresolved question remains the one a “guardrails” acquisition is trying to answer: can these tools be made reliable enough to deserve the trust the profession is rapidly placing in them? Legal AI startup Harvey reaches $15.5 billion valuation in new funding round | Reuters · TechCrunch · Artificial Lawyer 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. Sep 9

    SCOTUS Leaves Missouri's Map in Limbo, U.S. Resumes Visas for Hungary and Poland Only & Law Degrees Earned Behind Bars

    We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com. This Day in Legal History: The Attica Uprising On September 9, 1971, roughly 1,300 incarcerated men seized control of the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, taking dozens of guards and staff hostage in what became the most significant prison uprising in American history. They were protesting brutal, degrading conditions—overcrowding, censorship, inadequate medical care, racial abuse—and their demands, issued in a list of grievances, were strikingly basic: adequate food, religious freedom, medical treatment, and to be treated, in the words of one of their leaders, like human beings and not beasts. The uprising ended four days later in horrific violence. On orders from state officials, troopers and guards retook the prison by force, firing indiscriminately into the yard. Thirty-nine people were killed in that assault—both incarcerated men and the hostages the state was supposedly trying to rescue—nearly all of them shot by the retaking forces. It was one of the bloodiest single days in American history between citizens and their own government, and the official cover story, that prisoners had killed the hostages, was quickly disproven by autopsies. The significance of September 9, 1971 is that Attica became a turning point for prisoners’ rights in American law. It galvanized a movement and a wave of litigation; it forced courts and legislatures to confront the conditions inside prisons and the constitutional rights that do not stop at the prison gate. The Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and later civil-rights suits under Section 1983, became tools to challenge inhumane confinement. Attica is the backdrop to the modern understanding that incarcerated people remain people, with rights the state must respect. And it’s a fitting anniversary for today, because our final story is about two people who, from inside a prison, did something that would have been almost unimaginable in 1971—they earned law degrees, and now they want to join the profession that polices the very system that holds them. The Supreme Court has declined to reinstate Missouri’s new Republican-drawn congressional map, leaving the state’s districts in a genuine muddle heading into November. Here’s the mechanism: Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who handles emergency matters arising from Missouri as the circuit justice for that region, rejected the state’s request to put the new map into effect. He acted alone—he didn’t refer it to the full nine-member Court, and he didn’t explain his reasoning, which is how a lot of emergency-docket business gets done. The new map was a mid-decade redistricting effort that would have carved up a Democratic-leaning district around Kansas City to hand Republicans a better shot at an additional House seat—part of the nationwide redistricting arms race we’ve seen states launch ahead of the midterms. But this is where it gets tangled: a federal district judge in Missouri, a Trump appointee, had separately blocked the old map and ordered the state to use the new Republican one, with that order running for 14 days while the courts sort it out. So you have competing rulings pointing in opposite directions, and a state that genuinely doesn’t know, today, which map governs its election. The significance is twofold. Substantively, it’s a setback for the GOP’s redistricting push and, for now, preserves the older district lines. Procedurally, it’s another reminder of how much consequential election law is being decided on the emergency docket, by single justices, without explanation—and how that leaves candidates and voters in limbo. With the midterms weeks away, Missouri is a vivid example of courts rewriting, or declining to rewrite, the electoral map in real time. US Supreme Court won’t reinstate Republican-drawn congressional map in Missouri | Reuters NBC News · Al Jazeera The administration has quietly resumed immigrant visa processing for two countries—Hungary and Poland—while keeping a broad pause in place for much of the rest of the world. According to reporting, the directive to prioritize immigrant visas at U.S. missions in those two nations came directly from the White House, and the State Department has offered no public explanation for why these two were singled out. The context is important. This follows the sweeping suspension of immigrant visa processing for dozens of countries that a federal judge struck down in August as “patently unlawful.” Now, rather than resuming broadly, the administration has chosen to restart processing for two specific countries—both led by nationalist governments with close political ties to President Trump—while applicants from across Latin America, the Balkans, South Asia, and beyond remain frozen out, with people from countries as varied as India, Peru, and even the United Kingdom reporting canceled appointments. The legal and equitable problem here is selectivity. When the government resumes a paused program for two politically favored countries and no one else, without explanation, it invites exactly the kind of arbitrariness-and-favoritism challenge that administrative law is designed to police—the same vulnerability that sank the original 75-nation suspension. Immigration and foreign affairs give the executive enormous discretion, but “enormous discretion” is not the same as “unlimited and unexplained.” The significance is that this looks less like a neutral, orderly restart of a lawful program and more like the allocation of a government benefit along political lines—and that is the kind of thing that tends to end up back in court. US resumes immigrant visa processing for Hungary, Poland as pause remains elsewhere | ReutersThe Japan Times · The Korea Times And finally, a remarkable story that brings us full circle to today’s Attica anniversary: two people who earned accredited law degrees while incarcerated now face the next, and perhaps hardest, test of whether they can actually become lawyers. Jeffery Young and Maureen Onyelobi received their Juris Doctor degrees in a ceremony inside a Minnesota correctional facility—believed to be the first people to earn ABA-accredited law degrees while serving time, through a pioneering prison-to-law program. A JD from an accredited school entitles you to sit for the bar exam in any state. But passing the bar is only part of it. The real hurdle for formerly or currently incarcerated graduates is the “character and fitness” review—the part of bar admission where a committee examines an applicant’s background, honesty, and moral fitness to practice law. A criminal conviction doesn’t automatically disqualify you in most states, but it triggers intense scrutiny, and applicants have to demonstrate rehabilitation and candor to a board that has broad discretion to say no. This is where the profession’s gatekeeping meets its stated belief in redemption. The significance is genuinely profound. On one hand, character and fitness exists for good reason—lawyers hold clients’ money, secrets, and liberty in their hands, and the public needs to trust them. On the other, a system that permanently bars people who have paid their debt, educated themselves, and mastered the law from ever practicing it sends a message that rehabilitation is a fiction. These two graduates are about to test which message the legal profession actually means. And on the anniversary of Attica—when incarcerated people demanded to be seen as human—there’s something fitting about two of them asking not just to be treated as human, but to be admitted as officers of the court. They earned law degrees in prison. Now comes the next test | ReutersThe Business Standard · JD Advising 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. Sep 8

    Appeals Court Blocks SAVE Database for Voter Checks, the Montana License-Plate Loophole by the Numbers & Fixing NY's Charity Bottleneck

    We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com. This Day in Legal History: Ford Pardons Nixon On September 8, 1974, exactly one month after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, his successor, Gerald Ford, granted him “a full, free, and absolute pardon” for all federal crimes he “committed or may have committed” while in office. In a single stroke, Ford ended the possibility that a former president would be criminally prosecuted for Watergate—and he did it before Nixon had even been charged with anything. The pardon was, and remains, one of the most controversial exercises of presidential power in American history. Ford defended it as an act of national healing, arguing that a prolonged prosecution of Nixon would keep the country trapped in the trauma of Watergate—that, as he put it, “our long national nightmare” needed to end. Critics were furious, many suspecting a corrupt bargain in which Ford had traded the pardon for the presidency. The decision almost certainly contributed to Ford’s narrow loss in the 1976 election. Ford himself later carried in his wallet a passage from the Supreme Court’s decision in Burdick v. United States, which held that accepting a pardon carries an imputation of guilt—his answer to those who said Nixon got off scot-free. The significance of September 8, 1974 is that it defined, in the most dramatic possible way, the breadth of the constitutional pardon power. The Constitution gives the president near-total authority to pardon federal offenses, and the Nixon pardon showed just how sweeping that is: it can be granted before charges are filed, for unspecified crimes, over enormous public objection, with no one able to override it. That power—its scope, its potential for abuse, its use to shield allies from accountability—has been very much in our headlines this year, from the January 6 pardons onward. Ford’s decision is the towering precedent behind all of it, and the enduring, unresolved question it poses is the one we still argue about: is the pardon power an instrument of mercy and healing, or a tool for placing the powerful beyond the reach of the law? A federal appeals court has upheld the ban on the administration’s bid to use a federal immigration database to scrub state voter rolls—another significant ruling in the long-running fight over federal control of elections. In a 2-1 decision, the D.C. Circuit declined to lift a lower court’s block on the government using the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system—that’s the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database—to check the citizenship of registered voters. The legal grounds are worth noting because they’re a bit unusual. Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Robert Wilkins, both Obama appointees, upheld the finding that using SAVE this way likely violates the Social Security Act, because the system exposes millions of Americans’ private information, including Social Security data. The court also flagged the accuracy problem we’ve discussed before: SAVE is error-prone, and relying on it risks flagging actual citizens, forcing them to prove their citizenship or even face cancellation of their registration. Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, dissented. The ruling keeps the database off-limits for voter checks ahead of the November 3 midterms. This is a direct continuation of the SAVE fight we covered back in July, and it fits the summer-long pattern—courts repeatedly rebuffing federal efforts to centralize control over voter rolls, and here doing so on a privacy statute rather than the Constitution. The significance is that, once again, and now at the appellate level, the judiciary has said the federal government cannot repurpose a benefits-verification database into an election-policing tool—especially not weeks before an election, and not at the cost of exposing private data and risking the disenfranchisement of eligible citizens. Federal appeals court upholds ban on Trump’s bid to use citizenship data for voter checks | Reuters Now for the first half of a double dose of my own work this week—and this one let me put on my data-analyst hat. I did the statistical analysis behind a Bloomberg Tax deep dive into the “Montana license plate” loophole, and the numbers are genuinely startling. Here’s the scheme: instead of registering your car—or truck, boat, or private plane—in your home state and paying sales tax and fees, you set up a shell LLC in Montana, which has no sales tax, cheap registration, no emissions testing, and lets you hide behind the company. A registered agent will do it all for you, for around a thousand dollars, and you never have to set foot in Montana. The result is a lot of very expensive vehicles wearing Montana plates in states where their owners actually live. My job was to measure how big this has gotten, and I did it by comparing Montana to its genuinely car-heavy rural neighbors—Idaho, the Dakotas, Wyoming. The headline figure: in 2024, Montana had over 2.4 million registered vehicles but only 879,000 licensed drivers—a ratio of 2.81 vehicles per driver, the highest in the nation and more than double the U.S. average. That implies nearly a million vehicles that can’t be explained by geography or economics—and measured against the national average rather than Montana’s rural peers, the “excess” balloons to about 1.4 million. Crucially, the pattern tracked the national average until about 2010, and then registrations exploded, up 175% as the registered-agent LLC industry took its pitch online. My simulations put the lost sales-and-use-tax revenue somewhere between $2 billion and $5.1 billion. And states are now fighting back hard: Utah, using its insurance database to cross-check, has flagged as many as 80,000 suspect vehicles and is sending demand letters in waves; California has brought criminal charges; Tennessee indicted a YouTuber who filmed himself torching a Montana-plated Ferrari. The significance is that this sits right on the line between lawful tax avoidance and unlawful tax evasion—and the data suggests an awful lot of people have wandered across it. Utah Takes Montana License Plate Fight to 80,000 Vehicle Owners | Bloomberg Tax And for the second half of the double dose—my column for Bloomberg Tax this week—I look at a smaller but wonderfully fixable problem: New York’s charitable-giving program is letting donations pile up, undistributed, inside state government. Here’s the setup. When New Yorkers file their state income taxes, they can donate part of their refund to various charitable causes through tax “checkoffs.” The giving side actually works—New Yorkers gave $3.8 million this way in fiscal 2025, up from $2.6 million the year before, and I think the moment of a refund is psychologically a great time to give; that $50 feels more like found money than it does weeks later. The problem is what happens next. The state comptroller found $17.5 million sitting undistributed in these funds—the Gifts for Food Banks Fund sitting on more than a million dollars, a volunteer-firefighter and EMS recruitment fund holding more than two million, neither having disbursed a cent since 2023 or 2024. The money is being collected and then stranded inside a state grantmaking bureaucracy. My argument is that the fix is easy: stop routing charitable intent back through the government. Instead of parking donations in state-administered funds, New York should let taxpayers direct their contributions straight to eligible nonprofits—the state maintains a registry of qualifying charities, the taxpayer picks one at filing, and the state’s role ends at verifying eligibility and remitting the payment. That turns a grantmaking problem, which needs appropriations and agencies and rules, into a payment-processing problem, which the state already knows how to solve. If lawmakers want to juice giving further, offer a small match on the first $50 or $100. The deeper point is philosophical: the whole justification for favoring charities is that they do public-serving work outside of government—so when you route the giving back through Albany, and the money just sits there, you’ve defeated the entire purpose. A hungry person doesn’t get less hungry waiting for an agency to figure out how to disburse a food-bank fund. New York’s Bureaucratic Charitable Giving Program Has an Easy Fix | Bloomberg Tax 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. Sep 4

    Trump Takes Mail-In Voting Back to SCOTUS, IRS Targets Race-Conscious Schools' Tax Exemptions & Big Law Data Breaches

    We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com. This Day in Legal History: The Little Rock Nine On September 4, 1957, nine Black teenagers tried to walk into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas—and were turned away at the doors by soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard, deployed by Governor Orval Faubus specifically to keep them out. The image of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine, walking alone through a jeering white mob, became one of the defining photographs of the civil rights era. And the confrontation it began became one of the most important tests of whether the rule of law actually means anything. The legal backdrop was Brown v. Board of Education, decided three years earlier, in which the Supreme Court held that segregated public schools are unconstitutional. Little Rock had a desegregation plan; the Little Rock Nine were supposed to be its first students. Governor Faubus decided to defy the federal courts, using state troops to block integration. The standoff escalated until President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent in the 101st Airborne Division to escort the nine students into the school—federal soldiers enforcing a federal court order against a state government determined to resist it. The significance of September 4, 1957 crystallized the following year in the Supreme Court’s decision in Cooper v. Aaron, which arose directly from the Little Rock crisis. There, in an opinion signed personally by all nine justices—a rare show of unanimity—the Court declared that state officials cannot nullify a federal court’s interpretation of the Constitution, and that “the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution.” It’s a principle that echoes through so much of what we cover: that a court order is not a suggestion, and that no official, however powerful, gets to decide for himself which parts of the Constitution to obey. It’s also a fitting anniversary for today, because our second story is, at bottom, another chapter in the long, unfinished American argument about race and education. The Trump administration has taken its mail-in voting fight back to the Supreme Court, filing to have the justices clear away the last judicial obstacle to its executive order. Longtime listeners know this saga well. The order would create a federal list of eligible voters and restrict how the Postal Service delivers ballots. Back in late August, the Supreme Court, on its emergency docket, lifted one of two injunctions—but left the Postal Service piece blocked nationwide. The administration then went to the appeals court to try to clear that remaining block, and now it’s gone straight back to the Supreme Court to finish the job. So the whole thing is back in front of the justices, again on an emergency basis. Here’s what makes this significant and, frankly, uncomfortable. We are now two months out from the November midterms, and the fundamental legal question—whether the president actually has the authority to reshape how Americans vote by mail—still has not been decided on the merits. Everything so far has happened through emergency orders and stays, the “shadow docket,” with no full briefing, no argument, and no written opinion explaining the Court’s reasoning. Election administrators need settled rules to run an election; voters need to know how to cast a ballot. Instead, the rules are being rewritten in real time, in emergency filings, weeks before people vote. The significance is that the Supreme Court is now positioned to shape the mechanics of a national election through its emergency process—and whichever way it rules, doing it this way, this close to the election, on this thin a record, is itself a serious concern for the stability and predictability that election law is supposed to provide. Trump administration takes mail-in ballot fight to US Supreme Court | ReutersNPR · The Hill Now the biggest legal story of the day: the Treasury Department and the IRS have proposed regulations to strip federal tax-exempt status from private schools and colleges that consider race in admissions, scholarships, or policies. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed it bluntly, saying that schools rebranding race-based preferences as “equitable” or “diversity-enhancing” doesn’t change what he called their discriminatory nature. To understand how significant—and how legally aggressive—this is, you need to know a case called Bob Jones University v. United States. In 1983, the Supreme Court upheld the IRS’s power to deny tax-exempt status to a school that racially discriminated—there, a university that banned interracial dating—on the theory that tax exemption is reserved for organizations that serve a public purpose, and that racial discrimination in education violates fundamental public policy. That doctrine was forged to punish schools that discriminated against Black students. What the administration is doing now is taking that exact doctrine and inverting it: arguing that after the Supreme Court’s 2023 SFFA decision ended race-conscious admissions, it’s race-conscious programs—the ones designed to help underrepresented minorities—that constitute the illegal discrimination violating public policy. So the anti-discrimination tax weapon built to dismantle segregation is being turned against diversity programs. A few crucial caveats: this is a proposed regulation, not a final rule—it goes through notice-and-comment and will absolutely be litigated—and it pointedly exempts schools that select based on religion. The significance is enormous. Tax-exempt status is existential for schools; losing it means donations stop being deductible and the institution owes taxes. We’ve tracked this administration’s campaign against DEI—Harvard, Columbia, William & Mary, the Deloitte settlement—and this is the most powerful lever yet: using the tax code, and a civil-rights-era precedent, to force schools to abandon any consideration of race. Trump moves to strip tax-exempt status from schools that consider race | ReutersWashington Post · CNBC And finally, a story that should make every lawyer check their firm’s cybersecurity: data from two elite law firms, Quinn Emanuel and McDermott Will & Emery, has been exposed in a wave of cyber breaches hitting the legal industry. Law firms are, in a sense, the perfect target. Think about what they hold: their clients’ most sensitive secrets—merger plans, litigation strategy, trade secrets, personal financial and health information, government investigations. A single big firm is a one-stop shop for confidential data across dozens of major companies and individuals. That makes firms enormously attractive to criminal hackers and nation-state actors alike, and this latest wave—part of a broader surge of attacks on the legal sector—shows the threat is intensifying. Here’s the professional-responsibility dimension, because this isn’t just an IT problem. Lawyers have an ethical duty to protect client confidences—the ABA’s Model Rules require attorneys to make reasonable efforts to prevent unauthorized disclosure of client information, which in the modern world squarely includes cybersecurity. When a firm gets breached, it can face not only regulatory and contractual liability and breach-notification obligations, but also questions about whether it met its ethical duty of competence in safeguarding the data in the first place. The significance is a wake-up call for a profession that runs on confidentiality. As firms rush to adopt powerful new tools—we covered Google bringing Gemini AI into Big Law just last week—they’re accumulating and centralizing ever more sensitive client data, which raises the stakes on protecting it. The duty of confidentiality is as old as the profession; the threat surface is brand new, and growing. Data of law firms Quinn Emanuel, McDermott exposed in cyber breaches | ReutersBloomberg Law · The Record 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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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
    913
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    © Andrew Leahey
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