Minimum Competence

Andrew and Gina Leahey
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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

  1. há 12 h

    Meta's $18B Child-Harm Settlement, Tate Brothers' Extradition Bail Fight & Bayer's $7.25B Roundup Deal Advances

    This Day in Legal History: The Murder of Emmett Till On August 28, 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was abducted, tortured, and murdered in the Mississippi Delta by two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, after Till—a Black teenager visiting from Chicago—was accused of offending a white woman in a grocery store. His killers beat him, shot him, weighted his body, and threw it in the Tallahatchie River. He was a child, and his murder, and what came after, helped ignite the modern civil rights movement. The legal story is one of justice utterly failing, and then, slowly, refusing to disappear. Bryant and Milam were tried the next month in a segregated Mississippi courtroom. The trial lasted five days; the all-white, all-male jury deliberated for barely an hour before acquitting both men, with one juror later saying it wouldn’t have taken that long if they hadn’t stopped for a soda. Protected by double jeopardy, the two men then sold their confession to a magazine for a few thousand dollars, describing in detail how they’d killed the boy they had just been acquitted of murdering. It was one of the starkest demonstrations imaginable that the machinery of Southern justice was not built to deliver justice to Black victims. The significance of August 28, 1955 reaches across the decades. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made the searing decision to hold an open-casket funeral and let the world photograph her son. That act of witness galvanized a generation. And there is a haunting piece of calendar symmetry worth honoring: exactly eight years later, on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial and delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech to the March on Washington. The law eventually, partially, caught up—the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and, only in 2022, a federal anti-lynching law that bears Emmett Till’s name. It’s a reminder that some of the most important developments in American law began not in a courtroom win, but in a courtroom failure so profound that the country could not look away. The brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate were back in a Miami federal courtroom this week, shackled, asking a judge to release them on bond while they fight extradition to the United Kingdom. The two, who have built a massive and controversial online following, have been held in a federal detention center since their July arrest on U.K. rape and sex-trafficking charges. Their lawyers made a pointed argument: if Romania, where the brothers face a separate sex-crimes case, is willing to let them remain free pending those proceedings, then a U.S. court should free them too—especially since, they argue, two of the most recognizable men on the internet can’t exactly disappear. Prosecutors pushed back hard, and here the law is decidedly against the Tates. In ordinary criminal cases, release pending trial is the norm. But international extradition is different: there is a strong, long-standing presumption against bail, rooted in the idea that the United States has a treaty obligation to actually produce the person for the requesting country, and that letting an extradition target go free risks a diplomatic and legal failure if they flee. Courts generally require “special circumstances” to grant bail in an extradition case—a demanding standard—and prosecutors noted the brothers have money and have bragged about holding multiple passports. Legal experts quoted in the coverage thought it unlikely they’d win release. The significance is a useful window into a corner of the law most people never see: that fighting extradition is not like fighting ordinary charges, and the presumption of liberty that normally protects defendants is largely flipped when a foreign government is waiting to prosecute. Tate brothers press for release from US jail during extradition fight | ReutersPBS NewsHour · NPR A federal appeals court has cleared a significant hurdle for Bayer’s $7.25 billion settlement of tens of thousands of Roundup cancer claims. The Eighth Circuit dismissed a challenge by a group of objecting plaintiffs who were trying to derail the deal—and the fight was about forum, which sounds dry but matters enormously in mass litigation. Bayer structured this as a class-action settlement in Missouri state court, an unusual move: it’s using a single state-court proceeding to try to resolve claims nationwide. The objectors argued that a state court has no business fast-tracking a nationwide resolution, and that the whole thing belongs in front of the federal judge already overseeing the consolidated federal Roundup litigation. A federal judge ruled in June that the case could stay in Missouri state court, and now the Eighth Circuit has agreed, dismissing the appeal. Why does the forum matter so much? Because a settlement that binds a nationwide class of people—including people who haven’t actively participated—raises real due-process questions about whether a single state court can bind absent claimants across the country, and because plaintiffs and defendants often have strong strategic preferences about which court, and which rules, govern a mega-settlement. This connects to the Bayer story we covered earlier this summer, when the Supreme Court handed the company a big win on failure-to-warn claims; this settlement is the other half of Bayer’s campaign to finally contain a decade of Roundup litigation. A hearing to approve the deal is set for September 14, with roughly 65,000 claims hanging in the balance. The significance is that Bayer is close to buying its way out of a liability that has dogged it for years—and the courts just removed one of the last procedural obstacles. US court dismisses appeal over objections to $7.25 billion Roundup deal | ReutersRTÉ · Maryland Daily Record And finally—though this is anything but a footnote—the biggest story of the week, and arguably the summer: Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and fundamentally change how its apps work for teenagers, settling the landmark case accusing it of designing Facebook and Instagram to addict children. This is the resolution of the very trial we watched begin just ten days ago—the 29-state case in Oakland, with the whistleblower testimony from Arturo Bejar. Rather than let it run to a verdict, Meta settled, and the numbers are staggering: more than $17.6 billion to 48 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the territories, plus another $459 million to resolve privacy claims tied to the old Cambridge Analytica scandal. But the money may be the less important part. For the next decade, Meta has agreed to concrete design changes: teens will be capped at two hours a day on the apps, and blocked from using them between midnight and 6 a.m. without a parent’s consent. And in a clever pressure mechanism, part of the payout is contingent on whether YouTube and TikTok adopt similar protections—effectively using this settlement to try to move the whole industry. Everything we’ve tracked all summer led here: the New Mexico verdict, the Tennessee trial, the bellwether cases, the Ninth Circuit clearing these suits past Section 230. This is the reckoning arriving. It still needs approval from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who presided over the trial, but if it holds, it’s one of the largest consumer-protection settlements in American history—and, more consequentially, the first time a court-supervised deal will reach inside these platforms and re-engineer them for the safety of kids. The era of treating social media’s effect on children as an unregulated externality may have just ended, not with a verdict, but with $18 billion and a clock that shuts the app off at midnight. Meta reaches $18 billion of settlements over children’s social media addiction | ReutersCNN · Al Jazeera 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. há 1 dia

    Judge Weighs Kennedy Center Trump Signage, Lisa Cook Fights Fed Removal & X Loses NY Hate-Speech Suit

    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 Kellogg-Briand Pact On August 27, 1928, representatives of fifteen nations gathered in Paris and signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact—an international agreement in which the signatories solemnly renounced war as an instrument of national policy. Named for U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, it was born of the still-fresh horror of World War I and the earnest hope that the great powers could simply agree to stop settling disputes by force. Eventually 64 nations signed on. It is, on its face, one of the most idealistic documents in the history of international law—and one of the most famous cautionary tales about law’s limits. The pact had a fatal flaw: it contained no enforcement mechanism, no sanctions, no army, nothing but the promise itself and the hope that world opinion would keep nations honest. Within a few years, that hope was in tatters—Japan invaded Manchuria, Italy invaded Ethiopia, Germany rearmed, and the whole edifice collapsed into the Second World War. As a device for preventing war, Kellogg-Briand failed almost completely. And yet the significance of August 27, 1928 is more complicated than “noble failure.” The pact planted a legal idea that outlived its own impotence: that aggressive war is not just tragic but unlawful. After World War II, that principle became the backbone of the Nuremberg trials, where Nazi leaders were prosecuted for “crimes against peace”—waging aggressive war—a charge that traced its lineage directly to Kellogg-Briand. So the pact is a genuinely instructive anniversary for lawyers: it’s a reminder that a law without an enforcement mechanism is mostly an aspiration, but also that even an unenforced principle can lodge itself in the legal conscience and reappear, with teeth, decades later. It’s worth keeping that dual lesson in mind on a day when we’ve got stories about whether court orders and legal protections will actually be honored. A federal judge in Washington holds a hearing this afternoon on a question that sounds trivial but isn’t: whether adding President Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center’s signage defies a court order. We set this up yesterday. Back in May, Judge Christopher Cooper ordered the Kennedy Center to remove Trump’s name from the building, siding with Democratic Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, who sued over the renaming of the memorial to President John F. Kennedy. Then, on August 13, the center’s board—now stacked with Trump appointees—voted to alter the signage to read “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” and to christen the grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” The administration says this complies with the injunction because the building is still, technically, named for Kennedy—the Trump language is just a donor acknowledgment. Beatty says it’s open defiance. Today Judge Cooper hears them out. And this is genuinely the crux of the rule of law: an injunction isn’t a word game. Courts have long held that you can’t evade a court order by finding a technical workaround that accomplishes the very thing the order forbade. If Cooper concludes the board’s maneuver is a bad-faith attempt to do indirectly what he directly prohibited, the consequences can escalate toward contempt. The significance, as I noted yesterday, is that this small fight over a plaque is really a test of whether the executive branch treats a court order as a binding command or a puzzle to be solved. And on today’s Kellogg-Briand anniversary, it’s a pointed reminder that a legal order matters only if it’s actually enforced. US judge weighs challenge to restore Trump’s name to Kennedy Center | ReutersThe Hill · PBS NewsHour Now to a fight with far bigger stakes for the economy: the effort to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Cook’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, has sent a letter to the White House declaring there is “no legally cognizable cause” to fire her, arguing she “has never committed mortgage fraud or any intentional wrongdoing.” The White House has been trying to oust Cook for over a year, most recently by building a formal process to remove her over allegations that she listed two different properties as her primary residence in mortgage documents—and this comes after the Supreme Court already ruled against an earlier, more summary attempt to fire her. Here’s why this is one of the most important legal stories of the year. Federal Reserve governors are not ordinary executive officials who serve at the president’s pleasure; under the Federal Reserve Act, they can only be removed “for cause.” That phrase is doing enormous work. It traces back to the 1935 Supreme Court decision in Humphrey’s Executor, which upheld Congress’s power to insulate the heads of independent agencies from at-will presidential removal—the legal foundation of the Fed’s independence. The current Supreme Court has been chipping away at Humphrey’s Executor for other agencies, but it has pointedly signaled that the Fed is special and its independence protected. So the battle is being fought on the meaning of “cause”: Cook’s team says a disputed mortgage-paperwork allegation, with no finding of intentional wrongdoing and no crime, doesn’t come close to the kind of malfeasance that “cause” requires. The significance could hardly be larger. If a president can remove a Fed governor he disagrees with by gathering allegations and declaring “cause,” then the Fed’s independence—the firewall that’s supposed to keep monetary policy insulated from short-term political pressure—becomes a fiction. Markets, and the rule of law, are watching this one closely. Lawyer for Fed’s Cook, targeted by Trump, says there is no grounds for dismissal | ReutersCNBC · Axios And finally, Elon Musk’s X has lost its First Amendment challenge to a New York law requiring social-media companies to disclose how they handle hate speech. U.S. District Judge John Cronan in Manhattan dismissed the suit—and did so “with prejudice,” meaning X can’t refile. The law at issue is New York’s “Stop Hiding Hate Act,” signed by Governor Hochul in late 2024, which requires large social-media platforms to disclose their policies for handling hate speech, extremism, harassment, foreign interference, and disinformation, and to report on their efforts. X argued this compelled it to speak—forcing it to make statements about “highly sensitive and controversial” content under threat of lawsuits and fines, in violation of the First Amendment. The judge disagreed, and the legal reasoning is worth understanding. There’s a well-established doctrine that governments can require businesses to disclose “purely factual and uncontroversial information” about their own practices, as long as the requirement is reasonably related to a legitimate government interest—the standard from a case called Zauderer. Judge Cronan found that making X describe its own content-moderation policies is exactly that kind of factual disclosure, tied to New York’s interest in helping users make informed choices about the platforms they use. The significance is that this lands on one side of a genuinely unsettled national fight. Courts have split over social-media transparency laws—a similar California law was partly struck down on First Amendment grounds—so this New York ruling, upholding a disclosure mandate, deepens a divide that may ultimately need the Supreme Court to resolve. And there’s an irony worth noting: X, the platform that markets itself as the champion of free speech, just lost a free-speech case—by arguing that being made to describe its own rules violated its rights. Judge dismisses lawsuit by Elon Musk’s X challenging New York hate speech law | ReutersUS News · Daily Maverick 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. há 2 dias

    Kennedy Center Renaming Defies a Court Order?, Deloitte's $21.5M DEI Settlement & Ninth Circuit Blocks Ideological Grant Strings

    We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks 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 Declaration of the Rights of Man On August 26, 1789, France’s National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the foundational documents of modern constitutional government. The Marquis de Lafayette played a major role in drafting it, with input from his friend Thomas Jefferson, who was then serving as the American minister in Paris. In just seventeen articles, the Declaration tried to turn Enlightenment ideas about natural rights and legitimate government into law. A lot of it will sound familiar to American ears, in part because the American and French revolutions were very much in conversation with each other. Article I declares that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights”—today’s opening quote. The Declaration identifies liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression as natural rights. It says the law must apply equally, punishment must be authorized by law, defendants are presumed innocent, and the free communication of ideas is “one of the most precious of the rights of man.” It also makes separation of powers part of the definition of constitutional government: a society where rights are not secured and powers are not separated “has no constitution at all.” The Declaration mattered well beyond France. Its ideas influenced constitutions throughout Europe and Latin America and eventually found echoes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. There was also an enormous gap between the Declaration’s promises and what followed. Within a few years, the French Revolution had descended into the Terror, and the supposedly universal rights announced in 1789 were plainly not being extended to everyone. That makes August 26 an especially fitting date for another reason. In the United States, it is Women’s Equality Day, commemorating the 1920 certification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The coincidence is a useful reminder that declaring people “equal in rights” is considerably easier than actually making them so—and that many of the people supposedly covered by universal declarations of equality had to spend generations fighting to make those words apply to them. A federal judge previously issued an injunction barring the administration from renaming the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after President Trump. Then, earlier this month, the Kennedy Center’s board—now dominated by Trump appointees—voted 20 to 3 to change the building’s signage to read “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” and to name the surrounding grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” The administration’s argument, in a new filing, is essentially semantic: it says this doesn’t violate the injunction because the building is still named the John F. Kennedy Center, and the added inscription is merely a donor acknowledgment—the kind, it says, that’s “ubiquitous in similar facilities.” Democratic Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, who’s part of the suit, says the board “openly defied” the court’s ruling and has asked the judge to block the signage. Here’s the legal question, and it’s a real one: when does creative compliance with a court order become defiance of it? Courts don’t just police the literal words of an injunction—they police attempts to accomplish the forbidden thing through a technical workaround. If the injunction’s purpose was to stop the center from being turned into a monument to the sitting president, a judge may well look past the “we didn’t technically rename it” framing to the practical reality. The judge, Christopher Cooper, has set a fast briefing schedule with deadlines today. The significance is that this small, almost absurd dispute over building signage is really a test of something fundamental: whether the executive branch will comply with a court order in substance, or look for the narrowest possible reading to get what it wanted anyway. Trump administration says new Kennedy Center renaming does not violate court order | ReutersBloomberg Law · Time Deloitte has agreed to pay $21.5 million to settle Justice Department allegations that its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs amounted to illegal discrimination—a landmark in the administration’s campaign against corporate DEI. And note the legal vehicle, because it’s clever and aggressive: the DOJ brought this under the False Claims Act, the federal government’s primary anti-fraud statute. The theory is that Deloitte, as a federal contractor, certified compliance with anti-discrimination requirements while allegedly running DEI programs that themselves discriminated—making its certifications false. The specific allegations: Deloitte’s business units received monthly summaries tracking progress against “demographic goals”; roughly 150 senior partners and managing directors had part of their compensation tied to hitting those targets, some risking tens of thousands of dollars; and race and sex were allegedly factored into promotion decisions and access to certain training and mentoring programs. Of the $21.5 million, about $10 million is designated as restitution. Crucially, Deloitte denies the allegations and the settlement includes no admission of liability. The significance is that this reframes DEI from a corporate HR initiative into potential fraud against the United States. We’ve tracked the administration’s use of Title VI against universities—Harvard, Columbia, William & Mary—and this is the corporate front of the same campaign, deploying the False Claims Act against a major government contractor. That’s a powerful deterrent, because the False Claims Act carries treble damages and invites whistleblower suits. Whatever you think of DEI programs on the merits, the legal move here is significant: it puts every federal contractor on notice that diversity targets tied to pay and promotion could be recast as discriminatory, and therefore as a false certification the government can prosecute. Deloitte to pay $21.5 million to settle US government probe over DEI | ReutersJustice Department · Fox Business And finally, a federal appeals court has ruled that the administration cannot attach ideological conditions to federal grants for homelessness and transportation—another entry in the running saga over the limits of the executive’s power over the money. The Ninth Circuit, in a decision backing Santa Clara County and other local governments, affirmed a lower court and found that the administration abused its authority by imposing new strings on grants like the Continuum of Care program, which has funded homelessness services since 1987. Those grants have long been built around a “housing-first” philosophy—the approach of getting people into permanent housing without preconditions like sobriety or employment—and the administration sought to attach conditions cutting against that model and advancing its own policy priorities. The court found the cities would suffer irreparable harm if the funds were withheld. Here’s the legal principle, and longtime listeners will recognize it: back in July, we covered the anniversary of South Dakota v. Dole, the case that lets the federal government attach strings to the money it gives states—but only within limits. The conditions have to be clearly stated, related to the purpose of the funding, and not coercive. When an administration tries to bolt novel, ideological conditions onto grants Congress created for a specific purpose, courts have repeatedly said that exceeds those limits. This fits a pattern we’ve followed all summer—from the OMB grant clawbacks to the EPA’s frozen climate funds—of courts telling the executive that money Congress appropriated for a purpose can’t be turned into a lever for unrelated policy goals. The significance is that the spending power, real as it is, keeps running into the same wall: you can fund homelessness programs, or not, but you can’t quietly rewrite what they’re for. Trump cannot impose conditions on transportation, homelessness grants, US appeals court rules | ReutersPalo Alto Online · Mountain View Voice 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

  4. há 3 dias

    SCOTUS Lifts Mail-In Voting Block, U.S. Plans Record 200K Visa Revocations & Google Brings Gemini AI to Big Law

    We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks 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 National Park Service Is Created On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act, creating a new federal bureau inside the Department of the Interior to manage the country’s national parks and monuments. Before this, the roughly 35 parks and monuments the government had accumulated were administered in a haphazard, piecemeal way—some by the Army, some by scattered Interior officials—with no unified mission and no consistent protection. The genius of the Organic Act is compressed into a single, oft-quoted sentence that has generated a century of law and litigation. It directed the new Park Service to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein” and to “leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” That phrasing contains a built-in tension that lawyers and the courts have wrestled with ever since: the Park Service is told both to provide for the public’s enjoyment of the parks and to leave them unimpaired—two goals that can pull hard against each other when you’re deciding whether to build a road, permit a concession, or limit the number of visitors. That “dual mandate” is the central puzzle of public-lands law. The significance of August 25, 1916 is that it enshrined in law a genuinely radical idea: that some places belong to the whole public, in perpetuity, held in trust by the government for people who haven’t been born yet. Today the Park Service manages more than 400 sites across all fifty states and welcomes hundreds of millions of visitors a year. The writer Wallace Stegner, who gave us today’s opening line, called the national parks “the best idea we ever had”—absolutely American, absolutely democratic. On a day whose news is heavy with contested executive power, it’s a nice reminder that the law is also the instrument through which a society decides to preserve something for the common good. The Supreme Court has handed the Trump administration an interim victory on mail-in voting—but it’s important to be precise about what the Court did and didn’t do. In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the justices lifted an injunction that a Massachusetts federal judge imposed in June, which had blocked key parts of Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting in California and 22 other states that sued. That order aims to create a federal list of eligible voters and, controversially, to have the Postal Service deliver ballots only to people on that list. Here’s the crucial nuance. This is a stay, not a ruling on the merits—the Court did not decide whether the president actually has the authority to reshape how states run their elections. It merely paused the lower court’s block while the litigation continues. And it’s partial: the Postal Service’s role in the scheme remains blocked nationwide. Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, made the point sharply—she wrote that the decision doesn’t suggest the executive branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to do this, it just postpones the day of reckoning. This is the shadow docket in action, a theme we keep returning to: the Court altering the rules for a national election months before that election, through an emergency order, without a full merits decision or a written explanation of its reasoning. The significance is that, for now, parts of Trump’s order can take effect for the November midterms—a real-world consequence—even as the fundamental question of whether any of it is lawful remains formally undecided. The status quo the courts had maintained all summer just shifted, at least temporarily, and it shifted on the emergency docket. US Supreme Court lifts judicial hurdle to Trump’s mail-in ballot curbs | Reuters Washington Post · NPR The administration is preparing what would be the largest mass visa revocation in U.S. history: according to the Associated Press, the State Department plans to revoke the tourist and business visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are seeking asylum. The targets are holders of so-called B1 and B2 visas—the standard business and tourism visas—issued between 2016 and 2026, whose holders later sought asylum, with the action coordinated between the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. The legal logic is worth understanding. A visitor visa rests on a premise: that you intend to come temporarily and then go home. When someone on a tourist visa applies for asylum, the government’s position is that they’ve revealed an intent inconsistent with that temporary-visitor status—so it’s moving to strip the visitor visa. Importantly, officials say this wouldn’t necessarily mean immediate deportation; most people with pending asylum cases would be recategorized, losing their visitor status but not instantly removed. Still, the scale is staggering and unprecedented, and it raises hard questions. Seeking asylum is a legal right, protected by statute and international obligation, and there’s a real tension in penalizing people’s immigration status precisely because they used the lawful asylum process. There are also due-process concerns lurking in any mass action that recategorizes 200,000 people, and a potential chilling effect on those weighing whether to come forward and claim protection. The significance is that this fits the aggressive immigration-enforcement pattern we’ve tracked all summer—but at a scale that’s genuinely new, using visa revocation as a lever against the asylum system itself. US plans to revoke up to 200,000 tourism, business visas, AP reports | ReutersWTOP · Houston Public Media / NPR And a story close to home for everyone in this profession: Google has launched a version of its Gemini AI built specifically for lawyers. Google Cloud unveiled “Gemini Enterprise for Legal,” an agentic AI platform purpose-built for legal workflows—with specialized skills, connectors to legal research and document systems, and an ecosystem of partner tools. And its launch customers are not fringe experimenters; they’re elite firms: Cleary Gottlieb, Freshfields, Weil, and Williams & Connolly. When firms of that caliber sign on as launch partners, it’s a signal that AI in legal practice has moved from novelty to infrastructure. Here’s the significance, and the tension. On one hand, this is the mainstreaming of AI in law—the same shift that, as we discussed a few weeks ago, is thinning out entry-level hiring at big firms as software absorbs the document review and first-draft work once done by junior associates. Google is now competing directly with the specialized legal-AI companies for that market, and its entry accelerates everything. On the other hand, this collides with a problem we’ve covered again and again: the fake, hallucinated citations, the AI-generated errors, even the litigant hiding prompt injections in his filings. A more powerful, more deeply integrated AI tool doesn’t dissolve a lawyer’s duties of competence, confidentiality, and candor—it raises the stakes on them. The significance is that the profession is being reshaped in real time. The tools are getting better and more embedded, the biggest firms are adopting them, and the hard questions—about verification, about who’s accountable when the machine is wrong, about what happens to the training pipeline for young lawyers—are all arriving at once. Google expands Gemini AI platform for law firms, lawyers | ReutersArtificial Lawyer · Google Cloud And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a big loss for Maryland—and a valuable lesson for every other state eyeing the digital economy for revenue. Maryland’s first-in-the-nation digital advertising tax just took a potentially fatal blow, with the state tax court siding with Google, Apple, and Peacock in their challenges. My argument is that this doesn’t prove you can’t tax digital advertising—it proves Maryland went about it the wrong way, by designing a tax around the companies it wanted to pay rather than the activity it wanted to tax. Two design choices doomed it. First, Maryland taxed digital advertising while leaving comparable non-digital advertising—billboards, print, radio, television—completely alone. Second, the tax only kicks in for companies above a huge global revenue threshold, and the rate actually climbs, from 2.5% up to 10%, based on a company’s worldwide revenue, not its Maryland activity. The court saw that for what it was: a structure that, in practice, hits big out-of-state tech companies while sparing basically every in-state business, which runs into both the dormant Commerce Clause and the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act. As I put it, using worldwide corporate revenue to set the rate on identical in-state transactions is just a backward way of making big companies pay more—two companies doing the exact same amount of business in Maryland can end up with wildly different bills. There’s also a cautionary detail I love, because it says everything: Maryland passed this tax in 2021, but by 2025 the state comptroller had to hire an outside expert just to figure out what “digital advertising services” even means—introducing terms like “programmatic” and “visual” that weren’t in the statute at all. If you need to hire an expert four years after enactment to ascertain what your own tax taxes, maybe the problem isn’t that taxpayers are being difficult. And the fisca

  5. há 4 dias

    Judge Voids 75-Nation Visa Ban, Golden Gate Bridge Protesters Sentenced & TikTok's $400M Kids-Privacy Deal

    We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks 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: Communist Control Act On August 24, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Communist Control Act, a law that did something extraordinary in a country built around the First Amendment: it effectively outlawed a political party. The Act declared the Communist Party of the United States an instrument of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. It stripped it of “all rights, privileges, and immunities” available to legal organizations, and made knowing membership in the party potentially criminal. Perhaps more remarkable is how little resistance any of this encountered. This was the height of the McCarthy era, when the political cost of appearing insufficiently hostile to communism was enormous. The bill passed the Senate 79-0 and the House 265-2. Those margins tell you something important about the moment: liberals and conservatives alike had strong incentives to demonstrate their anti-communist bona fides, and almost no one had much incentive to be the person standing up for the constitutional rights of communists. Eisenhower signed the bill, and, at least on paper, an American political party ceased to have any legal existence. The significance of August 24, 1954 is mostly as a lesson in what happens to civil liberties when they are placed under enough political pressure—and in the messier ways our constitutional system often corrects itself. The Communist Control Act was constitutionally dubious from the start; punishing someone for just belonging to a political organization runs directly into the freedoms of speech and association. But the law was rarely enforced, courts largely avoided confronting its most sweeping provisions head-on, and it gradually withered into a stricture approaching a dead letter, though it technically remains on the books. Later Supreme Court decisions made considerably clearer that the government can’t punish mere association or abstract advocacy, as opposed to incitement to imminent lawless action. That makes this a fitting anniversary for a day when we also have a story about protesters sentenced for their political activity. The point captured in today’s opening quote from Justice Brandeis is easy to endorse when the speaker and the cause are popular. The real test of the freedom to think and speak as you will comes when neither is. A federal judge has struck down one of the administration’s broader immigration policies, vacating a State Department decision that suspended immigrant visa processing for applicants from 75 countries. The policy, announced in January, halted immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries—including Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, and Somalia—on the theory that applicants from those countries were likely to require public assistance. U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan called the policy “patently unlawful,” but the interesting part of the decision is less the rhetoric than the relatively straightforward statutory problem she identified: Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not have the power Congress gave someone else. Federal immigration law expressly limits the Secretary of State’s authority over how consular officers process immigrant visas. The administration therefore could not use the Secretary’s general authority to accomplish something Congress had specifically placed beyond his reach. It is a theme we have seen repeatedly this summer: not some enormous constitutional confrontation over presidential power, but the considerably more mundane question of whether the executive branch can point to a statute that actually authorizes what it is doing. Vargas’s order also does more than stop the policy going forward. She vacated visa denials based solely on the suspended-processing policy, meaning applicants who were turned away under it can have their applications reconsidered. The lawsuit was brought by immigrant-rights organizations, visa applicants, and U.S. citizens seeking visas for family members. The broader point is that immigration and foreign affairs may be areas in which the executive branch enjoys substantial discretion, but discretion is not the same thing as unlimited authority. The government still needs to identify where Congress gave it the power it claims to possess. Here, the court concluded Congress had done essentially the opposite. US judge strikes down policy suspending immigrant visa processing for 75 nations | ReutersWashington Post · Al Jazeera Seven pro-Palestinian protesters who shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in 2024 have now been sentenced, and the result is a useful little illustration of how the law handles civil disobedience. The seven were among 26 protesters who drove onto the bridge in April 2024, stopped their vehicles, and chained themselves together to protest the war in Gaza, blocking traffic for hours. They were convicted in July of misdemeanor false imprisonment, obstruction of a thoroughfare, and unlawful assembly. On Friday, they were sentenced to 30 days in jail—with an option that could cut that time in half—along with six months of probation and roughly $1,000 in fines and restitution. The First Amendment line here is not especially mysterious. Protest is protected; physically preventing other people from leaving is not. That is the significance of the false-imprisonment charge: motorists were stuck on a bridge with nowhere else to go. You can stand alongside the road holding a sign. You do not acquire a First Amendment right to chain the road shut merely because your reason for doing it is political. But the sentence is interesting in the other direction. The defendants potentially faced years in prison and received 30 days, while prosecutors dropped the most serious felony conspiracy charge after the jury deadlocked on it. That gap illustrates just how much calibration occurs after we decide that conduct is criminal. Prosecutors and judges can recognize both that the protesters deliberately interfered with the rights of hundreds of other people and that they did so as part of nonviolent political expression rather than for personal gain or predatory purposes. That is more or less how a legal system metabolizes civil disobedience: the political motivation does not erase the underlying offense, but neither must the law pretend that motivation is irrelevant when deciding how severely to punish it. On the anniversary of the Communist Control Act, it is an especially useful reminder that the legal treatment of dissent rarely comes down to a simple choice between “protected” and “illegal.” Much of the real work happens in between. Pro-Palestinian protesters sentenced over blocking Golden Gate Bridge traffic | ReutersKQED · Mission Local And finally, TikTok and parent company ByteDance have agreed to pay $400 million to settle the Justice Department’s lawsuit accusing the platform of violating federal children’s privacy law—an enormous number for a case built around a statute passed before TikTok, or really modern social media, existed. The Justice Department filed the lawsuit in 2024 on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that TikTok allowed millions of children under 13 to create accounts without their parents’ knowledge or consent and then made it unnecessarily difficult for parents to have those accounts deleted. The statute at issue is COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, which generally requires online services covered by the law to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13. There is an especially interesting wrinkle in how the $400 million settlement is structured. TikTok will pay $300 million now and another $100 million once a court vacates an earlier consent decree entered against Musical.ly, TikTok’s predecessor. That matters because this is not the first time the platform has encountered the government over children’s privacy. Musical.ly had already been penalized over COPPA violations, and the government’s latest case alleged that the problems continued afterward. TikTok is settling without admitting wrongdoing and says it has made substantial changes to its age controls and parental-oversight systems. But whatever one thinks of the underlying allegations, $400 million is a fairly substantial reminder that COPPA is not merely a disclosure statute sitting around from the early Internet. And this case fits into the larger fight over children and social media from a somewhat different direction than the addiction and product-design litigation we have been following. Those cases ask what platforms may design for children and what harms those designs may cause. COPPA asks the considerably less glamorous but foundational question that comes before all of that: who gets to collect information about children in the first place, and on what terms? Four hundred million dollars suggests the government still thinks the answer matters quite a bit. US Justice Department, TikTok settle $400 million children’s privacy suit | ReutersAxios · Justice Department 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. 21 de ago.

    Teen Drops Meta/Google/Snap Suit, DOJ Targets Mar-a-Lago FBI Agents & Tech Giants Fight Over AI Voice Data

    We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Brightlooks 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 American Bar Association Is Founded On August 21, 1878, seventy-five lawyers from twenty-one states gathered in Saratoga Springs, New York, and founded the American Bar Association. The stated mission had all the ambition—and word count—you would expect from a nineteenth-century professional organization: “the advancement of the science of jurisprudence, the promotion of the administration of justice, and a uniformity of legislation throughout the country.” James Overton Broadhead, a Missouri lawyer, became the ABA’s first president. And the idea apparently had some appeal. Within a year, the organization had grown from its original 75 members to nearly 300. It is worth remembering just how different the legal profession looked at the time. There were few meaningful licensing standards, legal education varied enormously from one place to another, and there was nothing resembling a national voice for lawyers. “The bar,” such as it was, was largely a collection of state and local institutions operating under their own rules and traditions. The ABA helped change that. Over the next century, it became one of the principal forces behind the professionalization of American law. It developed model ethics standards, eventually producing what became the Model Rules of Professional Conduct that form the basis for lawyer regulation in most states. It became enormously influential in law-school accreditation. And for decades, its assessments of federal judicial nominees carried substantial weight in Washington. In other words, the ABA became something close to an institutional center of gravity for a profession that, by design, does not really have one. Whether that has always been a good thing is a separate question—and there is certainly no shortage of lawyers willing to debate it. But the date is particularly interesting this year because the ABA is once again squarely in the headlines. Just this week, we covered the organization’s lawsuit challenging the administration’s executive orders targeting major law firms. The ABA’s argument, at bottom, is that the government is attempting to use its power to punish lawyers and firms for representing clients or causes the administration dislikes—and, in doing so, pressure the broader legal profession into falling in line. There is a rather striking symmetry to it. An organization founded nearly 150 years ago in part to promote “the administration of justice” now finds itself in court arguing that the independence of the lawyers responsible for administering that system is itself under threat. One can agree or disagree with the ABA’s politics—and plenty of people do. But the principle underlying its founding is harder to dismiss. A legal profession capable of governing itself, enforcing its own standards, and, when necessary, telling political power “no” is not merely a professional convenience. It is part of the architecture of the rule of law. Of course, independence is only valuable if lawyers actually use it. Which brings us neatly back to today’s opening quote from Charles Hamilton Houston: what lawyers choose to do with the power and independence their profession gives them matters enormously. Nearly 150 years after those 75 lawyers met in Saratoga Springs, that question has hardly become less relevant. Another key test case in the massive social-media litigation has evaporated: a New Jersey teenager has voluntarily dropped her lawsuit against Meta, Google, and Snap, just weeks before it was set for trial in October. The 15-year-old, identified in court records only by her initials, had alleged that the companies’ platforms fueled addiction, depression, and self-harm. Notably, her lawyer said she received no payment to walk away—she simply wanted, in the attorney’s words, to “resume her life.” TikTok had earlier settled her claims separately. If you’ve been following along, this should sound familiar: back in July, we covered a different teen plaintiff, in a bellwether case against Meta, dropping his claims days before trial. Now it’s happened again. Here’s why it matters strategically. These are “bellwether” cases—representative individual lawsuits, plucked from a pool of thousands, tried first so both sides can gauge how juries will react and calibrate settlement value. When a marquee bellwether disappears right before trial, it removes a data point everyone was watching. And the reason this one vanished is worth sitting with: not a secret settlement, but a teenager deciding she didn’t want to spend her life as the face of a landmark lawsuit, subjected to discovery into her mental health and cross-examination about her worst moments. The significance is a quiet illustration of a real tension in mass litigation—the individual plaintiffs who anchor these cases are often young and vulnerable, and the litigation itself exacts a toll that can lead them to walk away. Meanwhile, the states’ cases, like the 29-state trial underway in California, march on without that problem, because a state attorney general doesn’t have a childhood to protect. US teen drops lawsuit against Meta, Google, Snap ahead of trial | ReutersBenzinga · WJLA The Justice Department is seeking to question the FBI officials who carried out the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago—a striking move that turns the machinery of investigation around to point at the investigators. According to sources, the requests are coming from a team working under Joe diGenova, a Trump ally now overseeing a Florida-based probe, and the investigation is reportedly built on the theory that Trump was the victim of a criminal conspiracy against his rights. Let’s recall the facts, because they matter. The 2022 search was authorized by a federal judge and turned up more than 100 classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, including highly sensitive national-security records. That led to charges against Trump and two associates for retaining classified material and obstruction. The case never reached a jury on the merits—it was dismissed after a judge concluded the special counsel, Jack Smith, had been unlawfully appointed, and the DOJ dropped its appeal after Trump won the 2024 election. So here’s the inversion: agents who executed a lawful, court-approved search warrant, and found exactly the classified documents the warrant anticipated, are now themselves the subjects of scrutiny, under a theory that pursuing Trump was itself a crime against him. The significance is about the independence of law enforcement and the chilling effect of retribution. When agents who followed a valid warrant can be investigated years later for having done so—by a team led by a political ally of the person they investigated—it sends a message to every FBI agent and prosecutor about the personal risk of investigating the powerful. It’s the same thread we pulled on yesterday with the Comey prosecution: the concern that federal law-enforcement power is being turned to punish the president’s perceived enemies rather than to pursue crime. DOJ seeks to question FBI officials tied to search of Trump Mar-a-Lago estate, sources say | ReutersWashington Post · Yahoo News And finally, a fight is heating up that will help define who owns the raw material of the AI era: your voice. In federal court in Illinois, a group of journalists, podcasters, voice actors, and audiobook narrators are suing a who’s-who of tech—Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, Alphabet, Adobe, and the AI voice company ElevenLabs—alleging the companies harvested their “voiceprints” from publicly available audio recordings and used them to train commercial AI voice models without consent. This week, the two sides squared off over the companies’ motions to dismiss. The legal engine here is a powerful Illinois statute called BIPA, the Biometric Information Privacy Act—the same law that produced a $650 million settlement from Facebook over face-tagging. BIPA treats biometric identifiers, including voiceprints, as something a company can’t collect or use without informed consent, and it comes with statutory damages and a private right of action, which makes it a serious threat. The core dispute is about harm. The tech companies argue the plaintiffs can’t point to any concrete injury—no cloned voice showed up in a product they can identify—so there’s nothing to sue over. The plaintiffs counter that the harvesting itself is the harm: BIPA was designed to stop the nonconsensual capture of your biometric identity in the first place, whether or not it later surfaces in a product. The significance is that this is a preview of the defining legal question of AI training: the models are built on enormous quantities of human-created data—our voices, our writing, our faces—often scraped without asking, and the law is scrambling to decide whether that scraping is a harm in itself. Old privacy statutes like BIPA are becoming the sharpest tools plaintiffs have, and how these motions come out will shape whether the people whose voices train the machines have any say at all. Lawyers square off in fight over voice data used to train AI | ReutersMacDailyNews · Crypto Briefing 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

    Teen Drops Meta/Google/Snap Suit, DOJ Targets Mar-a-Lago FBI Agents & Tech Giants Fight Over AI Voice Data

  7. 20 de ago.

    Tupac Defense Says "Don't Believe My Client," Trump's Nine New Judicial Picks & DOJ Uses Comey's Novel in "86 47" Threat Case

    This Day in Legal History: The War on Poverty On August 20, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act, the legislative centerpiece of the “War on Poverty” he had declared in his State of the Union address seven months earlier. It was among the most ambitious pieces of social legislation in American history. More fundamentally, it committed the federal government to the idea that poverty was not merely an individual misfortune, but a national problem the country could organize itself to confront. The Act was broad by design. It authorized roughly $1 billion and created a collection of programs whose names remain familiar: the Job Corps, which trained young people; VISTA, conceived as a domestic version of the Peace Corps; the Neighborhood Youth Corps; and the Community Action Program. The last of those sent federal money directly to local organizations and required the “maximum feasible participation” of poor people in designing the programs intended to help them. The Act also created the Office of Economic Opportunity to oversee the broader effort. Head Start, which continues operating today, grew out of the same framework. The legacy of August 20, 1964, is genuinely mixed, which is precisely why it is worth remembering honestly. The War on Poverty created durable institutions, including Head Start, Job Corps, and legal-services programs for poor Americans, while embedding the principle that the federal government has some responsibility for expanding opportunity. But the “maximum feasible participation” requirement also produced fierce battles between local activists and city governments that were accustomed to controlling federal money. The initiative was then starved of funding as the war in Vietnam consumed both the federal budget and the country’s political attention. The Economic Opportunity Act remains a reference point in nearly every argument about what the government owes its most vulnerable citizens. It also pairs pointedly with a day of legal news dominated by criminal prosecutions and judicial power—a reminder that law is not only a mechanism for punishment, but, at its most aspirational, a tool for creating opportunity. In the trial of the man accused of orchestrating Tupac Shakur’s 1996 murder, the defense has settled on a genuinely remarkable strategy: asking the jury not to believe its own client. When we covered the opening of the trial, I noted that the case largely rests on Duane “Keffe D” Davis’s own words. Over the years, Davis said in media interviews and in a 2019 memoir that he was inside the Cadillac on the night Tupac was shot and that he handed the gun to the men in the back seat. Police had long suspected Davis, but they did not have enough evidence to charge him until he began publicly talking about the crime. His lawyer, Michael Sanft, is now attacking the reliability of those same admissions, at one point displaying a slide for jurors bearing a single word: “b******t.” The defense theory is that Davis is a braggart who exaggerated or invented his involvement to sell books and improve his street reputation—and that self-aggrandizing talk is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Legally, this is a fascinating position because Davis’s statements are doing much of the work a live confession ordinarily would, except that he made them for money and status rather than during a police interrogation. His effort to claim immunity based on a 2008 proffer has already failed before the Nevada Supreme Court, clearing the way for the statements to be used at trial. The case therefore turns on a basic but difficult evidentiary question: when someone publicly brags about participating in a notorious crime for personal gain, is that a confession the government can use to convict him, or is it just talk? The jury must decide whether Keffe D was telling the world the truth—or, as his own lawyer now argues, lying for profit. Defense strategy in Tupac murder case: don’t believe my client | ReutersCNN · KELO President Trump has announced nine new judicial nominees for federal courts in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Alaska as the November midterms approach. The group notably includes an Oklahoma state attorney who supported allowing taxpayer-funded religious charter schools, offering a preview of the church-state disputes these judges could eventually be asked to decide. The larger legal point is that lifetime federal judgeships may be the most durable form of power a president exercises. These nominees, if confirmed, will continue interpreting federal law and the Constitution for decades after the president who selected them has left office. There is an unusual wrinkle this time, however: Trump’s pace of judicial appointments has slowed because there are not many vacancies left. His first term substantially reshaped the federal judiciary, and an aggressive beginning to his second term further reduced the number of available seats. That is why a nine-person slate spanning six states is meaningful in a year when there simply is not much left to fill. The “as midterms loom” framing matters as well, because control of the Senate determines whether a president’s nominees receive confirmation votes at all. The administration therefore has every reason to move nominees while the current Senate math remains favorable. Even a comparatively modest batch of nominations illustrates the quiet, cumulative way presidents shape American law—not through the executive orders that dominate a news cycle, but through lifetime appointments that survive countless news cycles. Each of these nine nominees, if confirmed, would represent a decades-long imprint on the federal judiciary. Trump names nine new judicial nominees as November midterms loom | ReutersLaw360 · Bloomberg Law And finally, we have a genuinely novel legal argument—literally. The Justice Department is prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly threatening President Trump, and prosecutors are now pointing to Comey’s own novel as evidence against him. The charge arises from a May 2025 Instagram post in which Comey shared a photograph of seashells arranged on a beach to spell “86 47.” In that formulation, “86” is slang for getting rid of something, while “47” refers to Trump as the 47th president. Comey said he encountered the shells while walking on a North Carolina beach and posted the image as a clever piece of political commentary. Prosecutors have adopted a much darker interpretation. In a new filing urging the judge not to dismiss the case, the Justice Department cites Comey’s legal thriller FDR Drive, published that same month, in which a right-wing podcaster uses coded language to incite followers against political opponents. The government’s theory is that the novel demonstrates Comey understood how coded language can function as a threat and therefore knew what “86 47” would communicate. Prosecutors also suggested that he exploited the resulting controversy to sell books, quoting a message to his agent in which Comey wrote that the attention was “not my intention, but I’ll be OK if it sells books.” The First Amendment does not protect “true threats,” but it strongly protects political criticism and hyperbole, and the Supreme Court has held that the government generally must prove a speaker was at least reckless about how a statement would be understood. The central question is therefore whether “86 47” amounted to a genuine threat of violence or protected political speech. Using a defendant’s fictional writing to establish his state of mind is an aggressive and unusual prosecutorial move. Comey’s lawyers describe the case as retaliation for his criticism of Trump. The prosecution sits directly on the fault line between criminalizing a threat and criminalizing dissent—and the government is effectively asking the court to treat a novelist’s imagination as evidence of criminal intent.DOJ argues Comey novel shows he knew ‘86 47’ post was a threat against Trump | ReutersCNBC · The Hill 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. 19 de ago.

    Meta Whistleblower Testifies "Profits Won," Judge Strikes Ghost-Gun Rule SCOTUS Upheld & Trump's Law-Firm Privilege Claim

    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 Salem Witch Trials On August 19, 1692, five people—George Burroughs, John Proctor, John Willard, Martha Carrier, and George Jacobs Sr.—were hanged at Salem, Massachusetts, convicted of witchcraft. It was one of the darkest days in a period that has become the enduring American shorthand for a legal system gone catastrophically wrong. What makes the Salem trials so instructive for lawyers is that they weren’t lawless in form—they had judges, juries, indictments, and testimony. They failed on substance, and specifically on evidence. The courts admitted so-called “spectral evidence”: testimony from accusers that the defendant’s ghostly apparition had tormented them, something no one else could see or disprove. It was, by its nature, impossible to rebut—the perfect engine for convicting the innocent. The case of George Burroughs, a Harvard-educated former minister, captures the horror of it. At the gallows, Burroughs recited the Lord’s Prayer flawlessly—something a witch, according to popular belief, should have been incapable of doing. The crowd was shaken; it looked like proof of innocence. He was hanged anyway. When the evidence and the conclusion pointed in opposite directions, the conclusion won. The significance of August 19, 1692 is that it became a permanent cautionary tale baked into American law. Within months, prominent voices—including the minister Increase Mather, who gave us today’s opening quote about the danger of condemning the innocent—turned against the use of spectral evidence, and the trials collapsed. In the centuries since, the reforms we associate with due process—rules of evidence, the presumption of innocence, the requirement of proof that can actually be tested and challenged—are in many ways a long answer to Salem. It’s a fitting backdrop for a day when two of our stories turn on evidence: what an insider witness reveals under oath, and what a litigant is allowed to keep hidden. Salem is the reminder of what happens when a legal system stops caring whether its evidence is real. In the landmark trial where 29 states accuse Meta of designing its platforms to addict and harm children, jurors heard from a powerful first witness: Arturo Bejar, a former Facebook engineering director turned whistleblower. Bejar worked at the company for years, and he told the Oakland jury that internal culture put growth ahead of kids’ safety—that “move fast and break things” was the mantra, that Meta took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to whether children under 13 were on the platform, and that the company used the softer euphemism “problematic use” instead of “addiction” in a way that, he testified, undercounted the real harm. His central accusation is that Meta’s leadership knew, from its own internal research, what its products were doing to young users—and chose not to act. There’s a revealing legal sub-story here, too. Meta tried hard to keep Bejar off the stand, arguing he’d failed to preserve evidence because he deleted some Signal messages with former colleagues. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected that as a long-shot bid to eliminate a key witness. Meta, for its part, flatly denies the claims, insisting it never set out to hook children and has worked to make its platforms safer. The significance is that this is the evidentiary heart of the case: not abstract allegations about algorithms, but an insider describing, under oath, what he says the company knew and how it talked about it internally. It’s the same pattern that broke open the tobacco cases—a witness from inside translating the company’s own euphemisms back into plain English for a jury. Whether jurors believe him will shape one of the most consequential product cases in years. Former Meta engineer resumes testimony in landmark trial over social media’s harm to young users | ReutersThe Globe and Mail · LPM / NPR A federal judge in Texas has declared the Biden-era “ghost gun” rule unconstitutional—a striking move, because the Supreme Court upheld that very rule just last year. Some background: ghost guns are firearms assembled from parts or kits that lack serial numbers, making them largely untraceable, and in 2022 the ATF issued a rule bringing those parts and kits under federal firearms regulation. Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth had originally struck the rule down as exceeding the agency’s statutory authority—but in March 2025, the Supreme Court reversed him, holding the rule was a permissible reading of the Gun Control Act. Here’s the maneuver worth understanding: the Supreme Court decided a statutory question—whether the agency had the power to issue the rule. It did not decide the constitutional questions. So O’Connor has now ruled again, this time on entirely different grounds, holding that the rule violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and is unconstitutionally vague under the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. In effect, when the statutory door closed, the challengers walked through the constitutional one, and the same judge let them in—blocking the rule as to certain products for Defense Distributed and members of the Second Amendment Foundation. Gun-control advocates called the decision “egregiously wrong” and predicted an appeal. But there’s a genuine wrinkle: the Justice Department that would normally defend a Biden-era rule is now the Trump administration’s DOJ, which is far more sympathetic to gun-rights arguments—so whether the government vigorously appeals its own rule’s defeat is an open question. The significance is a vivid lesson in how litigation adapts: a Supreme Court win on statutory grounds does not necessarily end a fight if constitutional theories remain, and a determined judge can find a new path to the same result. Biden-era ‘ghost guns’ restrictions are unconstitutional, US judge rules | ReutersUS News · Maryland Daily Record The Trump administration has invoked presidential privilege to keep secret the identities of the people who crafted its executive orders targeting major law firms. The context: last year the American Bar Association sued the White House and Justice Department over what it calls a “law firm intimidation policy”—a series of executive orders aimed at punishing firms for representing clients, causes, or positions the president dislikes, and, the ABA argues, coercing lawyers into dropping those clients. In discovery, the ABA wants to know who was behind the orders and whether officials specifically intended to discourage firms from taking on cases against the government. The administration’s response is what’s notable. It has formally invoked the presidential communications privilege—the same doctrine at the heart of the Nixon tapes case—but stretched it in an aggressive direction: the DOJ argues the privilege shields not just the substance of confidential advice, but the very identities of the people who gave it, whether or not they’re executive-branch employees, and whether or not they’re even lawyers. In other words, the government is claiming it can keep secret who wrote the orders. Here’s the tension. The presidential communications privilege is real and important—presidents need candid advice—but it’s qualified, not absolute; the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon made clear it can yield to a sufficient showing of need. Extending it to conceal the mere identity of outside advisers, people who may not work for the government at all, is a notably broad claim. The significance is a double irony worth sitting with: these are executive orders designed to punish lawyers for their advocacy, and now the government is using one of the law’s most powerful secrecy doctrines to hide who dreamed them up. Whether a court accepts that will say a lot about how far executive privilege can be stretched to shield the process behind a controversial policy. Trump invokes presidential privilege in lawsuit over law firm orders | ReutersAbove the Law · Law & Crime And finally, in a piece I wrote for Forbes this week, I take up a question the president has apparently been chewing on: can the federal government stop New York’s new pied-à-terre tax—the surcharge on second homes I’ve written about before? My short answer is that there’s a federal solution, but it almost certainly isn’t the one Trump wants, because he has almost nothing he can do on his own. Start with the executive branch. The president cannot simply nullify a state tax by executive order—that’s not a power he has. The Justice Department could jump into the existing litigation or file its own federal challenge, but neither goes anywhere useful. The big obstacle is the Tax Injunction Act, a federal statute that keeps federal district courts out of the business of blocking state tax collection whenever taxpayers have an adequate remedy in their own state courts—which, here, they do. And when the DOJ once tried to get around that law by suing on behalf of homeowners over an allegedly discriminatory New York property-tax system, a federal court said no, you can’t evade the Tax Injunction Act that way. So the executive route is basically a dead end; the administration can litigate, apply pressure, and post on Truth Social, but it can’t make the tax disappear. Congress, though, has a real—if difficult—path, and this is where it gets genuinely interesting as a matter of federalism. Congress has more power over state taxation than the

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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

Informações

  • Criado por
    Andrew and Gina Leahey
  • Anos de atividade
    2023 - 2026
  • Episódios
    901
  • Classificação
    Livre
  • Copyright
    © Andrew Leahey
  • Site do podcast
    Minimum Competence

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