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.

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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 | Reuters
The 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 | Reuters
US 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 | Reuters
Above 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 president does. It has limited state taxes before: a federal railroad law, for instance, bars certain discriminatory property taxes on railroads and even gives federal courts jurisdiction to enforce it despite the Tax Injunction Act. And in a case called Arizona Public Service v. Snead, the Supreme Court upheld a federal statute enacted specifically to preempt a New Mexico tax that Congress found discriminated against interstate commerce. So using its affirmative Commerce Clause power, Congress can prohibit state taxes it decides burden interstate commerce. But there are two catches I walk through. First, anti-commandeering: Congress can’t order New York to repeal anything—it would have to regulate all states directly, invalidating a defined category of tax. Second, and harder, New York drafted this tax cleverly to dodge the obvious constitutional attack: it taxes based on use—whether a home is your primary residence—not based on whether you’re an in-stater or an out-of-stater. A New Jerseyan’s Manhattan apartment can be exempt if it’s their primary home; a New Yorker’s second home gets taxed. That use-not-residency design makes the usual discrimination claim much harder, and it means Congress would have to build a long, strained logical chain connecting a residence-neutral property tax to interstate commerce, then tailor a preemption statute to it and defend the whole contraption in court. So, yes, a federal fix is theoretically possible—but it runs entirely through Congress, and it’s a heavy lift. Which is a lawyer’s way of saying there’s probably not much the administration can actually do. My bet is that Trump just stops posting about it.

Trump Can’t Stop New York’s Pied-À-Terre Tax

This Day in Legal History: The Nineteenth Amendment Is Ratified

On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment—the final state needed to reach the three-quarters threshold—and with that vote, the constitutional guarantee that the right to vote could not be denied on account of sex became part of American law. It enfranchised, at a stroke, roughly half the adult population of the United States.

The story of how it happened is almost unbelievably close. Tennessee’s state senate had ratified comfortably, but the house was deadlocked, tied 48 to 48. The decisive vote belonged to a 24-year-old representative named Harry Burn, who had a red rose on his lapel signaling opposition to the amendment—and a letter in his pocket from his mother, Phoebe, urging him to “be a good boy” and vote for suffrage. He did. His single vote broke the tie, Tennessee ratified, and the amendment was certified into the Constitution days later. A generational struggle turned, in the end, on a young man listening to his mother.

The significance of August 18, 1920 is best understood as the payoff to a story we told on this show back in July. When we covered the Seneca Falls Convention and its 1848 Declaration of Sentiments—the founding document of the American women’s rights movement, which dared to demand the vote—I noted that it would take seventy-two years to win the ballot. This is that day. The distance from Seneca Falls to Nashville is the distance from a bold, ridiculed demand to a line in the Constitution. And like the Fifteenth Amendment before it, the Nineteenth didn’t instantly deliver on its promise—many women of color, in particular, remained effectively disenfranchised for decades until the Voting Rights Act. But it permanently changed who “the people” are in a democracy. It’s a reminder, on a day full of stories about the law’s unfinished business, that some of the most fundamental rights we now take for granted were won slowly, against fierce resistance, and sometimes by a single vote.

A landmark trial has begun in California federal court that could reshape the most popular apps on the planet: a bipartisan coalition of 29 states has put Meta on trial, alleging it deliberately designed Instagram and Facebook to addict and harm children. This is the big one we’ve been building toward all summer—the federal counterpart to the state cases in New Mexico and Tennessee. The states, led by Colorado, California, New Jersey, and Kentucky, told the court that Meta engineered features like infinite scrolling, notifications, “likes,” visual filters, and algorithmic recommendations to drive compulsive use, and misled the public about the platforms’ safety for young people. Here’s an important procedural wrinkle: while there’s an eight-person jury in Oakland, it’s serving only in an advisory capacity—the case will ultimately be decided by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. That’s because this is largely an equitable case, and what the states are really after isn’t just money but sweeping changes to how the platforms work: stronger age verification, restrictions on algorithms trained on children’s data, limits on notifications, and the removal of features like infinite scroll. On damages, Meta itself has floated the staggering figure of $1.4 trillion as its potential exposure, though the states haven’t named a number and legal experts consider an award anywhere near that scale unlikely. The significance is that this trial could force concrete, structural redesign of Instagram and Facebook for young users—not a settlement negotiated in private, but a judge’s findings after a public trial. Everything we’ve tracked, from the multistate penalties to the New Mexico verdict to the Ninth Circuit clearing these suits, has been leading here. This is where the social-media reckoning gets its fullest public airing yet.
Meta faces 29-state trial that could reshape Instagram and Facebook | Reuters
Yahoo Finance · anews

The Justice Department has opened a civil-rights investigation into the College of William & Mary, alleging the Virginia public university runs scholarship and mentorship programs that unlawfully discriminate in favor of minority students. The Department’s Civil Rights Division announced a “compliance review” under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—which bars race discrimination by institutions that receive federal funding—targeting several specific programs: a fellowship in the education school that gives preference to Hispanic or Latina women with financial need, a doctoral mentorship program for “future education leaders of color,” and a law-school scholarship program. Here’s the legal backdrop that makes this a national trend and not a one-off. After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ended race-conscious admissions, the fight didn’t end—it moved. The administration is now using Title VI to argue that race-conscious scholarships, fellowships, and pipeline programs are themselves a form of unlawful discrimination, framing programs designed to expand opportunity for underrepresented groups as illegal “discrimination in favor of minorities.” Supporters of these programs say they’re lawful efforts to remedy historic exclusion and build diverse professions; critics say any use of race, even to help, runs afoul of the post-SFFA legal landscape. It’s worth being precise: this is a compliance review, an investigation, not yet a lawsuit or a finding of wrongdoing. The significance is that this is part of a systematic campaign we’ve tracked against universities—from Harvard to Columbia—and it signals that the enforcement frontier after affirmative action has shifted from the admissions office to the financial-aid office. Every race-conscious scholarship in the country is now, potentially, a legal target.
DOJ probes College of William & Mary alleging discrimination in favor of minorities | Reuters
Bloomberg · Fox News

A federal judge has ordered the release of a woman charged with vandalizing the World War II Memorial in Washington—and the top federal prosecutor there, Jeanine Pirro, is not happy about it. The defendant, 41-year-old Melissa Farris of Kentucky, was arrested last week and charged with two felony counts after the memorial’s fountain was filled with soap suds and the words “Clean hands Dirty $” were spray-painted across a surface in red and green. A judge ordered her released on conditions—surrendering her passport and not leaving the continental U.S. without approval—and Pirro publicly criticized that decision. Let’s unpack the legal pieces, because there are two distinct ones. First, pretrial release: in the American system, the default is that a defendant awaiting trial should be released unless the government shows they’re a flight risk or a danger, with conditions used to manage any risk. A judge ordering release with conditions is the system working as designed—the presumption of innocence is not an empty phrase—even when a prosecutor would prefer detention. Second, the underlying conduct: Farris reportedly said on social media that she acted to protest tax dollars not being spent on ordinary Americans and alleged corporate wrongdoing. But political motivation doesn’t convert property destruction into protected speech—you can hold the message and still prosecute the spray paint. The significance ties into a thread we’ve followed: this is the same U.S. Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, at the center of the Reflecting Pool saga, again clashing over how a memorial-vandalism case should be handled—this time frustrated that a judge released a defendant rather than that a case was dropped. A preliminary hearing is set for September 3, and it’s a reminder that the everyday machinery of bail and pretrial release keeps operating regardless of how politically charged the underlying act may be.
US judge orders release of woman accused of vandalism at World War Two Memorial | Reuters
Washington Post · CBS News

And finally, in my column this week, I take on a well-intentioned proposal to tax artificial intelligence in order to help the workers it displaces—and argue that, while the instinct is right, the mechanism is wrong. The proposal in question is Representative Greg Casar’s AI Tax and Work Protection Act. Its premise is sound: if firms are capturing the gains from replacing human workers with AI while pushing the costs—unemployment, lost tax revenue—onto workers and society, those costs look like an externality, the same way pollution does. And we tax externalities all the time: cigarettes, gasoline, carbon. So taxing AI to fund worker protections is a reasonable idea in principle.

My problem is with the particulars. Casar’s bill doesn’t actually tax worker displacement—it taxes AI “tokens,” the technical units of AI computation, with the rate keyed to the unemployment rate. That creates an appealing feedback loop on paper: as AI drives up unemployment, the tax rises and generates more money to put people back to work. But it asks the Treasury to do two things it’s genuinely bad at. First, it has to figure out, in real time and on a political calendar, how much of any given rise in unemployment is actually caused by AI, as opposed to a recession, a pandemic, or a war. That’s a causal judgment the tax code has no machinery for. Second, and worse, it has to put a stable dollar value on a “token”—an unstable, non-standardized unit that spans text, code, images, audio, and video, and isn’t sold in any clean arm’s-length market. You’re trying to tax the meter, and the meter doesn’t have a reliable price.

So here’s the alternative I argue for: instead of taxing AI use, give the public an equity stake in the companies that capture AI’s gains—let the government own a piece of the franchise rather than tax the meter. This isn’t as exotic as it sounds; scholars like Jeremy Bearer-Friend and Sarah Polcz have proposed having AI firms pay tax in kind, transferring equity rather than cash, and Senator Sanders has floated a far more aggressive version—a 50% stake funding a sovereign wealth fund. My point is that you don’t have to go to 50% to adopt the underlying architecture. Equity is a better proxy than token usage: it scales with the actual size of the economic reallocation AI produces, and it only asks the government to value a company once, rather than to price billions of individual computations or adjudicate whether a particular prompt cost a particular job. If AI merely augments workers and produces modest gains, the public’s share stays modest; if it produces extraordinary gains, the public shares in the upside. A smaller equity assessment on the largest firms, held through an independently managed vehicle, would let the public participate in AI’s wealth without handing a shrunken Treasury an impossible measurement problem. The instinct to make sure the public benefits from AI is exactly right—we should just own a piece of the thing, not tax the ticker.
Taxing AI to Help Workers Sounds Good, But Public Deserves More | Bloomberg Tax

This Day in Legal History: Clinton Testifies Before the Grand Jury

On August 17, 1998, President Bill Clinton became the first sitting president to testify before a grand jury as the subject of its investigation. He gave his testimony via closed-circuit television from the White House to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s grand jury, concerning his relationship with a White House intern—and that same evening, he addressed the nation to admit he had misled the public about it.

The legal machinery that brought a president to that moment is worth understanding. It began, improbably, with a civil lawsuit: Paula Jones’s sexual-harassment suit, which produced the 1997 Supreme Court decision in Clinton v. Jones holding that a sitting president is not immune from civil litigation over unofficial conduct and can be deposed while in office. That deposition, and the questions in it, are what put Clinton’s statements under oath—and when those statements collided with what Starr’s investigation uncovered, the independent counsel built a case around perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton, carefully, insisted his earlier answers had been “legally accurate,” a phrase that became emblematic of the entire episode.

The significance of August 17, 1998 is layered. It led directly to Clinton’s impeachment by the House on charges of perjury and obstruction—only the second presidential impeachment in American history—and his acquittal by the Senate. But its deeper legal legacies are the ones that still echo: Clinton v. Jones established that the presidency is not a shield against civil accountability for private conduct, a principle you can hear resonating in today’s fights over presidential immunity, and the whole saga became a national seminar on perjury, executive privilege, and the limits of the independent-counsel model, which Congress let expire the following year. It’s a fitting anniversary for a day when the relationship between political power and prosecutorial judgment is, once again, at the center of the news.

Opening statements begin today in Las Vegas in the murder trial of Duane “Keffe D” Davis, nearly thirty years after the 1996 killing of rapper Tupac Shakur. Davis, 63, is charged with murder with a deadly weapon with intent to promote a criminal gang. He has pleaded not guilty and faces life in prison if convicted.

A sixteen-person jury has been selected, and prosecutors are expected to call roughly forty witnesses. The witness list includes Suge Knight, who was driving the car in which Shakur was shot, and Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, who responded to the shooting as a Las Vegas police sergeant in 1996.

Prosecutors say Davis was the “shot caller” behind a quickly assembled plan to retaliate after Shakur and members of his entourage beat Davis’s nephew at the MGM Grand earlier that evening. The government’s theory places the killing within a larger conflict involving rival street gangs.

The obvious problem for prosecutors is time. Trying a murder case three decades after the crime means dealing with faded memories, unavailable witnesses, and physical evidence that may have been lost or degraded. What eventually revived the case, however, was Davis himself.

Over the years, Davis publicly discussed his involvement in Shakur’s killing in interviews and in a memoir. Those statements now form an important part of the prosecution’s case. They also give the defense an obvious line of attack: statements made years later for publicity, money, or street credibility are not necessarily reliable accounts of what actually happened.

That makes Davis’s own words one of the most important legal issues to watch. Prosecutors do not merely have to show that he repeatedly claimed involvement; they have to persuade jurors that those claims, considered alongside the remaining evidence, prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The trial is therefore as much about the reliability of decades-old admissions as it is about solving one of the most famous unsolved murders in American popular culture.

Tupac shooting trial begins with opening statements | Reuters
Washington Post · PBS NewsHour

Attorney General Todd Blanche is publicly backing U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro after President Trump criticized her office for dropping a vandalism prosecution involving the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, Blanche said he “absolutely” supports Pirro, the top federal prosecutor in Washington. The comments came after Trump criticized her decision to abandon the prosecution of former Olympian David Hearn and others accused of damaging the Reflecting Pool.

The case grew out of a roughly $15 million renovation project that the administration pushed to complete before July 4. After an algae bloom appeared and portions of the pool’s lining began peeling, Pirro’s office brought vandalism charges. Prosecutors later dropped the case after concluding that the damage resulted from problems with the renovation rather than deliberate sabotage.

Trump was not happy with that conclusion. He publicly called on Pirro to revisit what he described as her “hastily made decision,” and the White House reportedly asked the Justice Department to consider whether additional charges were available.

Blanche is now defending the prosecutor’s decision. He said it was unfair to judge Pirro based on a single case when her office had made its decision based on the evidence available to prosecutors.

The legal principle here is prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutors have substantial authority to decide whether the available evidence justifies bringing or continuing criminal charges, and those decisions are supposed to turn on the law and evidence rather than the political preferences of the president. That principle takes on additional importance because Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer, faced questions during his confirmation about whether he could operate the Justice Department independently.

There is an important qualification. Blanche also said Trump supports Pirro, despite the president’s public criticism of her handling of this case. Still, an attorney general publicly defending a prosecutor’s evidence-based decision against presidential criticism is a meaningful test of how much independence federal prosecutors will have when their charging decisions conflict with the White House.

US Attorney General Blanche publicly backs Pirro after Trump criticism over Reflecting Pool | Reuters · US News
AOL

A federal judge has cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 1,100 Somalis living in the United States.

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston lifted a pause she had imposed in March on the Department of Homeland Security’s termination of Somalia’s TPS designation. The change largely reflects what has happened at the Supreme Court since Burroughs entered that earlier order.

Temporary Protected Status allows people from designated countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary conditions to remain and work legally in the United States for a limited period. The protection does not itself provide permanent immigration status, and the executive branch periodically decides whether conditions in a particular country continue to justify the designation.

The administration maintains that conditions in Somalia have improved enough to end TPS. Opponents point to continuing violence in the country, including fighting involving al-Shabaab militants, as evidence that returning people to Somalia remains dangerous.

Four Somali plaintiffs and advocacy organizations also argued that the administration’s decision was motivated by racial discrimination, citing President Trump’s previous comments about Somalis. Burroughs rejected that discrimination claim at this stage, although the broader litigation continues.

The most important legal development, though, happened above the district court. In June, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to terminate similar protections involving people from Haiti and Syria. Burroughs concluded that the Supreme Court’s intervention changed the legal landscape and limited her ability to continue blocking the Somali termination.

That illustrates how a Supreme Court ruling can affect considerably more than the people immediately involved in a particular case. Once the Court signaled that the executive branch has broad authority to terminate TPS designations, lower courts confronting similar challenges had less room to intervene. For the roughly 1,100 Somalis affected here, that means a temporary immigration protection that allowed them to remain legally in the United States can now be withdrawn while the underlying legal fight continues.

US judge clears way for Trump to end Somalis’ deportation protections | Reuters
US News · Fox News

This Day in Legal History: The Social Security Act

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, creating the foundation of the American social safety net and permanently changing the relationship between citizens and their government. Flanked by members of Congress and photographers, FDR put his signature to a law that guaranteed, for the first time in American history, a measure of economic security against the hazards of old age, unemployment, and poverty.

The Act was born of the Great Depression, when the suffering of millions—elderly people with no savings, workers with no jobs, families with no support—overwhelmed the old assumption that hardship was a purely private matter. Social Security established old-age benefits funded by taxes on workers and employers, created a federal-state system of unemployment insurance, and provided aid for dependent children, the blind, and people with disabilities. Roosevelt himself was clear-eyed about its limits, saying at the signing that no law could insure everyone against every vicissitude of life, but that this one gave “some measure of protection” against poverty-ridden old age and unemployment.

The legal significance runs deep, and it connects to a story we’ve told before on this show. When the Social Security Act was challenged as an unconstitutional federal overreach and an improper use of the taxing power, it reached a Supreme Court that had been striking down New Deal programs left and right. But in 1937—in the same term as the failed court-packing fight and the Court’s famous doctrinal shift—the justices upheld Social Security, in Steward Machine Company v. Davis and Helvering v. Davis, broadly reading Congress’s power to tax and spend for the general welfare. Those decisions helped cement the constitutional foundation of the modern administrative and welfare state. Ninety-one years later, Social Security remains the single largest program in the federal budget, and the principle it established—that the national government has a role in securing the economic dignity of its people—remains, as our opening quote from FDR suggests, a live measure of the country’s progress.

A federal trade court has upheld President Trump’s authority to close the “de minimis” tariff exemption—handing the administration a rare courtroom win on tariffs. The U.S. Court of International Trade, a three-judge panel in New York, ruled that Trump lawfully used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to end the duty-free treatment that low-value imports—parcels worth $800 or less—had long enjoyed. Some quick background: the de minimis exemption is what let a flood of cheap packages, especially from Chinese e-commerce sellers, enter the U.S. tariff-free, and closing it has already generated over a billion dollars in new duty payments. What makes this ruling notable is that it cuts against the trend. Trump’s tariff agenda has fared badly in court—the Supreme Court ruled in February that IEEPA does not authorize him to unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs, which led to that roughly $100 billion in refunds we covered, and the trade court later struck down a replacement tariff. So how does the administration win this one? The court drew a fine but important distinction: ending a duty-free privilege is not the same as affirmatively imposing a tariff. The challenger, an auto-parts importer, argued IEEPA gave the president no independent power to close the exemption, but the panel found that rescinding a trade-related “privilege” falls within the emergency-powers statute even if imposing new tariffs does not. The significance is that it carves out a narrow lane where the administration’s emergency-powers theory actually holds up—a reminder that in the tariff wars, the difference between taking away a benefit and imposing a new burden can be the difference between winning and losing in court.
US court backs Trump’s power to close ‘de minimis’ tariff exemption | Reuters
CNBC · Bloomberg

The Supreme Court has taken up a case that sounds technical but goes to the heart of whether wrongly detained immigrants can find a lawyer at all. The question is whether attorneys who successfully challenge an immigrant’s detention through a habeas corpus petition can recover their fees from the federal government. It turns on the Equal Access to Justice Act—a statute that lets people who beat the government in court recover their attorney’s fees, unless the government’s position was “substantially justified.” Here’s why this matters enormously right now. As immigration detention has surged, so have habeas petitions challenging it: one court in California went from a handful of these cases in 2021 to hundreds in a single month this year, and courts have repeatedly ordered the government to pay fees after finding people were detained unlawfully. But two federal appeals courts, the Fourth and Fifth Circuits, have held that habeas challenges to immigration detention aren’t the kind of “civil case” the fee statute covers—which would mean the lawyers who win these cases can’t recover a dime. Think about the practical stakes. Detained immigrants are frequently poor, often can’t work, and have no right to a free lawyer in immigration proceedings. Fee-shifting is a big part of what makes it economically possible for attorneys to take these cases at all. If the Supreme Court rules that EAJA doesn’t apply, it doesn’t change the substance of anyone’s detention—but it quietly removes much of the financial incentive for lawyers to challenge unlawful detention, weakening one of the few real checks on the system. The significance is that this is access to justice in its most concrete form: whether the courthouse door stays open depends, as it so often does, on who can afford to walk through it.
US Supreme Court case tests fees for immigration detainees | Reuters
SCOTUSblog · Bloomberg Law

And finally, a story from the frontier of AI misuse that is equal parts alarming and absurd. A Connecticut judge has sanctioned a plaintiff who hid secret instructions inside his own court filings—instructions aimed not at the judge, but at any artificial intelligence that might read the documents. The plaintiff, representing himself, buried text in white font on a white background, invisible to a human eye, telling any AI model reviewing the filing to side with him. This is what’s known as a “prompt injection” attack, and it’s reportedly the first documented instance of one aimed at a U.S. court. The court caught it—apparently tipped off by strange white spaces in the text—and issued an order warning him to stop. He didn’t. At the next hearing, he’d hidden a message reading “hi, I hope you can’t see me,” and, in another filing, a concealed link to a SpongeBob SquarePants video. The judge was not amused, issuing a decision bluntly titled “Court Sanction for Plaintiff’s Use of Prompt-Injection.” The remedy is almost poetically low-tech: the plaintiff is now barred from filing electronically and must submit everything on paper. Now, it’s easy to laugh—and the SpongeBob link earns a chuckle—but the serious point is real. This is a new species of the AI-integrity problem we’ve tracked all summer, alongside the fake hallucinated citations. It’s an attempt to corrupt the decision-making process itself, and it quietly reveals something bigger: that courts and their staff may increasingly be using AI tools to help review filings, which creates a brand-new attack surface for litigants willing to game it. The significance is that the age-old duty of candor to the tribunal now has to contend with adversaries trying to whisper to the machines—and courts are going to need new rules, and sharp eyes, to catch them.
Connecticut judge says plaintiff hid messages for AI in court filings | Reuters
404 Media · Tom’s Hardware

This Day in Legal History: Britain’s Last Executions

On August 13, 1964, two men—Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans—were hanged simultaneously in two different English prisons for the murder of a man during a robbery. They were the last people ever executed in the United Kingdom. Evans died at Strangeways Prison in Manchester and Allen at Walton Prison in Liverpool, both at eight in the morning, and with them, centuries of capital punishment in Britain came quietly to an end.

Neither man knew he was making history; the abolition of the death penalty wasn’t yet law. But the machinery of change was already turning. The very next year, in 1965, Parliament passed the Murder Act, which suspended the death penalty for murder for a trial period of five years. In 1969, Parliament made that suspension permanent for England, Scotland, and Wales. The death penalty lingered on the books for a handful of exotic offenses—treason, piracy with violence, certain military crimes—until it was finally abolished completely in 1998, bringing British law into line with the European Convention on Human Rights.

The significance of August 13, 1964 is sharpened by contrast. Britain reached the end of capital punishment through ordinary legislation, and much of Europe followed a similar path, treating abolition as a basic human-rights commitment. The United States took the opposite fork: the Supreme Court briefly halted the death penalty in 1972 in Furman v. Georgia, only to allow it back four years later in Gregg v. Georgia, and capital punishment remains part of American law today, administered by the federal government and a number of states. So this anniversary is a useful mirror—a reminder that two closely related legal systems, working from a shared common-law inheritance, reached opposite conclusions on one of the deepest questions a legal system can face: whether the state should ever have the power to take a life. That’s the question our opening quote, from Bryan Stevenson, puts squarely on the table.

The law firm Motley Rice is in line for a payday of more than $67 million—its fee for winning New Mexico’s sprawling case against Meta. We covered the underlying result: a judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a teen mental-health fund, on top of $375 million in civil penalties a jury imposed in March, bringing New Mexico’s potential recovery to more than $942 million. Motley Rice represented the state on contingency, and under its contract it can seek a sliding-scale cut—20% of the first $50 million recovered, scaling down to 5% on amounts over $250 million—which works out to roughly 7% of the total, or about $67 million. Here’s the practice-of-law angle worth understanding. States increasingly hire private plaintiffs’ firms to bring these massive cases because they don’t have the in-house firepower to go toe-to-toe with a company like Meta and its armies of lawyers. The firm fronts the enormous cost and risk of years of litigation in exchange for a percentage if it wins—the same model that produced the giant tobacco settlements of the 1990s, in which Motley Rice was a central player. Supporters say it lets under-resourced states take on deep-pocketed defendants they otherwise couldn’t touch; critics say it hands public law-enforcement power to private firms with a profit motive. The significance is that this is the economic engine behind the whole wave of state social-media litigation we’ve been tracking. The fee comes out of New Mexico’s recovery, and it only gets paid after appeals conclude—and Meta has said it will appeal—so the number, like the verdict, isn’t final. But it’s a rare, concrete look at the money that makes this kind of public-interest litigation actually happen.
Law firm Motley Rice’s fee for Meta case in New Mexico could top $67 million | Reuter
Albuquerque Journal · JD Journal

Two press-freedom organizations—The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation—have sued in Manhattan federal court to shut down a Trump Media service that sells wealthy subscribers early access to President Trump’s social media posts. The service, called Truth API, launched August 1 and charges up to $100,000 a month for a faster feed of ten high-profile Truth Social accounts, including the president’s own. The legal concern at the heart of the suit is a specific and serious one: Trump’s posts routinely move financial markets—an announcement about tariffs or a company can send stocks lurching—and a paid feed that delivers those posts to deep-pocketed subscribers before the general public gives those subscribers a head start to trade on market-moving information. In other words, it potentially creates a two-tiered market in the president’s words, where those who can pay six figures a month get to act on presidential statements seconds or minutes before everyone else. That’s the kind of information asymmetry securities law generally frowns on. The service drew scrutiny fast—Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff had already called for a government investigation days before this suit. It’s also legally novel: the plaintiffs are press-freedom groups, framing public access to a president’s official-ish communications as a matter of public interest, which raises interesting questions about their theory and standing. The significance is that this sits at a genuinely new intersection—of a president who governs partly through market-moving social media posts, the business incentive to monetize that, and a securities and public-information framework that never contemplated selling early access to the president’s feed. However the case comes out, it’s a preview of the strange legal questions created when official speech becomes a paid product.
Trump sued over service that offers paid early access to Truth Social posts | Reuters
Washington Post · NPR

A group of current and former Palestinian students and staff have sued Columbia University, alleging that the school discriminated against its Palestinian community over the past two years. According to the complaint filed in New York, the plaintiffs say Columbia failed to protect Palestinian members from harassment, subjected them to what they call “unfair and biased disciplinary hearings,” and “actively participated in and amplified” what they describe as racially, ethnically, and politically motivated targeting of Palestinians on campus. The legal vehicle here is worth understanding, because it’s the same one being wielded on multiple sides of the campus fights. Civil-rights law—principally Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—bars institutions that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. We’ve seen Title VI invoked against universities over allegations of antisemitism, and we’ve seen the Justice Department use it to pressure schools like Harvard. Here, Palestinian and Arab plaintiffs are invoking that same framework to allege discrimination against them. The context matters: Columbia suspended more than 65 students last year over a pro-Palestinian protest that shut down its main library, and it agreed to pay the federal government over $200 million to resolve federal probes and restore funding. Columbia has denied discriminating and says it condemns hate, and it declined to comment on the pending litigation. To be clear, these are allegations in a complaint, not proven facts, and I’m not weighing in on the underlying political conflict. The significance is legal and institutional: universities are now being sued from opposite directions under the very same civil-rights statute, and Columbia in particular finds itself squeezed between federal enforcers, one set of students, and another—each claiming the protection of Title VI. It’s a vivid illustration of how anti-discrimination law becomes the battleground when a campus fractures.
Palestinian students and staff sue Columbia University alleging discrimination | Reuters
US News · Middle East Eye

This Day in Legal History: Andrew Johnson Suspends Secretary Stanton

On August 12, 1867, President Andrew Johnson suspended Edwin Stanton, his Secretary of War, and installed General Ulysses S. Grant to run the department temporarily. It was a quiet-sounding personnel move that lit the fuse on one of the great constitutional confrontations in American history—and it turned on a question we still argue about: how much control a president has over the officials who serve beneath him.

The context was Reconstruction. Stanton was a close ally of the Radical Republicans in Congress, and as Secretary of War he controlled the Army’s presence across the defeated South, including the Freedmen’s Bureau—making him essential to Congress’s plans to remake the region and protect the newly freed. Johnson, who bitterly opposed that agenda, wanted Stanton gone. But Congress had anticipated exactly this: it had passed the Tenure of Office Act, which barred the president from removing a Senate-confirmed cabinet officer without the Senate’s consent. Johnson, trying to thread the needle while Congress was in recess, suspended Stanton rather than firing him outright. When the Senate later refused to concur and Johnson removed Stanton anyway in early 1868, the House impeached him—and he survived removal in the Senate by a single vote.

The significance of August 12, 1867 reaches all the way to the present. The Tenure of Office Act was eventually repealed and, decades later, the Supreme Court in Myers v. United States suggested it had been unconstitutional all along, endorsing a robust presidential removal power—the same removal-power debate that traces back to the very first Congress and runs through today’s fights over the independence of agencies and prosecutors. Johnson’s clash with Stanton is the original American showdown over whether a president can be checked in the control of his own executive branch. And on a day when we’ve got a story about the White House leaning on the Justice Department, that 159-year-old question feels remarkably current.

A federal appeals court has thrown out the government formula at the heart of the law meant to protect patients from surprise medical bills—handing a significant win to doctors and hospitals over insurers. Sitting en banc, all seventeen judges of the Fifth Circuit issued an unsigned opinion mostly siding with physicians and air-ambulance companies, and invalidating a federal rule as going beyond what Congress actually authorized in the No Surprises Act. Here’s how this works, because it’s less about patients than it sounds. The No Surprises Act protects you, the patient—if you get care from an out-of-network provider in an emergency, you only owe your normal in-network cost-sharing. The fight is over who pays the rest: the insurer or the provider. That gets decided in arbitration, and the key benchmark is something called the “qualifying payment amount,” or QPA. Whoever controls how the QPA is calculated basically controls who wins. The court found that federal agencies had let insurers game that number—by baking in so-called “ghost rates,” contracted amounts for services that providers never actually deliver, which dragged the benchmark down in insurers’ favor—and by improperly excluding bonus and incentive payments. The significance is twofold. Substantively, it rebalances a high-stakes payment fight away from insurers and toward providers. But the deeper theme is administrative law: this is a court holding that agencies rewrote a statute to favor one side beyond what Congress wrote—exactly the kind of post-Chevron scrutiny of agency rulemaking we’ve been tracking all summer. The patient protections stay; the multibillion-dollar question of who pays just got sent back to the drawing board.
US appeals court voids formula used to avert surprise medical bills | Reuters
American Medical Association · Bloomberg Law

A federal judge has blocked the U.S. Postal Service nationwide from enforcing the mail-in voting restrictions in President Trump’s executive order—and if this story sounds familiar to longtime listeners, it should. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston expanded an order she first issued in June, which had covered 23 states, into a nationwide injunction. Under the executive order, the Postal Service was supposed to gather state lists of eligible voters and deliver absentee ballots only to people on those lists; Talwani’s ruling bars USPS from refusing to deliver mail ballots based on those new federal verification requirements. Her reasoning is the same principle we keep coming back to: the executive branch, she wrote, has no authority to regulate elections—that power belongs to the states under the Constitution. And she stressed the timing, noting it’s now less than 90 days before the November 3 midterms, which makes it especially important not to let the federal government change election rules on the eve of the vote. This connects to the entire voting-rights arc we’ve followed—the administration’s 0-and-21 losing streak on voter rolls, the Supreme Court emergency application, the Voting Rights Act anniversary. The significance is that the courts continue to hold a firm, near-unbroken line: however much the administration wants federal control over how Americans cast and count ballots, judges keep ruling that elections are run by the states, and the closer we get to November, the more urgently they’re saying it.
Judge blocks US Postal Service from restricting mail-in voting | Reuters
NPR · US News

The White House has reportedly asked the Justice Department to explore bringing new charges against David Hearn—the former Olympian in the Reflecting Pool case—just over a week after the department dropped the case because its own evidence showed he didn’t do it. Recall the sequence: Hearn was indicted on a felony for allegedly damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, but prosecutors then moved to dismiss, telling the court that newly disclosed documents showed the damage came from a botched renovation, not vandalism. According to sources, President Trump was furious at U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for dismissing the case, and the White House has since asked the department to examine whether there’s a basis for a new charge—possibly a misdemeanor. The talks are described as preliminary, with no decision made, and Congressman Jamie Raskin has already launched a probe into the whole affair. Here’s why this is legally striking. The decision to drop the case wasn’t a technicality—it was the government concluding, on the evidence, that the underlying premise was false. To now go looking for new charges against the same person, at the White House’s urging and reportedly out of the president’s personal anger, raises the specter of vindictive prosecution—using the charging power not to pursue justice but to punish. The significance goes to the core of prosecutorial independence, the theme running through the Blanche confirmation fight and beyond: charging decisions are supposed to be driven by evidence and law, not by a president’s displeasure that a case was dropped. It’s a live test of whether that line still holds.
Trump White House asked DOJ to explore new Reflecting Pool charges, sources say | Reuters
US News · MS NOW

And finally, the law graduates who suffered through California’s disastrous 2025 bar exam have reached a settlement in their class action against the company that administered it. You may remember the debacle: the February 2025 California bar exam, run by the vendor Meazure Learning, collapsed into login failures, software crashes, frozen screens, and lost answers, throwing thousands of aspiring lawyers into chaos on the single most important test of their careers. That fiasco spawned multiple lawsuits—the test-takers’ claims were consolidated into a class action in federal court—as well as a state audit and a legislative inquiry. This settlement resolves the graduates’ own case, and it’s distinct from the separate deal the State Bar itself reached with Meazure last month, in which the vendor agreed to pay the Bar $5.25 million and forgive $1.36 million in unpaid invoices. The significance connects directly to a story we covered a couple of weeks ago—the meltdown of the new NextGen exam in Washington State. Two different states, two different vendors and formats, the same underlying failure: the high-stakes gateway to the legal profession buckling under basic technology problems, and leaving the people trying to enter the profession to pick up the pieces. These settlements put a price on that failure—but they also intensify a growing question about whether the bar exam, as currently built and administered, is a reliable way to license lawyers at all.
Law grads reach settlement in class action over botched California bar exam | Reuters
Bloomberg Law · ICLG

This Day in Legal History: The Weimar Constitution

On August 11, 1919, President Friedrich Ebert signed the Weimar Constitution into force, creating the first parliamentary democracy in German history. It came into effect a few days later, ending the provisional government that had followed Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the fall of the monarchy. On paper, it was a strikingly modern and liberal document—and its story is one of the most important cautionary tales in all of constitutional law.

The Weimar Constitution rested on genuinely progressive foundations: popular sovereignty, a separation of powers, and an extensive bill of fundamental rights, including—remarkably for 1919—formal equality between men and women and the right to vote for both. It established a directly elected president, a parliament, the Reichstag, and a framework that looked, in many respects, like a model twentieth-century democracy. For a document drafted in the chaos of postwar Germany, it was an ambitious attempt to build a rights-respecting republic from the ground up.

But the Weimar Constitution is remembered today largely for the flaw that helped destroy it: Article 48, which gave the president sweeping power to rule by emergency decree, suspending civil liberties when he deemed public order to be threatened. That emergency clause was invoked more and more frequently as the republic’s politics fractured—and in 1933 it became the legal mechanism through which the Nazi regime dismantled democracy from the inside, using the constitution’s own emergency powers to suspend rights and seize dictatorial control. Which brings us back to today’s opening quote: the Weimar experience is the definitive real-world example of Justice Jackson’s warning that an emergency power, once available, “lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” The significance of August 11, 1919 is that it stands as an enduring lesson that a constitution’s protections are only as durable as the limits it places on emergency power—that a democracy can be subverted not in spite of its own laws, but through them.

Luigi Mangione is due back in court for a pretrial hearing ahead of his murder trial, set to begin September 8, in the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel. Mangione, who is 28, has pleaded not guilty to murder, weapons, and forgery charges brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, and he has separately pleaded not guilty to federal stalking charges. At today’s hearing before Justice Gregory Carro, the parties are expected to take up jury selection and the thorny question of public access to what is shaping up to be one of the most closely watched trials in years. Let’s talk about the real legal challenges here, because this case is unusual on several fronts. First, Mangione faces parallel state and federal prosecutions arising from the same killing—something the Constitution permits under the “dual sovereignty” doctrine, even though it can feel like being tried twice. Second, the defense has signaled it may argue that Mangione lost control of his actions due to an extreme mental-health breakdown, and notably has not conceded that he was even the shooter, despite prosecutors citing surveillance video, DNA, ballistics, and a notebook. And third—the elephant in the courtroom—is that this case became a cultural flashpoint, with a wave of public anger at the health-insurance industry curdling, in some corners, into sympathy for the accused. That makes jury selection genuinely difficult: finding impartial jurors amid saturation coverage and strong public feeling is exactly the kind of problem that tests the machinery of a fair trial. The significance is that beyond the headlines, this is a serious test of whether the system can give a fair, dispassionate trial to a defendant the public has turned into a symbol—which is precisely when the guarantees of criminal procedure matter most.
Luigi Mangione due in court ahead of insurance CEO murder trial | Reuters
UPI · 6abc

President Trump has said that whether to revive the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” is now up to his newly confirmed attorney general, Todd Blanche—a statement that lands like the punchline to a story we’ve been telling for weeks. Recall the sequence: Blanche rescinded the fund on the eve of his confirmation to win over Republican holdouts, but Trump then acknowledged that he himself never signed the rescission order, which left the door open. Now, with Blanche confirmed as attorney general by that razor-thin 50-49 vote, Trump is saying the future of the fund rests with Blanche. And that is exactly the scenario that critics warned about. Think back to what senators extracted as the price of confirmation: a promise to kill a fund that would have used taxpayer money to pay people, including January 6 defendants, who claimed to be victims of the prior Justice Department. But a promise made by the executive branch can be unmade by the executive branch, and here the president is openly signaling that his former personal lawyer, now running the Justice Department, could bring it back. The significance goes to the very heart of the concern that dogged Blanche’s nomination: the independence of the attorney general. When the president publicly frames the revival of a controversial payout fund as a decision for “his” attorney general to make, it underscores the worry that the Justice Department’s most consequential choices may run through the lens of the president’s personal and political interests. The confirmation fight is over, but the question it raised is very much alive.
Trump says future weaponization fund is up to Blanche | Reuters
Forbes · Axios

A federal appeals court has cleared thousands of lawsuits to proceed against the major social-media companies over claims they deliberately designed their platforms to addict young users. The San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit rejected the bid by Meta, Google’s YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat to escape roughly 2,400 lawsuits consolidated in federal court, brought by states, municipalities, school districts, and individuals. The legal fight here is all about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—the 1996 law that shields online platforms from liability for content their users post. The companies argued that Section 230 also immunizes them from claims that they failed to warn about, or engineered, the addictive nature of their platforms. The court said no, and the distinction it drew is the crucial one: Section 230 protects a platform from being sued over what its users say, but it does not necessarily protect the platform’s own product-design choices—the infinite scroll, the algorithmic feeds, the notification schedules engineered to maximize engagement. Claims aimed at that design, the court reasoned, are different from claims aimed at user content. If you’ve been listening, you know this is the federal counterpart to everything we’ve tracked at the state level—the New Mexico judgment, the Tennessee trial, the multistate penalty fight. The significance is that the industry’s most powerful legal shield, Section 230, is being narrowed: plaintiffs are increasingly framing their cases around addictive design rather than harmful content, and courts are increasingly letting those cases through. That reframing may prove to be the key that unlocks the courthouse door for the whole wave of social-media harm litigation.
US appeals court allows thousands of lawsuits against social media companies to proceed | Reuters
NBC News · Al Jazeera

And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I dig into a question hiding underneath the AI gold rush: who’s actually paying for it? My starting point is a striking data point—Microsoft’s current federal tax expense fell year over year from about $14.1 billion to just $2.5 billion, even as its revenue surged. And a big part of that drop comes from accelerated deductions in last year’s massive 2025 tax law, which restored 100% bonus depreciation—letting companies write off the full cost of huge investments, like AI data centers, in the very first year.

My core argument is that the tax law is financing the AI infrastructure boom, but it isn’t creating it—and that distinction matters enormously before anyone declares the policy a success. The political narrative writes itself: capital spending soared after the tax cut, therefore the tax cut worked. But I think correlation is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there. Microsoft and its rivals aren’t pouring tens of billions into AI infrastructure because Congress rediscovered depreciation. They’re doing it because falling behind in AI could threaten their core businesses—it’s become about as close to a strategic necessity as it gets. And here’s the tell: Microsoft announced its roughly $80 billion AI data-center plan in a blog post in January 2025, a full six months before the tax law was even signed. The trajectory was public, budgeted, and well underway before the depreciation rules changed.

So my point to Congress is: prove it. Before congratulating yourselves, you owe the public evidence that these tax benefits actually changed corporate behavior rather than just rewarding investments companies were already racing to make. And I want to push back on the idea that this is “just” a timing benefit and therefore basically free. Timing isn’t free—letting a company keep its cash now in exchange for tax revenue later is like giving it an interest-free loan, and every dollar of accelerated depreciation is a dollar the Treasury can’t use for something else this year. That’s a real opportunity cost, felt in deficits or forgone public investment. My recommendation is concrete: Congress should require the Treasury and the Joint Committee on Taxation to regularly estimate how much of this investment is genuinely induced by the tax break, how much was simply pulled forward, and how much would have happened anyway. Because the public is quietly helping finance the AI revolution—and if Congress intends to make taxpayers silent investors in it, it should at least have the honesty to say so, and to show the math.
Tax Law Is Funding the AI Infrastructure Boom, Not Creating It | Bloomberg Tax

This Day in Legal History: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Joins the Court

On August 10, 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, becoming the second woman—and the first Jewish woman—ever to serve on it. She had been confirmed by the Senate just a week earlier by a lopsided 96 to 3, a margin that is almost unimaginable for a Supreme Court nominee today, and she took the seat vacated by the retiring Justice Byron White.

Ginsburg reached the Court after one of the most consequential legal careers of the twentieth century—much of it spent, as a litigator, dismantling sex discrimination brick by brick. In the 1970s, as head of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, she argued a series of cases before the very Court she would later join, persuading an all-male bench to recognize that treating men and women differently under the law often rested on nothing but stereotype. She was strategic and incremental, sometimes choosing male plaintiffs to show that gender lines cut both ways. On the Court, she became known for landmark majority opinions like United States v. Virginia, striking down the male-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute, and, later, for pointed dissents that made her an unlikely cultural icon.

The significance of August 10, 1993 is a fitting frame for today’s news, because it raises a question the Court is wrestling with right now: when justices come and when they go. Ginsburg famously declined to retire during President Obama’s second term, confident she could outlast the political moment; when she died in September 2020, President Trump filled her seat, shifting the Court’s balance for a generation. That episode turned “strategic retirement” from an academic debate into a live and painful one—and it’s the exact debate hanging over our second story today. Ginsburg’s life is a reminder both of how much a single justice can shape the law, and of how fraught the timing of a lifetime appointment has become.

The Senate has confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general, ending one of the most bruising cabinet fights of Trump’s second term with a razor-thin 50-49 vote taken overnight on Saturday. We’ve followed this saga from the beginning—the tense confirmation hearing, the stalled committee vote, the eleventh-hour deal to rescind the anti-weaponization fund—and this is where it lands. Two Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, broke ranks and voted no, citing concerns ranging from the Epstein files to that $1.8 billion fund; Senator Bill Cassidy provided the decisive vote, saying Blanche was the best option the president was likely to offer. Blanche, you’ll recall, was Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer before joining the Justice Department, and that’s the heart of why this was so contested: the concern that the nation’s top law-enforcement officer would serve the president personally rather than the law. The significance is twofold. First, the margin itself—a single vote, with defections from the president’s own party—signals just how uneasy even some Republicans were about Blanche’s independence. Second, remember what it took to get here: Blanche had to formally dismantle a controversial initiative to win confirmation. But as Democrats pointed out, that was an executive-branch promise, not a law, and the same executive branch can revisit it. So Blanche takes office as attorney general having made a concession whose durability is genuinely uncertain—confirmed, but on the narrowest possible terms and with the questions about his independence very much unresolved.
Senate Republicans narrowly confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general | Reuters
NPR · Washington Post

Justice Samuel Alito has put an end to a summer of retirement speculation, confirming that he intends to stay on the Supreme Court. “Obviously, I’m here for another term,” the 76-year-old justice said in an interview published in the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. The speculation had reached a fever pitch back in June, when a veteran Supreme Court reporter’s pre-written retirement story was published by mistake and then quickly retracted—but the talk never fully died down. What makes Alito’s statement legally and politically interesting is what he pushed back on. He explicitly rejected the suggestion that he should time his retirement strategically—stepping down now, while President Trump is in office and Republicans control the Senate, so that a younger conservative could be confirmed to replace him and hold the seat for decades. And that is exactly where today’s Ginsburg anniversary comes crashing in. Justice Ginsburg made the opposite bet: she declined calls to retire while President Obama could name her successor, and when she died in 2020, a president of the opposite party filled her seat and reshaped the Court. That history is precisely why so many now urge aging justices to retire strategically. Alito is declining to play that game—at least publicly. The significance is that this keeps a reliably conservative vote on the Court for now, but it also spotlights an uncomfortable feature of our system: lifetime tenure means the timing of a single retirement can shape constitutional law for a generation, and we increasingly expect justices to make that intensely personal decision with one eye on the electoral calendar.
Justice Alito says he is staying on Supreme Court for another term | Reuters
ABC News · Fortune

And finally, a federal judge has approved more than $2.5 billion in settlements that New Jersey reached with DuPont, Chemours, Corteva, and 3M to resolve claims over contamination from PFAS—the “forever chemicals” that have become one of the biggest environmental-liability stories of the decade. Chief U.S. District Judge Renée Marie Bumb signed off on Friday, ending a legal battle that began back in 2019. A quick primer: PFAS are a family of synthetic chemicals used in everything from nonstick coatings to firefighting foam, and they’re called “forever chemicals” because they essentially don’t break down in the environment or the human body, and they’ve been linked to serious health harms. New Jersey sued under a natural-resource-damages theory—the idea that these companies polluted the state’s shared resources, its water and land, and must pay to restore them. The numbers are substantial: DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva will pay $875 million over 25 years, clean up four former industrial sites, and fund a $1.2 billion remediation account; 3M will pay up to $450 million. The judge called the deal “fair, reasonable and adequate” and even an “impressive windfall” given the risks of taking such a case to trial. The significance is that this is one of the largest state PFAS recoveries yet, and it fits the mass-tort pattern we’ve watched all summer—from talc to Roundup—where companies, facing enormous litigation exposure, choose certainty over trial. But this one has an environmental twist: beyond the money, it forces the actual cleanup of contaminated sites, and it gives every other state attorney general eyeing PFAS litigation a $2.5 billion data point to bring to their own negotiating table.
New Jersey’s $2.5 billion ‘forever chemicals’ settlements with DuPont, 3M, others win court approval | Reuters
Philadelphia Inquirer · New Jersey Attorney General

This Day in Legal History: The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

On August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, one of the most consequential—and most cautionary—delegations of power in American history. The vote was overwhelming: unanimous in the House, and 88 to 2 in the Senate. The resolution authorized President Lyndon Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” in Southeast Asia—and it became the legal foundation for the escalation of the Vietnam War, all without a formal declaration of war.

The resolution passed after Johnson told the public that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had made unprovoked attacks on two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. In the years that followed, serious doubts emerged about what had actually happened—particularly regarding the second reported attack, which may never have occurred at all. Congress, acting on the president’s account and in a moment of Cold War urgency, handed the executive branch what amounted to a blank check for war. At the time there were only about 25,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam; that number would eventually exceed half a million.

The significance of August 7, 1964 is that it became the defining lesson in the dangers of Congress ceding its war powers to the president. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war precisely because the founders feared executive war-making, and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution showed what happens when the legislature abdicates that role. The backlash shaped a generation of law: Congress rescinded the resolution in 1970, and in 1973 passed the War Powers Resolution over President Nixon’s veto, trying to claw back some control over the commitment of American forces. It’s a permanent reminder—resonant on a day full of stories about the reach of executive power—that authority handed over in a crisis is very hard to take back.

The Trump administration’s campaign to force states to hand over their voter registration data has now lost twenty-one court cases in a row—an unbroken streak of defeats as the November midterms approach. According to a Reuters analysis, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking their voter rolls, and it has gone zero for twenty-one, with federal courts from Pennsylvania to California to Michigan, plus the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, all rejecting the effort. Here’s the detail that really tells the story: seven of the fifteen district judges who ruled against the administration were appointed by Trump himself, and some Republican state officials—in Idaho, Kentucky, Utah, and West Virginia—have resisted the requests too. This isn’t a partisan split; it’s a near-consensus rejection. The legal problem is structural. Under the Constitution, the administration of elections is primarily the job of the states, and courts have repeatedly found the federal government lacks the authority to simply demand statewide voter data. We’ve tracked the pieces of this all summer—the SAVE database fights, the threats to prosecute election officials, the mail-in voting order—and this is the throughline: a coordinated push for federal control over election machinery running headlong into a judiciary, staffed partly by the president’s own appointees, that keeps saying no. The significance is that the courts are holding a hard line on the decentralized structure of American elections, and doing it unanimously enough that it’s hard to dismiss as politics. It’s a fitting counterpoint to yesterday’s Voting Rights Act anniversary: sixty years apart, the fights over who controls the ballot continue.
Analysis: Trump loses 21 straight court battles for state voter rolls as midterms near | Reuters
CBS News · Brennan Center

President Trump has signed two new executive orders attempting to narrow birthright citizenship—despite the fact that the Supreme Court rejected his last attempt just over a month ago. Recall that on June 30, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil, striking down his earlier order. These new orders are narrower. The White House is taking aim at “birth tourism”—foreigners traveling to the U.S. specifically to give birth—and at denying birthright citizenship to children of some foreign diplomatic staff, with the possibility of extending limits to U.S. territories later. It’s worth being precise here, because the two pieces are legally very different. The diplomatic-staff piece actually sits on firmer ground: the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to those “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and children of accredited foreign diplomats have long been recognized as a genuine exception. But the birth-tourism piece runs straight into the June ruling, which held that a child’s citizenship doesn’t depend on the immigration status or purpose of the parents. And crucially, these are executive orders—they set executive-branch policy, but they don’t carry the force of a statute or override a constitutional holding. After his June loss, Trump had called on Congress to act; instead he’s gone back to the executive-order well. The significance is a real test of what a president can do after the Supreme Court has ruled against him on constitutional grounds. Legal experts say it’s unclear what practical effect these orders can even have, and fresh legal challenges are all but certain. It’s an attempt to chip at the edges of a ruling the administration couldn’t overturn head-on.
Trump to sign orders on birthright citizenship, Axios reports | Reuters
CBS News · Al Jazeera

And finally, a New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a teen mental-health fund and to substantially overhaul how its platforms work for young users—one of the most significant rulings yet in the wave of litigation over social media and children. Judge Bryan Biedscheid in Santa Fe found that Meta created a “public nuisance” in New Mexico, siding with Attorney General Raúl Torrez—the same AG who, as we noted yesterday, is suing the Justice Department over the Epstein files. Torrez had accused Meta of designing its products to addict young users and failing to protect children from sexual exploitation on its platforms. The “public nuisance” theory is worth flagging, because it’s the same legal tool that drove the big opioid settlements: the idea that a company’s conduct created a widespread harm to the public that it can be forced to help abate. And the money is only part of it. The judge imposed a five-year decree requiring concrete design changes—monthly limits on teens’ time on Facebook and Instagram, restrictions on notifications, tighter controls on adult contact with minors, safeguards around AI chatbots, and enhanced review of child sexual abuse reports. This lands amid everything we’ve tracked: the Tennessee trial that just opened, the multistate penalty fight, the bellwether cases. Meta says it will appeal and that it’s been working to remove harmful content. The significance is that a court hasn’t just put a price on Meta’s conduct—it has ordered the company to redesign its products for kids, backed by the public-nuisance theory. If that approach holds up on appeal, it’s a template other states will follow, and it moves the social-media reckoning from damages into the far more consequential territory of forced design change.
New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567 mln teen mental health fund | Reuters
Washington Post · Yahoo Finance

This Day in Legal History: The Voting Rights Act of 1965

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, arguably the most effective civil-rights statute in American history. Johnson signed it at the Capitol, and after a ceremony in the Rotunda, he moved to the President’s Room near the Senate Chamber—the same room where Abraham Lincoln had signed a bill freeing enslaved people pressed into Confederate service—flanked by congressional leaders, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and others who had fought and bled for this moment.

The Act was a direct response to the machinery of disenfranchisement that Southern states had built after Reconstruction. For nearly a century, literacy tests, poll taxes, and outright intimidation had kept Black Americans from the ballot box despite the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee. The Voting Rights Act attacked that machinery head-on: it banned literacy tests, and—crucially—in Section 5, it required jurisdictions with the worst histories of discrimination to “preclear” any change to their voting rules with the federal government before those changes could take effect. It also authorized federal examiners to register voters directly. The impact was immediate and staggering: over a quarter-million new Black voters registered by the end of 1965 alone.

The significance of August 6, 1965 is that it transformed American democracy by finally making the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment real. But it’s also a living, contested statute, which is why it belongs in the news and not just the history books. In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court effectively disabled the Section 5 preclearance requirement, holding that the formula for deciding which jurisdictions were covered was outdated. In the years since, fights over voting rules, voter rolls, and ballot access—many of which we’ve covered on this show—have unfolded on the terrain the Voting Rights Act created and that Shelby County reshaped. Sixty years on, the argument the Act tried to settle is still very much open.

A court filing has revealed the striking scale of the aftermath of one of the biggest separation-of-powers rulings in years: the U.S. government has already refunded about $100 billion in tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down. According to the filing in the U.S. Court of International Trade, roughly $100 billion in refunds—duties plus interest—had been completed as of the end of July, representing more than half of the $166 billion the government had collected under the invalidated tariffs. Here’s the backstory. After returning to office, President Trump used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—a law meant for genuine national emergencies—to impose sweeping tariffs on trading partners. This February, the Supreme Court ruled he had exceeded his authority, holding that IEEPA doesn’t hand the president that kind of open-ended tariff power. Now the bill is coming due, and the refunds go to the importers who paid the duties in the first place. There’s a direct line from this to a story we covered last week: after losing the IEEPA tariffs at the Supreme Court, the administration reached for Section 338, a dormant 1930s trade statute, to hit Canada—a workaround that itself invites fresh legal challenge. The significance is a vivid, hundred-billion-dollar lesson in the cost of executive overreach. When a president stretches a statute past its limits and the courts say no, the consequences aren’t abstract—they’re measured in massive refunds and a scramble for new legal authority. It’s the separation of powers with a price tag attached.
US refunds $100 billion in tariffs struck down by Supreme Court, filing shows | Reuters
NBC News · US News

New data shows that entry-level hiring at the country’s largest law firms has fallen—and the reasons say a lot about where the profession is heading. According to the National Association for Law Placement, firms with more than 500 lawyers pulled back on hiring associates straight out of law school, and for the first time in memory, those firms brought in more lateral associates—attorneys with prior experience—than fresh graduates. Laterals made up about 49% of associate hires, while entry-level grads fell to roughly 38%, a sharp drop from the 46% share they’d held. Three forces are driving this, and the middle one should get your attention. First, clients increasingly want sophisticated, autonomous counsel who can hit the ground running. Second—and this is the newsy part—artificial intelligence is absorbing exactly the kind of tasks that used to be assigned to first-year associates: document review, initial research, first drafts. Third, there’s a deep pool of experienced lateral talent available to poach. The significance is both immediate and long-term. In the short run, it’s a harder market for new graduates entering six-figure debt into a profession that’s hiring fewer of them. But there’s a real structural risk the report flags: the junior-associate years are how firms train the next generation of partners. If AI hollows out entry-level work and firms stop hiring and mentoring juniors, they may find themselves, a decade from now, with no mid-level talent to promote—having automated away the bottom of the pipeline that feeds the top. It’s a preview of a question every knowledge profession is about to face.
Entry-level hiring at large US law firms declined for first time in a decade, data shows | Reuters
Law.com (American Lawyer) · NALP

New Mexico has sued the U.S. Justice Department for access to the unredacted files on Jeffrey Epstein, accusing the federal government of stonewalling the state’s own investigation. New Mexico’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez, reopened the state’s Epstein investigation earlier this year and requested the unredacted federal files to identify people—visitors and staff at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch property in New Mexico—who allegedly participated in or witnessed crimes. The state says the DOJ reneged on a 2019 arrangement under which New Mexico paused its own probe and turned evidence over to federal authorities in exchange for continued information-sharing. The Justice Department counters that under the Epstein Files Transparency Act and protective court orders, it is neither required nor permitted to disclose victim-identifying information, and that New Mexico has offered “no lawful basis” for such sweeping disclosures. Torrez put the stakes plainly: the state says it needs to see those files before it can decide whether to charge anyone. The significance is a genuine legal collision between two legitimate interests. On one side is a state prosecutor who says he can’t do justice—can’t bring charges—without evidence the federal government is holding. On the other are real statutory and court-ordered protections for the privacy of victims, which exist for good reason in a case defined by the sexual abuse of young women and girls. It’s also another chapter in the long-running, politically charged fight over transparency in the Epstein files, an issue that has repeatedly surfaced around this administration. A court will now have to weigh a state’s investigative need against federal victim-protection rules.
New Mexico sues US government for access to Epstein files | Reuters
Al Jazeera· UPI

And finally, OpenAI has asked a federal judge to throw out Apple’s lawsuit accusing it of stealing trade secrets—a case we covered when Apple filed it back in July. To recap, Apple alleged that OpenAI misappropriated its confidential information to jump-start its own push into consumer hardware, using former Apple employees, aggressive recruiting, and supply-chain connections. In its motion to dismiss, OpenAI calls the allegations “baseless” and makes a pointed argument: “OpenAI has no use, need, or desire for Apple’s trade secrets,” its lawyers wrote, insisting it’s “building something entirely new and different from anything at Apple.” OpenAI’s core defense is to reframe the story—not as theft of secrets, but as ordinary competition for talent. It says its real interest is in recruiting top engineers, many of whom simply chose to leave Apple for more exciting work. And that reframing goes right to the heart of trade-secret law. Hiring a competitor’s employees is completely legal—people are free to change jobs and use the general skills and knowledge they’ve built. What’s illegal is taking or using the former employer’s specific, protected confidential information. So the whole case turns on which side of that line the conduct falls: lawful talent raid, or unlawful secret-grab. The judge is set to hear arguments on October 1, and OpenAI faces an August 17 deadline to respond to Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction. The significance is that this is shaping up to be a marquee test of where the law draws the line between competing for people and stealing their knowledge—a question that will define a lot of fights in the AI talent wars.
OpenAI asks US judge to dismiss Apple’s trade secrets case | Reuters
Bloomberg · Axios

This Day in Legal History: The First Federal Income Tax

On August 5, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Revenue Act of 1861, and with it created the first federal income tax in the history of the United States. The country was three months into the Civil War, the Union’s costs were exploding, and the government needed money on a scale the old system of tariffs and land sales simply couldn’t provide. So Congress reached for something new: a tax of three percent on annual incomes over $800.

The 1861 income tax was, in practice, a bit of a false start. The $800 threshold meant only a small slice of the population owed anything, the administrative machinery to collect it barely existed, and in fact no income tax was ever actually collected under the 1861 Act—it was superseded the next year by the Revenue Act of 1862, which built the real apparatus, including the office of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, the direct ancestor of the modern IRS. But the significance of August 5, 1861 is conceptual and enduring: it was the moment the federal government first asserted the power to tax the incomes of individual Americans directly.

That assertion would be contested for decades—the Supreme Court struck down a later income tax in 1895, and it took the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 to settle the question for good. But the line runs straight from Lincoln’s wartime measure to the entire modern federal tax system. It’s a fitting anniversary for a day when one of our stories is about the fees and sanctions flowing from a lawsuit against the IRS—the very institution whose origins trace back to this Civil War revenue scramble. The income tax was born of necessity, in the middle of the gravest crisis the country ever faced, and it’s been at the center of American political and legal argument ever since.

After Trump’s roughly $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS was thrown out as brought in “bad faith,” a federal judge ordered him to pay the legal fees of those who fought it—and now the Justice Department is fighting the size of that bill. In this particular case, the challengers are seeking a fairly modest sum, around $43,500. But it’s part of a much bigger pattern: according to a Bloomberg analysis, attorneys have sought fees topping $100,000 in at least ten cases over the past year, totaling more than $2.5 million, and the DOJ is pushing courts to throw out or shrink many of those requests. Here’s the legal mechanism at work. Ordinarily in American litigation, each side pays its own lawyers—that’s the “American rule.” But courts can shift fees onto a party as a sanction when a lawsuit is frivolous or brought in bad faith, which is exactly what happened with the IRS suit, a case that also named Trump’s sons and alleged harm from the leak of the family’s tax records. Fee-shifting like this is meant to deter abusive litigation and to make whole the people forced to defend against it. The significance—and the irony—is that after a court found the underlying suit was an abuse of the judicial process, the government is now spending its lawyers’ time contesting comparatively small fee awards owed to the people who were dragged into it. And because the DOJ is doing the contesting, it’s taxpayers funding both sides of that fight. It’s a small-dollar story that illustrates a large-dollar problem: what happens, and who pays, when the government itself is found to have litigated in bad faith.
Trump fights fees for challengers in lawsuit against IRS | Reuters
Yahoo Finance (Bloomberg) · AOL

A federal appeals court has overturned a ban on Perplexity’s AI-powered shopping agents accessing Amazon—and it’s a genuinely landmark ruling for the future of “agentic” artificial intelligence. Back in March, a court had temporarily barred Perplexity’s shopping tool, built into its Comet browser, from operating on Amazon’s platform. Amazon’s legal theory rested on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act—the federal anti-hacking statute that makes it illegal to access a computer “without authorization.” Amazon argued that when Perplexity’s AI agent logs into Amazon and shops on a user’s behalf, that’s unauthorized access. The appeals court disagreed, and the reasoning is what makes this important: the court found Amazon unlikely to succeed, concluding that it was Perplexity’s users—real people, with real Amazon accounts—who were accessing the platform, not Perplexity itself. The AI agent was simply acting as the user’s tool. This is the first time a federal appeals court has addressed whether AI agents acting on behalf of users can lawfully access online platforms, and that question is about to be everywhere. We’re heading into a world where your AI assistant books your travel, does your shopping, and manages your accounts—and the legal system has to decide whether that’s you using a tool, or a company trespassing on someone else’s system. The significance is that this ruling plants an early flag on the side of the user: if you’re authorized to be somewhere online, your AI agent acting for you is authorized too. Expect this to be cited constantly as the agentic-AI economy collides with decades-old computer-access law.
Amazon loses US court ban on Perplexity’s AI shopping tools | Reuters
Bloomberg Law · Engadget

A federal judge has dismissed the last of the January 6 Oath Keepers prosecutions—but he did so under vocal protest, in a rebuke that is itself the story. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta granted the Justice Department’s motion to drop the cases against nine remaining Oath Keepers members tied to the Capitol attack, closing out the final chapter of the January 6 prosecutions. The dismissal flows from the administration’s decision, on the first day of Trump’s second term, to drop all pending January 6 cases. Here’s the legal framework and the tension inside it. Under the rules of criminal procedure, prosecutors have broad power to dismiss charges, and courts generally must defer to that call—the executive branch, not the judge, decides whom to prosecute. Mehta acknowledged the government had the authority. But he made unmistakably clear he thought it was wrong, writing that “today’s epilog diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy—the peaceful transfer of presidential power—to buckle.” That’s extraordinary language from a sitting federal judge. The significance is a stark illustration of the limits of judicial power against prosecutorial discretion. A judge who presided over these seditious-conspiracy trials, who saw the evidence and entered the convictions, had to sign the order erasing them because the decision to prosecute—or not—belongs to the executive. He could register his profound disagreement for the historical record, but he could not stop it. It’s a study in where one branch’s power ends and another’s begins.
US judge grants Justice Department bid to dismiss Oath Keepers prosecutions | Reuters
Washington Post · CNN

And finally, a divided federal appeals court has ruled that the EPA cannot claw back roughly $20 billion in clean-energy grants—another decision drawing a hard line around executive power over money that Congress has already committed. The D.C. Circuit restored an injunction against EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s move to terminate grants that had been awarded to nonprofit groups from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program Congress created in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to finance renewable-energy projects, including in communities historically shut out of green financing. Zeldin had frozen the money in early 2025, saying it didn’t align with the agency’s priorities and might be tainted by fraud, waste, and abuse. The court wasn’t persuaded: six judges concluded that terminating the grants and clawing back the funds “based solely on a policy disagreement” likely violated the Inflation Reduction Act, and pointedly noted the EPA gave no assurance it would leave the money alone if the injunction were lifted. This should sound familiar—it’s the same principle we saw when a judge blocked the administration from canceling grants it deemed inconsistent with its priorities. The significance is the recurring constitutional boundary of this era: when Congress appropriates money for a purpose and an agency awards it, a new administration generally can’t just unwind those commitments because it dislikes the policy. The EPA says it’s reviewing the decision and may take it to the Supreme Court—which would tee up a definitive answer on just how much power a president has to stop spending money Congress told him to spend.
EPA cannot block billions in climate grants, US appeals court rules | Reuters
US News

This Day in Legal History: The Acquittal of John Peter Zenger

On August 4, 1735, a New York jury acquitted printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel—a verdict that planted one of the earliest seeds of freedom of the press in America. Zenger published the New York Weekly Journal, which had spent a year printing scathing criticism of the colonial governor, William Cosby. For that, Zenger was jailed for nearly ten months and put on trial for libeling the governor.

Here’s what made the case so important. Under the English common law of the time, truth was no defense to a charge of seditious libel—in fact, the more true the criticism, the more “dangerous” it was thought to be, because it was more likely to undermine the government’s authority. The judge instructed the jury accordingly: they were only to decide whether Zenger had published the words, and the court would decide whether they were libelous. But Zenger’s brilliant lawyer, Andrew Hamilton of Philadelphia, went over the judge’s head and appealed directly to the jury, arguing that they had the power to weigh the truth of what Zenger printed—and that truthful criticism of government could not be a crime. The jury agreed, and acquitted.

The Zenger verdict didn’t immediately change the formal law—truth wouldn’t be firmly established as a defense to libel for decades—but its influence was enormous. It established, in the American mind, two ideas that would prove foundational: that truth ought to be a defense to a charge of defaming the government, and that a jury of ordinary citizens could stand between the state and a critic it wanted to silence. Those principles run straight through the First Amendment and into modern press-freedom law, including New York Times v. Sullivan two centuries later. The significance of August 4, 1735 is that it’s a origin point for the American conviction that the freedom to criticize those in power is not a privilege the government grants, but a liberty the people hold—an idea that, as today’s stories show, is still very much contested.

Todd Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general has cleared its biggest obstacle: the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to advance him after he cut a deal with the Republican holdouts who had threatened to sink it. We’ve tracked this saga closely—the stalled vote, Senator Cornyn’s refusal, and then Blanche’s move over the weekend to formally rescind the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund.” The final piece came in a deal struck late Sunday with Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who had demanded written assurances about the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns. With those assurances in hand, the committee’s Republicans are now expected to line up behind him. It’s worth noting the Democrats’ objection, because it’s a substantive legal point: they argue Blanche’s rescission order doesn’t actually prevent the administration from reviving the fund after he’s confirmed, and they’re calling for legislation to bar it permanently. In other words, an executive-branch promise can be undone by the same executive branch, which is exactly why they want a statute. The significance is that advice-and-consent worked as a real check—Blanche had to publicly dismantle a controversial initiative to win the votes—but it also exposed the limits of that check. A confirmation deal extracts a promise; it doesn’t write a law. The nation’s next top law-enforcement officer advances, having conceded the point, but with the durability of that concession still an open question.

Blanche set to clear nomination hurdle after deal wins senators’ vote | Reuters
US News (AP) · CNN

A coalition of two dozen Democratic-led states has sued to block a new federal policy that would let immigration authorities get their hands on personal data about low-income families enrolled in a cash-assistance program. The policy would allow the Administration for Children and Families—which runs welfare programs—to share detailed personal information about benefit recipients with other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, and it’s set to take effect August 11. The states’ legal theory is twofold. First, they argue the policy violates the Administrative Procedure Act—the law that requires federal agencies to follow proper procedures and not act arbitrarily—by ignoring existing data-sharing restrictions and slapping new conditions on federal funding. Second, they invoke the Constitution. And a separate suit filed in Brooklyn by civil-rights and privacy groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, adds a Privacy Act claim—the federal statute that limits how the government can use and share the personal data it collects. Here’s why this matters beyond the courtroom. Programs like this cash-assistance program serve some of the most vulnerable families in the country, and the fear that applying for help could funnel your information to immigration enforcement produces a powerful chilling effect—people forgo food and cash aid they’re legally entitled to. It’s the same dynamic behind the “public charge” fights, and fittingly, today marks the anniversary of the 1882 immigration law that first tied benefits to immigration status. The significance is a collision between the machinery of the welfare state and the machinery of immigration enforcement, with data privacy law as the battleground—and courts once again asked whether the administration followed the rules before repurposing sensitive government data.

States sue over Trump policy of sharing benefits data with immigration authorities | Reuters
Detroit News (AP) · UPI

And a striking piece of accountability journalism: a Reuters investigation has found that judges in 75 separate cases have ruled that the Trump administration violated First Amendment rights—this despite the president campaigning as a free-speech champion who vowed to end what he called years of “government censorship.” The 75 rulings span the full range of First Amendment protections: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press. According to the reporting, judges have repeatedly found that the administration chilled or suppressed the speech of citizens and groups who oppose its agenda—an unusually broad pattern of judicial pushback on constitutional grounds. A few caveats worth stating plainly, in fairness: many of these are trial-level rulings, some are preliminary, and the administration disputes them and is appealing in various cases, so not every one is a final word. But the sheer volume is the story. When dozens of federal judges, appointed by presidents of both parties, independently conclude that the same administration is infringing the First Amendment, that’s a signal that’s hard to wave away. The significance ties directly to today’s Zenger anniversary. The whole American tradition of free expression rests on the idea that the government cannot punish or silence its critics—and this reporting suggests that principle is being tested, and defended by the courts, on an extraordinary scale. It’s a reminder that the First Amendment is not self-enforcing; it lives or dies in the accumulation of individual rulings by judges willing to say no.

Trump vowed to ‘bring free speech back.’ Judges in 75 cases ruled that he has stifled it | Reuters
CNN · Yahoo News

And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I take on New York City’s brand-new pied-à-terre tax—the city’s first surcharge on high-value second homes—and my basic take is that it’s good policy being undermined by a messy rollout. The trigger for the piece is a striking number: the city’s initial roll flagged about 31,000 potentially liable properties, versus the roughly 10,000 officials had projected. That gap set off a backlash, and I wanted to separate the policy from the implementation.

On the policy, I come down in favor. High-value second homes are actually a really sensible tax base, because they represent concentrated, largely immobile wealth. That’s the key word—immobile. A wealthy person’s labor income or investments can pick up and leave, but a condo can’t reincorporate in Delaware or establish residency in West Palm Beach. It just sits there, and its value depends overwhelmingly on the city around it—the transit, the sanitation, the parks, the public safety, the cultural institutions. So a well-calibrated surcharge is really just asking people who hold significant, location-keyed wealth to return a share of the value the city itself creates and preserves. Across the OECD, the top wealth quintile holds roughly three-quarters of secondary-real-estate wealth, so this is a genuinely progressive base, and economists generally find recurring taxes on immovable property are among the least damaging to growth.

Where I get critical is the data and the process. That 31,000-property list isn’t a final bill—it’s a preliminary screening pool, and many of those owners will be winnowed out. But the size of it exposes how hard it is for City Hall to tell a true second home from a rental, a family residence, or a property held in trust, using fragmented government records. Property records can identify an expensive apartment; they’re much worse at revealing who’s actually sleeping in it, and when. My core recommendation is transparency: every formal notice should include a plain-language reason code explaining exactly why a property was flagged and what records produced that conclusion, and the city should publish aggregate data on how many determinations are screened out, appealed, reversed, and upheld. The burden of the government’s record gaps shouldn’t fall on homeowners forced to rebut an unexplained conclusion. So my bottom line is that a second-home surcharge can be progressive, economically sound, and administratively workable—but only if the government is willing to show, clearly, whom it means to tax and how it got there. Make the first two years a genuinely transparent implementation period, and the policy earns its legitimacy before the real revenue arrives.

New York City’s Second-Home Tax Is Good Policy With a Data Issue | Bloomberg Tax

This Day in Legal History: The Immigration Act of 1882

On August 3, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Immigration Act of 1882, the first comprehensive federal law regulating immigration into the United States. Before this, immigration had largely been left to the individual states; this Act marked the moment the federal government claimed the subject as its own, and it built the first federal machinery for controlling who could enter the country.

The Act did two enduring things. First, it imposed a “head tax”—fifty cents on every immigrant arriving by ship—to fund the administration of immigration, and it placed enforcement under the Secretary of the Treasury, creating the country’s first federal immigration bureaucracy. Second, and more consequentially for the law that followed, it created categories of people who would be excluded: convicts, the “insane,” and—in language that would echo for the next century and a half—”any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” That public-charge concept, born here in 1882, is the same doctrine we discussed just a couple of weeks ago when the current administration revived an expansive version of the public-charge rule.

The significance of August 3, 1882 is that it is the taproot of the entire federal immigration system. Coming just months after the Chinese Exclusion Act, it established the foundational premise that the national government decides the terms of admission to the United States, and it introduced the framework—head taxes, excludable categories, federal enforcement—on which everything since has been built. It’s worth sitting with the tension in the date: 1882 is also, almost exactly, the moment Emma Lazarus was composing “The New Colossus,” with its welcome to the tired and the poor. The law and the poem were born together, and the distance between them—between the statute’s exclusions and the sonnet’s embrace—is a distance the country has been arguing about ever since.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has formally rescinded the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” clearing what had been the biggest obstacle to his confirmation. If you were with us last week, this is the resolution of that story. The fund—created by a Justice Department order back in May—would have used taxpayer money to compensate people who claimed to be victims of the prior administration’s Justice Department, a group that notably included those convicted in connection with the January 6 Capitol attack. Republican Senator John Cornyn had refused to support Blanche’s nomination until the fund was killed, and this week Blanche did exactly that, signing an order declaring the May directive “rescinded” with “no force or effect,” and, as part of the deal, agreeing to limit the related immunity arrangement so it applies only to the IRS and not to other agencies. The significance ties together several threads we’ve followed all summer. This fund grew out of the same collusive IRS settlement that a federal judge voided as a sham, and it sat at the center of concerns about the Justice Department being used to reward the president’s allies. That a senator from the president’s own party forced its formal repeal as the price of confirmation is advice-and-consent working as a genuine check—and it means the incoming attorney general takes office having had to publicly dismantle one of the administration’s most criticized initiatives before the Senate would trust him with the job.

Acting US Attorney General Blanche rescinds ‘anti-weaponization’ fund before confirmation vote | Reuters
NPR · NBC News

In a court filing, Capital One has disclosed for the first time that it closed more than 300 Trump Organization bank accounts back in 2021 after an anti-money-laundering review—the first time a bank has formally tied such concerns to its decision to cut off the president’s family business. The context is a lawsuit: the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and Eric Trump sued Capital One in Florida last year, alleging the bank “debanked” them for political reasons, having notified the Trump Organization of the closures in March 2021, just weeks after January 6. Capital One’s filing reframes that story entirely. The bank says its compliance team did precisely what federal regulators expect—flagging accounts that raised anti-money-laundering red flags and acting on them. Here’s the legal machinery underneath. Under the Bank Secrecy Act and related anti-money-laundering rules, banks are legally obligated to monitor their customers, file suspicious-activity reports, and, when warranted, close accounts; failing to do so can expose a bank to serious regulatory penalties. Importantly, Capital One did not accuse the Trump Organization of actual money laundering—flagging a risk and proving a crime are very different things. The significance is that this is a clean collision between two hot legal debates: the “debanking” complaint that financial institutions are dropping customers for political or ideological reasons, and the reality that banks operate under mandatory AML obligations that require them to shed risky accounts. A court will now have to decide which of those framings fits what Capital One actually did.

Capital One says it closed Trump Organization’s accounts after anti-money-laundering review | Reuters
CNBC · NPR

Tom Goldstein, the prominent Supreme Court advocate and SCOTUSblog founder we’ve been following, has launched his appeal—asking the Fourth Circuit to overturn his twelve convictions for tax and mortgage fraud and to undo his six-year prison sentence. Recall the case: a jury found that Goldstein concealed millions from a secret high-stakes poker life, diverted his law firm’s fees to cover gambling debts, and lied to mortgage lenders; he was sentenced to 72 months and ordered to pay more than $3 million in restitution. The appeal is a reminder that even a resource-intensive, headline conviction gets a second look, and Goldstein is raising some genuinely lawyerly arguments. The most interesting is venue—the constitutional requirement that a defendant be tried in the right place. His team argues that while prosecutors proved he filled out loan applications in Maryland, they never proved from where he actually transmitted the documents, leaning on a recent Fourth Circuit decision that took venue seriously. He’s also challenging the admission of statements he made in media interviews and the wording of the jury instructions. Commentators describe his path as daunting, and it is—appellate courts rarely overturn convictions, and factual findings get real deference. But the significance is that these are exactly the kinds of technical, procedural issues on which serious appeals are built. Goldstein spent his career winning cases at the top of the appellate system; now he’s testing whether that same system will scrutinize the government’s work in convicting him.

US Supreme Court lawyer Tom Goldstein appeals tax conviction | Reuters
Law360 · Bloomberg Law

And finally, the Justice Department has moved to drop its criminal case against David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist charged with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool—and the reason is striking. We covered Hearn’s not-guilty plea back in July, when his lawyers called the prosecution an abuse of power built on a “concocted narrative.” It turns out that characterization may have been closer to the truth than the charge. In a 20-page filing, prosecutors acknowledged that evidence received after Hearn was indicted shows the damage to the pool “was the result of flawed installation by the contractor,” compounded by “the rush to complete the project” before the America 250 celebrations around July 4. In other words: not vandalism—shoddy construction. The U.S. Attorney’s office said it only learned of the flawed-installation evidence after a grand jury had already indicted him. The significance goes right to prosecutorial power and its risks. A 67-year-old man was detained for hours and charged with a felony over damage that, by the government’s own admission, he didn’t cause. The case collapsing is the system correcting itself—but only after Hearn spent weeks as a felony defendant. It’s a real-world illustration of a point we keep returning to: the decision to charge is one of the most consequential and least reviewable powers in the legal system, and when it’s exercised on a flawed factual premise, the damage to the person charged is done long before the dismissal.

US Justice Department drops case against former US Olympian over Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool | Reuters
PBS NewsHour · CNN

This Day in Legal History: America’s First Patent

On July 31, 1790, the United States issued its first patent under the newly enacted Patent Act of 1790. The patent was granted to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for an improved method of producing potash and pearl ash, chemicals widely used in fertilizer, soapmaking, and glass production. President George Washington, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph personally signed the patent—a reminder that, in the nation’s earliest years, the federal government itself directly evaluated patent applications.

The Patent Act of 1790 was one of Congress’s first major efforts to implement the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 authorizes Congress to “promote the progress of science and useful arts” by granting inventors exclusive rights to their discoveries for limited periods. Rather than viewing patents as natural rights, the Framers saw them as legal incentives designed to encourage innovation while ultimately benefiting the public.

The original patent system was remarkably small. A board consisting of Jefferson, Randolph, and Secretary of War Henry Knox decided whether an invention was “sufficiently useful and important” to merit protection. As the country industrialized, that system quickly became overwhelmed, leading Congress to create a more formal Patent Office in 1836 with professional examiners and standardized procedures.

The first patent issued on this day marked the beginning of what has become one of the world’s most influential intellectual property systems. Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants hundreds of thousands of patents each year, and patent law continues to shape industries ranging from pharmaceuticals and biotechnology to software and artificial intelligence.

President Donald Trump is pressing Senate Republicans to confirm acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose nomination has stalled because of a dispute over a proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis have withheld their support while demanding written assurances that the Justice Department will not establish the program. The fund emerged from a proposed settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit accusing the Internal Revenue Service of improperly handling his tax records. Critics contend that the program could use taxpayer money to compensate Trump supporters who claim they were unfairly targeted by federal authorities, including people investigated or prosecuted in connection with the January 6 Capitol attack. Trump defended the proposal by arguing that victims of government misconduct deserve compensation and maintained that he would not personally benefit from it. Cornyn and Tillis have also objected to a separate provision that could shield Trump and certain associates from future IRS audits. Blanche reportedly met with the senators as the Justice Department attempted to resolve the disagreement. Even without confirmation, Blanche may be able to remain acting attorney general while his nomination is pending, provided that Trump does not formally withdraw it and the Senate does not reject it.

Trump defends ‘anti-weaponization’ fund as Blanche nomination stalls | Reuters

New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued prediction-market operator Kalshi, alleging that the company is offering illegal gambling without a state license. Kalshi allows customers to trade contracts tied to the outcomes of sporting events, elections, television programs, and other future events. New York argues that these transactions function as wagers because customers risk money on outcomes they cannot control. State officials also object to Kalshi allowing customers between the ages of 18 and 20 to participate, while New York generally requires mobile sports bettors to be at least 21. The lawsuit seeks to stop the allegedly unlawful activity, recover Kalshi’s gains, impose civil penalties worth three times those gains, and obtain restitution for customers. James previously brought similar cases against prediction-market platforms operated by Coinbase and Gemini. Kalshi argues that its contracts are federally regulated derivatives under the exclusive authority of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than gambling products governed by individual states. The CFTC has supported that position and filed an emergency request seeking to prevent New York from enforcing its gambling laws against the company. Courts in several other states have already restricted Kalshi’s operations, while a federal judge in New York recently declined to protect the company from state enforcement. The litigation could determine whether prediction markets must comply with state gambling laws, federal commodities regulation, or both.

New York Says Kalshi’s Prediction Markets Are Illegal Gambling

Former federal health official Anthony Fauci could face a contempt-of-Congress referral after refusing to answer more than 100 questions during a Senate investigation into the government’s response to COVID-19. Senator Rand Paul, the Republican chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the panel would consider referring Fauci for prosecution. Federal law makes it a crime for a person summoned by Congress to deliberately refuse to provide relevant testimony or requested documents. Congress cannot prosecute the offense itself, however, so a committee must approve a referral, followed by the full Senate or House, before the Justice Department decides whether to pursue charges. Reuters reported that a Senate referral would likely require 60 votes, meaning some Democratic support would be necessary. Prosecutors would then need to persuade a grand jury that Fauci intentionally refused to answer questions that fell within the committee’s legitimate investigation. Fauci would likely argue that the Fifth Amendment allowed him to remain silent because his testimony could expose him to criminal liability. President Joe Biden previously pardoned Fauci for possible federal offenses committed between 2014 and January 2025, but that pardon does not cover conduct occurring after Biden left office. The pardon creates an unsettled legal issue because courts have not clearly decided whether a witness may invoke the Fifth Amendment regarding conduct already covered by a presidential pardon. Even if Congress approves a referral, the Justice Department and a Washington grand jury would still have separate opportunities to decline the case.

Could Fauci face criminal charges for refusing Senate COVID questions? | Reuters

This Day in Legal History: America’s First Representative Assembly

On July 30, 1619, in a wooden church at Jamestown, twenty-two elected representatives took their seats alongside the governor and his council, and the first representative legislative assembly in what would become the United States came to order. This was the Virginia General Assembly—soon known through its elected chamber as the House of Burgesses—and it marks the beginning of self-government by elected representatives in America.

The mechanics were modest and the setting brutal: two burgesses were elected from each of the colony’s eleven settlements, and they met in sweltering heat so severe that one burgess died during the six-day session. But the principle was revolutionary. Under instructions from the Virginia Company, Governor George Yeardley had called forth a body in which colonists—not just a distant crown or company—would have a hand in making the laws that governed them. It became the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World, and it planted an idea that would grow over the next century and a half into a full-blown theory of government by consent.

The significance of July 30, 1619 is that so much of American constitutional order traces back to this cramped, miserable first session. The House of Burgesses trained generations of colonial leaders in the practice of legislative self-government; it was the venue where figures like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson cut their political teeth; and its example fed directly into the revolutionary conviction that legitimate power flows from the consent of the governed and is exercised through elected representatives. It’s a fitting anniversary for a day when one of our stories turns on that very principle—the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise and consent on who leads the Justice Department.

President Trump and the Justice Department have asked the Supreme Court to throw out the $83 million defamation verdict that writer E. Jean Carroll won against him, arguing that he can’t be sued for statements he made while he was president. Some quick context: a Manhattan jury awarded Carroll roughly $83 million in early 2024 over defamatory comments Trump made in 2019 denying her sexual-assault allegation. This is now Trump’s second trip to the Supreme Court in the Carroll saga—recall that back in June the justices declined to hear his appeal of a separate $5 million verdict, which we covered here. The new appeal leans heavily on the Court’s 2024 presidential-immunity decision, which gave presidents broad immunity for official acts. Trump’s lawyers argue that because he made the disputed statements in 2019 while in office, that immunity should shield him, and they accuse the appeals court of “procedural contortions” to avoid the question. The significance is about how far the 2024 immunity ruling stretches. That decision arose in the context of criminal prosecution for official acts; here it’s being deployed to wipe out a civil defamation judgment for things a sitting president said to reporters. Whether “official act” immunity reaches a president’s public denials about a private, decades-old personal matter is a genuinely consequential question—and the fact that the Justice Department has joined Trump’s personal civil appeal is itself a notable signal about how the government is deploying its weight.

Trump asks Supreme Court to throw out E. Jean Carroll’s $83 million verdict | Reuters

Washington Post · CNN

Todd Blanche’s bid to become attorney general has hit a serious snag: the Senate Judiciary Committee scrapped a planned vote after Republican Senator John Cornyn said he is “not prepared to vote yes.” We’ve tracked Blanche’s nomination through his confirmation hearing, and the math has always been tight—with the recent death of Senator Lindsey Graham, committee Republicans have just one vote to spare, so Cornyn alone could sink it. What’s notable is the substance of his objection, because it ties together several threads we’ve followed all month. Cornyn’s concerns center on the administration’s roughly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” and the settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS—the very deal a federal judge voided weeks ago as a collusive arrangement, and which would have handed Trump and his associates protections from tax audits unavailable to ordinary taxpayers. In other words, the sticking point isn’t Blanche’s résumé; it’s the integrity of the tax system and whether the Justice Department has been used to engineer special treatment. The committee said the vote is postponed while it works “to secure sufficient support.” The significance is a real-time illustration of advice and consent functioning as a check—not a rubber stamp. A president’s nominee for the nation’s top law-enforcement job is stalled because a member of his own party wants answers about a tax settlement that courts have already called unlawful. It’s the Senate’s constitutional role doing exactly what it’s designed to do: forcing accountability before handing over power.

Trump’s attorney general nominee hits snag as senator withholds support | Reuters

NPR · Washington Post

And finally, a story close to home for anyone in this profession: the debut of the new national bar exam has gone badly wrong. This week marked the first-ever administration of the NextGen Uniform Bar Examination—a major overhaul of how aspiring lawyers are licensed—across ten jurisdictions. And in Washington State, it collapsed. Officials canceled the entire first day of testing after network bandwidth and Wi-Fi problems left hundreds of examinees unable to even access the exam; somewhere between 645 and 700 standard-time test-takers were affected. Missouri saw delayed start times, and a Maryland site had a shorter delay. The National Conference of Bar Examiners, which runs the exam, insists the NextGen platform itself performed as intended and pinned the failures on local network and site infrastructure rather than the software. That’s cold comfort to the test-takers. Think about what’s actually at stake for them: months of full-time study, bar-prep costs, and in many cases a job offer contingent on passing—all thrown into limbo. Washington is offering a make-up exam on September 1, or the option to transfer to the February 2027 sitting or get a refund, and there are already calls for a class action and even for “diploma privilege”—admitting these graduates without an exam. The significance is both practical and symbolic. Practically, hundreds of careers are on hold through no fault of the examinees. Symbolically, the gateway to the legal profession—the gatekeeping ritual that’s supposed to certify competence—failed a basic test of its own on its most important day, and it’s going to intensify the already-heated debate over whether the bar exam, in any form, is the right way to license lawyers.

Tech problems, cancellation mar new US bar exam for some test-takers | Reuters

Bloomberg Law · Above the Law

This Day in Legal History: The First Hague Convention

On July 29, 1899, delegates from twenty-six nations signed the first Hague Convention, the product of an international peace conference convened at the initiative of Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II. It was one of the founding moments of modern international law—an attempt, at the close of a violent century, to subject the conduct of war and the resolution of disputes between nations to legal rules rather than raw power.

The 1899 Convention did two enduring things. First, it began the codification of the laws and customs of war—rules on the treatment of prisoners, the protection of civilians, and limits on certain weapons—laying groundwork that would grow into the modern law of armed conflict and, eventually, the Geneva Conventions. Second, and just as important, it created the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the first standing international institution designed to let states resolve their disputes through neutral arbitration instead of on the battlefield. The idea was radical for its time: that sovereign nations would voluntarily submit their quarrels to a legal process.

The Hague system was, of course, imperfect—the twentieth century that followed was the bloodiest in human history, and the conventions did not prevent two world wars. But the significance of July 29, 1899 is that it planted the institutional and conceptual seeds of everything that came after: the League of Nations, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the international criminal tribunals, and the entire architecture of treaties and adjudication that structures relations between states today. It reflects an enduring aspiration—one that runs through so much of what we cover—that disputes are better settled by law than by force. It’s a fitting backdrop for a day whose stories, in their own ways, are all about turning conflict over to the legal system rather than settling it by other means.

A federal appeals court has revived a proposed class action accusing Chobani of deceiving consumers by marketing some of its Greek yogurt as “zero sugar.” The Seventh Circuit in Chicago ruled that consumers can proceed with claims under state consumer-protection laws, because Chobani Zero Sugar yogurt contains about four grams per serving of allulose, a naturally occurring sweetener. Here’s the wrinkle that makes this interesting. Allulose is chemically a sugar, but the body barely metabolizes it, so the FDA lets manufacturers leave it out of the “sugars” lines on the Nutrition Facts panel. Chobani leaned on exactly that, saying its panel accurately shows zero grams of total and added sugar. But the court focused on the big front-of-package promise—”Zero Sugar”—and found persuasive an FDA brief explaining that “total sugars” actually includes all monosaccharides, allulose among them. Under FDA rules, a product generally can’t be labeled “zero sugar” or “sugar free” unless it has less than half a gram of sugar per serving. Writing for the court, Judge Thomas Kirsch said it was not implausible that consumers—here, a couple who bought the yogurt at a Costco near Chicago—were “fooled” by that absolute promise. The significance is a reminder that the technically-accurate fine print on the back doesn’t necessarily save a bold marketing claim on the front. This is how consumer-protection law polices the gap between what a label shouts and what a product actually contains, and the ruling lets the plaintiffs try to prove that gap misled shoppers.

Chobani must face lawsuit over zero-sugar yogurt claim, US appeals court rules | Reuters

Yahoo Finance · Insurance Journal

eBay and three of its former executives have agreed to pay roughly $56 million to settle a civil suit brought by a Massachusetts couple who were the targets of one of the more disturbing corporate harassment campaigns in recent memory. The couple, Ina and David Steiner, publish an e-commerce trade newsletter, and back in 2019 several eBay employees—furious over the Steiners’ coverage of the company—orchestrated a campaign to terrorize them: shipping cockroaches, live spiders and fly larvae, and a bloody pig Halloween mask to their home, sending threatening messages, and conducting covert surveillance. It grew out of internal communications in which senior executives discussed taking the couple “down.” The criminal side of this played out years ago, with multiple former employees prosecuted and sentenced. This week’s news is the civil resolution: eBay will pay about $46 million to the couple plus millions more in charitable contributions, and the former executives are personally on the hook—two million dollars from former CEO Devin Wenig, and smaller sums from two others. The significance here is corporate accountability, and specifically accountability for retaliation against the press. A powerful company weaponized its resources to punish two journalists for critical coverage—the kind of retaliation that strikes at the heart of a free press—and while the criminal cases addressed the individual foot soldiers, this settlement attaches a very large price tag to the company and the executives at the top. It’s a stark example of the civil justice system doing what the criminal system often can’t: reaching the institution and its leadership, and making them pay.

eBay, former executives to pay $56 million to settle couple’s harassment case | Reuters

CNN · CNBC

And finally, prosecutors have offered their most detailed account yet of why they believe activist Charlie Kirk was killed, arguing in a new court filing that the man accused of shooting him targeted Kirk for his political and religious views. Kirk, a prominent conservative activist and ally of President Trump, was shot and killed in September 2025 at a university in Utah; Tyler Robinson, who is 23, is charged in his death. In the filing, prosecutors pointed to Kirk’s opposition to gay marriage and transgender rights, and cited a letter from a board member of Kirk’s organization describing him as the face of a political and religious movement. They allege Robinson’s own lifestyle ran contrary to Kirk’s views and that he targeted Kirk because of his “political expression.” Robinson’s defense attorney pushed back, arguing that the materials the state is relying on show nothing about whether Robinson actually disagreed with Kirk or what was in his mind. And that disagreement is the legal heart of this. Motive is not, strictly speaking, an element the prosecution must prove to establish murder—but it is powerful evidence, it helps a jury make sense of a killing, and in a serious case it can bear heavily on how the crime is characterized and punished. What we’re watching is the perennial challenge of proving why someone did something: the state assembling external evidence to reconstruct a defendant’s internal state of mind, and the defense insisting that inference isn’t proof. The significance is that a case already saturated with political meaning will now turn, in part, on a genuinely hard legal question—how, and whether, prosecutors can establish motive—and the coming proceedings will test whether their theory holds up under the rules of evidence.

Prosecutors say Charlie Kirk was attacked for his politics, cite anti-LGBT views | Reuters

This Day in Legal History: Sonia Sotomayor Advances to the Supreme Court

On July 28, 2009, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, sending her to the full Senate, which confirmed her the following week. With that confirmation she became the first Hispanic justice—and only the third woman—ever to serve on the Court.

Her path to the bench was the stuff of American mythology, and it was central to her nomination. Born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, raised in a housing project, diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at seven and losing her father at nine, she went on to Princeton and Yale Law School, then worked as a Manhattan prosecutor before becoming a federal trial judge and later a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. As a district judge, she famously issued the injunction that ended the 1994–95 Major League Baseball strike. Her confirmation fight, though, turned heavily on a single phrase from an earlier speech—her remark that a “wise Latina” might, with the richness of her experiences, sometimes reach a better conclusion than someone without them. Critics called it bias; supporters called it an honest acknowledgment that lived experience shapes judgment.

In the years since, Sotomayor has become one of the Court’s most forceful liberal voices, known for pointed dissents on race, criminal justice, and—fittingly for today—the very “shadow docket” at the center of our lead story. She has been among the sharpest critics of the Court deciding major questions through emergency orders with little briefing and no argument. The significance of July 28, 2009 is both symbolic and substantive: symbolic, in that a woman from a Bronx housing project reached the pinnacle of the American legal system and expanded who Americans see reflected on their highest court; and substantive, in that she has spent her tenure insisting the Court explain itself and show its work—an insistence that lands with particular weight in a week when the justices are again being asked to make consequential law on the emergency docket.

The Trump administration has escalated its fight over mail-in voting all the way to the Supreme Court, asking the justices on an emergency basis to let its executive order take effect nationwide. This is the direct sequel to yesterday’s story: after the First Circuit refused on Saturday to lift the injunction blocking key parts of the March order, the Justice Department went straight to the high Court, asking it to put that injunction on hold while the litigation continues. The order directs federal agencies to build voter-eligibility lists and to restrict Postal Service delivery of ballots not tied to those lists; a coalition of 23 states and D.C. argues the President simply lacks authority to impose federal rules on elections that the Constitution assigns to states and to Congress. What’s notable here is the vehicle. This is an emergency application—part of what critics call the “shadow docket,” where the Court decides consequential questions quickly, often with little briefing and no full argument. Regular listeners will remember the shadow docket as a recurring concern precisely because it lets the Court make major law in the shadows. The justices have told the states to respond by August 3, so a decision could come fast. The significance is that one of the most consequential election-administration questions in years—decided against the administration twice below—is now in the hands of a Supreme Court being asked to act on an emergency timeline, months before the midterms.

Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow mail-in ballot restrictions | Reuters

Washington Post · CNBC

Johnson & Johnson has announced a $5.5 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming its talc products caused ovarian cancer—a deal that could finally close out more than a decade of litigation. The settlement would cover roughly 69,000 cases consolidated in New Jersey federal court plus related state cases, amounting to about 99.75% of the remaining talc claims. If you were with us last week, the timing is impossible to miss: just days ago, the federal magistrate judge overseeing those 69,000 cases cast serious doubt on whether the plaintiffs could even prove specific causation, ordering them to explain why their claims shouldn’t be dismissed. Days later, J&J puts $5.5 billion on the table. That sequence is a lesson in how litigation leverage works—a favorable evidentiary signal can push a defendant toward a global resolution on its own terms, or embolden it, depending on the read. The mechanics matter: the deal needs acceptance by 95% of the ovarian-cancer claimants and approval from the judge overseeing the federal litigation. And notably, J&J isn’t conceding anything—its litigation chief called the claims “meritless,” and the company still denies its talc caused cancer, though it pulled talc-based baby powder from U.S. and Canadian shelves back in 2020. The significance is that after years of trials, appeals, and two failed attempts to offload the liability through bankruptcy, J&J is choosing certainty and closure over continued combat—paying billions to make a decade of litigation risk go away, without ever admitting its product was dangerous.

Johnson & Johnson announces $5.5 billion settlement of talc lawsuits | Reuters

CBS News · Bloomberg Law

A major trial has opened in Nashville, where the state of Tennessee is telling a jury that Meta knew its Instagram platform was harming teenagers and buried the evidence to protect its profits. In opening statements for what’s expected to be a seven-week trial in state court, Tennessee’s lawyers said Meta’s own researchers repeatedly flagged that some teens were using the platform compulsively—linked to eating disorders, depression, and self-harm—yet the company declined to disable engagement features like autoplay, notifications, and infinite scroll, which the state says were designed to keep teens hooked and maximize the ads they saw. Meta’s lawyer countered that the company has been transparent about the risks teens face and about the dangerous content it works to find and remove. The legal theory here should sound familiar—it echoes the playbook used against Big Tobacco: the argument that a company’s own internal research proves it knew about the harm and chose profit anyway. That’s powerful evidence if the jury believes it, which is likely why, according to reporting, there’s already been a fight over whether Meta’s lawyers tried to keep some of that internal research out. This connects to threads we’ve followed all month, from the multistate suit seeking enormous penalties to the individual bellwether cases. The significance is that these harm-to-teens claims are now being tested in front of an actual jury, and the outcome will shape how Meta and its peers value the risk—and how aggressively other states and plaintiffs press similar cases.

Meta disregarded its own research on teen harm, Tennessee tells jury | Reuters

And finally, in my column for Bloomberg Tax this week, I use a striking data point—the Miami metro area’s cost of living has reportedly now surpassed greater New York City’s—to make a case about how we misunderstand what it means to call a state “low tax.” My core argument is that focusing on a single, highly visible tax like the income tax gives you a badly incomplete picture of whether a place is actually affordable, and for whom.

Here’s the logic. Florida markets itself relentlessly on having no personal income tax, and rankings like the Tax Foundation’s competitiveness index put Florida near the top and New York dead last largely on that basis. But I argue that conflates three very different claims: that Florida collects less through income taxes, that households there bear lower total costs, and that residents end up better off. Only the first is clearly true. The costs a state doesn’t cover through an income tax don’t vanish—they get shifted, recovered through other levies, or pushed into the private market. It’s the same principle as a restaurant that offers “free” parking: the cost of that parking is just baked into the price of the food. When Florida forgoes an income tax, residents still pay—through sales and property taxes, fees, sky-high insurance premiums, and services they have to buy privately that other states provide publicly. And because the income tax is the most progressive major revenue source a state has, replacing it with all of that tends to shift the burden down the income ladder.

The comparison I keep coming back to is the everyday cost that a public system absorbs in New York but a family pays out of pocket in Florida. New York guarantees every four-year-old a free, full-day pre-K seat; Florida’s program funds about 540 instructional hours—roughly three hours a day—leaving working parents to cover the rest. New York’s subsidized transit lets many households skip a car entirely. None of these private substitutes—an insurer, a toll road, a childcare provider—charges you less because you earn less, the way an income tax does. So here’s the distributional punchline of my piece: Florida’s model is a genuinely great deal if you make ten million dollars a year, because avoiding the income tax dwarfs everything else. But for the merely affluent professional making a few hundred thousand—and certainly for middle- and lower-income households—those insurance bills, tuition payments, and housing costs can quietly eat the whole “tax savings.” My bottom line is that any honest discussion of tax competitiveness has to start with comprehensive household-burden metrics across income levels, not a single headline rate—because “low tax” and “affordable” are not the same thing, and treating them as if they were lets officials sell breaks for the wealthy as broad affordability wins.

Miami’s Cost of Living Shows Income Tax’s Limits as a Metric | Bloomberg Tax

This Day in Legal History: The First Executive Department

On July 27, 1789, President George Washington signed the act establishing the Department of Foreign Affairs—the first executive department created under the brand-new Constitution, and the direct ancestor of today’s State Department, which was renamed a few weeks later. It’s easy to overlook, but this was a foundational moment: the First Congress was building the executive branch essentially from scratch, deciding what federal administration would actually look like in practice.

The most consequential part of the debate wasn’t the department’s diplomatic functions—it was a question that still echoes through constitutional law today: who controls the officials who run these departments? The Constitution says the President appoints principal officers with the Senate’s consent, but it is conspicuously silent on who can remove them. As Congress drafted the statute, it confronted this head-on in what historians call the “Decision of 1789.” After intense debate, Congress structured the law to reflect the view that the President alone—without needing the Senate’s permission—holds the power to remove the department head. That choice embedded a powerful assumption about presidential control of the executive branch into the very first agency Congress built.

The significance of July 27, 1789 reaches all the way to the present. The Decision of 1789 has been cited by the Supreme Court for a century as evidence that the Constitution vests the President with broad removal power—in cases like Myers v. United States, and more recently in the modern fights over the independence of agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the removal of officials at supposedly independent commissions. Every time we argue about whether a president can fire the head of an agency at will, we are arguing about a question the First Congress thought it had answered when it created this very first department. It’s a reminder that the architecture of executive power was contested from the founding’s opening days—and that those early choices still bind us.

A federal appeals court has refused to let the administration implement President Trump’s executive order overhauling mail-in voting, keeping the order frozen ahead of November’s midterm elections. In a 2-1 decision, the Boston-based First Circuit declined to lift an injunction that Democratic-led states won on June 25, when a lower-court judge found key parts of the order unconstitutional. Here’s what the March order actually did. It directed federal officials to build a national “state citizenship list” of eligible voters, and told the Justice Department to investigate officials who mail ballots to people the administration deems ineligible. The constitutional problem is structural: under the Constitution, the authority to set the “times, places and manner” of elections rests with the states and with Congress—not with the President acting alone by executive order. The states argued, and the courts have so far agreed, that the President can’t unilaterally rewrite the machinery of federal elections. This fits a pattern we’ve tracked all month—the SAVE citizenship database fight, the Justice Department’s warnings to election officials, the gutting of the Election Assistance Commission. The significance is that the judiciary is repeatedly drawing the same line: however much a president wants to reshape how Americans vote, elections in this country are decentralized by constitutional design, and that design is holding, at least for now, right when it matters most.

US appeals court rules Trump cannot implement mail-in voting order | Reuters

Tom Goldstein—one of the most celebrated Supreme Court advocates of his generation, who argued 44 cases before the Court and co-founded SCOTUSblog—has been sentenced to six years in prison for tax evasion and mortgage fraud. We previewed the sentencing on Friday; now the number is in: 72 months, and the judge revoked his bond and took him into custody on the spot. Recall the conduct the jury found: Goldstein concealed millions in winnings and losses from his secret life as an ultra-high-stakes poker player, diverted his law firm’s legal fees into personal accounts to cover gambling debts, and steered money to his creditors so it never surfaced as reportable income. The Justice Department had asked for eight years; the judge landed at six. The significance is the same point I made in my Forbes piece last week, now delivered with a prison term attached: the tax laws reach even the most sophisticated players, but only when the government invests the resources to untangle complex, deliberately obscured finances. Goldstein’s case is the rare, resource-intensive prosecution that actually happens—and its severity sends a message to the sliver of high-end taxpayers who assume complexity is a shield. That a lawyer who reached the absolute summit of the profession is now headed to federal prison over how he handled his taxes is a stark bookend to a remarkable career.

Star US Supreme Court lawyer Goldstein sentenced for tax crimes | Reuters

And finally, the same Boston appeals court has rejected the administration’s bid to revive its $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers. The First Circuit declined to pause a lower-court ruling from June 8 that struck down the fee, and the reasoning goes to the heart of who gets to impose costs like this. The trial court held that the fee was, in substance, an unlawful tax that Congress never authorized—and taxing is a power the Constitution gives to Congress, not the executive. To put the number in perspective: employers seeking an H-1B visa typically paid somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000 in fees before this; the administration wanted to charge a hundred thousand dollars, as part of a broader effort to discourage companies from hiring foreign workers over Americans. The three-judge panel found the administration hadn’t shown it was likely to prove it stayed within its authority. The significance connects directly to the theme running through today’s episode: the limits of executive power. Just as the President can’t unilaterally rewrite election rules, he can’t unilaterally impose what amounts to a six-figure tax on visa applications without Congress. When the executive reaches for a power the Constitution assigns elsewhere—here, the power to tax—the courts have been willing to say no. It’s a reminder that even sweeping policy goals have to run through the constitutional plumbing of who is actually allowed to do what.

Appeals court rejects Trump bid to halt $100,000 H-1B visa fee ruling | Reuters

This Day in Legal History: The Scottsboro Case

On July 24, 1937, the state of Alabama dropped all charges against four of the nine young Black men known to history as the Scottsboro Boys—a small, belated measure of relief in one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American legal history, and a case that helped reshape constitutional criminal procedure. The nine, ranging in age from approximately 13 to 20, had been arrested after riding a freight train through Alabama in 1931 and falsely accused of raping two white women. Within two weeks, in a series of rushed trials before all-white juries, eight of them had been convicted and sentenced to death; the trial of the youngest, Roy Wright, ended in a mistrial when the jury could not agree on whether to impose death or life imprisonment.

The extraordinary speed and unfairness of those proceedings produced two landmark Supreme Court decisions that still shape the rights of criminal defendants. In Powell v. Alabama in 1932, the Court held that the defendants had been denied due process because they had not received the timely and meaningful assistance of counsel needed to prepare their defense. The Court’s holding was formally limited to capital cases involving indigent defendants incapable of adequately defending themselves, but it became a foundational step toward the broader right to appointed counsel later recognized in Gideon v. Wainwright. Then, in Norris v. Alabama in 1935, the Court overturned Clarence Norris’s conviction because Alabama had systematically excluded qualified Black citizens from its jury rolls. Building on earlier equal-protection precedents, the Court made clear that a state could not accomplish through discriminatory administration what the Constitution prohibited it from doing expressly.

The Scottsboro cases dragged on for years through retrials, reconvictions despite one accuser’s recantation, appeals, and slow, partial releases. On July 24, 1937, Alabama dropped all charges against Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright. Prosecutors expressly concluded that Roberson and Montgomery were not guilty; Williams and Wright were released principally because of their youth and the six years they had already spent imprisoned. The state continued prosecuting or imprisoning the remaining defendants.

The significance of the Scottsboro saga is twofold: it exposed nationally how the Jim Crow justice system operated against Black defendants, and it forced the Supreme Court to give practical constitutional force to protections—meaningful representation by counsel and freedom from racially discriminatory jury selection—that we now consider basic. It is a reminder that some of the most important rights in American law were secured through the suffering of people who were themselves never fully given justice.

Thomas Goldstein, one of the most prominent Supreme Court advocates of his generation and a co-founder of the widely read SCOTUSblog, is being sentenced today after a jury convicted him of tax evasion and mortgage fraud. Goldstein argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court and built a celebrated appellate practice—but prosecutors showed the jury a hidden second life as an ultra-high-stakes poker player, in games running into the tens of millions of dollars. The jury found him guilty on 12 of 16 counts, including tax evasion, assisting in the preparation of false returns, willfully failing to pay taxes on time, and lying to mortgage lenders. The conduct is a case study in exactly the kind of sophisticated evasion I wrote about in Forbes this week: prosecutors said Goldstein concealed millions in poker winnings and losses, diverted his law firm’s legal fees into personal accounts to cover gambling debts, and directed people to pay his creditors so the money never showed up as his income. That’s not a wage earner whose taxes are withheld automatically—it’s precisely the complex, hard-to-trace arrangement that takes real investigative resources to unwind. The Justice Department has asked for eight years in prison. The significance is a pointed reminder that the tax laws reach even the elite of the legal profession—and that when the government does devote the resources to untangle a sophisticated scheme, the accountability can be severe. A man who spent his career at the pinnacle of the legal system now faces the system’s full weight.

Star US Supreme Court lawyer Goldstein to be sentenced for tax crimes | Reuters

The Justice Department has dropped its subpoenas of New York Times journalists over their reporting on the Qatari-donated Air Force One—a striking retreat that came after a federal judge tore into nearly every aspect of the government’s approach. We’ve been following this one: the subpoenas were issued July 10, days after the Times published its stories, seeking grand jury testimony and phone records to unmask the reporters’ sources. At Thursday’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian pressed the government hard. He criticized prosecutors for hastily issuing subpoenas that the DOJ’s own lawyers admitted were riddled with “inadvertent errors,” and he chided them for asking another judge to gag phone companies from telling the journalists their records had been subpoenaed—days after the department had already publicly confirmed the subpoenas existed. Faced with that skepticism, the government agreed to withdraw them. A Times lawyer called it “a great day for the First Amendment and a great day for the rule of law.” The significance is worth stating precisely. This wasn’t a sweeping constitutional ruling establishing a reporter’s privilege—the DOJ retreated before the judge had to decide the hard First Amendment question. But it’s a concrete example of judicial scrutiny working as a check: when a court forced the government to justify subpoenas aimed at the press, the case collapsed under its own sloppiness and overreach. After a month of friction between the administration and the media, the press got a clear win.

US judge to weigh New York Times subpoenas over Trump plane reporting | Reuters

And finally, the pause on Paramount Skydance’s roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery has been extended—a federal judge has now frozen the deal through August 17. When we covered this earlier in the week, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín had issued a short 14-day restraining order at the request of a dozen state attorneys general; now that freeze runs deeper into August, buying the court time to weigh the states’ request to block the merger outright. The states’ antitrust theory has sharpened. They argue the combination would lessen competition in three specific markets: wide-release theatrical film distribution, top-grossing theatrical distribution, and basic cable licensing—harming movie theaters, cable distributors, and ultimately audiences. Remember the framework: antitrust law lets courts halt mergers that would concentrate too much market power, and a pause like this preserves the status quo so the deal can’t close before a judge decides whether it’s lawful. The significance is that time is itself a weapon in merger fights. Every week a deal sits frozen adds cost, uncertainty, and risk for the companies, and it gives regulators and challengers leverage. Here it’s state attorneys general—not federal antitrust enforcers—driving the challenge, and they’ve now kept one of the largest media mergers in history on ice for the better part of a month, with the decisive rulings still to come.

Paramount-Warner Bros. deal paused through August 17, judge rules | Reuters

This Day in Legal History: Congress Shrinks the Supreme Court

On July 23, 1866, Congress passed the Judicial Circuits Act, and in doing so did something that sounds almost unimaginable today: it shrank the Supreme Court. The Act provided that the Court would gradually contract from ten justices down to seven, as sitting justices died or retired and their seats simply went unfilled. Yesterday we talked about Franklin Roosevelt’s failed attempt to enlarge the Court to overpower it; today’s anniversary is the mirror image—Congress reducing the Court’s size for pointedly political reasons.

The politics were about President Andrew Johnson. Johnson, who had ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, was locked in a bitter struggle with the Radical Republicans in Congress over Reconstruction. Congress did not trust him, and one thing it was determined to deny him was the power to shape the Supreme Court. By legislating that upcoming vacancies would go unfilled until the Court shrank to seven, Congress effectively stripped Johnson of any Supreme Court appointments. It was court-unpacking as a weapon of inter-branch warfare—using Congress’s control over the Court’s size not to change its rulings directly, but to lock a distrusted president out of influencing it.

The size of the Supreme Court has never been fixed by the Constitution—it’s set by statute, and it has ranged from six at the founding up to ten and back down over the country’s first century. After Johnson left office, Congress promptly passed the Judiciary Act of 1869 and settled the number at nine, where it has remained ever since. The significance of July 23, 1866 is that it’s the clearest historical example of Congress manipulating the Court’s very size for immediate political advantage—and, paired with the 1937 court-packing fight, it bookends the story of how the number nine came to feel sacrosanct even though it never actually was. The Court’s independence, it turns out, has always rested partly on a political truce about not touching its structure.

A Manhattan federal judge is set to weigh today whether to throw out the Justice Department’s subpoenas to New York Times journalists who reported on security concerns about President Trump flying on a Qatari-donated Air Force One. This is the next chapter of a story we covered when the subpoenas first landed: they were issued July 10 by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney, and U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian has paused their enforcement pending this afternoon’s hearing. The two sides want very different things. Prosecutors have asked the judge merely to put the subpoenas on hold for a couple of weeks, saying the investigation’s next steps could shape his decision; the Times wants them quashed outright, arguing they’re designed to harass and intimidate journalists in violation of the First Amendment. The legal backdrop is genuinely unsettled. There is no absolute reporter’s privilege under federal law—prosecutors correctly note the First Amendment doesn’t categorically excuse reporters from testifying in criminal investigations—but courts have long been wary of subpoenas that function as fishing expeditions to unmask sources. The significance is that this hearing is a concrete test of where that line falls, and it lands amid a broader pattern we’ve tracked all month of friction between the administration and the press. However Judge Subramanian rules, it will be an early data point on how much protection newsgathering gets when the government wants to know who talked.

US judge to weigh New York Times subpoenas over Trump plane reporting | Reuters

The teenager at the center of a closely watched lawsuit blaming social media for his depression and anxiety has dropped his claims against Meta just days before trial. The plaintiff, a 15-year-old known in court papers as R.K.C., had originally sued four companies—Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram, Snap’s Snapchat, and ByteDance’s TikTok—alleging their platforms were engineered to be addictive and harmed his mental health. YouTube, TikTok, and Snap all reached confidential settlements earlier, which would have left Meta as the lone defendant when the case went before a Los Angeles jury on July 27. Instead, R.K.C. withdrew, ending the case. Here’s why this matters beyond one teenager. His was a “bellwether” case—one of a small set of representative lawsuits chosen from a huge pool of similar claims and tried first, so both sides can see how juries react and use those signals to gauge settlement values across the whole litigation. When a marquee bellwether evaporates right before trial, it sends a message, though an ambiguous one: it could reflect a quiet settlement, a weakness in this particular plaintiff’s proof, or simply strategic repositioning. The significance is that the sprawling social-media-harm litigation against these platforms rolls on, but this particular test balloon won’t be inflated—depriving both the companies and the thousands of other plaintiffs of a data point they were watching closely.

Teen plaintiff suing Meta over mental health harms drops his claims against company days before trial | Reuters

A federal judge has cast serious doubt on roughly 69,000 lawsuits claiming that Johnson & Johnson’s talc products caused ovarian cancer, warning the plaintiffs they must come forward with better evidence or risk having their cases dismissed. U.S. Magistrate Judge Rukhsanah Singh in Trenton, New Jersey, zeroed in on a problem at the heart of the litigation: causation. In a mass tort like this, plaintiffs generally have to show not just that a product can cause harm in the abstract—”general causation”—but that it caused this particular plaintiff’s disease—”specific causation.” Judge Singh noted that two of the plaintiffs’ own expert witnesses, testifying in preparation for a set of bellwether trials, conceded they could not rule out other possible causes of the women’s cancers. That’s a serious admission, because it goes to whether the experts can offer an opinion that’s admissible at all under the rules that make judges the “gatekeepers” of scientific testimony. If you’ve been listening, this should ring a bell—it’s the same expert-gatekeeping battleground we saw in the Tylenol-autism case, just cutting the other direction. Here the judge ordered plaintiffs to explain, by November 19, why their cases shouldn’t be tossed for lack of an admissible expert opinion tying J&J’s talc to their specific cancers. The significance is that after years of litigation, settlements, and failed bankruptcy maneuvers, the whole edifice of these 69,000 claims may hinge on a question of scientific proof—and the judge just signaled the plaintiffs have a real problem.

US judge casts doubt on 69,000 cases alleging J&J talc caused cancer | Reuters

And finally, in a piece I wrote for Forbes this week, I make an argument that runs underneath a lot of the tax stories we’ve covered lately: the tax code is only as real as its enforcement. My core claim is that defunding the IRS doesn’t actually shrink the tax code—it quietly splits it into two.

Here’s the framing I start with. Washington has a strange way of talking about tax enforcement. Money to help the IRS collect taxes that are already legally owed gets described as spending, waste, or bureaucratic excess—but when Congress cuts that funding and less revenue comes in, the shortfall gets treated like weather, as if it just happened. I think that’s exactly backwards. Congress can write whatever rates, deductions, partnership rules, and anti-abuse provisions it likes, but without skilled auditors and functioning technology, a big chunk of those rules becomes purely aspirational.

And crucially, that aspiration isn’t evenly distributed. For most wage earners, there’s almost no room to maneuver: your income is reported by your employer, your taxes are withheld before you ever see the paycheck, and a computer can flag a mismatch without a human ever looking at your return. But wealthier filers and large businesses often operate through partnerships, closely held entities, cross-border transactions, and complex securities arrangements that take specialized expertise and real time to unwind. So my point is that defunding the IRS doesn’t create a smaller tax code—it creates two codes: a statutory, basically inescapable one for people whose income is visible, and a negotiated one for people whose finances are complicated enough to delay, obscure, or contest what they owe. Strip out the enforcement capacity, and the nominal rule stays on the books while its practical effect on the highest earners quietly weakens. That’s regressive—a backdoor tax cut for the taxpayers best positioned to resist enforcement.

There’s a new bill, the Stop CHEATERS Act, that would restore enforcement funding, and I think its sponsors are right about the underlying problem. But I argue they should retire the “fair share” language they’ve wrapped around it. “Fair share” is subjective—reasonable people can argue forever about whether capital gains should get preferential treatment or whether the top rate is too high or too low, and those are legitimate legislative questions. But that’s not the issue here. Congress already wrote the laws; taxpayers are already obligated to follow them. The case for funding the IRS isn’t about inventing a new standard of fairness after the fact—it’s about consistently administering the standards we already have. By leaning on “fair share,” Democrats risk making basic enforcement sound like a partisan redistribution project when the stronger, harder-to-dismiss argument is simply this: if Congress imposes a tax, the government should be funded well enough to collect it. Anything less isn’t restraint or a considered policy choice—it’s a quiet exemption for those who can afford to fight.

The Tax Code Is Only As Real As Its Enforcement | Forbes