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Assessing Non-Packing Rationales For Increasing the Size of the Supreme Court

2026-06-12T23:08:20Z

The Supreme Court Justices (2023). (Pool/ABACA/Newscom)

In a recent Lawfare article I outlined the case against "packing" the Supreme Court, and explained why the Court's recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais doesn't justify such a measure. Court-packing is generally understood as an attempt to alter the Supreme Court's ideological balance by increasing the number of justices. Thus, most current Democratic proposals would transform the current 6-3 conservative majority on the Court into a 7-6 progressive majority, by adding four justices.

But there are various non-packing rationales for increasing the number of Supreme Court justices. I sometimes see them brought in response to my criticisms of court-packing. In this post, I assess the most common of these arguments. In general, I think they are relatively weak. But, to the extent they have merit, they could potentially be addressed without packing the court, by means that ensure the new - larger court - would have roughly the same ideological balance as the old one. That would prevent the slippery slope escalation caused by court-packing would be likely to lead to destruction of judicial review. If you want to expand the Court, but oppose such compromise measures, that's a strong sign that court-packing - not these other issues - is your main objective.

If your main reason for wanting to expand the court is to change its ideological balance, the points made in this post are unlikely to sway you (check out my various critiques of court-packing instead!). But if you do care about these other issues, read on.

The most often heard non-packing justification for increasing the size of the Court is the idea that we need to have thirteen justices because we now have thirteen appellate circuit courts. Thus, we should have one Supreme Court justice per circuit, as was the norm throughout much of the nineteenth century. For example, potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg recently stated that "Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that there have to be nine Supreme Court justices… It just takes a readiness to set up a court that fits this country. We could have 13 seats matching the district structure of the federal judiciary."

The problem with this argument is that, as Josh Braver documents in an important article, the nineteenth century expansions of the size of the Supreme Court to match the number of circuits was primarily a result of the policy of "circuit riding," under which Supreme Court justices routinely heard cases as circuit judges on "their" lower court. Circuit riding was a difficult and time-consuming responsibility, and one justice could not readily do it for two circuit at once (especially given relatively slow nineteenth century transportation). But mandatory circuit riding was abolished by Congress in 1891. Today, the supervisory responsibilities of Supreme Court justices with respect to their assigned circuit courts are fairly minimal. Thus, it is not a great imposition for some of the justices to have to oversee two or more circuits rather than just one one.

Currently, two justices - Alito and Kavanaugh - each oversee two circuits, while Chief Justice Roberts handles three. I am skeptical either that this is an excessive burden on these justices or that it gives them way too much power relative to the other six. But if you disagree, there's a simple solution that does not create opportunities for court-packing: increase the number of justices to 13 (one per circuit), but let the party that does not control the White House select two of them. In that way, both the conservative and liberal blocs on the Court would add the same number of justices.Thus, no packing, and no slippery slope escalation.

There may be some moderately complicated political maneuvering required to do this; the president and his party would have to credibly commit to nominating and confirming two justices chosen by the "out" party. But such political deal-making is common place. One way to do it would be for the president and the opposition party to agree on the four names in advance, and include a provision in the expansion law that ensures it will only go into force if all four of these individuals are nominated and duly confirmed within a certain period of time (say, within one year of the law's enactment).

A second possible non-packing rationale for court expansion is the idea that we need more justices so the Supreme Court can hear more cases. Justice Brett Kavanaugh and a number of outside critics of the Court believe it hears way too few cases, and should take many more. Perhaps they are right. I don't have a strong view about what the optimal total number of Supreme Court cases, though there are certainly some specific areas where I would like to see the justices do more (e.g. - constitutional property rights cases).

But even if Court should take more cases, it is not clear that it needs more justices to do so. The Court currently hears only about fifty to sixty cases on the regular docket per year, including just 56 last year (not counting "shadow docket" cases that don't get full briefing and oral argument). But, as recently as the early 1980s, it was hearing 160 cases per year. And there were only nine justices then, too! Hearing more cases would actually be easier today than it was then, since modern technology (most notably specialized electronic databases and now AI) makes it easier to quickly research and analyze relevant legal issues.

The reason why the Court hears so few cases is not because we have too few justices, but because the justices have near-total control over their docket, and (with, perhaps, a few exceptions) they don't want to take more. There is no guarantee this would change merely by increasing the size of the Court. The new justices may be happy hearing relatively few cases, just like the current ones. Fewer cases means more free time and longer summer vacations! Who wouldn't want that?

If Congress wants the justices to hear more cases, it could more effectively achieve that goal by increasing the scope of the Court's mandatory jurisdiction. Before the enactment of the Judges Act of 1925, the Supreme Court had a sizable mandatory jurisdiction, and thereby heard more cases. Congress could repeal or modify that legislation, thereby increasing the justices' workload.

There is some irony here. If, like many left-liberals, you think the Court does a terrible job on most important cases, you may not actually want them to hear more! Perhaps it would be better if they decided even fewer issues, thereby leaving more under the control of lower federal courts (which are, on average, somewhat more liberal than the present Supreme Court majority).

Even if you do want the Court to hear more cases, and you are persuaded that increasing the number of justices is the best way to achieve that result, it can be accomplished without changing the Court's ideological balance. Simply adopt the ideologically balanced expansion outlined above. If you think 13 justices are not enough, the same approach can be used to increase to 15 or even more (with 15, the president's party and the opposition party would each get to choose three new justices).

Finally, it is sometimes argued that a larger court would lead to a higher quality of deliberation and perhaps a greater diversity of experience among the justices. I am by no means sure this is true. For example, it does not seem like bigger state supreme courts make better decisions, on average, than smaller ones. The same is true for en banc circuit court rulings in circuits with more judges, as opposed to those on circuits with fewer judges. At present, the total number of judges in a circuit varies from six in the First Circuit, all the way up to 29 on the Ninth. I see little, if any, correlation between numbers and quality here.

On the other hand, I am also not certain that nine is the optimal number of justices, as opposed to 11, 13, or 15. Once again, however, the number can be increased without changing the ideological balance, by the procedure already described.

As noted in my Lawfare article and other writings, I am far from an uncritical admirer of the current majority on the Court, and I think they get some important issues wrong. I oppose court-packing because it would make things much worse than they are now, not because the status quo is anywhere near ideal. I also favor a number of reforms that do not require changing the number of justices, most notably term limits.

I am not endorsing the status quo here. This post merely shows that we probably don't need to expand the size of the court to achieve various other improvements in the Court's work product. And to the extent that expansion is desirable, it can and should be done without creating opportunities for court-packing.

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Cultural Difference "Cannot Be Accepted as a Reason to Mitigate" Ethiopian-Born Lawyer's Dishonesty-Related Misconduct

2026-06-12T21:27:05Z

From the long (20K-word) decision of the Washington Supreme Court Thursday in In the Matter of Disciplinary Proceeding Against Feyissa, written by Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud:

After a 12-day disciplinary hearing, a hearing officer (HO) concluded that Shakespear N. Feyissa committed six counts of misconduct. The presumptive sanction for most of those counts was disbarment…. The Disciplinary Board (Board) of the Washington State Bar Association (Bar) unanimously adopted the HO's disbarment recommendation. Feyissa appeals….

Attorney Shakespear N. Feyissa was born in Ethiopia. He immigrated to the United States at around age 17….

There's a lot going on in the case, and you can read it for yourself here. But here's one brief passage that particularly struck me:

Feyissa claims that the HO refused to consider cultural differences. But the record contradicts that assertion ….

As stated above, Feyissa's friend testified about cultural differences between Ethiopian and Western cultures relating to norms in negotiations. The witness opined that "in Ethiopia, 'If you tell a lie but everybody's happy, then you didn't do anything wrong.'"

The HO clearly did not refuse to consider this testimony or to evaluate its impact on the case, as evidenced by her conclusion of law on the issue; the HO made the sustainable legal conclusion that this cultural difference "does not exempt Respondent from his professional obligations under the RPCs, and thus cannot be accepted as a reason to mitigate Respondent's conduct as a lawyer."

Here are the passages from Feyissa's counsel's briefs that raise the argument to which the supreme court was apparently referring:

The complaint also alleged that Mr. Feyissa made false statements in negotiating on his clients' behalf. As explained below, due to the very different set of norms in Ethiopian culture surrounding negotiations, he did not understand the limits of bluffing and puffery in negotiations, and made the false statements solely to get his clients more money. Mr. Feyissa admitted the false statements for which he was responsible, stopped engaging in that practice after receiving the grievance; and expressed regret for his conduct during the hearing…..

[T]he Hearing Officer refused to consider evidence that in Mr. Feyissa's culture, telling lies is accepted as long as it makes other happy and that in negotiations, both sides understand that the other will exaggerate and twist the truth….

The Hearing Officer also erred by refusing to consider Mr. Feyissa's cultural background in finding that the false statements "seriously adversely reflected on his fitness to practice," wrongly concluding that because his cultural background did not "exempt Respondent" from the RPCs, it should not be considered at all. Mr. Feyissa never asserted that he was exempt from the RPCs. Instead, the context for the misstatements is critical in evaluating whether the misrepresentations to third parties seriously adversely reflected on his fitness to practice. As discussed above, there was uncontested evidence that false statements are acceptable in negotiations in Ethiopian culture. Mr. Feyissa now understands that the rules governing his conduct in negotiations and agrees that he did not comply with the RPCs, but the reason he thought he was allowed to make such statements needs to be considered when determining the degree to which his conduct reflected on his fitness to practice….

ODC criticizes Mr. Feyissa's counsel for asking race-related questions and claims that "[t]he Hearing Officer's explicit rejection of Respondent's attempt to inject race into the proceeding makes clear that the Hearing Officer had foreclosed any consideration of race as a factor in this case and undercuts the claim that the decision was tainted by racial bias." That assertion is based on Respondent counsel attempting to impeach Dr. Britton after ODC opened the door by eliciting demonstrably false testimony that he and Mr. Feyissa had a similar skin tone. The Hearing Officer's refusal to permit impeachment based on race-related testimony on direct is itself a potential instance of implicit racism. As discussed in the Opening Brief …, color-blindness is a contemporary form of racism. That is further reflected in the Hearing Officer's refusal to consider evidence that falsehoods in negotiations are acceptable in Mr. Feyissa's culture, which she wrongly viewed as using "cultural background [to] exempt Respondent from his professional obligations under the RPCs."

Just to be clear, I have no reason to think that Ethiopians are indeed culturally more open to lying than Westerners in negotiations; of course, many Westerners lie about all sorts of things, including during negotiations; and the rules related to honesty in negotiation can be complex—to quote the comments to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, for instance,

Under generally accepted conventions in negotiation, certain types of statements ordinarily are not taken as statements of material fact [as to which a duty of honesty applies]. Estimates of price or value placed on the subject of a transaction and a party's intentions as to an acceptable settlement of a claim are ordinarily in this category, and so is the existence of an undisclosed principal except where nondisclosure of the principal would constitute fraud.

But even if Feyissa's counsel was correct that Ethiopian norms related to honesty in negotiation are different here, I agree with the hearing officer that this shouldn't be seen as a mitigating factor here.

The post Cultural Difference "Cannot Be Accepted as a Reason to Mitigate" Ethiopian-Born Lawyer's Dishonesty-Related Misconduct appeared first on Reason.com.

Terrorists and Criminals Reportedly Got $37.5 Billion From COVID Relief and Other U.K. Aid Programs

2026-06-12T21:05:50Z

From 2015 to 2021, more than 28 billion pounds (about $37.5 billion) was given to terrorists and hostile states by the British government, according to The Telegraph.

As the outlet reports, a secret government dossier shows more than 28 billion pounds of spending ended up in the hands of terrorist groups and other national security threats. Sources told The Telegraph that an organized crime network linked to Eastern Europe made a "concerted effort to obtain British public funds."

The document includes details of COVID loans being sent to Islamic State group terrorists, grants given to companies linked to the Russian government, and research spending on companies associated with the Chinese military. The report also outlines instances of human traffickers claiming government benefits and COVID relief grants being channeled to the Islamic State in Syria.

Officials have reportedly known the scathing details of the dossier—which was commissioned by security officials in 2023 after reports emerged of widespread fraud in the government's pandemic-era rescue packages—for years. The secret dossier "was never made public to save the government from the political embarrassment of revealing the huge scale of misdirected funds," according to the sources who spoke to The Telegraph.

This isn't the first report on government waste during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2025, the British government published a report to Parliament which found that 10.9 billion pounds (about $14.6 billion) of taxpayer money had been lost to "fraud and error" during the pandemic response. An estimated 324 million pounds ($434 million) of personal protective equipment spending was fraudulent. Meanwhile, the Bounce Back Loan Scheme issued 1.5 million loans worth 46.5 billion pounds ($62.3 billion), with an estimated 2.8 billion pounds ($3.75 billion) lost to fraud and error. That report found that "inadequate checks facilitated significant volumes of fraudulent applications," and that loans were dished out to businesses, but "no checks were made."

Officials knew of the risks associated with handing out such large sums of money from the start. That report said that they "lacked the necessary capabilities to effectively manage the fraud and error risks associated with a substantial loan portfolio," and that they "recognised the high fraud risk."

The secret dossier was compiled by analyzing government grants awarded between 2015 and 2021, a period in which even billions in misdirected funds represented only a fraction of the British state's vast aid expenditure. During this period, Britain had one of the highest foreign aid budgets in the world, committing to 0.7 percent of gross national income toward foreign aid. Under the statutory target, foreign aid spending rose from 12.1 billion pounds (about $16.2 billion) in 2015 to 15.2 billion pounds (about $20.4 billion) in 2019, before falling to 11.4 billion pounds (about $15.3 billion) in 2021 after the government reduced the target to 0.5 percent of gross national income. Across the seven-year period, Britain spent roughly 95 billion pounds (about $127.4 billion) on foreign aid.

Indeed, wasteful spending under the guise of foreign aid is not a new phenomenon. As one report from the Institute of Economic Affairs, a British free market think tank, details, the government has spent foreign aid in regions that are wealthier than parts of Britain itself. The richest region that received foreign aid, Ordos in China, was richer than 69 regions in Britain. Projects funded include a temporary cycle lane in Mexico City and an all-female traditional Chinese opera in Shanghai.

However, The Telegraph's reporting reveals that the government has now well and truly outdone itself. The government does not just fund frivolous projects but also directly finances fraudsters, gangsters, terrorists, and hostile regimes. Looks like a government big enough to spend billions in the name of saving the world is also foolish enough to hand that money to some of the worst people in it.

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"Eight Conspirators … Threatened University of Michigan Officials, Businesses, and the Jewish Federation"

2026-06-12T19:54:04Z

From a Justice Department press release Wednesday:

"… In the dead of night, masked and hooded defendants allegedly threw noxious chemicals through the windows of families' homes and taped demand letters to their front doors….," said Jennifer Runyan, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Detroit Field Office.

After the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, the defendants and unindicted conspirators enacted a series of coordinated "actions" threatening University of Michigan leaders, law enforcement, and businesses. Seemingly prompted by their perception of the University of Michigan's and other victims' purported financial support of Israel, the conspirators insisted publicly that they "must escalate, mobilize, and organize to demand divestment by any means necessary."

According to the indictment, on October 20, 2023, the defendants publicly posted a list of demands on social media directed at University of Michigan leadership. Among the demands, they required the University to make a "full and complete divestment" from Israel and any businesses supporting Israel. Unsatisfied by the University's response, the defendants "prepared to take action" against the leadership by what they called "autonomous actions," which included forcibly entering and occupying University of Michigan buildings, defacing buildings, and blocking and disrupting events on campus. They also posted threats on the internet that included photos of their "autonomous actions." …

The defendants also allegedly held meetings to identify targets of their "autonomous actions." They used the internet to research personal addresses, photographs, political and social connections, business ownership, and other personal details of the targets.

They also discussed methods by which to harm the targets and their families, including poison, bombs, and psychological torture. For example, on May 21, 2024, [defendant Paige Elizabeth] Feyock and then-medical student [defendant Ahmet Kerem] Korkaya agreed to "kill," "torment," and "terrorize" their targets and families. Referring to one victim, Korkaya stated his "entire family" was on his "hit list" Feyock added that they should "get" the "kids" of two victims. Korkaya, referring to another victim, stated, "I'm gonna be the dirtiest f------- doctor ever / I'm gonna be [victim's] doctor / poison her a-- slowly." Feyock agreed, "We need people following [victim] / get into that house then burn it down."

As part of the conspiracy, the defendants are alleged to have traveled at night to the targeted homes and businesses. They damaged and defaced homes and businesses with spray-painted messages, threats, and symbols, including inverted triangles, which Hamas has used in its military videos to mark targets for death; red handprints, which Hamas has used to symbolize the Ramallah Lynching of 2000 and the murder of two Israeli military reservists during the Second Intifada; and phrases such as "INTIFADA" and "DIVEST NOW." The defendants also left demand notes containing additional threats, caulked doors shut, bike-locked entryways, broke windows, and threw glass jars filled with butyric acid and dye into the homes. The defendants took photographs of the destruction and posted the photos online with "official statements" and additional warnings and threats, such as "you cannot hide" and "we only come back stronger."

Below are photos of the alleged threats spray-painted on the Jewish Federation Building on the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, as well as two other businesses.

The indictment also charges Zainab Aliasgar Hakim and … Feyock with witness intimidation. In July and August 2024, Hakim and Feyock devised a plan to confront the victim, a University of Michigan student whom they believed may have been cooperating with federal authorities. They planned to convince the victim not to provide information about the defendants' criminal activities.

Hakim warned that the victim was "going to send us to federal prison." Feyock explained, "we have to do something about [victim] / [victim] is actually a liability / the fact that [victim] is naming you to [unindicted conspirator] is a major issue." Feyock told other conspirators that the victim "has to be neutralized" and that she and Hakim were going to "strip search" the victim "to see if he is wearing a wire / not taking no chances with him." Hakim and Feyock confronted the victim on August 6, 2024, and afterward, Feyock told another conspirator that the victim "knows not to talk about [the autonomous actions]."

Alexander Matthew Sepulveda is also charged in the indictment with destruction of property to prevent seizure. According to the indictment, Sepulveda and Jonathan Hongru Zou were involved in an "autonomous action" at the home of the University of Michigan's Provost. Sepulveda and Zou threw two glass jars filled with a blue substance and food compost through a window of the Provost's home. They also spray painted the home with inverted red triangles and phrases including "Divest" and "Free Palestine." …

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Judge Ross Did Not Even Sign Her First Apology Letter

2026-06-12T19:36:13Z

This story keeps getting weirder. @Jimmy_Esq flags the fact that Judge Ross writes like a toddler. The problem is worse.

Here is her signature on the May 29 letter:

That is fourth grade penmanship.

And here is her signature on the June 11 letter:

That is an adult's signature.

And here is Ross's digital signature from the Raffensperger case (an order she certainly didn't read):

The signatures on May 29 and June 11 are totally different. The May 29 signature includes "Judge" as a her first name. Who does that?? In the second letter has initial "E."

The letters from June 11 are far more angular, and match the type of letter in her standard digital signature. I realize I have some expertise in authenticating the provenance of Alexander Hamilton's signatures, but this one wasn't too hard.

I suspect Judge Ross didn't even sign her first, completely unremorseful letter. She couldn't even bring herself to put her name on it. It is clear she asked some subordinate to sign it for her, and that person actually signed it "Judge Ross."

Judge Ross should be ashamed of herself. She materially breached the terms of her private reprimand many times over. Impeach her.

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Short Circuit: An inexhaustive weekly compendium of rulings from the federal courts of appeal

2026-06-12T16:20:07Z

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.

New case! Art Yatsko wants to build a modest home in North Port, Fla. for his retirement. And though his lot is in a neighborhood comprised entirely of single-family homes, the city recently rezoned the area to promote commercial uses. Art could build a shooting range or a nightclub, or he could seek permission to build a duplex, but he is absolutely downright forbidden from building a single-family home. Which is arbitrary, irrational, and dishonorable, so Art has teamed up with IJ to sue. Click here to learn more.

New on the Short Circuit podcast: Suing a probation officer and moth-eaten precedent.

This Third Circuit case has a lot of familiar parts: a pro se litigant squaring off against gov't lawyers, complaints of constitutionally insufficient notice, and ultimately a finding of civil contempt. Except here it's the gov't arguing that the pro se party didn't provide enough notice, and let's just say the contempt order doesn't run against the guy you all thought it would.
Federal inmate is beaten to death by other inmates; despite emergency alarm's being triggered and live video footage of dodgy activity, guards inexplicably fail to spring into action until hours after he died. Third Circuit (unpublished): The Bureau of Prisons has an administrative-remedy program to deal with prisoners' grievances, which means that we courts shouldn't imply a right to bring a constitutional claim under Bivens. What? Dead inmates can't actually use the administrative-remedy program? Because they're dead? No matter. Case dismissed.
Fifth Circuit (2022): The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act of 2020 violates the nondelegation doctrine! Fifth Circuit (2024): And intervening amendments to the statute have fixed exactly half of the problem! SCOTUS (2025): Maybe give that another look? Fifth Circuit (this week): Nope. Just half!
Dallas police respond to couple sleeping in their van with lights, sirens, and shouting commands. The driver reverses slowly and hits a cop car. Police respond by opening fire, killing the driver and injuring the passenger. An officer who shot a dozen times was fired, indicted (the first Dallas cop in more than 40 years); a jury acquitted him. Fifth Circuit (2024, unpublished): Can't sue the officers, but maybe the city? Fifth Circuit (2026, unpublished): Can't sue the city, either.
We don't know much about the unsuccessful doggie-daycare plaintiff in this unpublished Fifth Circuit opinion, but if he didn't want gov't officials telling him what to do, he probably shouldn't have opened his business in the City of Bossier City. (We know, the locals don't pronounce it like that. Let us have our fun.)
When a district court denies a defendant's request for qualified immunity, the defendant gets a special right of interlocutory appeal (which can delay litigation for months). But what if the district court just doesn't mention the request for qualified immunity at all? That triggers the same appeal right as a denial would, says the Fifth Circuit.
A "heckler's veto" is when the gov't silences speech because of the hostile reaction of listeners. And, per the Sixth Circuit, it remains as unconstitutional in limited public forums as it is in traditional public forums. Thus, a Xenia, Ohio school board member should not have yoinked the microphone from a speaker who was expressing her views regarding the school district's alleged teaching of critical race theory.
The Kenosha County, Wisc. jail has long contracted with federal agencies to house immigrants who are civilly detained pending hearings or removal. While in custody, the detainees are required to perform unpaid custodial work, on pain of discipline like loss of phone privileges or solitary confinement. A violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1589, which provides a civil damages remedy for people who are forced to provide labor or services by means of physical restraint or threatened abuse of legal process? Jail: Come on, guys. That statute's meant to deal with human traffickers, not righteous gaolers like us. Seventh Circuit: It's actually not so limited. Case undismissed.
Under Indiana law, members of the public may only attend executions if they are invited by the condemned inmate or are immediate family members of the victim. Reporters sue, arguing that the First Amendment protects their right of access to gov't proceedings. Seventh Circuit (over a dissent): That applies to trials, not executions, and the law treats members of the press just like everyone else. No First Amendment violation.
Allegation: Prison guards at Moberly, Mo. facility are supposed to check on certain inmates every 20 minutes. These guards didn't, and an inmate committed suicide by hanging. District court: The guards are not shielded from suit by state-law official immunity because the checks are a mandatory, rote task. Eighth Circuit: Reversed. The checks are discretionary because, if they had done them, then they would have had discretion in assessing the inmate's condition and any steps to take.
After 32 years in prison, man is exonerated of murder; the prosecution's star witness was an accomplice to the actual shooter and, in exchange for full immunity, adopted the story San Francisco investigators fed him. Ninth Circuit: The man's fabrication-of-evidence and malicious-prosecution claims can proceed. Dissent: Even if his rights were violated, that wasn't clearly established in 1990.
Pro se Kansas prisoner: I was subject to excessive force during a medical emergency. Defendants: Qualified and sovereign immunity, please. District court: Happy to consider it, but please comply with the page limits for your motion. Defendants: No, we'd rather appeal. Tenth Circuit: Guys, official immunities may give gov't defendants lots of chances for interlocutory appeals, but not just because you don't want to follow the rules. Appeal dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.
This case demonstrates the complexity of trying a criminal case and the many legal fights that happen in the lead up to and during trial. Unfortunately for the crooked federal agent convicted of participating in an oxycodone-trafficking conspiracy, the Eleventh Circuit doesn't find any of those issues sufficient to disturb his conviction or sentence.
Florida man sues, arguing that "any use of city or state tax dollars supporting a public place with a Confederate name—streets, schools, and the like—violates his statutory and constitutional rights." Eleventh Circuit: "His disgust, no matter how deep and how sincere, is not the kind of injury that can give rise to a lawsuit."
And in en banc news, the Ninth Circuit will reconsider its decision that celebrity tattoo artist Kat Von D is off the hook for copyright infringement for her skillful recreations of Jeff Sedlick's famous photo of Miles Davis on a friend's arm. The earlier panel had affirmed a California jury's ruling that the tattoo was not "substantially similar" to the photo under the Ninth Circuit's "intrinsic test" for substantial similarity, which looks to the jury's subjective interpretation of the overall concept and feel.

New case! North Dakota is one of only two states that require every private school teacher to get a license. And then on top of that, N.D. officials dictate which courses and grade levels teachers are allowed to teach. Obtaining a license is onerous, time consuming, and expensive. And it means that private schools like IJ client Capstone Classical Academy can't hire teachers they know to be perfectly well qualified. "Private schools across the state are turning away Ph.D.s, working professionals, and accomplished educators from other states because none of them happen to hold North Dakota's particular paper credential," says IJ Senior Attorney Michael Bindas. "That isn't a recipe for quality—it's a barrier to it, especially in a state that is already finding it hard to attract and keep great teachers." Click here to learn more.

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Elon Musk Becomes the World's First Trillionaire. Is That Such a Bad Thing?

2026-06-12T21:58:20Z

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, extended his lead by becoming the first trillionaire in world history. Many progressives have bemoaned this result for years, but is there really anything to fear?

The space exploration company SpaceX went public this week, announcing on Thursday an initial price of $135 per share. Musk, the founder, CEO, chief technology officer, and chairman of the board, "holds roughly half of the company's stock, including shares that he might earn far in the future tied to accomplishments such as shooting computer data centers into space and creating a human settlement on Mars," Shira Ovide and Faiz Siddiqui report at The Washington Post. "Those Musk shares in SpaceX are worth about $867 billion at Thursday's IPO price. Combined with the chunk of the automaker Tesla that also belongs to Musk, his stock in the two companies is valued at more than $1.1 trillion combined."

The company's stock opened at $150 and hit $170 after trading began, putting Musk comfortably above the trillion-dollar mark even without the bonus shares tied to space colonization.

The news was hardly a surprise. Musk even referred to himself as a trillionaire in March, in a cheeky reply to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) on X—the platform formerly known as Twitter before Musk bought it outright in 2022.

Of course, Musk does not actually have $1 trillion in checking and savings—he is a trillionaire on paper, and he will only remain one as long as both SpaceX and Tesla maintain healthy stock prices.

Still, it represents a significant milestone in the history of human achievement.

In fact, this has been a long time coming, for Musk or anyone. As Chase Peterson-Withorn notes at Forbes, it took more than a century after the world's first millionaire to crown its first billionaire, with the first trillionaire coming just over 100 years after that.

There was speculation in 2020 that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos could become the first trillionaire when COVID-19 lockdowns sparked a massive uptick in online ordering. Online commenters were unenthused at the prospect, though one wonders how many of them spent the early days of the pandemic stocking up on toilet paper and generic Robitussin.

Ultimately, Bezos' gains leveled off, and his wealth currently sits at a paltry-only-by-comparison $262 billion.

At least as far back as 2021, analysts at Morgan Stanley suggested not only that Musk could become the first trillionaire, but that it would come from SpaceX.

Of course, progressives have blanched at the idea of a single person controlling that much wealth.

"This is not only grossly immoral. It is insane economics," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) wrote in September, when reports suggested Musk's Tesla compensation package could push him above billionaire status. "No society can survive when one man becomes a trillionaire while the working class struggles to survive. This cannot stand."

Earlier this year, Sanders proposed an annual 5 percent wealth tax on U.S. billionaires.

Last month, Ocasio-Cortez declared that no billionaire becomes one honorably: "You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they're worth, but you can't earn that."

It's simply impossible, per Ocasio-Cortez, that any person could make something—a product, a service, an experience—that creates billions of dollars of value for consumers, without somebody else being worse off as a result.

But SpaceX has pioneered innovations in space travel that very recently seemed like science fiction. "SpaceX's ability to lower launch costs by roughly 90 percent—through reusable first-stage boosters, but also a vertically integrated manufacturing process and a high-cadence flight rate—is mega innovation equal to any of the past quarter century," writes James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute. "That massive cost decline, with another 90 percent or more potentially on the way through full reusability, has fundamentally altered the economics of space and finally made possible the dreams of the original Space Age: orbital cities, deep-space habitats, space-based solar, asteroid mining."

Besides, economics is not zero-sum. Musk's balance sheet growing to a trillion dollars does not mean other people lose money; it means the economy as a whole is growing.

And growing economies are good for everybody, not just the uberwealthy: Between 1990 and 2025, the global share of people living in "extreme poverty" declined by nearly two-thirds, from 2.31 billion to 808 million, even as the global population increased by nearly 3 billion—an accomplishment J.D. Tuccille called "nothing short of miraculous." It's not a coincidence that over that same period of time, global gross domestic product (GDP) roughly quadrupled, boosting countless thousandaires into millionaires and millionaires into billionaires in the process.

This is not to say Musk and his wealth are completely beyond criticism. After all, despite talking a big game about the government butting out of business affairs, his companies have benefited from tens of billions of dollars in government contracts. Just last month, SpaceX won a $4 billion contract with the Space Force.

But it remains the case that many companies, including SpaceX, contribute to the economy by creating a product that others are willing to pay for, and there's nothing exploitative about that.

Even some of the cynics currently naysaying about Musk have shown a bit of hypocrisy on the subject.

Sanders long railed against "millionaires and billionaires," making them a target of his 2016 presidential campaign. But when he ran again in 2020, Sanders suddenly cut the phrase in half, to just "billionaires."

Perhaps not unrelated is the fact that in the intervening years, Sanders himself became a millionaire.

The post Elon Musk Becomes the World's First Trillionaire. Is That Such a Bad Thing? appeared first on Reason.com.

Blake Lively Entitled to Attorney Fees (But Not Punitive Damages) in Justin Baldoni et al.'s Libel Lawsuit Against Her

2026-06-12T18:38:18Z

Some excerpts from Judge Lewis Liman (S.D.N.Y.) long opinion today in Wayfarer Studios LLC v. Lively:

[Blake] Lively filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Department ("CRD") against [Justin] Baldoni and his co-defendants, the Wayfarer Parties, alleging, among other things, that Baldoni and others sexually harassed her on the set of the Film {It Ends With Us} and that the Wayfarer Parties retaliated against her for raising complaints about that harassment by launching a smear campaign to tarnish her reputation….

Lively then sued over that alleged behavior, and the Wayfarer Parties "counter-sued, asserting claims, including defamation, against Lively and others for making statements that the Wayfarer Parties" engaged in or tolerated "sexually inappropriate conduct" or retaliation. The Court rejected that counterclaim, on the grounds that

"the fair report privilege … precluded the Wayfarer Parties from bringing a defamation claim against Lively for providing a copy of her CRD complaint to the New York Times,"
"the Wayfarer Parties had insufficiently alleged that text messages Lively may have provided to the Times were defamatory," and that
they hadn't adequately alleged "that Lively was responsible for any statements made by her husband Ryan Reynolds" "or publicist Leslie Sloane."

In May, the parties settled all their claims, but expressly left open whether Lively can recover attorney fees and damages under Cal. Civil Code § 47.1. (They also waived their right to appeal from any such determination.)

Section 47.1 … [seeks] to shield "survivors of sexual assault, harassment, and discrimination from defamation lawsuits"—and, in particular, the burdensome and invasive discovery process those lawsuits often entail—"by clarifying that claims made in good faith are a form of protected speech." [It also seeks] to compensate survivors for successfully defending themselves against meritless and retaliatory defamation suits by permitting them to recover attorneys' fees and damages incurred as a result of the suits.

To accomplish these goals, the law establishes that "[a] communication made by an individual, without malice, regarding an incident of sexual assault, harassment, or discrimination is privileged under Section 47." (Section 47 provides for a number of other defamation privileges, including the fair report privilege.)

Section 47.1 provides that prevailing defendants in such defamation cases (and recall that Lively was in effect a defendant as to the counterclaims) are entitled to reasonable attorney's fees as well as treble and punitive damages.

The court held that, given Lively's choosing to bring the motion under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d), the "treble and punitive damages" aspect of § 47.1 is unavailable in this case:

Rule 54(d) is titled "Costs; Attorney's Fees," and it discusses certain procedures for the award of those two categories of expenses. It does not mention "damages"—compensatory, treble, punitive, or otherwise….

That treble and punitive damages cannot be sought through the procedural vehicle of a Rule 54(d) motion finds further support from a reading of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure "as a whole." The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure establish that "[t]here is one form of action—the civil action." … "A civil action is commenced by filing a complaint with the court." That formal filing "trigger[s] the full array of legal, procedural, and evidentiary rules governing the process by which a court adjudicates the merits of a dispute."…

By seeking damages through Rule 54(d), Lively circumvents this web of procedures and processes designed for the orderly, just, and fair determination of civil claims in federal court. In essence, she seeks to pursue a kind of malicious prosecution or abuse of process claim … and to hold the Wayfarer Parties liable not only for actual damages, but to triple those damages and to impose additional punitive damages, all without the benefit of formal pleading, discovery, and dispositive motion practice in line with Rules 12(b) and 56.

Also lurking in the background is a potential conflict with the Seventh Amendment, which guarantees in federal court the right to a jury trial "in Suits at common law." To the extent a claim for damages under Section 47.1 resembles a kind of abuse of process or malicious prosecution claim, courts have held that "[a]n action for malicious prosecution falls well within the recognized forms of action at common law" for Seventh Amendment purposes….

It is understandable that Lively might attempt to shoehorn her damages claim into a Rule 54(d) motion. Litigation is costly, time consuming, and risky, and to the extent Section 47.1 is intended to remedy harms to defamation defendants as quickly, efficiently, and easily as possible, Rule 54(d)'s procedures—which permit fee liability and award determinations based upon mere motion and evidentiary hearing, present an alluring alternative to the normal arc of litigation. But those benefits cannot come at the expense of the rights of the defamation plaintiff….

But the court held Lively "is entitled to attorneys' fees and costs." It explained why that's consistent with federal procedures and with § 47.1, and also adds this about Wayfarer's First Amendment defense:

The First Amendment protects the rights of citizens to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. This includes petitioning courts for redress. The Noerr-Pennington doctrine stems from this principle. It stands for the proposition that "efforts to influence governmental action through litigation, lobbying, and the like" are "immunized from antitrust liability," "provided the activities are more than a mere 'sham.'" Courts have held that the doctrine is "relevant outside the context of antitrust actions." …

[But] "fee shifting is not civil liability within the meaning of the Noerr-Pennington doctrine." "[B]eing charged with the costs of a suit is not the same thing as being civilly liable for having filed the suit." "Fee shifting simply requires the party that creates the costs to bear them." At least with respect to fees, then, the Court finds the Wayfarer Parties' First Amendment concerns unfounded.

And the court had this to say on the merits of the § 47.1 claim:

[A] defamation defendant is entitled to recover fees and damages under Section 47.1 where: (1) they prevail in the action; (2) the communications at issue in the action conveyed factual information related to an incident of sexual assault, harassment, or discrimination that the individual personally experienced, including workplace harassment under FEHA; (3) the communications were made without malice; and (4) there is or was a reasonable basis to file a complaint regarding the assault, harassment, or discrimination….

[Section 47.1(c) requires that defendants] show that the information contained within the allegedly defamatory statement be the kind for which it would be reasonable to file a complaint. Put differently, Section 47.1(c) serves a gatekeeping function, ensuring that defendants do not unreasonably attempt to stretch the substance of the contested statements to fall within the purview of the statute.

It would be unreasonable, for example, to file a complaint of sexual harassment based on a single instance of vulgar language in the context of a comedy writer's room for an adult show with adult themes. Cf. Lyle v. Warner Bros. Television Prods. (Cal. 2006). A defamation defendant's statements about that experience therefore likely would not benefit from the Section 47.1 privilege. It would also be unreasonable to characterize a supervisor's comments about "bringing his 'guys' into the company" and his rejection of a single travel and expensive reimbursement request as "conduct based on sex or of a sexual nature." See Haberman v. Cengage Learning, Inc. (Cal. Ct. App. 2009). A defamation defendant's attempts to invoke Section 47.1 in that circumstance also likely would be rejected.

The Court need not explore the boundaries of the privilege and all the circumstances in which it might not apply, as it is clear here that the allegations contained with Lively's statements are the kinds for which it would be reasonable to file a complaint. To reiterate, the Wayfarer Parties do not dispute that the statements at issue are ones regarding sexual harassment or discrimination. Of course, they do so indirectly insofar as they dispute the truth of Lively's allegations. But they do not contest the categorical subject-matter match between the substance of her statements and Section 47.1….

The burden accordingly shifts to Wayfarer Parties to demonstrate that the statements were made with malice. {"The malice necessary to defeat a qualified privilege is 'actual malice[,]' which is established by a showing that the publication was motivated by hatred or ill will towards the plaintiff or by a showing that the defendant lacked reasonable grounds for belief in the truth of the publication and therefore acted in reckless disregard of the plaintiff's rights."} … And the Wayfarer Parties have provided little evidence in connection with the motion, and none establishing that Lively acted with malice….

The only evidence that the Wayfarer Parties have submitted in connection with the Section 47.1 motion which might arguably bear on Lively's malice comes from [Danny] Greenberg's deposition, in which he was questioned about a single message he sent in which he used the word "extortion" to "referenc[e] just cumulative behavior that both the studio and Wayfarer and Justin was having to manage." This evidence falls far short of satisfying the Wayfarer Parties' burden.

The testimony excerpts make only vague reference to "behavior" issues without specifying what exactly those issues were or the background surrounding them. There is no indication that Greenberg—who was Baldoni's talent agent at the time and who was proposing language for Baldoni to use in a letter to Sony Pictures Entertainment—was referring to Lively's complaints of sexual harassment, as opposed to something else. Indeed, the Wayfarer Parties' own briefing asserts that these comments were made in connection with Lively's "threats that she would not return to the set unless she was given control over the script and editing"—not that they were made in connection with false and malicious complaints of sexual harassment. Greenberg further added at his deposition that he did not "remember [his] state of mind when [he] wrote" the comment.

Without more, the Wayfarer Parties cannot carry their burden of defeating the Section 47.1 privilege. Lively is entitled to fees and costs.

The amount of fees will be determined later.

The post Blake Lively Entitled to Attorney Fees (But Not Punitive Damages) in Justin Baldoni et al.'s Libel Lawsuit Against Her appeared first on Reason.com.

‘Why Is America Hosting the World Cup If It Is So Hostile?’: Trump’s Border Crackdown Spoils Soccer Tournament

2026-06-12T18:59:30Z

It's strange behavior to throw a party and turn away guests at the door. The joint bid by the United States, Canada, and Mexico to host the FIFA World Cup—backed by President Donald Trump during his first term—had bragged about the ease of travel, calling North America "one of the top destinations in the world for international visitors."

But now that the soccer tournament is underway across North American cities, fans from the 48 participating countries have found themselves hassled or barred from coming by strict U.S. border policies. Even some of the participants themselves had trouble getting in.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection interrogated Iraqi soccer star Aymen Hussein for seven hours on his arrival at the airport in Chicago before letting him in. His official photographer wasn't allowed in with him. "Why is America hosting the World Cup if it is so hostile to foreign nationals?" Hussein said, according to Al Jazeera.

Swiss player Breel Embolo had his U.S. travel clearance granted, yanked when the U.S. government discovered he had been fined over a 2018 bar fight, and then granted again at the last minute.

Hussein and Embolo were luckier than Somali referee Omar Artan, who was turned away in Miami after 11 hours of interrogation. Andrew Giuliani, the executive director of the White House Task Force on the World Cup, said border officers found some "derog" (derogatory information) on Artan and refused to explain further.

So it went for other invited guests. In addition to selling tickets on the open market, FIFA allocates each national team 8 percent of their games' tickets to distribute to invited fans. And for the first time ever, Senegal was unable to bring an official fan delegation to the World Cup due to the U.S. immigration restrictions. The Ivory Coast also had to cancel its fan delegation.

"The supporters have cancelled the trip because the U.S. government does not want to see supporters from certain countries, including Ivory Coast, on its soil. The United States has been clear with us, saying they do not want to see our supporters," Julien Kouadio Adonis, president of the Ivorian national fan committee, told Agence France-Presse.

Senegal and the Ivory Coast are on the Trump administration's travel ban list. So are Haiti and Iran, two other countries playing in the World Cup. But the trouble was not restricted to officially banned countries. When 150 Ghanaian fans applied to travel as a group, only three received visas. Abu Kass, the head of the Jordanian fans' association, told the BBC that only one Jordanian fan received a visa. He himself was rejected.

For the first time in World Cup history, the host country is also at war with one of the participating countries. The Iranian team, which has its training camp in Mexico, is scheduled to play its first matches in Los Angeles and Seattle. The U.S. Embassy in Turkey waited until less than a week before the World Cup to issue the players' visas, and denied visas to more than a dozen team staff. Iran also had its fan ticket allocation yanked at the last minute.

"Sports transcends borders, and we look forward to welcoming competitors and fans from around the world," Ambassador Tom Barrack, the U.S. envoy to Turkey and Syria, said in a statement about the Iranian team.

Unlike the U.S. government, the American people seem to be getting along well with our foreign guests. When the Algerian national team set up their training camp in the small college town of Lawrence, Kansas, locals turned out to welcome their guests. The University of Kansas band learned the Algerian anthem and a local banjo player went viral for his rendition of an Algerian folk song. Algerian stars played soccer with American little leaguers and basketball with the Kansas Jayhawks.

"I want to say thank you to Algeria for choosing our hometown of Lawrence, Kansas to come here. So welcome to the United States, and welcome to Kansas," a local man told Algerian television. "We don't know too much, but we want to welcome you here."

The post Trump's Border Crackdown Spoils World Cup appeared first on Reason.com.

Our Friend with the "Attractive, Busty Jewess" Problem Denied Pseudonymity Again, in Case Against Dartmouth

2026-06-12T17:57:03Z

From a filing in one of the same plaintiff's other cases.

From today's decision by Judge Steven McAuliffe (D.N.H.) in Doe v. Trustees of Dartmouth College (for an earlier similar decision related to Doe's lawsuit against Penn, see here):

"Litigation by pseudonym should occur only in exceptional cases." Indeed, a "strong presumption" exists against proceeding by pseudonym, which "dims the public's perception of the matter and frustrates its oversight of judicial performance." That presumption, however, is rebuttable….

Doe alleges that he was denied admission to Dartmouth's business school because of his "non-Jewish White ethnic heritage." He says that despite his "outstanding qualifications," his application was rejected. He further asserts that Dartmouth excludes nearly all "non-Jewish Whites" from admission, unless the applicant is female, "queer" or a "veteran[] of the U.S. armed forces," because those applicants "pose no threat to the Jewish Supremacists." According to Doe, Dartmouth's admissions decisions are part of a greater plan "drafted by the Jewish Supremacists with the express goal of exterminating non-Jewish Whites."

Doe claims that he will be subject to a "significant risk of professional retaliation and social stigma within his academic and professional community, causing irreparable harm to his career and personal well-being" should his identity be publicly disclosed (presumably due to his application's rejection, but perhaps due to his litigation theories). He goes on to argue that "[p]ublic identification in a high-profile discrimination suit against a major institution like [Dartmouth] carries a significant risk of 'blacklisting' from potential future employers and professional collaborators."

And, because his complaint alleges that defendant's admission practices "unfairly favor Jews," Doe argues that, if his identity is disclosed, he could be subjected to financial harm such as "debanking," physical harm, or murder by Mossad agents. {Doe alleges President John F. Kennedy was murdered by Israeli intelligence agents in an effort to thwart Kennedy's attempts to obstruct Israeli military efforts.} That is because, he says, "Jews commonly harm or murder their opposers and the families of the opposers." Finally, he argues that anonymity is warranted because his case relies on his academic records, which are confidential and protected under federal law….

To warrant anonymity here, Doe must establish that he "reasonably fears that coming out of the shadows will cause him unusually severe harm (either physical or psychological)." Doe alleges only that disclosure of his identity will result in injury to his reputation, employment prospects, and financial status. Courts have regularly held, however, that "[o]rdinary reputational injury, embarrassment, or economic loss do not meet that standard."

Doe does assert that his physical safety will be threatened if he is not allowed to proceed pseudonymously because "Jews commonly harm or murder their opposers." But, those allegations, unsupported by any particularized evidentiary showing, are, to put it charitably, not credible. That is, Doe fails to plausibly allege with any degree of specificity a legitimate threat to his physical safety. And, finally, … plaintiff's concerns regarding the confidentiality of his academic record can be easily addressed using tools "such as redacting or sealing documents to manage privacy concerns that arise during the litigation." … "FERPA permits limited disclosures in litigation and does not by itself mandate anonymity for a plaintiff who has chosen to bring a public lawsuit." …

I expect Doe will be appealing (as well as continuing to be unappealing), since he is now appealing the no-pseudonymity decision in the Penn case.

The post Our Friend with the "Attractive, Busty Jewess" Problem Denied Pseudonymity Again, in Case Against Dartmouth appeared first on Reason.com.

Maryland Court Rules Against Unconstitutional Stop-and-Frisk in Victory for State's Gun Owners

2026-06-12T16:39:08Z

In 2023, Steven Hicks was stopped by Detective Mitchell Ramsey, an officer in the Baltimore Police Department's Group Violence Unit. After seeing a handgun "physically printing" through Hicks' shirt, Ramsey conducted a stop-and-frisk search, despite Hicks repeatedly telling officers before and during the search that he had a license to carry.

After police found cocaine on his person, Hicks was indicted on multiple drug and firearm offenses. He filed a motion to suppress the evidence, arguing that the arresting officers lacked "probable cause or reasonable suspicion" to stop and frisk him since he was licensed to carry a firearm. The Circuit Court for Baltimore City denied Hicks' motion, after which he pleaded guilty to the charges and received a five-year prison sentence without the possibility of parole.

Last week, the Appellate Court of Maryland ruled in Hicks' favor. In an opinion, the court held that Baltimore police officers violated Hicks' Fourth Amendment rights by relying solely on their suspicion that he had a firearm. For now, the ruling leaves Hicks a free man.

Writing for the court, Judge Kathryn Graeff found the initial stop by Ramsey ran afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court's holding in N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen (2022), which made public carry of a firearm presumptively legal. The court also found that Detective Alex Rodriguez's search of Hicks' satchel and pockets "exceeded the scope of a Terry frisk," which is limited to a pat-down of outer clothing.

The appellate court's ruling affirms the Second Amendment rights of Maryland residents and could meaningfully change police departments' stop-and-frisk practices across the state.

Because Rodriguez didn't testify, the state had little evidence to justify the search under the "plain sight and plain feel doctrines." While patting Hicks down, Rodriguez put his hands "slightly into" the satchel around Hicks' body. He then pulled the satchel away from Hicks, felt the outside of the satchel, and announced there was another gun inside.

Rodriguez then continued to search Hicks, going through his pockets until he found "small baggies" and "numerous small plastic containers" filled with a substance later identified as cocaine. Based only on the footage from Rodriguez's body camera, there was no proof that the additional handgun and drugs seized were in plain view or plain feel. However, the court noted that the frisk would have been permissible had the initial stop been lawful.

Before the Bruen decision, Maryland was a "may-issue" state, meaning it limited gun licenses to people who had a "good and substantial reason" to fear for their safety. In October 2023—while Hicks' appeal was pending—Maryland became a "shall issue" state, granting a gun license to any adult who met a broad set of requirements and passed a firearms safety course.

Under the "may-issue" laws, Maryland courts had consistently held that possession of a handgun was "presumptively illegal." Hence, an investigatory stop was legal if cops had a "reasonable suspicion" that the person was carrying a concealed firearm.

The government based its case on this prior interpretation, arguing that the presumption of legality depended on "each State's substantive criminal law, not Bruen." The appellate court rejected this argument, citing several court rulings post-Bruen that found the presumption that anyone in possession of a firearm is engaged in unlawful conduct "inconsistent" with the Constitution, the Terry doctrine, and the Fourth Amendment.

In U.S. v. Wilson (2025), the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that even though Louisiana had a "shall-issue" permitting structure similar to Maryland's, "keeping and bearing arms is presumptively lawful nationwide," meaning cops can't suspect someone of a crime or engaging in criminal activity solely because they have a firearm.

The ruling backed up a previous opinion issued by the 5th Circuit in U.S. v. Daniels (2025), in which the court found officers can't "look with suspicion on citizens presumably lawfully exercising their Second Amendment rights."

In an email to Reason, Lindsey Eldridge, chief of public affairs for the Baltimore Police Department, says the department is "aware of the Appellate Court of Maryland's opinion" and is "currently reviewing the court's decision and evaluating its implications," in consultation with the City's Law Department.

Baltimore City State's Attorney Ivan Bates tells Reason the ruling will "require officers to articulate additional facts indicating criminal activity beyond mere possession of a gun before conducting a stop." Still, the city police are already training officers to "rely on as many factors as possible when establishing reasonable articulable suspicion."

It's not all good news for Maryland gun owners; the appellate court did note that the standard set by Bruen is "arguably" not a "positive change," reasoning it could place limits on cops' ability to "thwart danger to the public."

Still, the ruling will likely protect law-abiding gun owners in Maryland from frivolous searches conducted by police in the state, guaranteeing a freedom already granted to them by the U.S. Constitution.

The post Maryland Court Rules Against Unconstitutional Stop-and-Frisk in Victory for State's Gun Owners appeared first on Reason.com.

Large Libel Models Ruling in Germany, Allowing Liability Against Google AI

2026-06-12T18:47:03Z

From Matthias Bastian (The Decoder) Tuesday:

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers ….

The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the "AI overview" is its own content, not just a list of search results.

Google's AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn't respond appropriately….

Google's AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results "in its own words and according to its own structure," the ruling says. In the case at hand, for example, it opened with confident claims like "Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices," then built its own structure with a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users.

The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements." …

At the hearing, Google argued that users could check the linked sources themselves to verify whether the AI summary was correct. Users generally knew "that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted," the company claimed….

The court rejected this. The possibility of disproving a statement through further research doesn't "regularly exempt from liability for this statement." …

I am told the judgment itself is this one, though I haven't reviewed a translated copy myself.

Under American law, I think Google AI would likewise be potentially subject to liability even though Google Search wouldn't be: 47 U.S.C. § 230. As I wrote in 2023,

Section 230 states that, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." "[I]nformation content provider" is defined to cover "any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service."A lawsuit against an AI company would aim to treat it as publisher or speaker of information provided by itself, as an entity "that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of [such] information."

As the leading early § 230 precedent, Zeran v. AOL, pointed out, in § 230 "Congress made a policy choice … not to deter harmful online speech through the … route of imposing tort liability on companies that serve as intermediaries for other parties' potentially injurious messages." But Congress didn't make the choice to immunize companies that themselves create messages that had never been expressed by third parties. Section 230 thus doesn't immunize defendants who "materially contribut[e] to [the] alleged unlawfulness" of online content.

An AI company, by making and distributing an AI program that creates false and reputation-damaging accusations out of text that entirely lacks such accusations, is surely "materially contribut[ing] to [the] alleged unlawfulness" of that created material….

Relatedly, traditional § 230 cases at least in theory allow someone—the actual creator of the speech—to be held liable for it (even if in practice the creator may be hard to identify, or outside the jurisdiction, or lack the money to pay damages). Allowing § 230 immunity for libels output by an AI program would completely cut off any recourse for the libeled person, against anyone.

In any event, as noted above, § 230 doesn't protect entities that "materially contribut[e] to [the] alleged unlawfulness" of online content. And when AI programs output defamatory text that they have themselves assembled, word by word, they are certainly materially contributing to its defamatory nature.

Likewise, as I argued in my Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output, if an AI company is alerted that its software is regularly outputting specific false statements about a person or business, and doesn't take prompt and reasonable steps to stop that, it could be held liable even under a knowing/reckless falsehood standard. (I also argued that it could be liable for proven damages caused to private figures even under a negligent design standard.)

In any event, I can't speak to whether the German court's decision is consistent with broader principles of German law, but from the press account it sounds like the analysis under U.S. law would likely be in many ways similar (except for the temporary injunction, which I expect would be harder to get, though not necessarily impossible). For more posts on Large Libel Models, see here.

The post Large Libel Models Ruling in Germany, Allowing Liability Against Google AI appeared first on Reason.com.

The Latest Chicanery in Judge Ross's Case

2026-06-12T14:29:21Z

Earlier, I offered some high-level thoughts on the latest episode of As the Couch Turns. Here, I want to drill down into the details.

First, the Eleventh Circuit's decision to make this reprimand private must be contrasted with the Ninth Circuit's decision to make Judge Nelson's investigation public. I agree with Arthur Hellman that the Ninth Circuit had the authority to make this proceeding public, but the Chief Judge was not obligated to. Judge Nelson has been charged with minor offenses. Given his lack of criminal history, the charges are likely to be dismissed. All of this may come to nothing. But now there is a permanent statement from the Ninth Circuit that Judge Nelson may have engaged in misconduct.

The Eleventh Circuit made the incomprehensible decision to make the reprimand private, but include so many facts that her identity could be readily determined. I am inclined to follow Hanlon's Razor here to explain the explanation. If it was intentional, then the members of the Judicial Council may have engaged in misconduct to bypass the confidentiality rules by subterfuge.

Second, Judge Ross sent her three-sentence apology letters on May 27, 2026. She did this after being given a sweetheart deal that not even Alex Acosta would have approved. And she spit in the face of her colleagues. She thought she could squeak by without offering any remorse, even though her identity was widely known.

Third, Judge Ross's brazenness forced her brave law clerks to once again reach out to the judicial process that had failed them before. They told the Judicial Council they "do not believe the letters of apology we received from Judge Ross comply with the remedial measures recommended by the Special Committee and adopted by the Council. Specifically, the apologies fail to 'make clear to the recipient the sexual misconduct for which the judge is apologizing.'"

On June 10, Chief Judge Pryor then gave Judge Ross a chance to "respond to the above allegations and state whether you failed to send adequate letters of apology to your former clerks." This offer to correct the record, yet again, is inexplicable. There is nothing to explain. She failed to do what she promised she would do. Of course the rules permit "appropriate corrective action," but Judge Ross is not a first-time offender. She has proven herself to be an inveterate liar who abuses process to save her skin. No law student or law clerk or law partner would ever be given this many chances.

Judge Ross (or ChatGPT) then wrote an apology letter to the three clerks.

"I am writing to you for a second time to convey my deepest apologies for my harmful, offensive, and unprofessional behavior that made your clerkship an unpleasant experience. My initial letter was entirely deficient, as I did not take full accountability for my actions, and I failed to give you the apology that you deserve."

Ross's chambers provided this letter to Bloomberg Law (and probably others).

The following day, Judge Pryor wrote back to say he would not identify a new complaint:

Based on my review of your new apology letters, my disclosure of the June 10 inquiry to The New York Times, and your consent to disclose the apology letters to the New York Times, I have determined not to identify a new complaint under Rule 5.

I am very confused by this chronology. First, the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council and the JC&D Committee agreed to make the reprimand private. But the Chief Judge, acting by himself, decided to publicize the matter to the New York Times? How does Chief Judge Pryor have this authority? Did the other (unnamed) members of the Council agree to this plan? Moreover, it seems that Pryor decided not to investigate Ross further based on her making her private reprimand into a public reprimand. How does he have that authority? Judge Ross would have never consented to any reprimand if it was public. Judge Pryor nullified the cornerstone of the Judicial Council's agreement with Judge Ross. Finally, she already engaged in misconduct by not following the terms of the agreement. There was on need for further fact-finding.

This entire situation stinks, and continues to stink more by the day.

Judge Pryor's conduct here has not been exemplary. I say this with some pause, because I have long respected and worked with Judge Pryor on many matters. The problem speaks to a broader issue: Chief Judges have vast amounts of unstated powers. And absolute power can be wielded in improper fashions. Vindictive chief judges (like Kimberly Moore) can rule their circuits like petty tyrants. Magnanimous chief judges (like Bill Pryor) can provide too solicitous treatment of offending judges.

Congress needs to revisit this entire regime.

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Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day Has Some Strange Assumptions About the Media

2026-06-12T21:48:43Z

Given the recent success of Backrooms, a movie based on a YouTube series that was itself based on a meme, it's tempting to view Steven Spielberg's often crackling but frequently frustrating Disclosure Day in the same light. This is the beard's riff on the old "ancient aliens" meme, the popular-on-the-internet History Channel freeze frame featuring a zap-haired "expert" who somehow always seemed to be conveying the same amusingly crazy idea: I'm not saying it was ancient aliens—but it was ancient aliens.

History Channel/Know Your Meme

Spoiler alert: In Spielberg's movie, the aliens aren't quite ancient; they've only been around since the 1940s, at least as far as the United States government and its sinister corporate tentacles know. But this isn't much of a spoiler, given the trailers and the fact that the basics of alien existence are revealed to the viewer by the end of the first act.

Indeed, that's the setup, rather than the resolution: aliens exist, there is copious archival footage to prove it, and shadowy forces have been engaged in a massive cover-up in order to gain power over alien technology and cow the public. The movie, then, is about the quest to release the evidence to the world.

That quest starts with the hacker Daniel Kellner, played with quiet intensity by the increasingly excellent Josh O'Connor, who makes off with a cache of drives containing classified footage depicting alien contact and technology as the movie opens. It expands quickly to a consortium of aliens-are-real devotees led by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), as well as Margaret Fairchild (a marvelous Emily Blunt), a scatterbrained local TV weather woman who finds herself speaking in foreign, even alien, tongues. Kellner and Fairchild are connected by a kind of psychic alien destiny, like Elliot and E.T. in Spielberg's kiddie-alien classic, and Wakefield is something like a John the Baptist figure, preparing the way for the prophets of the stars.

The challenge they face is that the secret of alien existence has been hidden by Wardex, a nefarious corporation with ties to the U.S. military that has been hiding the revealing footage. The corporation's central figure is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), who has appropriated some alien tech for himself in the form of a little stone obelisk that, when clutched, allows him to create a psychic connection with others, including Kellner's girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson). The scenes where he burrows into her mind, like a hacker pwning a network, are electric, and nearly make up for the fact that none of this makes even a single alien blood droplet of sense.

The movie's problems start with the fact that everyone speaks in breathless riddles and oblique teases, as if they are background characters on some late-breaking spinoff of Lost, rather than explaining themselves in clear language to each other. But the bigger problem is the nature of the disclosure itself.

Spielberg wants viewers to take for granted that aliens are real, and that the video proof, contained on what amounts to a bunch of thumb drives, would simply and instantly convince everyone who sees it. The videos themselves look like what they are—Hollywood fakes made using a combination of computer effects, costumes, and puppetry. Often, they are just seconds long. Sometimes they are shot in the grainy, blurry style of real-world, official UFO footage, which as we know proves little and fails to convince many people. Sometimes they are a good bit clearer, but in a way that makes them look like high-end Hollywood frauds.

The movie simply assumes that broadcasting this footage to the world will convince the general public that aliens are real. Most of the movie's second act is organized around the mad dash to get the footage out, which turns out to mean playing it on a local NBC News affiliate. (The movie is distributed by Universal, part of the same media conglomerate that owns NBC.) By the very end, the movie conveniently hopscotches this problem, but it does so in a way that renders the quest to broadcast the footage, which is to say most of the movie's narrative, completely unnecessary.

For most of the movie's runtime, however, the plan is simply for a hacker and a local TV weather reporter to release the footage. I know Blunt's character is just a fun-loving weather personality, but surely she has some sense of journalistic values? Has anyone in this movie heard of verification? Asking for comment? This is why no one trusts the media.

Indeed, this is part of what makes this movie so odd: It's set in a contemporary United States, in which it's assumed that essentially everyone does trust the media. There are iPhones and internet connections, but we see no podcasters, no YouTubers, not even any skeptical mainstream media pundits, let alone the sort of sketchy, attention-seeking politicians who would want to turn this headline news event into fodder for self-aggrandizement. Aliens are real, and that's why we must tax billionaires and oligarchs, now please donate to my campaign, said no one in this movie.

From Close Encounters of the Third Kind to E.T. to that one Indiana Jones movie that we've all tried to forget about, Spielberg has long been obsessed with aliens. Here, he wants to hammer home a grand, heartwarming idea about how radical empathy is what connects people, animals, and perhaps even big-eyed mystical space aliens, but the movie is almost shockingly naive about the willingness of the masses to peacefully and productively converge around a controversial belief. In the movie's dramatic scheme, the only significant barrier to their acceptance of alien life is a villainous corporate entity with an impressively large collection of tactical vests and black vehicles.

The good news is that on a scene-by-scene basis, Disclosure Day is taught, thrilling, and worth arguing with, which is to say it's a Steven Spielberg movie. The bad news is that it exists in an unrecognizable parallel universe—and not because of the beings from outer space. The world of Disclosure Day is a world without ancient aliens-obsessed wacko experts, without memespeak nihilism, without paranoiacs and grifting conspiracy mongers, without partisan argument or propaganda or meaningful skepticism of any kind. This movie isn't actually a meme, but it probably should have had more of them.

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Judge Ross Lacked Any Remorse, and The Chief Judge of the Eleventh Circuit Gave Her One Too Many Chances To Correct The Record

2026-06-12T18:59:22Z

Earlier this week, I thought the Judge Ross scandal had reached its terminus. Indeed, I had to give Judge Ross credit. She conned her colleagues so many times, yet they kept giving her more chances.

She brazenly and repeatedly had sex in her offices within in moaning distance of her law clerks. None of her colleagues knew. When confronted, she lied about it repeatedly. She tried to obstruct the investigation by blaming her law clerk, who had the courage to blow the whistle. But after Judge Ross was caught--and she certainly knew she would be caught--she was given a second chance to correct the record. With this chance to unstain her reputation, Judge Ross finally came clean (unlike her couch).

The Eleventh Circuit was persuaded by her genuineness, looking past the fact that she had brazenly lied to them before. (If any law student is found to have made a material lie once, they are expelled and have no chance of ever sitting for the bar.) Rather than giving Judge Ross a public reprimand she so justly deserved, she was given a third chance and offered a private reprimand. After all, she expressed remorse and wanted to be rehabilitated. We all know that liars and adulterers mend their ways and never do it again, right?

The punishment was not a punishment at all. She gave up administrative responsibilities that, frankly, most judges don't really want. And she offered to write "vague" apology letters. The Judicial Council did not condition the private reprimand on the contents of the letter. Once again, the Judicial Council trusted an inveterate liar who had sex on the public fisc. This was her fourth chance, which she would waste.

Even after her story blew up and made international headlines, Judge Ross still had no remorse. Did Judge Ross take this chance to offer a sincere and genuine apology to her clerks. No, not even close. She wrote an offensive letter with offered zero contrition. The courageous law clerks once again spoke up charging that Judge Ross did not fulfill her sweetheart deal.

Did the Chief Judge of the Eleventh Circuit finally decide that Judge Ross abused the terms of the private reprimand, and throw the book at her? No, Judge Ross got yet a fifth chance to offer a new apology letter. Finally, Judge Ross (or ChatGPT) put together a letter that acknowledged her conduct. She escape consequences once again.

The judicial misconduct process is not being enforced in a consistent manner. Some judges who did nothing wrong have been put through purgatory. Other judges who engaged in actual misconduct receive an endless supply of second chances.

Judge Ross lacked any remorse, and the Chief Judge of the Eleventh Circuit gave her one too many chances to correct the record

Let me put this in perspective that all judges can understand.

When a suspect make a false statement to the FBI and obstructs the investigation, they do not get a chance to correct the record, they get indicted.

When a defendant makes an insincere apology during sentencing, they do not get leniency, they are called unremorseful and suffer the consequences.

When a defendant violates the terms of supervised release, they do not get five do-overs, they get remanded to custody.

Judges have had their careers ruined because of vindictive Chief Judges with agendas. By contrast, Judge Ross had kid glove treatment.

Judge Ross should be treated like the miscreant she is, and should not be given an unlimited number of second chances. She cannot credibly exercise the judicial power.

Judge Ross needs to be impeached. And Congress needs to review the vast discretion that Chief Judges are abusing.

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'VERY HARD'

2026-06-12T13:15:36Z

Trump exercises restraint with Iran: Last night, President Donald Trump said he would hit Iran "VERY HARD."

"At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking ‌Kharg ⁠Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of ⁠their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have ⁠with Venezuela," he said via Truth Social.

Thankfully, Trump walked that all back, calling off U.S. strikes in Iran and saying that a peace deal looked to be "in pretty final shape" (which has not been confirmed by Iran).

Meanwhile, "Israeli airstrikes continued in southern Lebanon on Friday, the Lebanese state-run news agency reported, as the long-running conflict with Iran-backed Hezbollah militants showed few signs of letting up despite Trump's claims of diplomatic progress with Iran," reports The New York Times. Iran has said repeatedly that peace deals must include an end to Israel's strikes in Lebanon, but it's not clear whether they've backed down from that stipulation, fearing more American strikes on Iran.

Pulling out fighter jets: Trump is making good on his years of threats to force NATO to stand on its own two feet by withdrawing one-third of the fighter jets the U.S. had been supplying to Europe.

"The decision would limit NATO's ability to launch long-range strikes and conduct surveillance," reports The New York Times. "The planned drawdowns include: Reducing the number of F-16 and F-15E fighter jets from roughly 150 to 100; Reducing maritime reconnaissance aircraft from 26 to 15 and cutting all eight aerial refueling tanker jets previously available to Europe; Reallocating a missile-launching submarine and an aircraft carrier, along with several warships and scores of jets that join the carrier's missions; Reallocating one of two groups of bombers previously assigned for Europe's defense."

This is probably a good thing; Europe is being forced into independence that they've long known could be coming. But it comes at a challenging time, given Russian incursions into NATO airspace, and sooner than the Europeans had expected.

Interestingly, Britain's defense secretary, John Healey, resigned this past Thursday, saying Prime Minister Keir Starmer hasn't allocated enough to the country's defense. Another defense official, Al Carns, also quit, saying the government's current defense budgets were "not built for the threat we face." Will Britain be forced to step up as the U.S. recedes?

Scenes from New York: New Jersey Transit is preparing backup ferries to help with demand as fans try to make it to the World Cup. I kind of love how they assume public transit will buckle under the pressure.

QUICK HITS

"When SpaceX starts trading this week, one group will be noticeably absent from the frenzy: investors from China and Hong Kong. They are also likely to miss out on the upcoming initial public offering for OpenAI," reports The New York Times. "SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket maker and artificial intelligence company, has excluded investors in China and Hong Kong from participating in its I.P.O., according to five people with knowledge of the decision, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. OpenAI, another leading A.I. company, is likely to impose the same restriction when it goes public this year, said three people with knowledge of the discussion. The company has already barred Chinese investors from participating in private fund-raising rounds, one of those people said."
"A small number of firms are set to net tens of billions of dollars in returns from SpaceX's initial public offering at a nearly $1.8 trillion valuation, marking one of the most significant windfalls in venture capital history," reports Bloomberg. The firms are Founders Fund, which owns a 3 percent stake, Andreessen Horowitz (stake undisclosed), and Sequoia Capital, which owns a roughly 1.5 percent stake.
"Los Angeles is a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans roughly 3-to-1, and the results of last week's primary suggest that the city is getting bluer," opines Erika D. Smith over at Bloomberg. "How blue? Enough that it could soon become the new standard-bearer for West Coast progressivism—a mantle that has long belonged to San Francisco."
Lemonade stand robbed at gunpoint in South Boston. Messed up.
I highly recommend this article on the matchmaking industry from Stephanie Murray over at Tablet.

You'd think matchmakers would be happy about the explosion in demand for their services! Alas, many seemed genuinely troubled by it. "Far from helping to revive tradition, many matchmakers sense that they are being asked to fill a gaping social vacuum in modernity." pic.twitter.com/tldcfFUlwc

— Stephanie H. Murray (@stephmurrayyyy) June 11, 2026

Good discourse on the above, and technological progress more broadly:

i like jason crawford's spin on this , which is that progress is the replacement of one set of problems with a better set of problems (which is different than the elimination of problems)

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) June 11, 2026

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Today in Supreme Court History: June 12, 1967

2026-01-26T15:32:02Z

6/12/1967: Loving v. Virginia decided.

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Graham Platner Signals a Problem for Democrats, and the Rest of Us

2026-06-12T19:03:15Z

The "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party is on a roll, winning nominations and elections. Left-wing leaders are taking earned victory laps as they chalk up victories for candidates espousing socialism, hostility to Israel (and often Jews), identity politics, and other leftist positions that were until recently thankfully rare in American politics. But the radicals' support for Maine's deeply troubled Graham Platner, who won the party's nod to compete in the U.S. Senate race, shows the dangers posed by a movement that seemingly holds ideological lunacy as its highest value. It's not clear that anybody is in a position to stop them.

The Surging Left

"Progressives are on the march," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) trumpeted June 3, even before Platner and other progressives won this week's party primaries. Although not technically a Democrat, the democratic socialist is a leader of his movement's rapid takeover of the party.

A week later, Politico's William Steakin, Lisa Kashinsky, and Andrew Howard reported that "the Vermont senator's endorsed candidates cleaned house on Tuesday, a coast-to-coast show of force headlined by a resounding win for his embattled Senate pick in Maine, Graham Platner, in spite of days of turmoil that had thrown his candidacy into question." Other progressive wins that day include California congressional hopeful Randy Villegas, New Jersey's Adam Hamawy and Analilia Mejia, Montana's Sam Forstag, Pennsylvania's Chris Rabb, and others.

A Trainwreck of a Candidate

"Embattled" is right. Platner's controversies began with the revelation that he sported a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo that he belatedly covered (he claims he didn't know the meaning, but for years referred to it as "my Totenkopf," prompting his then-political director to call bullshit and quit the campaign). Platner buffed his totalitarian-curious credentials by calling himself as a "communist." He also was allegedly abusive to his old girlfriends, regularly grabbing one "hard enough to leave marks."

Platner's womanizing, dismissal of rural dwellers as stupid, online bigotry, and pose as a blue-collar icon despite living off military disability payments and family money barely rise to the level of notice in politics. He's a human trainwreck who can barely manage his own life, seeking power over others.

But these revelations trickled out without impeding the candidate's political trajectory. In April, Maine Gov. Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign after failing to gain traction against Platner, who currently polls ahead of incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins.

"Working class champions are taking down corporate political dynasties and forcing lobbies like AIPAC to hide out of unpopularity — our movement is delivering on the demands of Democratic voters and taking tonight's momentum forward to keep winning this month from New York to Colorado," Usamah Andrabi of Justice Democrats, a progressive group founded by former Sanders staffers, told Politico.

Minimal Accomplishments Meet Ideological Lunacy

The term working class champions does heavy lifting here. Platner isn't the only progressive favorite to come from money and have a spotty employment history. Democratic socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the son of an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and a Columbia University professor, dabbled in rap music and activism before winning office. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, another socialist, was funded by her parents until her election. Like Platner, they tout government-funded services, restrictions on private property, high taxes, and hostility to "billionaires" and "corporations." For the mayors, that's led to clashes with business leaders that are pushing people and investment out of their cities. Seattle icon Starbucks is reducing its presence there and building a new corporate hub in Nashville, while Texas is drawing companies and high-income professionals from New York. It's easy to conclude that a lack of significant private sector experience leads politicians to serious missteps.

Statist economics is a given with progressives, but the movement carries other ideological baggage, too. In his statement for Justice Democrats, spokesman Andrabi denounced AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobby group. Such statements are standard in progressive pronouncements, with hostility to the world's sole majority-Jewish state and its allegedly outsize influence (often blurring into open antisemitism) expected of movement candidates. Wilson denounced Israel for "genocide" and Mamdani attacks Israel. Tuesday's progressive winners—Forstag, Hamawy, Mejia, Rabb, and Villegas—all read from the same script on Israel. For his part, Platner said last week of his Republican opponent, "Senator Collins is bought and paid for by [Israel's Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, and she votes accordingly."

Democratic Voters Lead the Way

In fact, progressive candidates are following the lead of their supporters. Both major parties have shifted ideologically in recent years, but Democrats are sprinting to the fringe.

"Democratic voters moved sharply to the left in their ideological identification and policy preferences on a range of issues between 2012 and 2020," the University of Virginia's Center for Politics noted in 2023.

After the 2024 presidential election, John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times reported, "the data shows Democrats taking a sharp turn leftward on social issues over the past decade."

Last September, Gallup polling found that among Democrats, independents and Republicans, "Democrats are the only partisan group of the three that views socialism more positively than capitalism—66% to 42%."

And an April Pew Research survey found that "eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents currently have an unfavorable view of Israel."

Established Democratic officials with relatively moderate positions are being abandoned by voters who have become enamored of once outlier ideas like displacing private enterprise with government services, seizing private property, confiscating wealth, and demonizing a tiny minority of the population. In their search for candidates touting those positions, these seekers of "working class champions" seem willing to embrace people who are nothing of the sort—including some with histories of minimal accomplishments and extremely poor judgment.

The situation poses real dangers for Democrats and for the country. Democrats are becoming far more ideologically radical than most Americans, who remain generally pro-market on economics and mixed on social issues. That should hurt Democrats. But this is a time of political turmoil when the GOP is also in flux, ideologically amorphous, and has become something of a cult around the president.

Progressive Democrats like Platner and his comrades are unprepared for serious responsibility and unfit to govern. But it's not clear that anybody is in a strong position to keep them from power.

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Review: George Washington's Apple Brandy

2026-06-08T12:52:06Z

From Johnny Appleseed to apple cider, apples have long been part of the country's culinary tradition. No one has ever declared anything "as American as peach pie." So while no official ranking exists, it's safe to say that apples are the most patriotic fruit.

It is fitting, therefore, that America's first president, George Washington, made—and presumably consumed—his own apple brandy. Much of the apple brandy found on liquor store shelves today is cheap grape brandy that's been quickly flavored and in some cases sweetened. But Washington's apple brandy was an aged, brown, unsweetened spirit distilled directly from apples, almost like apple whiskey.

A replica of Washington's apple brandy is available for purchase at his Mount Vernon estate. Those who can't make the trip can pick up a bottle of Laird's Straight Apple Brandy Bottled In Bond, made from a similar process, at better liquor stores around the country.

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Review: The Lesser-Known Texts That Shaped the American Revolution

2026-05-27T13:55:11Z

When we recall the American Revolution, we remember the hits: Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's Valley Forge speech. Less remembered are the many pamphlets and sermons that shaped the worldview of the American colonists and brought them to the point of revolution in the first place.

In his 1967 book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn does the yeoman's work of reintroducing these less-famous texts into our historical memory. With heavy quotations, Bailyn shows how writers before and during the Revolution denounced the corrupting legacy of Robert Walpole (Britain's first prime minister), railed against executive usurpations of legislatures, and tried to identify when exactly tariffs became internal taxes. Bailyn's conclusion: The ideological origins of the American Revolution were both extremely libertarian and extremely paranoid.

We now know that London passed the Stamp Act and deployed redcoats to Boston because the bumbling British government was trying to raise revenue while keeping its restive colonists in line. But the writers of the time saw every English move as part of a conspiracy to reduce the colonists to the status of mere slaves through standing armies and onerous taxation.

Their now-familiar conclusion: American liberty could be protected only by an independent revolutionary government based on popular consent and dedicated to the protection of individual rights.

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Brickbat: Volunteer Medicine

2026-06-11T18:53:17Z

In Georgia, a new interpretation of state law could force many health clinics run by nurse practitioners to close. Under state law, nurse practitioners must practice under the supervision of a doctor. But the Georgia Composite Medical Board has ruled that nurse practitioners cannot pay physicians for that supervision. Nurse practitioners argue that many physicians will be unwilling to take on the responsibility without compensation, making it difficult or impossible for clinics to operate. The board says the current interpretation makes the doctor the nurse practitioner's employee, the reverse of what it says is required by law. But nurse practitioners say the change will reduce access to healthcare, especially in rural and underserved areas where nurse practitioner-led clinics often provide primary care services.

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Open Thread

2026-06-12T07:00:00Z

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Federal Circuit Stays Enforcement of Ruling Against Trump's Section 122 Tariffs

2026-06-12T03:13:07Z

Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit imposed a stay blocking enforcement of the Court of International Trade's ruling against Donald Trump's massive Section 122 tariffs (which impose a 10% tariff on most imports from countries around the world). The Court of International Trade had previously rejected a similar motion for a stay, but that is now overruled. The stay will continue until the appeals process concludes. The case involves two consolidated lawsuits: one filed by the Liberty Justice Center (the same public interest group that I worked with on the earlier case that led to the invalidation of Trump's IEEPA tariffs by the Supreme Court) on behalf of two small-business importers, and one brought by 24 state governments led by the state of Oregon.

Today's decision isn't a ruling on the merits of the case, and the panel that issued it likely will not be the same one that hears the merits. But it's problematic, nonetheless.

One of the standards for determining whether a stay of an injunction is warranted is likelihood of success on the merits. Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 authorizes the president to impose up to 15% tariffs for up to 150 days in response to "fundamental international payments problems" that cause "large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits" or "an imminent and significant depreciation of the dollar," or create a need to cooperate with other countries in addressing an "international balance-of-payments disequilibrium." The Court of International Trade concluded that there is no "balance-of-payments deficit" of the kind required to use the statute.

Today's Federal Circuit ruling states that "Although we do not offer our own interpretation of Section 122 at this stage, we are persuaded by the federal government's argument that the CIT majority's interpretation—that 'balance-of-payments deficit[ ]' is limited to deficits measured by liquidity, official settlements, or basic balance—may be incorrect." The panel offers little analysis to support this point, and simply ignores extensive evidence that "balance-of-payments deficit" refers to conditions that can only exist under a fixed exchange rate system of the kind in force prior to 1973 (I summarized that evidence in the amicus brief I wrote on behalf of myself and the Cato Institute). The ruling also overlooks the key point that accepting the government's interpretation of this statute would give the president virtually unlimited power to impose Section 122 tariffs anytime he wants.

That, in turn - as the CIT pointed out - leads to serious constitutional nondelegation problems (I outlined those in detail in Part III of the amicus brief). The Federal Circuit panel dismisses those concerns, saying that "There is merit to the federal government's argument that Section 122 already contains the guardrails required by the nondelegation doctrine such that it is not necessary to set out precise "balance-of-payments deficit[ ]"
measurement methods for the statute to survive challenge." The problem is there are no such "guardrails" if a balance-of-payments deficit must be assumed to exist at virtually all times. For reasons noted in our brief, the 15% cap on tariff rates isn't enough, and the 150 day time limit could - if the court accepts the government's interpretation of the law - easily be circumvented.

In addition to flubbing the nondelegation issue, the panel also completely ignored the issue of the major questions doctrine. As argued by the plaintiffs, and in greater detail in Part II of my amicus brief, this rule - which played a key role in the IEEPA litigation - weighs heavily against the government's position.

Another key factor in determining whether a stay is warranted is whether a stay would result in "irreparable harm." As I have pointed out previously, importers forced to pay illegal tariffs suffer a variety of harms that cannot be made good by after-the-fact refunds, such as lost sales, disrupted supplier relationships, lost investment, and more. Last year, when the Federal Circuit stayed the injunction against the IEEPA tariffs, the resulting nearly year-long collection of illegal taxes caused grave harm of that type on a large scale. The CIT seems to have learned from that mistake. This Federal Circuit panel did not.

The Federal Circuit ruling holds that these effects can be ignored because "those alleged harms do not necessarily stem from the stay but rather are a consequence of accounting for the undisputed risk that plaintiffs may ultimately owe the tariffs." This argument makes little sense. If tariffs are being collected on each transaction right now, that cannot help but increase prices (leading to lost sales), disrupt supplier relationships, and so on, to a greater extent than a mere possibility that tariffs may be owed later - especially given that the legal case against the tariffs is very strong.

In addition, the Federal Circuit should have learned from the painful experience of the IEEPA tariff refund system. Even now, almost four months after the Supreme Court ruling, only about $20.6 billion of the $166 billion in illegally collected IEEPA tariff have been sent out for disbursement. And the government is trying to avoid repaying much of the remainder. This sorry state of affairs shows that the Federal Circuit panel should not trust the Trump Administration's assurances that, if they lose the case, any harms will be made good by prompt refunds.

Today's ruling does not necessarily prefigure a decision on the merits. The court's analysis of the substantive issues is cursory and tentative, and does not consider a number of key points at all. Moreover, the merits issue is likely to be heard by a different set of judges. Stay motions in the Federal Circuit are heard by a special motions panel, whose members' identities are not publicly revealed. So the merits issue may be considered by an entirely different panel. Alternatively, it might be heard en banc by all 11 active Federal Circuit judges (as happened with the IEEPA case).

As I have noted before, the injunction today's ruling stayed would not have completely blocked collection of the Section 122 tariffs, because - for technical reasons - it only applied to tariffs paid by the state of Washington and the two private importers represented by the LJC. Even so, this decision makes it unlikely that Section 122 tariff collection will be stopped or significantly limited until the appellate process concludes - which could potentially take another several months (or longer, if the case reaches the Supreme Court).

Despite its limited nature, this is a troubling and problematic ruling. The court misanalyzed a number of key issues, especially in failing to properly consider the sweeping nature of the government's claim to tariff authority. Hopefully, the panel that considers the case on the merits won't repeat those mistakes.

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The Judicial Misconduct Complaint Against Judge Ryan Nelson: What Happens Next?

2026-06-11T21:29:05Z

I am happy to pass along this guest post from Professor Arthur Hellman about Judge Nelson's case:

On Tuesday, the New York Times and NPR published reports on what the Times called the "parking lot confrontation" involving Judge Ryan D. Nelson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Bloomberg Law has published a more in-depth account. These stories followed in the wake of the initial report the preceding Friday in the Idaho State Journal. In a guest post on Sunday evening, I explained how Judge Nelson's actions might lead to an investigation of possible judicial misconduct under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 (JCDA or Act). The Act defines misconduct as "conduct prejudicial to the effective and expeditious administration of the business of the courts." I won't repeat that discussion here, but some of it has been overtaken by later developments, and it will be useful to report on those.

The basic facts can be quickly stated. The "confrontation" took place in a parking lot in Idaho Falls, Idaho, on April 2. It appears to have begun when another man (who has not thus far been publicly identified) said (twice) to Judge Nelson: "Learn how to park." A video published by the Idaho State Journal shows Judge Nelson apparently knocking off the man's glasses, running after him, and then stomping on the glasses. Judge Nelson has now been charged with misdemeanor battery and malicious injury to property, also a misdemeanor.

In the Sunday evening post, I said that "the first step is for Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Mary Murguia to identify a complaint" against Judge Nelson and thereby initiate the investigatory process under the Act. That has now happened. On Monday, Judge Murguia issued an order identifying a complaint based on media reports about Judge Nelson's conduct and her own "limited inquiry of currently available information."

Ordinarily, judicial misconduct proceedings are confidential until the proceedings have concluded. That is what happened in the proceeding involving Atlanta District Judge Eleanor Ross; the public knew nothing about the investigation until the reviewing committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States issued its final order affirming the private reprimand issued by the Eleventh Circuit Judicial Council. But a provision in the Rules for Judicial-Conduct and Disability Proceedings (JC&D Rules), initially adopted in 2008, allows the chief judge to "disclose the existence of a proceeding under these Rules when necessary or appropriate to maintain public confidence in the judiciary's ability to redress misconduct or disability."

Judge Murguia relied on this provision as authorizing immediate disclosure of her Monday order. But she made clear that there will be no further interim disclosures: "All subsequent misconduct proceedings will be confidential pursuant to [the statute and the Rules]." Unless something unexpected happens, we will have to wait until final disposition to know what steps she and the Judicial Council of the Circuit have taken to resolve the complaint.

I have suggested elsewhere (pp. 371-74) that this disclosure provision appears to conflict with the confidentiality requirement of the statute. But as long as the Judiciary is willing to make some interim orders public, there is no reason why it should not disclose certain others. Here, for example, Judge Murguia may request that the Chief Justice transfer the proceeding to another circuit. If that request is granted, it would be appropriate, in my view, to make public the order of transfer.

Judge Murguia took pains to note that all of the information that prompted her order "was only very recently received." Given that the criminal charges were filed on April 22 (according to the Idaho State Journal), it is fair to conclude that Judge Nelson did not convey the information to the Chief Judge before she learned of it from the media reports.

It would have been prudent as well as courteous for Judge Nelson to have "self-reported" the episode early on. That would have enabled Chief Judge Murguia to carry out an informal inquiry, without necessarily identifying a complaint, before public scrutiny began.

Late Sunday evening, David Lat discussed the episode on his "Original Jurisdiction" Substack blog. He reported that he had reached out to Judge Nelson for comment and had received a statement from Judge Nelson's counsel. That statement read: "Mr. Nelson is embarrassed by this incident. It is out of character and does not represent how he behaves. Immediately afterwards, Mr. Nelson reached out and offered an apology and full compensation for the sunglasses. He intends to work through the proper process."

So Judge Nelson has not only offered an apology; he has also offered full compensation. Judge Murguia could well find that these actions constituted "voluntary corrective action." If so, the Act and the Rules permit her to "conclude the proceeding" without the need to determine whether Judge Nelson engaged in misconduct. That is an established practice, and I believe it is fully consistent with the forward-looking perspective of the Act.

One caveat: Judge Murguia would probably not take that course unless she had some confidence that the parking lot altercation was an isolated episode and did not reflect a pattern of behavior that might constitute misconduct. In that regard, David Lat reported that two former clerks had contacted him to say that the conduct seen in the video does not reflect the person they had come to know.

To be sure, that is not conclusive. Former Second Circuit Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, whose analysis of a similar episode I quoted in my prior post, also said that the ultimate question is whether the judge's extrajudicial behavior "create[s] in reasonable minds a perception that the Judge's ability to carry out judicial responsibilities with integrity, impartiality, and competence is impaired." (Emphasis added.) That is the question that Chief Judge Murguia will have to address in the first instance, taking into account the apology that Judge Nelson has already offered.

The post The Judicial Misconduct Complaint Against Judge Ryan Nelson: What Happens Next? appeared first on Reason.com.

DHS Says He's a Terrorist. His Lawyers Say He's Being Punished for Palestinian Advocacy.

2026-06-11T20:55:58Z

On March 30, Salah Sarsour, a Palestinian-born community leader and the president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, was detained by multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents while on his way to work. Now, his attorneys allege that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has deprived the legal permanent resident of religious freedoms and basic medical care for his Type 2 diabetes while incarcerated.

In a letter recently submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Sarsour's lawyers claim that the 53-year-old's health has deteriorated while in custody at the Clay County Jail in Brazil, Indiana. Sarsour, the letter says, has experienced severe abdominal pain, but has not been allotted any medical assistance and has lost 30 pounds during his two months in detention.

"Though he recently developed severe abdominal pain, he was told by officials in the jail that they could not help him and that he must purchase his own medication," the letter reads. "His blood sugar levels are not being consistently checked. As a diabetic, he is at risk of 'permanent organ damage' (kidneys, heart, brain) and '[s]udden and preventable death' if he does not receive proper treatment."

Sarsour's attorneys also allege that he has been unable to pray, due to being repeatedly interrupted by jail guards, and was denied the ability to obtain religious articles such as a Quran. When he asked for an adequate diet to stabilize his blood sugar levels, he was told to purchase barbecue pork rinds from the jail's commissary, which would go against his dietary needs and religious beliefs.

Sarsour was taken into federal custody after being identified by the DHS as "a criminal illegal alien from Jordan suspected of funding terror organizations and lying on immigration forms," according to an April statement from the agency. This claim is based on Sarsour's prior conviction as a minor by an Israeli military court for "throwing a Molotov cocktail at the homes of Israeli armed forces and illegally attempting to possess weapons and ammunition" over 30 years ago. In the same April statement, the DHS repeatedly called Sarsour a "terrorist" who was previously denied an immigrant visa at the American Consulate in Jerusalem due to an Israeli conviction and lying on a green card application form about the conviction in 1998.

The DHS did not respond to Reason's requests for comment on the accusations against Sarsour.

Sarsour's attorneys and supporters have denounced the arrest and the department's claims as an attack on his constitutional right to free speech. They say Sarsour's detention is a politically motivated measure targeting an outspoken Palestinian activist, pointing out his clean criminal record since his arrival in the United States in 1993 and the government's having known about his criminal conviction for over 30 years. Sarsour and his legal team have filed a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that his detention is unlawful and a clear violation of his First Amendment right to free speech, his Fifth Amendment rights to due process, and his rights under the Equal Protection Clause.

"The government has a policy to target Palestinian rights activists," Samuel B. Cole, chief immigration litigation counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois, tells Reason. "They have done it since the beginning of this administration. They have articulated the policy through their senior leadership, and there is no question that Mr. Sarsour is now a victim of this unlawful policy."

Department of Justice lawyers continue to challenge concerns about Sarsour's detention, particularly regarding his well-being, after an investigation they conducted with nine days of daily glucose monitoring gave him a clean bill of health. After visiting Sarsour at the Clay County Jail last week, Cole isn't convinced of this analysis, describing Sarsour as "substantially thinner" than when he entered custody two months prior.

"We have a letter from his physician explaining that given his medical condition, he needs daily glucose monitoring," Cole says, "and that the jail's nine days of daily monitoring is insufficient, and this is his health at risk."

Sarsour's immigration status proceedings continue to unfold alongside his petition for release, with the next status hearing scheduled for June 24.

Meanwhile, at Sarsour's home in Milwaukee, the charges lobbied against a well-known voice have brought shockwaves to the Islamic community. On the Islamic Society of Milwaukee's website, a community-organized LaunchGood fund has raised over $200,000 to cover Sarsour's legal costs.

"[Brother] Salah is being targeted on the basis of his Palestinian and Muslim background, and his advocacy for Palestinian rights," the LaunchGood description says. "We know this fight for Br. Salah is part of a larger trend of attacks on immigrants that whittle away at democratic norms and legal protections for everyone. That is why this fight is a fight for all of us."

The post DHS Says He's a Terrorist. His Lawyers Say He's Being Punished for Palestinian Advocacy. appeared first on Reason.com.

Graham Platner, Other Fools Blame Their Problems on the 'Epstein Class'

2026-06-11T19:52:15Z

Graham Platner is now the Democrats' official choice to be Maine's next senator, scandals be damned. Notably, his first campaign advertisement since becoming the candidate does not even mention his opponent, Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine), but instead focuses on "powerful Democrats and Republicans" who possess "a love of Jeffrey Epstein and a hatred of me."

Platner is running on opposing "the Epstein class."

The only thing the DC establishment can agree on is a love of Jeffrey Epstein — and a hatred of me.

Together, we will take back our government from the Epstein class.

WATCH: Our new TV ad pic.twitter.com/H0Ekeqa4uC

— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) June 10, 2026

It's time to start calling out this shameless, cynical line of attack (and defense) with greater fervor. The "Epstein class" is a phrase coined by Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D–Ga.) to refer to a nebulous, nonspecific group of societal elites who are supposedly complicit in the crimes of Epstein. Increasingly, this is directed at President Donald Trump, who knew and associated (and then disassociated) with Epstein 30 years ago, before his crimes were known—though many Democrats have been perfectly willing to throw the Clintons under the bus.

But the truth is that there is no Epstein class. There is no sinister cabal of wealthy, powerful pedophiles who abused underage girls provided by Epstein. The theory that these elite pedophiles skirted justice because of government incompetence—or because high-level government agents were involved—is false. The disclosure of the Epstein Files, of millions of pages of relevant documents, has not produced a shred of evidence to support such an idea. This should matter. Eventually, people making sensational claims should feel required to present proof, particularly when the course of action they advocated—the unprecedented public release of police notes and uncorroborated investigative files—is adopted. The theorists have none.

By invoking the "Epstein class" and asserting that it is this group of (imaginary) persons who are out to get Platner, the candidate is doing exactly what Hunter Biden did when he appeared on Candace Owens' podcast: distracting from his own failings by insinuating that there's some really corrupt, evil class of criminals who are out to get him. Concerned about the fact that Platner very obviously lied about not knowing his tattoo was a Nazi symbol? Ignore that: It's what the Epstein class wants you to think!

Class Dismissed

For what it's worth, the rise of this lazy and false smear—which is now predominantly wielded by partisan Democrats—is entirely the fault of top Trump administration officials. A fascinating article in The New York Times excerpted from a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan details exactly how this came to be. In their capacity as independent podcasters, people like Dan Bongino and Kash Patel helped popularize the idea that the FBI was protecting Epstein clients and that Trump would reveal all if reelected. (Trump himself never shared much enthusiasm for this issue.) Once they joined the administration, however, they were forced to confront a troubling truth: There was no such client list to unveil.

"As they took office in 2025, Trump's advisers were subject to intense pressures of their own making," note Haberman and Swan.

According to their reporting, Vice President J.D. Vance is keenly aware of how disappointed the MAGA base has been with the administration's handling of the Epstein Files. For this, he has only himself to blame. It will prove impossible to satisfy the demand for something that simply does not exist.

This Week on Freed Up

Check out the latest episode of my new podcast with Christian Britschgi, in which we stop being polite…and start getting real.

Worth Watching

Oh man, they're remaking Ocarina of Time for the Switch 2!

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time will be reborn on Nintendo Switch 2 in 2026. #NintendoDirect pic.twitter.com/t3qz5IVv5u

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) June 9, 2026

I am excited. I am also concerned, because there are so many ways they could mess this up. It's generally not a great idea to tinker with things that were basically perfect the first time around. (Thus my opposition to the latest Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action show; it's fine, but why bother?) The opportunity to improve the graphics is nice, but the original game has so much charm and personality specifically because the pixelated sprites look weird and unsettling. I'm also terrified that they will make it open world, like Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild. Do not do this, Nintendo!

That said, the Super Mario RPG Remake was excellent, and I thought that game was perfect to begin with, too. Moreover, I wouldn't mind if they mixed up the puzzles in the dungeons, made combat more dynamic, and increased the difficulty for veterans.

The post Graham Platner, Other Fools Blame Their Problems on the 'Epstein Class' appeared first on Reason.com.

No Heckler's Veto Allowed at School Board Meetings

2026-06-11T20:44:21Z

An excerpt from yesterday's Sixth Circuit decision (which I think is generally quite correct) in Boddy v. Grech, written by Judge Richard Allen Griffin, joined by Judges John Bush and John Nalbandian:

During a public comment period of a Xenia School Board meeting, plaintiff Darbi Boddy attempted to express her views regarding the school district's alleged teaching of critical race theory. In prepared remarks, delivered in a calm and deliberate manner, Boddy took issue with the "cowardice" of the school district's superintendent and characterized the Board as "failing."

Displeased with the speech, Board president Mary Grech threatened to turn off Boddy's microphone. Forty seconds later, as some in the audience became disruptive in reaction to Boddy's remarks, defendant Grech abruptly seized Boddy's microphone and recessed the meeting. Boddy was denied her allotted five minutes of public comment, and she was not offered any additional time to address the Board when the meeting resumed….

[Boddy] addressed the Board calmly and deliberately:

My name is Darbi Boddy and I live in West Chester. I am a previous Board of Education member for the Lakota School District; I am on the board of Protect Ohio Children and represent the southern part of Ohio and the organization responsible for the heat map. I am also a leader for Moms for America in Butler County. I recently heard about the failing Xenia Board of Education and the cowardice [sic] superintendent who cannot perform adequately in his role ….

After speaking for only twenty-eight seconds, president Grech interrupted Boddy, shouting "Excuse me!" Boddy, however, continued. Quickly, Grech again yelled, "Ma'am, excuse me I will cut your mic." Undeterred, Boddy continued to methodically read from her prepared remarks:

This superintendent reprimanded the one good board member who was doing [his] due diligence and asking questions so he could better understand the teaching environment, make educated decisions to determine what is best for the students of Xenia and therefore help create an educational environment free of racism and division, as is his job per ORC and school policy. It appears quite obvious this board and superintendent do not advocate for transparency and want to continue pushing racist and divisive ideologies to the children of Xenia and indoctrinate them into an anti-American agenda ….

At this point, some in the crowd began to heckle Boddy with loud boos, which continued for approximately fifteen seconds.

About a minute and twenty seconds into Boddy's remarks and amid loud boos, Grech moved to recess the meeting, which another Board member quickly seconded. Yet Boddy continued to speak. A few seconds later, Grech walked up to the podium and took the microphone away as Boddy was speaking. Some in the crowd cheered; others jeered and booed. Boddy continued speaking, without a mic, as the Board shuffled out of the room. Although Boddy was prevented from using her allotted five minutes of public comment, the Board did not offer Boddy any additional time to finish her remarks after the recess.

The court concluded that Boddy's speech didn't fall within any First Amendment exception:

Boddy's use of "failing" and "cowardice" do not constitute fighting words. Nor was her speech obscene, as it did not appeal to a "shameful or morbid interest in sex." She did not utter any "threatening, profane or obscene revilings" either….

And even if Boddy's speech was offensive, the First Amendment protects this kind of speech. A contrary rule would permit "a majority to silence dissidents," and allow the government to ban "the expression of unpopular views." … "The government may not censor speech merely because it is offensive to some." Even seemingly neutral rules that ban "attacks on people or institutions" "could be considered viewpoint discrimination." And regardless of the forum, viewpoint discrimination is impermissible.

The court rejected the district court's "characterize[ing] some of Boddy's speech as an ad hominem attack not protected by the First Amendment":

First, we have never held that an ad hominem attack is per se unprotected speech…. Nor has the Court held that ad hominem attacks are without First Amendment protection….

Second, as a factual matter, Boddy's speech was not an ad hominem attack. Boddy was criticizing the Board and superintendent for their policy choices as public employees. An ad hominem attack is a "personal dig or affront … [or] the criticism of an adversary's character as opposed to the substance of the adversary's arguments." Boddy's speech was not personal or related to the character of any individual Board member. She did not address any member by name and merely characterized the Board as "failing."

And even the use of "cowardice" to describe the superintendent's actions was related to his performance in his public facing role. "Freedom to criticize public officials and expose their wrongdoing is at the core of First Amendment values."

The court concluded that the restriction was viewpoint-based, and not based on application of neutral "decorum" rules:

Grech's justification for cutting Boddy's speech reveals that she curtailed Boddy's speech because she shared viewpoints critical of the Board…. Grech testified that she made the threat to cut the microphone because Boddy "was starting down the path of calling [people] names." But we condemned this precise rationale in Ison as impermissible viewpoint discrimination. Although Grech claimed later that she admonished Boddy because of how she was speaking, not because of what she was saying, the district court erred to the extent that it credited this portion of her testimony because the record shows otherwise.

First, consider the idea that Grech cut off Boddy because of her hostile tone. As the district court found—and the video evidence confirms—Boddy's tone and demeanor were objectively professional and consistent with proper decorum. So this first rationale is no help to defendants. Second, that some of Boddy's speech was directed at Lofton alone does not make it unprotected.

Third, the video shows that Boddy did not incite the crowd. To the contrary, Grech acknowledged that her threat to cut the microphone may have riled up the crowd. The video corroborates this understanding. And the district court similarly found that Grech, not Boddy, may have incited the crowd….

Grech's other testimony regarding Amber Boddie's reprimand is also problematic because it suggests that speech critical of the Board would violate the decorum rule, but speech praising the Board would not. The Board "may not exclude speech merely because it criticizes school officials." …

And the court held that the government's actions unconstitutionally "perpetuate[d] a heckler's veto":

"Of course, the First Amendment generally does not allow speech to be restricted because of some enthusiastic audience members' reactions." … Rooted in the idea that the government cannot favor one citizen's speech over another, we have held that speech "does not lose its protection under the First Amendment due to the lawless reaction of those who hear it." And "[p]unishing, removing, or by other means silencing a speaker due to crowd hostility will seldom, if ever, constitute the least restrictive means available to serve a legitimate government purpose."

In Bible Believers, a group of anti-Muslim evangelists attended Dearborn's Arab International Festival with the goal of converting patrons with their offensive and anti-Muslim messages. At the event, the group was surrounded by "youthful hecklers" who began throwing "bottles and other garbage at the Bible Believers." The police officers' focus was on the evangelists, and they asked that the group stop using their megaphone to amplify their controversial speech. We held that the police officers "effectuated a heckler's veto by cutting off the Bible Believers' protected speech in response to a hostile crowd's reaction."

Although Bible Believers concerns a heckler's veto in the context of a public forum with police as the relevant government actors, several important throughlines surface regardless of the forum at issue. When a "peaceful speaker" engages in protected speech and "is confronted by a hostile crowd, the state may not silence the speaker as an expedient alternative to containing or snuffing out the lawless behavior of the rioting individuals." Nor can the government "sit idly" by as the crowd imposes a "tyrannical majoritarian rule." It should "take any appropriate action to maintain law and order that does not destroy the right to free speech by indefinitely silencing the speaker."

We have yet to apply the heckler's veto to a limited public forum, but its application flows logically from our First Amendment jurisprudence. After all, a heckler's veto theory is another way to show impermissible viewpoint discrimination—which is improper regardless of the forum at issue. As the Ninth Circuit has explained, a "claimed fear of hostile audience reaction could be used as a mere pretext for suppressing expression because public officials oppose the speaker's point of view." Situations could arise "where the asserted fears of a hostile audience reaction are speculative and lack substance, or where speech on only one side of a contentious debate is suppressed." Similarly, the Third Circuit has suggested that a heckler's veto theory hinges on whether the government's actions were based on the content of the speech.

Under this framework, the heckler's veto test turns into a fact-bound test for viewpoint discrimination—here, whether Grech used the disorderly crowd as a pretext to stifle Boddy's speech. The facts suggest that Grech sanctioned a heckler's veto and in fact gave rise to it. Boddy shared an unpopular view, and some in the crowd tried to shout her down. Grech made no effort to quiet the crowd before moving for a recess. She also testified that she may have helped rile up the audience when she threatened to cut the mic.

As in Bible Believers, the government actor did not protect the speaker from the crowd but silenced the speaker in an effort to maintain decorum. And because of the forum, Grech had more control over the proceedings than an officer on the street. The Board's policies empowered Grech to regulate the meetings for reasonable decorum, and she could have used her authority to quiet the crowd instead of Boddy. Instead, she threatened to cut Boddy's microphone and then did just that. Further, Boddy was not offered the opportunity to finish her speech after the recess. So Boddy can show a likelihood of success on the merits under her heckler's veto theory as well.

Curt Hartman represents plaintiff.

The post No Heckler's Veto Allowed at School Board Meetings appeared first on Reason.com.

Iowa Man Seen in Viral Body Camera Footage Wins $105,000 Wrongful Arrest Lawsuit

2026-06-12T02:16:10Z

A federal jury in Iowa awarded $105,000 to a former college student late last week after officers wrongfully arrested him for driving under the influence without probable cause. The award comes nearly four years since the Fourth Amendment-violating traffic stop went viral.

On a rainy night in August 2022, Tayvin Galanakis, a then-19-year-old member of the William Penn University football team, was stopped by officers in Newton, Iowa, for driving with his high beams on within city limits. Body camera footage of the stop shows Galanakis explain that he was using his high beams because one of his headlights was out and turning them off when other cars approached.

It was the first time he had ever been pulled over, and Galanakis was slow to find his up-to-date registration and insurance information. Just a few minutes into the stop, Newton Police Officer Nathan Winters asked Galanakis to step out of the car and had him sit in the police cruiser.

"How much have you had to drink tonight?" Winters asks. "None," Galanakis responds. "What do you mean, 'none'?" Winters shoots back.

Winters proceeds to accuse Galanakis of being under the influence, citing "watery and bloodshot eyes," "fumbling over the registration," and an "odor of alcohol" he says is coming from Galanakis. After confidently asserting he's had "nothing to drink" and that he "can't wait" to take a test, Galanakis asks what happens if "nothing pops up." "Do you get in trouble?" Galanakis asks. "No," Winters responds, "I'm doing what I'm supposed to do."

Winters leads Galanakis through several field sobriety tests in the rain. Despite no obvious evidence of intoxication, Winters claims Galanakis is showing "signs of impairment" before moving on to a breathalyzer test. But Galanakis blows a blood alcohol level of 0.00.

"When's the last time you smoked weed?" Winters asks, to which Galanakis denies having smoked weed recently. "I blew a zero, so now you're trying to say I smoked weed?" asks Galanakis. "You can't do that, man. You really can't do that."

"Absolutely I can," Winters responds.

Galanakis was then arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated and taken to the Newton Police Station. Eventually, Galanakis was released after voluntary drug tests proved he was, in fact, completely sober.

Shortly after his arrest, Galanakis posted the body cam footage online, where it's gained almost 2 million views and sparked hundreds of calls to the Newton Police Department expressing outrage, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch. And in February 2023, Galanakis filed a lawsuit against the arresting officers and the City of Newton for claiming, in part, they arrested him without probable cause and in a "gross disregard of Tayvin's civil rights."

Winters and the second arresting officer struck back with a counterclaim, arguing Galanakis had defamed them when he published the footage and criticized them online. But in May 2023, most of the officers' defamation claims were dismissed when a federal judge ruled that Galanakis' statements were clearly "his opinion or 'rhetorical hyperbole' about what had happened during the encounter."

Galanakis' claim, however, moved forward and even overcame qualified immunity after a federal judge found that "no officer could reasonably conclude that there was a substantial chance that Galanakis was under the influence of marijuana" and that he showed "almost no indicia of intoxication." (Qualified immunity is a doctrine that shields state actors from personal liability for violating constitutional rights that aren't clearly established.)

Now, nearly four years since the initial stop, an Iowa jury has ruled in favor of Galanakis, awarding him $105,000, including damages for both his civil rights and false arrest claims, and punitive damages against both arresting officers.

Holding law enforcement officers accountable for violating constitutional rights is essential for not only preserving civil liberties, but for deterring government overreach and abuse of power. And while Galanakis was eventually successful in standing up for his constitutional rights, his case remains an outlier in a legal system that makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to hold bad cops accountable.

The post Iowa Man Seen in Viral Body Camera Footage Wins $105,000 Wrongful Arrest Lawsuit appeared first on Reason.com.

Marco Rubio's 'Cage Fights for Diplomacy' Are Another Form of Crony Capitalism

2026-06-11T19:27:03Z

Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a memorandum of understanding with Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) president Dana White on Thursday to "collaborate on the global growth of mixed martial arts." The New York Post gave the ceremony exactly the kind of attention-grabbing headline that the Trump administration might have been looking for: "Rubio and UFC will sign deal to use cage fights for diplomacy."

The details of the agreement were somewhat more boring. It enlists the UFC into the "sports diplomacy" programs run by the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The bureau spent around $52.5 million on "citizen exchanges," which includes sports diplomacy and other non-academic cultural events, in FY 2025. Examples include the Global Sports Mentoring Program for women sponsored by espnW.

In other words, rather than turning the United Nations into the Thunderdome, the new deal seems to be a way to give a leg up to a private sports league. President Donald Trump has been a longtime fan of UFC and a longtime friend of White. The martial arts news site Uncrowned noted that State Department backing "is worth real money" when it comes to booking international venues.

"We're excited about what this brand means about America's ability to expand and reach out to other parts of the world," Rubio said at the signing ceremony. "It will be an American company and an American brand—even if it may be their fighters—bringing this sport to these places, and that's the definition of American soft power."

Ironically, the Trump administration has been trying to dismantle the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs since Trump's second inauguration. Rubio initially froze the bureau's budget by around 93 percent and proposed abolishing U.S. government-sponsored cultural and educational exchanges altogether. Although Congress restored the bureau's budget, the administration is asking again to cut it by 68 percent, mostly by cutting educational programs, such as the Fulbright scholarship.

But Rubio seems to have found another use for the bureau: cozying up to private sports leagues. In January, the National Football League signed a memorandum of understanding with the State Department to sponsor international flag football tournaments, training camps, and exchanges. Thursday's agreement brings UFC under the same fold.

UFC is hosting a $60 million match at the White House on Trump's birthday. Lawyers in a lawsuit to halt the match called it a "volcano of corruption" and "the first private, for-profit sporting event ever held on White House grounds" in a filing on Wednesday. The White House called the lawsuit "an obstructionist, baseless, and dilatory" tactic.

"The White House is the people's house. It belongs to the people of the United States," Rubio said at Thursday's signing ceremony. "For them to be able to see this event with their White House in the background as part of our celebration of 250 years is a gift to the American people."

And a gift to Trump, whose favor advisers compete to curry. Earlier this year, the FBI also partnered with UFC to train its agents in self defense. Rubio himself has been pushing out Vice President J.D. Vance as Trump's heir apparent. On April 12, while Vance was bringing back news of the failed U.S.-Iranian peace talks, Rubio was watching a UFC match in Miami with the Trump family. In other words, the real "sports diplomacy" here is Rubio's outreach to Trump.

The post Marco Rubio's 'Cage Fights for Diplomacy' Are Another Form of Crony Capitalism appeared first on Reason.com.

Two Senators Offer a Bipartisan Solution to Censorship by Proxy

2026-06-11T18:51:34Z

President Donald Trump and his allies rightly condemn the Biden administration's censorial meddling with social media, which sought to suppress constitutionally protected speech that federal officials viewed as dangerous. Trump, who issued an executive order aimed at "restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship" on the first day of his second term, promised to end such bullying. Yet he has not been shy about using the influence of his office to restrict speech, as illustrated by his demands that ABC punish late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel for saying things he did not like.

Sens. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) have teamed up to offer a more consistent and principled response to the dangers of "jawboning," a form of indirect censorship that operates via government pressure on third parties such as social media platforms and TV networks. On Thursday, Cruz and Wyden introduced the JAWBONE Act, which would allow Americans affected by such pressure to seek damages from officials who exert it.

"JAWBONE" stands for "Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression." While that reach for an apt acronym is awkward and barely comprehensible, the bill itself makes considerably more sense.

"Holding the government accountable and giving Americans the tools to fight back is essential," Cruz says. "The JAWBONE Act ensures the First Amendment is protected, not undermined." Wyden adds that "nearly all of Americans' speech—including TV news, online streams and social media—flows through private corporations that are highly susceptible to government pressure." Since "regular Americans can't count on those companies to stand up to government jawboning," he says, "they need a way to level the playing field."

A summary of the bill says it would create "a cause of action against any government agency or employee that jawbones companies involved in social media, AI, or broadcasting, regardless of whether the jawboning succeeds." Plaintiffs could seek "money damages and reasonable attorney fees." The bill also aims to increase transparency and accountability by requiring agencies to publicly disclose relevant communications with "social media companies, AI companies, and broadcasters."

The JAWBONE Act has been endorsed by a bunch of civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Institute for Free Speech, Public Knowledge, Americans for Tax Reform, the Internet Accountability Project, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The bill "would mark major progress toward addressing indirect and unconstitutional government censorship of Americans' speech," FIRE says.

Beginning with the 1963 case Bantam Books v. Sullivan, which involved implied government threats against distributors of "objectionable" books and magazines, the Supreme Court has held that such "informal censorship" violates the First Amendment. The Court reaffirmed that principle in the 2024 case National Rifle Association v. Vullo, which involved a state regulator's attempts to discourage financial institutions from doing business with the gun rights group. But as illustrated by the outcome in Murthy v. Missouri, which the Court decided a month later, it can be difficult for victims of informal censorship to vindicate their First Amendment rights.

That case involved plaintiffs who claimed their online speech had been suppressed as a result of the Biden administration's crusade against "misinformation" about COVID-19. But the majority, which questioned the asserted causal link, held that none of the plaintiffs had standing to sue, adding that they had not adequately alleged that they were apt to suffer future injuries in the absence of an injunction.

Under current law, FIRE notes, victims of jawboning face several obstacles. First, they may not know their speech was deleted or downgraded because of covert government pressure. FIRE offers an example: Suppose you criticize the IRS on Facebook, triggering a private demand from an IRS official who says, "Delete this user or we're going to start launching tax audits of Facebook executives." Although "your First Amendment rights were violated," FIRE says, "you have no idea it even happened." The JAWBONE Act aims to remedy that problem by requiring disclosure of such communications.

Second, FIRE says, "the government can get away with attempted jawboning when the third party does not act." The JAWBONE Act addresses that issue by allowing lawsuits based on such attempts.

Third, establishing a link between government action and ostensibly private decisions can be challenging, especially when companies that succumb to jawboning are not inclined to cooperate with potential plaintiffs. The JAWBONE Act "makes it easier for plaintiffs to obtain discovery, requiring the government to share more information about their jawboning," FIRE says. "This will help victims prove their case in court."

Finally, when jawboning involves federal officials, the statute that authorizes lawsuits alleging violations of constitutional rights, 42 USC 1983, does not apply. The JAWBONE Act fills that gap by expressly allowing lawsuits against federal officials.

"The JAWBONE Act enforces Americans' First Amendment rights by making clear that the federal government cannot pressure [third parties] to censor speech," says Greg Y. Gonzalez, FIRE's legislative counsel. "Multiple administrations of both parties have engaged in jawboning, reflecting a broad and enduring problem. When federal officials cross this line, the JAWBONE Act ensures they can finally be held accountable. It's a bipartisan solution for a bipartisan problem."

The post Two Senators Offer a Bipartisan Solution to Censorship by Proxy appeared first on Reason.com.

Social Security Is Going Bankrupt Because Its Benefits Are Too Generous

2026-06-12T21:45:39Z

Ernest Hemingway once wrote that there are two ways to go bankrupt: "gradually and then suddenly."

For Social Security, the "gradually" phase is coming to an end. According to the latest report from the trustees who oversee Social Security, the program will hit insolvency in late 2032—and, at that point, benefits will be cut by about 22 percent. That moment of crisis is no longer some distant problem to be worried about in the future. Senators elected later this year will be serving their terms when the "suddenly" arrives.

But there are two other ways in which to go bankrupt: by spending too much money, or by not taking in enough to cover those expenditures.

Often, Social Security's fiscal problems are thought of as being the latter. For years, Social Security has run deficits, and that literally means that the program is not collecting enough tax revenue to cover the benefits being paid.

But that's not actually the most accurate way to think about Social Security's problems. To a significant degree, Social Security (like the rest of the federal government) has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. It is the program's overly generous benefits that are actually driving Social Security into insolvency.

To illustrate that point, look at the Social Security Administration's own data. A two-income middle-class couple who retired in 1990 would have earned about $44,000 in annual benefits (in inflation-adjusted 2026 dollars). That same couple retiring this year would expect to receive more than $60,000 in annual Social Security benefits.

If you're more of a visual learner, here's a chart showing how those benefits have increased. And, remember, this is adjusted for inflation.

There's a third factor: Rising benefits, even after adjusting for inflation. In 1990, a 2-earner middle-income couple received about $44,000 in annual benefits. In 2026, a middle-income couple gets $60,000. By 2050, $86,000. /2 pic.twitter.com/npN3YRQ924

— Andrew G. Biggs (@biggsag) June 9, 2026

Those surging benefits have put a serious strain on Social Security's finances. As Andrew Biggs, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out in a post on Twitter this week, the average American who will retire in the 2030s is promised more than 30 percent more in benefits than what they contributed in taxes. "If retirees simply got back what they paid in, Social Security would be solvent," he wrote.

That is a problem with deep roots. In December 1977, Congress voted to automatically increase future Social Security benefits by indexing those payments to national average wage growth. Previously, Social Security benefits could only increase when Congress voted to allow it.

When the change was made, Congress also considered a plan to index benefits to inflation. That would have made more sense. But wages have consistently grown faster than inflation in recent decades—which is a good thing for workers—and that dynamic has created a situation where Social Security is obligated to pay benefits far in excess of what payroll taxes can cover.

There is no reason for Social Security to pay out such generous benefits. The program's stated goal is to keep senior citizens out of poverty. But, according to Biggs' calculations, that average two-income household getting $60,000 in annual Social Security benefits is receiving more than twice the amount needed to keep them above the poverty line—and that's before they dip into any private savings.

In short: Benefits to most Social Security recipients could be cut significantly without pushing anyone into poverty. And that's what should happen. Social Security is a safety net program, not one meant to finance a lavish retirement lifestyle.

The question of whether Social Security has a spending or revenue problem is going to be extremely relevant in the very near future. Raising taxes (or borrowing more heavily) to close Social Security's funding gap makes little sense when the benefits side of the ledger caused this crisis.

The post Social Security Is Going Bankrupt Because Its Benefits Are Too Generous appeared first on Reason.com.

Beyond Orgasm: OneTaste Case Is About Freedom of Conscience, Says European Religious Freedom Group

2026-06-11T17:36:11Z

A European religious freedom group is slamming the prosecution of OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone and former executive Rachel Cherwitz. The group, CAP LC—official (French) name Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience—has United Nations consultative status, which means it's accredited by the U.N. to submit written statements and make oral arguments before the U.N. Human Rights Council. "The issues at hand involve not only the fate of two individuals but also the limits of freedom of thought, conscience, and belief," said CAP LC in a recent letter to the council.

Daedone and Cherwitz were convicted last year of one count of conspiracy to commit forced labor and sentenced to nine and 6.5 years in prison, respectively. They have since appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

OneTaste is a wellness group best known for its promotion of orgasmic meditation (OM), a partnered clitoral stroking practice that the group advocates for both sexual and psychological health reasons. But while OM gets the most attention, it was just one part of a system of beliefs inspired by Buddhism, feminism, theosophy, and more. OneTaste leaders advocated for openness to new experiences, including sexual experiences, and consensual non-monogamy. Hardcore OM devotees sometimes lived in communal spaces and engaged in other common behaviors, like participating in daily yoga and abstaining from alcohol.

In court, prosecutors seemed intent on putting the group's beliefs and practices on trial. They also relied on concerning theories of forced labor and of consent. Alleged victims freely admitted to consenting to various activities—from non-sexual activities and labor to participating in orgasmic meditation sessions to hookups with OneTaste investors or students—and sometimes even initiating these activities. But according to prosecutors, this consent and initiative didn't count because OneTaste leaders were psychologically manipulative and exerted outsize influence on some participants' lives. This was forced labor, suggested prosecutors, because Daedone and Cherwitz made them think they wanted to do things that they might not have done independently.

"The legal theory used to secure the convictions marks a major departure from established constitutional principles," states the CAP LC letter to the U.N. Human Rights Council. "The defendants were convicted…based solely on psychological influence, without evidence of threats, violence, or physical coercion."

You can see how this theory might apply to a wide range of religious groups, philosophical movements, political movements, self-improvement programs, health regimens, lifestyle groups, and so on. If the federal statute against human trafficking (which forced labor falls under) moves beyond cases involving force, fraud, restraint, and more traditional forms of coercion (like threats or blackmail) and starts extending to things like persuasion, spiritual instruction, and advice giving, we risk turning all sorts of influence and ordinary business into a crime. All authorities have to do is label something a cult, and voila—any of the group's instructions, practices, and marketing tactics become sinister.

The "prosecution relied heavily on anti-cult narratives and the idea of 'brainwashing,' a theory largely dismissed by scholars of religion as pseudoscience," states the CAP LC letter. "If psychological influence alone can count as forced labor, any spiritual, therapeutic, or community group—regardless of belief—may face prosecution based on subjective interpretations of relationships."

"Former members of mainstream faith communities could file civil claims under trafficking laws, which require less evidence and offer significant financial incentives," it continues. "This precedent risks legitimizing the use of trafficking law to target minority spiritual movements, a trend already apparent in other parts of the world where broad definitions of 'coercion' have been used to suppress unorthodox beliefs."

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ACLU Sues After Facial Recognition Falsely Identifies Florida Man as a Child Abductor

2026-06-11T15:25:02Z

Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, and the only evidence linking him to the crime was an AI facial recognition hit. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he is now suing the officers and agencies who put him through it.

In November 2023, police in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, responded to a call about an attempted child abduction at a McDonald's. Witnesses said an adult man allegedly tried to get the child, identified as a girl under 12 years old, to leave the restaurant with him. According to a police report, facial recognition software concluded with 93 percent confidence that the suspect was Robert Dillon.

In August 2024, Deputies arrested Dillon at his home in Fort Myers, Florida—hundreds of miles away, at the opposite end of the state. "Are you shitting me, man?" Dillon asked the arresting deputy. "I haven't been out of Fort Myers in two years." Further, he also said he had never been to Jacksonville Beach.

Dillon posted bail and pleaded not guilty to enticing or luring a child—a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. More than two months later, prosecutors dropped the charges after his attorney provided evidence that he was at work on the day in question.

But that doesn't excuse the fact that he was only arrested in the first place, and threatened with prosecution for a particularly heinous offense, because of shoddy police work.

The ACLU is now suing the city of Jacksonville Beach, as well as the individual police officers and officials involved in the case. According to the lawsuit, the responding officer viewed security camera footage of the suspect but didn't take a copy; instead, he took pictures of the screen with his cell phone. "In the photos, the suspect image is low resolution, and the suspect's face is partially shadowed and off-axis," the lawsuit claims.

When an investigator queried the facial recognition system, it was with the officer's grainy secondhand cell phone photos.

But there were other leads that police could have followed, to either bolster their case or point in another direction. For example, when he approached the girl, the suspect was picking up food that had been ordered ahead; this implies he had an online account, with contact information and a form of payment attached.

"These records could have been used to identify the actual person who placed the suspect's order," the lawsuit notes. "Upon information and belief, Jacksonville Beach PD personnel never requested or obtained mobile ordering records, payment data, or online account information from McDonald's."

Further, the McDonald's manager recognized the assailant as a "regular customer"—likely precluding Dillon, who lived and worked on the other side of the state and did not frequently travel. Besides, at no point did investigators search footage for the suspect's previous visits, either for higher quality images or transaction records. And once they settled on Dillon as a suspect, investigators could have gotten a warrant for his cell phone's GPS data, showing whether or not he was at a fast food restaurant 300 miles away from his home on the night in question.

The lawsuit notes that when Dillon's name came up, investigating officer Scott O'Connell queried the police database of license plate readers, which did not detect Dillon's vehicles in Jacksonville Beach within the 48 hours surrounding the attempted abduction.

Otherwise, the investigation seems to have consisted entirely of the grainy cell phone photos of surveillance footage. According to the lawsuit, O'Connell checked them against photos from inmate booking records and the sex offender registry but found no potential matches. Weeks later, with no leads, he sent the photos to other law enforcement agencies, asking for help. It was at this point that an investigator ran them through facial recognition, which flagged Dillon.

But as the ACLU notes, facial recognition's accuracy "depends significantly on the quality of the probe image. Lower-quality images contain less interpretable facial data, degrading the system's ability to produce a reliable template."

At the very least, it requires a much better source image. Besides, no such investigative tool should form the sole basis for an arrest warrant. "If you came to me with a facial recognition hit and that was your probable cause, I would probably kick you out of my office because that's not how it works," Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters told local news. (Waters is among those being sued in the ACLU lawsuit, because it was an investigator from the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office who ran the grainy photo through facial recognition and advised O'Connell it was a "93% match" to Dillon.)

While he was ultimately released, Dillon still had to suffer the indignity of not just being arrested, but being tarred as a possible child abuser. When deputies placed him in a group holding cell after his arrest, the lawsuit says Dillon "sat in silence, too frightened by the gravity of the charge to speak with or interact with anyone." Even after the charges were dropped, it took an entire year for authorities to take down his mug shot and expunge the arrest from his record.

Unfortunately, Dillon is hardly the first person in this position: The ACLU estimates he is one of at least 14 people arrested since 2019 after being erroneously identified by facial recognition.

Dillon's lawsuit, filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, seeks both compensatory and punitive damages, as well as a requirement that the police departments in question will adopt new safeguards against the misuse of facial recognition technology in the future.

"The night I spent in jail after they arrested me for a crime I did not commit still haunts me to this day. I will never get over how terrified and worried I was, wondering if I'd ever go home to my wife and daughter again," Dillon said in a statement. "Florida police must implement safeguards and ensure this never happens to anyone else, because until they do, nobody is safe."

The post ACLU Sues After Facial Recognition Falsely Identifies Florida Man as a Child Abductor appeared first on Reason.com.

The Economist Who Wants To Make the World Poorer

2026-06-11T15:16:20Z

Writer and philosopher Ayn Rand was often accused of inventing cartoonish villains. Rogues like Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead would scheme to seize the global economy's commanding heights in pursuit of a distorted sense of justice. But the people who hold such ideas don't just appear in cartoons or in Rand's novels.

Enter Thomas Piketty and company.

In early June, Piketty—the French economist whose work on inequality has made him something of a rock star even while being serially challenged for methodological errors, data imputations, and cherry-picked baselines—and his large team unveiled what can only be described as a villainous plan. It's a comprehensive program for global managed decline dressed up in the language of climate justice and equality.

The plan is far too ambitious for most nations to accept. But given the influence of Piketty and his circle of economists on U.S. wealth taxes and prominent global policy proposals, we should take its underlying ideas seriously.

Piketty's plan would cap gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in wealthy countries at roughly $69,000, far less than America's current $94,430. The plan would also limit annual global economic growth to between 0 percent and 0.5 percent. Monsieur Piketty would allot only 0.115 percent annual growth to the U.S, whose GDP has expanded by more than 3 percent on average since 1930. This would hurt not just the billionaires but every American.

The plan would mandate an international three-day work week and reduce construction activity by 70 percent, manufacturing by 87 percent, and even leisure-sector activity by 58 percent. There would be massive and punishing trade actions against noncompliant countries.

It envisions a "Global Justice Fund" financed not by taxing carbon but by global wealth and income taxes. This fund would be 20 times the size of current development aid and would be administered by a new international bureaucracy answerable to heaven knows who.

Don't be fooled by Piketty's training as an economist. This is not economic thinking. Consider the utter inconsistency of relying on a vast stock of wealth (mostly from the U.S.) for redistribution while suffocating long-term growth to near zero. Much of the value of the assets needed to finance this scheme would be destroyed. It is also disqualifying to claim that sub-Saharan Africa will grow at 4 percent if we crush the economies that provide the capital for its investments and buy its exports.

Let's ask the uncomfortable question: What would it require to enforce Piketty's plan? About this matter, he is conveniently vague. Confiscating something on the order of 10 percent of world GDP and redirecting it through a newly created supranational body does not happen by asking nicely. You cannot restructure the global economy at that scale without a coercive apparatus that dwarfs anything in human history.

The mechanism must be authoritarian. It would require a world government with the power to tell billions of people which jobs they may and may not hold, what they may build, what they may eat, and how many hours they are permitted to work.

And to what end? "Climate change" is an insufficient answer when Piketty's entire edifice is built on a discredited foundation. The report relies on a baseline from the "RCP8.5" climate scenario that projects Earth warming by as much as 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. But last month, the United Nations' own climate panel officially retired RCP8.5 (always a high-end estimate) as "implausible." A more central projection is around 2.7 degrees Celsius. Replies to Piketty's X feed pointed this out immediately. His response, as far as anyone can tell, has been silence.

That leaves the inequality argument. Worldwide income inequality is nearing a 150-year low, but Piketty insists that radical redistribution of wealth is essential for the Global South. And where have billionaires and wealth been popping up fastest in recent decades? Embarrassingly, data from Piketty's World Inequality Database confirms that it's in South and Southeast Asia and East Asia. These are the exact Global South regions that have spent recent decades rescuing hundreds of millions of people from poverty through market-directed economic growth.

A core confusion of the degrowth ideology is its conflation of inequality and poverty, in fact two very different things. Reducing inequality by making everyone poorer is not a victory for the poor. The billions of people still lagging in the global income distribution have one realistic path out: growth. Dynamic, market-driven, property-rights-protected growth is the only proven path to prosperity. It's also the path to environmental improvement, which costs money.

Degrowth is the ultimate luxury belief. It's dreamed up by tenured professors in Paris and progressive think-tank pundits in Brussels. These are people who already have high incomes, comfortable apartments, generous health care, and pensions, and whose ideas would pull up the ladder on billions of poor people.

Rand's villains always insisted they were acting for the greater good. They always had elaborate plans. They always needed just a little more power to make it work. And they thought little about the terrible burdens their plans would impose on ordinary people.

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Some Question for Todd Blanche's Upcoming Confirmation Hearing

2026-06-11T14:54:54Z

It's hard to think of a better illustration of the dramatic changes that our President has wrought in the world of law and lawyering than the (still-very-much-unfinished) Todd Blanche story. Blanche's actions since being named Acting A.G. – the risible Comey indictment ("SeashellGate"?)[1], the "Anti-Weaponization" slush fund for Trump's cronies and January 6 insurrectionists that even Trump's long-time supporters couldn't stomach,[2] the waiver of claims against the President of the United States (his boss) that he forgot to include in the Settlement Agreement the DOJ had negotiated[3](!) – would surely, in earlier times, have gotten him fired, and possibly sanctioned or worse for having perpetrated a fraud on the court.[4]

Instead, it earned him a promotion. To paraphrase Vince Lombardi, loyalty isn't everything, it's the only thing.

But the good news is that the nomination will allow the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask Blanche some questions at his confirmation hearings. Here are some questions that I'd like Blanche to answer:

Were you involved in the negotiations leading up to the May 18 "Settlement Agreement" between the President and the I.R.S.? And/or the drafting of the Settlement Agreement itself?
1. If you were not involved, were you briefed beforehand on the deal that was being struck?
2. If you were involved, in what capacity were you acting – as counsel to the I.R.S.?
  1. Were you concerned about potential conflicts of interest in such a scenario, given that (a) before you became Acting AG you were the President's personal lawyer, and (b) as Acting A.G. the President - your adversary in the action - is your direct superior and can fire you at will?
3. Before the Plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their claims in the Florida case, the Court had ordered special briefing on the question of whether there was a "case or controversy" in the action. Briefs were due in less than a week after Plaintiffs' motion to have the claim dismissed was filed. Presumably, the DOJ was hard at work preparing its briefs on the question. What position was the DOJ going to take on behalf of its client (the IRS) on the matter? Was there, or was there not, a justiciable "case or controversy"?
4. You didn't sign the Settlement Agreement (although it was signed on behalf of the United States by your deputy, Assistant A.G. Woodward). Why not?
5. When did you become aware that the parties had negotiated a provision pursuant to which the IRS would waive all of its claims against Mr. Trump that may have accrued up to that point in time?
6. Do you know why the Settlement Agreement did not include any waiver of IRS claims? Was that just an oversight? On whose part? Is your order of May 19 an attempt to correct that oversight?
7. The Settlement Agreement states that Mr. Trump and the other Plaintiffs will receive "a formal apology from the United States,"and that this was their "sole and complete relief" in the case. [Sec. III(A)] But that would suggest that the IRS' waiver was not part of the settlement between the parties. Is that correct?
8. But if the waiver was not part of the settlement between the IRS and Mr. Trump, then what authorizes you to include it in your May 19 Order?
  1. If I promise to stop asking you uncomfortable questions about your behavior as Acting Attorney General, will you give me a waiver of all claims the IRS might have against me? And putting aside whether you'd like to do that - do you seriously believe that you are authorized to grant me such a waiver on behalf of the United States? Please explain.
9. The Settlement Agreement states that "the corpus of the Anti-Weaponization Fund's funding does not represent the value of any current claim by Plaintiffs, but rather is based on the projected value of future claimaints' claims." On May 18, the DOJ announced that the fund would receive $1.776 billion. Although you have backtracked on this point and declared that the DOJ is not moving forward with the Anti-Weaponization Fund, I am just curious - was this actually "the projected value of future claimants' claims"? You must have some worksheets and/or calculations to back that up, yes? May we see them?

[1] See Eugene's takedown of the charges against Comey here.

[2] See my earlier postings here, here, and here.

[3] Seriously. You can see for yourself that the IRS did not waive any claims against Trump in the Settlement Agreement. That waiver was granted in the special "Order" Blanche issued on the following day.

Why wasn't it included in the Settlement Agreement? The only explanation I can come up with is that the lawyers simply forgot to include it. Maybe they got confused; the Settlement Agreement does have a "waiver of claims" clause (see Sec III(B)) – but that one goes in the opposite direction! Plaintiffs are waiving their claims against the IRS!

You can imagine the scene:

Blanche: "Did you put that waiver into the Settlement Agreement?"

Lawyer in Charge of Drafting Settlement Agreement: "We sure did!"

That kind of thing would get a first-year associate fired. But Mr. Blanche has turned it into nomination to be our next Attorney General.

[4] We will learn, I hope, a great deal more on this score shortly. Judge Williams, in the SD FL case, has asked for briefing, due this Friday, on possible collusive conduct by the two parties in this case, and I suspect she will hold at least one public hearing on the matter as well. The long and the short of the allegation is that the two sides – Trump on one side, the IRS on the other – agreed that Trump would file a phony lawsuit against the IRS, that he would voluntarily dismiss his claims before the IRS had to answer the claims, and the parties would announce that they had "settled" the case. This would enable them to get their hands on the DOJ's "settlement fund," without any of that nasty Congressional oversight or approval.

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Blockbuster NYT Reveal About Judge Ross Scandal

2026-06-11T15:25:12Z

For several weeks now, I have been surprised that the major newspapers have not covered the Judge Ross scandal. In particular, I was shocked to see nothing from the New York Times and the Washington Post. I even noted how Bloomberg Law was winning the coverage.

Well, it seems the Times was working on something big. Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Mattathias Schwartz published a story this morning about Judge Ross. And we learn a lot. They got three law clerks to speak, plus they got a copy of the "apology" letter.

The New York Times confirmed it was Judge Ross through interviews with three of her former clerks and two people familiar with the matter, and obtained a signed apology letter that she wrote as part of a judicial reprimand.

First, this "secret" was passed down from year-to-year among law clerks:

For years, Judge Eleanor Ross's secret was passed down from law clerk to law clerk.

They whispered about the sultry jazz music that emanated from her chambers when a uniformed police commander, a man they called her "visitor," disappeared into her private office. The clerks could sometimes hear the unmistakable sounds of sex from behind the door.

They chalked it up as one of the burdens of working for Judge Ross, who routinely rubber stamped their draft orders and added little else before issuing them as rulings. But the clerks in the Atlanta courthouse felt helpless: Do you report your married boss, a federal judge no less, for having a clandestine in-office affair with a law enforcement officer?

One day last year, a clerk did exactly that.

Second, Judge Fogel—unlike Judge Wood—stated the obvious. The punishment handed down was woefully inadequate.

Jeremy Fogel, a retired federal judge who consults with judges on ethics questions, said some in the judiciary disagreed with how Judge Ross's case had been resolved. "Many of the sitting judges with whom I've spoken believe the findings as a whole warranted a more significant sanction," he said.

Another judge who shall remained unnamed wrote to me, saying that my post about Judge Wood was out of line, and demanded and I should apologize. I added an update to my post, but my criticism stands even stronger in light of the correction.

Third, we get more details about her chambers:

She soon settled on the 17th floor of the federal courthouse, in an office with two couches, a meeting table and windows that overlooked the Atlanta Falcons' stadium.

Among the décor in her chambers was a picture of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a quote from a Beyoncé and Drake song overlaid: "All them fives need to listen when a ten is talking." Elsewhere, she hung an apology letter from a lawyer she had chastised for being underdressed and underprepared in court.

In their first year of the prestigious two-year clerkship, Judge Ross's clerks would sit at a desk just feet away from the door to her office. In addition to their legal work, they were tasked with greeting visitors, and they kept a small CCTV screen nearby to see who was outside.

And details about the sex:

So it was odd when they would see a uniformed police officer walk down the hallway toward the back door of Judge Ross's office.

The walls were thin, and the clerks could sometimes hear music and the judge and officer chatting. Then the music would continue, and the talking would stop. Other times, what they heard was more explicit.

The three clerks told The Times that their stomachs churned when they realized what was taking place. But, coupled with her other actions, it also represented something fundamentally painful to them: that a person with a role they revered, a person whose job it was to decide America's laws, seemed not to care the way they cared.

Fourth, the clerks were even more troubled about her utter disregard for the civil docket. They insist barely 5% of the civil orders were reviewed, and only then for typos and grammar.

One clerk said it felt like their belief in the legal system had been yanked out from underneath their feet, and that they wondered whether to continue working in law.

While the clerks said they might have been willing to overlook isolated personal foibles, they were more broadly disturbed by the lack of attention Judge Ross paid to the civil disputes that came before her.

While Judge Ross was engaged on her criminal cases, the clerks — often fresh out of law school — told investigators that she largely let them decide how to rule on key motions in lawsuits. It was not unusual to go weeks without hearing much from her except for a brief email — "Please docket." — a few minutes after they sent her a draft order, three clerks told The Times.

They estimated that she provided edits on roughly 5 percent of the civil orders that they drafted in her name, and even then mostly just for grammar or typos.

Judge Ross later disputed the clerks' account to the judicial committee, saying that she made edits to 30 to 40 percent of drafts.

The Eleventh Circuit could have compared her draft orders and published orders, but decided not to investigate this ground.

Fifth, the Times obtained a copy of the "apology" note. I put "apology" in quotes because this is woefully inadequate. It's like saying, "I'm sorry you were offended."

Ultimately, the committee required the judge to send apology letters to the six law clerks who spoke to investigators.

The committee said the letters "should be sufficiently specific so as to make clear to the recipient the sexual misconduct for which the judge is apologizing."

The letters she sent, dated May 27, were three sentences long and identical.

"Thank you for your contributions to our court during your clerkship," Judge Ross wrote, according to a copy obtained by The Times. "I convey my deepest apology for not taking steps to ensure that it was a more positive experience. I wish you all the best in your future legal endeavors and in life."

I wonder if ChatGPT wrote this?

Sixth, the clerks found the letter "offensively vague."

The three former clerks who spoke to The Times said that they viewed the letter as offensively vague. One decided to share it with the chief judge of the 11th Circuit, believing it didn't comply with the committee's order.

I agree. The whistleblower clerk should appeal this matter to the Judicial Conference of the United States. The Chief Justice needs to confront this mess.

Seventh, the Times actually got members of the Atlanta bar to go on record.

Judge Timothy C. Batten, Judge Ross's former colleague in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, worried that her misconduct would affect how courts and judges were viewed by the public.

"I'm really sorry this happened and reflects poorly on the court," he said in an interview. Judge Batten retired last year as chief judge of the district court and said he had never gotten wind of Judge Ross's misconduct.

Now, some in the Atlanta legal world wonder if Judge Ross's career will survive.

"I don't know where you go from here," said Don Samuel, a criminal defense lawyer in Atlanta who has long known, and respected, Judge Ross.

"There's so much snickering going on by everybody that I can't imagine what it will be like to be on the bench and wonder what everybody's thinking," he said.

I hope this reporting jumpstarts impeachment talk.

The post Blockbuster NYT Reveal About Judge Ross Scandal appeared first on Reason.com.

2 Texas Grandmothers Who Overcame Addiction Wanted To Become Social Workers. The State Wouldn't Let Them.

2026-06-11T13:46:27Z

Last week, Texas' 15th Court of Appeals dismissed a case brought by two women who've been denied social workers licenses in the state. Despite their master's degrees and what the court described as "many strong…letters of recommendation," the women's decades-old criminal offenses, committed in the throes of addictions they have since overcome, made them categorically ineligible for licensure under state law.

The plaintiffs, Katherin Youniacutt and Tammy Thompson, plan to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court of Texas. "We're confident, under the existing precedent, that we're entitled to proceed with our case," Arif Panju, an attorney at the Institute for Justice (I.J.), who is representing the women, tells Reason.

Youniacutt and Thompson, who struggled with substance abuse earlier in their lives, say in their petition before the court that they've reformed themselves. Youniacutt, "a victim of clerical abuse" as a child, turned to alcohol to cope, and in 2007, pled guilty to assaulting an off-duty police officer with her car while under the influence.

Thompson began using methamphetamine in the wake of an ugly divorce. When she was threatened in 2006 by a man with a baseball bat, she was protected by friends and onlookers and left the scene before police arrived. Two years later, Thompson learned that the man had accused her of assaulting him with the bat, and "though she does not recall ever picking up the bat or striking him," she pled guilty to the charges and received two years' probation, eventually resulting (because of her drug use) in a 4-year prison sentence in 2010.

After earning their master's degrees in social work, Youniacutt and Thompson, who are both sober, were eager to become "licensed master social workers" and begin treating others who struggle with trauma and substance abuse.

The Texas State Board of Social Worker Examiners even assured both of them in 2019 that although their histories "may present a barrier to licensure," they would not be disqualified, and the Board would consider extenuating circumstances before making a decision.

However, later that year, Texas passed a law banning from every healthcare profession anyone who was ever "previously convicted of…the commission of a felony offense involving the use or threat of force." The Board of Examiners did not contact either woman to notify them of the change.

When, after paying hundreds of dollars in exam and application fees, the women finally completed all the licensing requirements—Thompson in 2021 and Younicacutt in 2023—their applications were denied.

Now the two women have challenged the lifetime ban's legality under the Texas Constitution, arguing that it amounts to an "unreasonable" imposition on their "right to earn an honest living in the occupation of [their] choice." After a district court allowed the case to proceed—agreeing that the ban was "irrational"—the state district attorney filed an appeal, which proved successful last week.

The Court of Appeals decided that, in fact, "requiring licensed social workers not to have committed violent felonies is still arguably rationally related to the State's interest."

Panju tells Reason that the Court of Appeals essentially "deferred blindly to the Legislature." He says it merely pointed to a legislative study noting that "concerns have been raised regarding the prevalence of licensed healthcare professionals using their privilege and position of authority to commit crimes against vulnerable patients." And then it concluded that on those grounds alone, the lifetime ban—as applied to two grandmothers who'd utterly turned their lives around—was entirely rational.

"That's not how economic freedom works in the United States," says Panju. "And certainly not in Texas." After the ruling handed down by the Texas Supreme Court in Patel v. Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (2015), he says a restriction on economic liberty must do a lot more work to justify itself.

"Under the test laid out by the Supreme Court," he says, the court has to "actually look at the people bringing the challenge—Ms. Thompson and Ms. Youniacutt—and look at the real-world effect of the law on them, as part of the analysis." The Court of Appeals didn't do that: "It just…pulled out the 'Government Always Wins' rubber stamp," and dismissed their complaint "at the level of abstraction."

Asked about their Supreme Court prospects, Panju says he's "confident, under the existing precedent, that we're entitled to proceed with our case."

Once the motion to dismiss is defeated, he says, all the details of "the real-world effects of the law on…Ms. Youniacutt and Ms. Thompson" will be considered, and "we'll have this declared unconstitutional."

Until then, these two Texas grandmothers will be banned from guiding others through the same challenges they faced.

The post 2 Texas Grandmothers Who Overcame Addiction Wanted To Become Social Workers. The State Wouldn't Let Them. appeared first on Reason.com.

Is It the Phones?

2026-06-11T14:58:01Z

Phones and young people and baby making: Online interaction is "lacking in some essential emotional nutrient that human beings evolved to harvest from the physical proximity of other human beings," writes Noah Smith at his Substack. "Perhaps it's something cognitive—the richness of context that tells you that no, your friend's life isn't perfect just because they posted a cool video of their trip to Europe, and thus you don't need to feel constantly envious and inadequate and left-out. Or perhaps it's something physical—the tiny touch of a high-five or a hug, the simple feeling of the proximity of other human bodies."

"Whatever this emotional nutrient is, our young people are starving for it, while they binge on the cheap sugar-alcohol of emoji reactions and story views," Smith continues. Meanwhile, "the global fertility decline is a long-standing trend. Every country that escapes poverty, urbanizes, and teaches its people to read is going to transition from a high fertility rate (5-7 children per woman) to a much lower rate. Long before the smartphone burst on the scene, most of Europe and the richer parts of East Asia had fallen below replacement-level fertility." Now it's hit the U.S. as well, with a new record low of 1.57 per April's report. (About one-quarter of the fertility rate drop is due to falling rates of teen pregnancy since about 2007, which is an undeniable victory.)

But "why is fertility falling everywhere across the globe, to such low levels, all at once?" asks Smith. "Whatever the cause is, it can't be something local and parochial. It can't be the effect of America's Great Recession, or Confucian culture, or whatever. It has to be something that has been affecting the entire world at the same time, and that narrows it down to a pretty short list." This brings us to the new paper that's been making the rounds: "Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T's 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly," which has been robustly critiqued (as well as, more broadly, the theory that phones are massively responsible for falling fertility).

However, "the old fertility drop was due to parents having fewer children, while the recent drop is due to fewer people becoming parents at all"—a critical distinction. Less marriage, less coupling. Also, possibly, the expectation of love as a precursor to marriage:

You're going to read a thousand takes on why there are less kids being born. But you won't hear the obvious one. There are less couples, less marriages.

The threshold for coupling up is love. Women would rather be single than not be in love. But love is rare. Always has been pic.twitter.com/s9KM99pXg9

— LindyMan (@PaulSkallas) May 11, 2026

Smith and others point to the rise of sexlessness and social isolation—time spent alone—coinciding with the rise of smartphones as a major contributor:

Smartphones appear to have accelerated the global fertility crisis -- by making social isolation and singledom more comfortable and entertaining.

Chatbots could nudge humanity even further in this direction. Today, digital technology doesn't just provide loners with perpetual… pic.twitter.com/eMXSZg8kt1

— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) June 8, 2026

It's fascinating that these anti-social trends—part of "the anti-social century," as Derek Thompson put it at The Atlantic—have happened basically everywhere, all at once; that there appears to be no obvious corrective; and that people can't even necessarily agree on what type of impact the phones (specifically: smartphones that can access social media) have had. Of course, the pandemic almost certainly functioned as an accelerant to preexisting social-withdrawal trends, and government-mandated lockdowns should be partially blamed. But there's something larger happening here, where synthetic socialization delivering cheaper, easier-to-come-by dopamine hits seems to satiate some part of our social longing, but with plenty of unintended consequences along the way.

I'm persuaded by the Smith argument, for what it's worth. But Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown pushed back on all of this, which is also worth your time. I'm just hoping we get a Knicks-related birth rate spike nine months from now, which brings me to…

Scenes from New York: WE LOVE A COMEBACK!!! MIRACLE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN! After being down 29 points in the second half, the Knicks managed to pull through. In the last few seconds, Jalen Brunson went for a game-winning 3-point shot that bounced off the rim and needed just a little boost from OG Anunoby to help it in. It was extraordinary. My whole neighborhood was erupting with cheers. I am shocked the noise level of my own little watch party didn't wake up my 3-year-old (who spent much of yesterday decorating cupcakes in Knicks colors).

The only good thing Mayor Zohran Mamdami has ever done:

When James Dolan cancels the watch party outside MSG, we bring the watch party to you.

Thanks to the @NBA, Knicks Game 4 is now playing on dozens of @LinkNYC screens across our city.

LGK. pic.twitter.com/gRcYjobzSV

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) June 11, 2026

Incredible scenes all around the city:

JFK TERMINAL 8 TONIGHT WHEN THE KNICKS TOOK THE LEAD pic.twitter.com/YvQujrsplV

— Renny Gong (@rennyxgong) June 11, 2026

yes!!! i risked the no fly list screaming pic.twitter.com/XuwShzUfiU

— kyle (@kyle4prezident) June 11, 2026

Someone from their second floor apartment projects the Knicks game against the 4th Avenue-9th Street station pic.twitter.com/oUJQ34XnPM

— Steven Vago (@Vagoish) June 11, 2026

NY Post backpage pic.twitter.com/vm1D5eUmsY

— Stefan Bondy (@SbondyNBA) June 11, 2026

LOOKIN' AT YOU, WEMBY:

visiting the shaolin monks then losing the wu tang game in historical fashion is crazy storytelling

— alex (@steven_lebron) June 11, 2026

I LOVE NEW YORK SO MUCH!!!

QUICK HITS

"We're going to be attacking them, attacking them very hard," President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House yesterday, referring to Iran. "We hit them hard yesterday, and we're going to hit them hard again today." Trump also threatened to seize Kharg Island, "which handles roughly 90% of Iran's crude exports," per CNN. Iran's military is now targeting U.S. bases for the second day in a row.
"The Food and Drug Administration approved a new sunscreen ingredient this week for U.S. markets," writes the editorial board of The Washington Post, referring to bemotrizinol, which was approved for use in Europe 27 years ago. "That shouldn't be remarkable. Yet this is the first time the agency has done so since 1999…The reason for this disconnect is a 1938 law that classified sunscreen products as drugs to be regulated by the FDA. That has required time-consuming animal testing and clinical trials to prove that they every new variety is safe to be sold over the counter."
"Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's government has introduced legislation that would ban social media for youth under 16 unless companies such as Meta Platforms Inc. and X Corp. meet a set of safety standards," reports Bloomberg.
Worth your time: "How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi" over at The Atlantic.
Agreed:

"Remote work is the biggest innovation for ambitious women with children since the dishwasher."

Citing @FamStudies research: Mothers of young children who worked full-time from home spent 2.4 additional hours with their children

Excellent @katebachwsj @WSJFreeEx pic.twitter.com/5jv3sl4a9v

— Carter Skeel (@CarterSkeel) June 10, 2026

The post Is It the Phones? appeared first on Reason.com.

'Find Some Kids': How Health Officials Drummed Up Fake Support for Tobacco Bans in Massachusetts Towns

2026-06-11T17:26:58Z

Massachusetts has a long and storied history of prohibition. The Puritans banned dice, cards, and gaming tables. The state was one of the first to ban alcohol and marijuana. Missing from this murderer's row of vices is tobacco—for now.

Local boards of health are banning nicotine in their towns and cities by imposing "Nicotine-Free Generation" (NFG) policies. These forbid anyone born after a specific date from buying any kind of tobacco in their lifetime, ever. In Massachusetts, the specific date is typically either January 1, 2004, or January 1, 2005. The bans usually cover not just cigarettes but all nicotine products, regardless of their level of health risk, including cigars, nicotine pouches, vapes, hookah, and pipe tobacco.

The boards of health responsible for these rules are municipal bodies. They're empowered to adopt and enforce "reasonable health regulations." Their work typically focuses on sanitary code enforcement, restaurant inspections, housing conditions, and communicable disease control.

Board members are elected in some towns and appointed in others. The elections typically have a low profile and a low turnout, and they're often uncontested. Most residents are unaware that a tobacco regulation is being considered until it has already been adopted.

Public records from 13 Massachusetts municipalities reveal that the adoption of NFG policies is not the result of popular demand. It is the result of a coordinated, state-funded campaign of a dedicated network of activists, collaborating with health board members and a melange of tobacco control programs, pursuing predetermined outcomes with little regard for public opinion.

The Massachusetts Tobacco Cessation and Prevention Program (MTCP), for example, is a taxpayer-funded public health program whose goal is to prevent young people from using nicotine, help current users quit, protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke, and eliminate tobacco-related disparities. Nowhere in its legal mandate is there a duty to lobby localities to ensure adults never have the choice to use nicotine.

But local tobacco control programs, funded through MTCP, use tobacco control program managers and coordinators to scout potential cities to target for a generational ban. MTCP tracks each new effort and includes NFG adoption among its tracked goals.

The dual role of government employee and prohibition activist is evident in an email chain from March 2025. Maureen Buzby, a tobacco inspection coordinator employed by the city of Melrose, wrote to the town of Hopkinton's health director, Shaun McAuliffe, after learning of the town's interest in a generational ban at an MTCP meeting. Using her government email account, Buzby offered to deploy "an amazing group of volunteers" who would "answer questions, attend a meeting, testify at a hearing, whatever."

McAuliffe described the arrangement in an email to the town's Select Board chair: "The Commonwealth has assigned NFG staff and reps from the [Massachusetts Municipal Association] to insulate us through the remainder of the process."

Public records request

Buzby was explicit about MTCP's interest in NFG, writing to the town of Mansfield's health director: "MTCP has asked all of us Tobacco Program Managers to let them know when new tobacco policies get passed."

The grant report for the Six City Tobacco Initiative, which is entirely funded by the Massachusetts Department of Health, recorded Somerville's adoption of NFG in March 2025 as "another win." The use of such language in a grant report to a state health department suggests that this is an active policy being pursued with no public mandate.

In These Towns, the Board Decided Before Anyone Testified

On April 14, 2025, McAuliffe wrote to Lisa Stevens-Goodnight of the Massachusetts Municipal Association: "We intend to hold the hearing mid-May. I intend to rally the parents of the kids that are addicted to Zins [sic], etc. My Board is committed to passing this."

Public records request

*Somerville's board passed a ban a month before the public hearing. A pre-written hearing script used in Amherst said: "Board members only need to listen to the public testimony. No [Board of Health] member will comment or ask any questions."

In Belchertown, Public Health Director Andrea Crete initiated contact with advocacy organizations, solicited template letters of support, and coordinated external experts. Letters sent to the board were drafted by outside parties, vetted by Crete, and then put before the board as if they were spontaneous expressions of local support. One federally funded Drug-Free Communities program director asked Crete to review her draft letter: "Let me know if there is anything specific you would like me to add."

There were about 1,000 emails in opposition. Yet the Belchertown Board voted 4-0-1 in favor of NFG.

One member who voted in favor, Ken Elstein, had spent the preceding weeks helping the outside advocates shape the regulation he would approve. In an email chain that October and November, under the subject line "Belchertown TFG comments," Elstein traded edits on the draft language with the Public Health Advocacy Institute's Mark Gottlieb, Kate Silbaugh of Boston University's law school, and Anthony Ishak of Massachusetts General Hospital, with Gottlieb supplying a detailed legal analysis in return. Elstein relayed another member's private doubts about the measure to the same advocates, and he took in the Public Health Advocacy Institute's legal read on it before a single resident had the chance to see it, let alone object.

Six weeks later, Elstein made each of the three motions to adopt the regulation. By 1:40 a.m., not seven hours after the gavel, a finished press release was already going around to Elstein and his collaborators, with instructions to "get ahead of the story."

'Find Some Kids'

The emails reveal how officials understood their own role. When an opponent emailed the Hopkinton Board of Health, McAuliffe forwarded the message not to the board members he is supposed to serve but to Buzby. His response: "I'm going to line up as many parents that have addicted kids that I can. Game on." Buzby coached him on credibility: "Youth are the most important voices. As well as local residents. We get chastised regularly for being 'outsiders.'"

Town employee Erin Bartolini, a Drug-Free Communities coalition coordinator who used her government email, maintained a catalog of template testimony for different audiences and distributed it to young people, encouraging them to recruit friends and parents. After Hopkinton adopted a generational tobacco ban, the apparatus was redeployed to the neighboring town of Ashland. McAuliffe emailed Buzby: "I can speak to Rajit and find some kids." He then contacted other town departments: "Do we still have a joint program with Ashland where we could recruit from?" A colleague asked: "For what?" McAuliffe replied: "Support NFG for Ashland."

Public records request

The director of Hopkinton Youth & Family Services suggested sending "Emily our young intern" who "wanted to speak at Hopkinton and lost out on time."

To be clear, it is already illegal for children to buy any kind of tobacco product in Massachusetts. And if they don't want to use nicotine after they turn 21, they do, in fact, have the option not to use it. Instead, they are dragooned into supporting legislation to ban their future selves and peers from having the choice in the first place.

Residents Voted Against the Ban. Officials Kept It Anyway.

In Manchester-by-the-Sea, after the health board adopted a generational tobacco ban by a 3–1 vote in October 2024, residents successfully petitioned for a nonbinding warrant article to be placed before a town meeting. Opponents of the tobacco ban won the vote, 81–76, at the April 2025 town meeting. The board's response was to keep their NFG policy anyway. Health Director Wendy Hansbury reframed the loss, arguing the vote was "so close" that the board was "justified saying that you side with the ½ that want to protect youth."

In Ashland, the Health Board resisted. Chair Ed Burman said, "the Board discussed at length and felt 5 Board Members shouldn't make this decision for the whole Town." According to the minutes of a November 2025 meeting, board member David Kinsman said, "He would like to live in a world where nobody uses tobacco products. However, there are a lot of things in the world that he wishes didn't exist and believes that NFG goes too far…mentioned Covid and the public belief that government went too far during the pandemic. Doesn't want to erode that trust any further and tell adults what they can and can't do."

These responses appear to have baffled NFG campaigners. Stephanie Patton, a prevention coordinator in Stoughton, emailed Buzby: "Do you have any intel into why the [Board of Health] in Ashland went the way that they did?"

Who's Funding the Push for Lifetime Tobacco Bans in Massachusetts?

The Public Health Advocacy Institute is the leading pressure group pushing generational tobacco bans. The institute reported total revenue of $741,000 in fiscal year 2022; the following year, that figure soared to $21.2 million. Whatever the source of that sudden increase, public or private, it's an eye-popping amount of money for a small policy shop offering free legal defense to municipalities that adopt NFG.

The Massachusetts Health Officers Association and the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards together reported millions more in government grants, with the latter group's senior staff attorney supplying draft NFG regulations to towns. These taxpayer-funded associations turned into distribution channels for a campaign nobody voted for.

The Strategy Behind Going Local First—and Then Using It to Push a Statewide Ban

Why do NFG advocates target boards of health rather than the state legislature or Congress? It's because local health boards have a low profile and are rarely scrutinized. They consist of three to five members who, by self-selection and the very nature of the office they hold, are more likely to prize longevity above all other values. More strategically, littering the state with localities that have NFG policies gives advocates ammunition to demand that the legislature adopt tobacco bans statewide.

Elstein, the same Belchertown board member, said as much at a Northampton presentation: "The more localities that pass this policy, the pressure it puts on the state to pass a statewide NFG bill."

This reveals an irony. For decades, tobacco control organizations have opposed measures that would give state legislatures exclusive power to regulate tobacco, arguing that local action serves as a laboratory for policy innovation. But the FOIA record shows the commitment to local democracy is threadbare. When enough municipalities adopt the same regulation, the advocates pivot to the state legislature and argue for statewide adoption, citing regulatory coherence. This is precisely the argument for preemption that the tobacco control movement has spent decades opposing.

The process is already in motion. Emily Reynolds, at the time a staffer in Massachusetts state Sen. Jason Lewis's office, kept Buzby and the Public Health Advocacy Institute abreast of developments regarding state-level NFG legislative hearings. "I am forwarding the public hearing notice for the tobacco free generation legislation….Please forward this on to any advocates that you think would be interested," Reynolds wrote in an email in July 2025.

Youth nicotine use is at a 25-year low, and fewer than 2 percent of kids smoke cigarettes. The war on youth nicotine use has been fought and won. Nicotine-free generation bans are about restricting tomorrow's adults, not today's kids. It's not unreasonable to imagine that if NFG advocates get their way, age-graded prohibition could be applied to a host of other products and activities that adults enjoy but run afoul of the preferences of public health officials.

*CORRECTION: This piece previously included a reference to a town where an NFG policy was not actually implemented.

The post 'Find Some Kids': How Health Officials Drummed Up Fake Support for Tobacco Bans in Massachusetts Towns appeared first on Reason.com.

Today in Supreme Court History: June 11, 1993

2026-01-26T15:31:20Z

6/11/1993: Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah decided.

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Gordon Wood's Enduring Defense of the American Revolution

2026-06-11T13:38:06Z

In 1775, the great British essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson entered the political fray over the American Revolution with a scorching pamphlet that attacked the wayward colonials for their disloyalty to the crown and hypocritical talk of freedom. "How is it," Johnson demanded, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

That sort of question still looms large over many contemporary debates about the American Revolution. "Why should anyone take seriously the founders' odes to liberty," the argument may go, "when many of those same founders participated in the vile institution of slavery?"

I got to thinking about Johnson's pamphlet the other day after I learned about the tragic death of the towering American historian Gordon Wood. The connection came to mind because Wood had offered his own response to such Johnsonian questioning in what was, to my mind, his best book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Here is what Wood had to say:

To focus, as we are today apt to do, on what the Revolution did not accomplish—highlighting and lamenting its failure to abolish slavery and change fundamentally the lot of women—is to miss the great significance of what it did accomplish; indeed, the Revolution made possible the anti-slavery movement and women's rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.

The example of John C. Calhoun, the famous South Carolina statesman and inveterate defender of slavery, may help to buttress Wood's point. In 1848, Calhoun denounced both the Declaration of Independence and its author, Thomas Jefferson, for promulgating the idea that "all men are created equal," which Calhoun described as "the most false and dangerous of all political errors." Calhoun was no fool. He well understood that if the Declaration of Independence was ever followed to its logical conclusion, it would spell doom for American slavery.

The great abolitionist hero Frederick Douglass knew that, too. The only difference was that while Calhoun disparaged Jefferson's words, Douglass celebrated them. By the middle of the 19th century, it was Douglass, and the antislavery movement to which he devoted his life, that truly embodied the radical principles of the American Revolution.

"It was no accident," Wood wrote, "that Americans in Philadelphia in 1775 formed the first anti-slavery society in the world." For them, just like for Douglass several decades later, the principles underlying the American Revolution could point nowhere else.

In Other Legal News

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue opinions today in one or more argued cases. As of this writing, we're still waiting on huge opinions dealing with executive power, birthright citizenship, immigration, and more.

As we wait for those big SCOTUS decisions to drop, I wanted to highlight a fascinating copyright case that's been bouncing around in the lower courts. If you're familiar with the tattoo-based reality TV shows Miami Ink or LA Ink, you may also be familiar with the tattoo artist who goes by the name Kat Von D. Well, a few years ago, Von D tattooed an image of Miles Davis on one of her friends. That image was based on a picture of Davis taken by a photographer named Jeff Sedlik. After Sedlik learned about the tattoo, he demanded to be paid a licensing fee. A federal copyright suit eventually followed.

Writing at Courthouse News, Edvard Pettersson lays out the legal and artistic differences between the parties:

Von D testified that no one in the tattoo world gets licenses to use photographs as references for their creations. She maintained her use of the Miles Davis image was "fair use" because it was her interpretation of the image and served an entirely different purpose than Sedlik's work….

Sedlik, however, turned out to be a stickler when it comes to unlicensed use of his work; he regularly scans the internet to find infringers. He testified how in 2014 he tracked down another tattoo artist who had posted on social media a tattoo he had done based on the same Miles Davis photo.

I am sympathetic to Von D's fair use argument in this case. And while it's not exactly pertinent to this particular dispute, I might add that I am sympathetic to the legal plights of tattoo artists in general, as this venerable profession has long suffered under bogus regulations and other unjustifiable government interference. Indeed, it was not until 2010 that a federal judge finally held that "the tattoo itself, the process of tattooing, and the business of tattooing are forms of pure expression fully protected by the First Amendment."

In any event, Sedlik v. Von Drachenberg looks to be a copyright case to watch, as its final outcome may have costly implications for many tattooists at work today.

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1776 All-Stars: Why Thomas Jefferson Is the Most Fascinating Founder

2026-05-26T19:48:43Z

This is part of 1776 All-Stars, a series about Reason's favorite American Founders. Read more here.

Joanna Andreasson
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1819. This accords well with the Cato Institute's definition of libertarianism: "the belief that each person has the right to live his life as he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others."

Immediately following his definition of rightful liberty, Jefferson properly cautioned, "I do not add 'within the limits of the law'; because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual."

Nearly half a century earlier, as a 27-year-old lawyer in 1770, Jefferson sought freedom for Samuel Howell, who was being held in indentured servitude because his grandmother was white and his grandfather was black. In his legal brief, Jefferson declared, "Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will." Jefferson was asserting the libertarian moral claim that every individual has full self-ownership. Alas, he lost the case.

Six years later, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson famously wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Historian Walter Isaacson calls that phrase "the greatest sentence ever written." And the claim that sentence made has reverberated across the world for the last two and a half centuries.

Despite declaring that "all men are created equal," Jefferson benefited from the labor of more than 600 enslaved people at Monticello and other properties over the course of his lifetime. Jefferson was conscious of this hypocrisy. In his first draft of the Declaration, he indicted King George III for having "waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere." Jefferson further accused the king of "suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce." Jefferson later explained that this passage "was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it."

In his 1783 draft of a new constitution for the Commonwealth of Virginia, Jefferson proposed that the new General Assembly not have the power "to permit the introduction of any more slaves to reside in this state, or the continuance of slavery beyond the generation which shall be living on the 31st. day of December 1800; all persons born after that day being hereby declared free." Jefferson recognized the evil of slavery but could not politically bring about its end or bring himself to give it up.

Jefferson was a fierce supporter of the liberty of conscience. "It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god," he observed in 1782. "It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." While Rhode Island was the only colony without an established state church, the 1786 adoption of Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom made Virginia the first state to end the use of taxes to support state-sanctioned churches.

Jefferson was ambassador to France as the new Constitution was being hammered out in 1787. But in his correspondence with chief writer James Madison, Jefferson decried the "omission of a bill of rights providing clearly & without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal & unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land & not by the law of Nations." Persuaded, Madison drafted a Bill of Rights that largely incorporated Jefferson's concerns; it was ratified as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.

Jefferson's hypocrisy with respect to slavery is a blot on his legacy. But he still deserves our praise for expressing the principles and framing the institutions that enabled the eventual extension of civil and political rights to all American men and women. On the anniversary of Jefferson's Declaration, it is up to us to sustain and extend that document's ideals.

1776 All-Stars, a series about Reason's favorite American Founders:

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Brickbat: 'Less Serious' Theft

2026-06-10T15:12:03Z

Former San Luis Obispo County, California, probation officer Fallyn Rollins was sentenced to 270 days in county jail after she admitted embezzling over $160,000 from her department's union while serving as its treasurer. Prosecutors and the Santa Barbara Probation Department had recommended a sentence of eight years and four months in state prison, arguing that Rollins abused a position of public trust, but the judge instead imposed a much shorter jail sentence and smaller fine after considering testimony about her mental health. The judge said she found Rollins' crimes "substantially less serious" than other similar crimes, noting that though she used the stolen funds to buy a luxury car, she primarily spent it on daily living expenses like childcare. In addition to her jail sentence, Rollins paid $169,875 in restitution.

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Open Thread

2026-06-11T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

The House Just Passed a 'Pro-Worker' Bill That Takes Power Away From Workers

2026-06-11T00:27:07Z

On Tuesday evening, the House of Representatives passed the Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA) in a 230–193 vote, with 20 Republicans crossing party lines to vote in support of the Democratic-led legislation. The bill, which aims to speed up first contract talks after workers unionize, now moves to the Senate.

The bill has been celebrated by a growing consortium of populists that has taken over the Republican Party.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), who has sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said he was "glad to see the House has done the right thing for working-class Americans." He added, "We need real labor reform that puts workers first." Rep. Pete Stauber (R–Minn.), who cosponsored the bill in the House, said he was "proud to partner" on the bill to "hold employers accountable and ensure workers have a real voice at the negotiating table," adding that "when our workers succeed, our entire nation succeeds." The bill has also been heralded by Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, who described it as the "best opportunity yet for conservatives to show they support strong labor laws and the rights of workers."

The FLCA is designed to speed up negotiations when a new union is certified or recognized, in part by requiring the parties to enter contract negotiations within 10 days of a collective bargaining request. They then would have 90 days to negotiate, followed by 30 days of mediation, before the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service must be notified. A three-person arbitration panel would then be created, and a majority of that panel could forcibly impose a first contract on both sides, binding the employer and worker for two years unless they both later consent to changes.

Once this process is complete, the union would become the exclusive bargaining representative for every worker, including those who did not vote for it, did not join it, and may wholly disagree with its priorities. The FLCA would mandate a federally supervised arbitration panel to impose contract terms on the entire workplace, meaning that many workers would lose the ability to negotiate for themselves. Their wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions could be settled by union officials they did not support, and government bureaucrats they did not vote for.

Rep. Tim Walberg (R–Mich.) made this very point on the House floor. He argued the bill actually "erodes workers' rights" and that a "government-appointed arbitration panel" would impose a contract if the parties do not reach an agreement within the bill's timeline.

"Supporters of this bill assure businesses and workers that it is about worker empowerment and efficiency," Walberg said. "I may be misremembering the definition of empowerment, but I can guarantee it does not mean taking away a worker's right to vote on his or her own contract and giving that power to a Washington bureaucrat with no stake in the outcome."

Practically speaking, labor negotiations take a long time for a reason. The legislation points to a Bloomberg Law analysis that found that the average number of days between the formation of a union and the parties entering into a contract was 465 days. "It's a hard statistic to pin down," according to Bloomberg Law, partly because private-sector collective bargaining agreements are not required to notify the government when an agreement is made.

However, the FLCA treats the potential delays themselves as evidence of a problem requiring federal intervention, even though the number itself does not distinguish between bad-faith stalling and ordinary bargaining. By forcing first-contract negotiations into an arbitrary 120-day window, the bill risks reducing bargaining to a procedural hurdle before outside arbitrators impose the final terms.

The bill's future is uncertain in the Republican-controlled Senate. However, in 2025, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, criticized the bill for taking "workers out of the process by removing the need to ratify a contract." He added that workers "cannot reject" the agreement, and said that it would be "removing the democracy from the workplace." For now, the jury is still out on whether other senators will share Cassidy's concerns.

Crucially, a faster contract is not necessarily a fairer one. The FLCA may speed up bargaining, but it does so by replacing negotiation with government compulsion. Conservatives who claim to put workers first should be wary of a bill that hands workers' choices to union officials and federal arbitrators.

The post The House Just Passed a 'Pro-Worker' Bill That Takes Power Away From Workers appeared first on Reason.com.

Upcoming National Constitution Center Annual Supreme Court Review

2026-06-11T15:28:50Z

NCC

The National Constitution Center's annual Supreme Court Review event is being held on July 7 in Philadelphia. I wanted to highlight it here, because three different regular Volokh Conspiracy bloggers will be among the speakers: Jonathan Adler, Keith Whittington, and myself. There are lots of other speakers - many of them highly prominent - as well. Loyal VC readers will surely want to attend, or at least watch online!

Additional information and free registration available here. You can watch either online or in person.

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A DOJ Brief Preposterously Insists That Trump's 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' Was Politically Neutral

2026-06-12T14:17:00Z

In a brief filed on Friday, Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. argues that a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump's brazenly corrupt "Anti-Weaponization Fund" is moot because the Justice Department does not plan to implement the idea. Woodward also notes that the lawsuit, Floyd v. Department of Justice, is based on the premise that the fund was designed to benefit Trump's supporters, excluding Democrats who claim they were victims of Republican "lawfare and weaponization." And that, he says, is simply not true.

Trump himself cast doubt on both of those arguments in a Meet the Press interview that aired two days after Woodward filed his brief. The president suggested that the fund, which was part of a May 18 "settlement agreement" that resolved his lawsuit against the IRS, might not be dead after all. And he described the intended beneficiaries as people who "have been hurt so badly by radical-left lunatics" who "worked for the Biden administration and Sleepy Joe."

As the contrast between Woodward's arguments in court and Trump's comments on TV illustrates, the Justice Department's portrayal of the Anti-Weaponization Fund is completely divorced from reality. Woodward's description of the fund, which he officially approved by signing the "settlement agreement," glides over the reasons why it provoked the bipartisan backlash that persuaded Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to ditch the idea two weeks after announcing it.

The pretext for the Anti-Weaponization Fund was a lawsuit in which Trump preposterously claimed that IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn's illegal leaking of his tax returns had caused "at least" $10 billion in damages. In addition to offering an improbable estimate of the injury he had suffered, Trump missed the statutory deadline for filing such claims. And even if he had filed his lawsuit on time, he would have faced the challenge of showing that the IRS was responsible for the crimes of a man it did not employ.

Despite those legal weaknesses, the Justice Department never mounted a defense. That failure underlined the blatant conflicts of interest created by the lawsuit, which pitted Trump against agencies he oversees in a case where both sides were represented by attorneys who work for him. The situation was so bizarre that Kathleen Williams, the federal judge overseeing the case in the Southern District of Florida, questioned whether it involved a genuine controversy between adverse parties, as required for the lawsuit to proceed.

"Because President Trump is the Chief Executive," Woodward concedes, his lawsuit against his own administration "presented unique challenges." That is putting it mildly: If the parties were not truly adverse, which they clearly were not, this was a fake case from the beginning, and any "settlement" arising from it is just as phony.

"Ultimately," Woodward says, "the federal defendants agreed to resolve the litigation." That ultimately is doing a lot of work. Why settle a lawsuit that was fatally flawed? Could that decision have something to do with the fact that the lead plaintiff happened to be the boss of the Justice Department lawyers charged with defending the IRS, which they manifestly failed to do?

Woodward does not say. But it is clear that the Justice Department did not treat Trump like other plaintiffs with similar claims. In 2022, Woodward notes, Kenneth Griffin, another billionaire whose tax returns were disclosed by Littlejohn, sued the IRS under 26 USC 7431, the same statute that Trump invoked. Unlike Trump, Griffin filed his lawsuit within two years of learning about the disclosure, as that law requires. Also unlike Trump, Griffin faced Justice Department lawyers who actually challenged his claims.

The Justice Department argued that Littlejohn did not count as a federal employee, another requirement for a Section 7431 claim. The judge declined to dismiss the lawsuit on that basis but indicated that the issue would be addressed in summary judgment proceedings or possibly a trial. He also ruled that Griffin had not adequately alleged a separate claim for damages under the Privacy Act. "Ultimately," Woodward says, Griffin "settled with the United States for a formal apology."

Although Trump never had to contend with government lawyers determined to pick apart his claims, he also got an apology. But unlike Griffin, he got a lot more: $1.8 billion in taxpayer money for his allies and supporters, plus blanket protection from liability for tax violations and any other federal offenses he or his family may have committed prior to May 19—a jaw-dropping immunity promise that Blanche revealed the day after he announced the main agreement. Neither arrangement had anything to do with Trump's claims against the IRS.

Williams never had a chance to review that sweet deal. And because Trump dropped the lawsuit two days before the deadline for briefing on the question of whether it involved a real dispute, she never resolved that crucial issue. But she recently signaled that she plans to revisit the question. On May 29, she ordered the plaintiffs to address "charges of collusion," "whether the Parties are truly adverse," "the assertion that the dismissal in this case was premised on deception by the Parties," and "the question of whether the case should be reopened because the Court was the 'victim of a fraud.'"*

Woodward does not mention any of that. Nor does he explain the logic that connects the Anti-Weaponization Fund to Trump's complaint that the IRS failed to properly supervise contractors entrusted with confidential tax information. But as Woodward tells it, the fund was a politically neutral plan to compensate victims of government abuse.

"Plaintiffs' premise—that hypothetical claimants must have been targeted
by Democrat, rather than Republican, administrations—misreads the plain language of the Settlement Agreement," Woodward says. "Nothing in the Settlement Agreement would have precluded persons targeted by a Republican administration from submitting a claim. Claimants need only 'assert at least one legal claim stating that the claimant was a victim of Lawfare and/or Weaponization,' meaning they were 'target[ed]…for improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons."

Other aspects of the "settlement agreement" belie that claim of neutrality. The document describes the Anti-Weaponization Fund as a response to abuse of "government power" by "Democrat elected officials, political and career federal employees, contractors, and agents." It specifically cites "the Biden Administration's wrongful labeling of certain parents as domestic terrorists" and "the Biden Administration's abuse of the FACE Act," which prohibits obstruction of access to abortion clinics.

The agreement does not mention any abuses by Republican administrations, such as Trump's vindictive and legally frivolous attempts to imprison his political opponents. As Blanche sees it, there is no problem with that sort of weaponization.

Despite the fund's framing, Woodward insists that it would have been open to all purported victims of "lawfare and weaponization," regardless of their ideology or political affiliation. But the process was clearly designed to favor the president's friends, since the five-member board charged with doling out the money would have been completely under Trump's control. The board would not have been required to publicly disclose its procedures or decisions, and it would have stopped accepting claims a month and a half before Trump leaves office.

In case those clues were not enough, Trump made it clear who the intended beneficiaries were. "I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!" he explained four days after the "settlement" was announced.

Those "others" presumably include the 1,600 or so Trump supporters who were arrested for participating in the 2021 Capitol riot, since Trump already has pardoned them and has frequently described them as victims of government persecution. He reiterated that take during his Meet the Press interview. "The people were destroyed by dirty cops and by weaponization," he said. "Many of those people should be compensated."

Trump did not rule out compensation for rioters who were convicted of assaulting police officers—a prospect that angered the Republican legislators who objected to the Anti-Weaponization Fund. "I wouldn't be inclined to say" those people should receive compensation, he said, "but I have to see it." He suggested they might in fact have legitimate claims, since "they pled guilty because they were frightened."

Woodward omits all of this context, without which the political reaction to the fund is inexplicable. The compensation scheme "garnered significant attention and provoked widespread discussion about the weaponization of government, whether and how any claims process should function, and past settlements reached by other administrations," he blandly reports. "After Plaintiffs filed this case, the political process continued to play out. On June 2, 2026, the Acting Attorney General told Congress that although 'the reasons for the Fund remain important,' the Fund is 'not going forward, period.'"

Trump seemed to contradict that assurance during the Meet the Press interview, suggesting that the fund could be revived in some form. "I think the weaponization fund is a great idea, and so do many other Republicans," he said. "You have to get it approved. If they get it approved, that's great. If they don't get it approved, I'd be disappointed."

Woodward nevertheless may be right that the lawsuit challenging the fund, which was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia on May 22, no longer involves a genuine "case or controversy." He may also be right that the plaintiffs—a former federal prosecutor, the city of New Haven, Common Cause, and the National Abortion Federation—never had standing to sue. And he persuasively argues that their First Amendment and equal protection claims are unlikely to succeed.

Woodward's description of the "settlement agreement," by contrast, is so misleading that a reader unfamiliar with the controversy it provoked would be puzzled as to why the Trump administration abandoned this seemingly fine idea. It is pretty clear why Woodward does not want to get into all of that, since the explanation would implicate him in a scam. Under the pretext of a phony lawsuit, Trump extracted benefits for himself, his family, and his supporters. That would not have been possible without the eager assistance of government attorneys who abandoned legal ethics in their rush to please the president.

*CORRECTION: The original version of this article misstated which side was supposed to file a response to the former federal judges' motion.

The post A DOJ Brief Preposterously Insists That Trump's 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' Was Politically Neutral appeared first on Reason.com.

Why Are Republicans and Democrats Abandoning Economic Freedom?

2026-06-10T18:48:21Z

Politicians promise they'll "help" us.

President Donald Trump says he'll "create the jobs and future you deserve."

President Joe Biden liked to say, "Help is on the way."

I prefer President Ronald Reagan's: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

An economy runs best when government gets out of the way and lets free market competition work.

Economist Donald Boudreaux gets that, and it's why The Triumph of Economic Freedom is the title of his new book.

Boudreaux explains in my new video: "The more we move away from free markets, the worse things become."

Biden's spending increased inflation, and his administration gave billions of dollars to politically connected companies like Intel.

Now, Trump's doing similar things.

"Free markets are on the ropes now," says Boudreaux. "It's really important that people step back, look at economic history…they'll see that we prosper more the more economically free we are."

Now, people blame greed and free markets for the high cost of housing and daycare.

"Housing is rising in prices chiefly because of government!" says Boudreaux. "Land use restrictions reduce the supply and restrict building. Rent control reduces the supply of rental housing….Daycare is riddled with government regulations, which raises the cost of those things."

Houses and daycare would be cheaper and better if capitalists were allowed to freely serve their customers without government intrusion.

Likewise, AI will lower costs, but it will also eliminate jobs, so ignorant politicians like Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) want laws to protect existing jobs. Bad idea, says Boudreaux.

"Some jobs are destroyed, but others are created. The jobs created tend to be better….If we had today the same technology we had 40 years ago, the only web designers would have eight legs….Our living standards rise as a result of these innovations….People might not like change, but you can't get economic growth without it."

Some politicians want to tell stores how many self-checkout lanes they're allowed and how many employees must work at registers.

"How does government know the 'right' number of workers in any business? That's up to those businesses," says Boudreaux. "It's in their interest to run their companies as efficiently as possible, which keeps down prices. When government does things like this, that's going to raise the prices."

Seattle's new socialist mayor Katie Wilson says she'll help people by making sure they have more leisure time.

"You should have time to read a book and lay on the grass," she says. "We need bread. But we need roses, too."

"Pretty words," laughs Boudreaux, "but what business is it of government to decide how people should spend their time? That's an individual decision. Why should government put its finger on the scale?"

"To make life nicer," I say.

"If I want to work more, you're making life worse for me, not nicer. I can smell the roses on my own time."

Mayor Wilson also says, "We cannot allow giant grocery chains to…close stores at will and leave behind food deserts."

"What she's proposing," replies Boudreaux, "is to prevent stores from closing or downsizing. Once she does that, she'll find that fewer stores will move in. The long-run effect will be fewer grocery stores in Seattle."

Politicians' belief that they know better how to help people sometimes leads to absurd ideas, like a Minnesota legislator's plan to study the "benefits of shoplifting" because "perhaps people are relying on that…maybe it's assisting them."

"Let's then also study the benefits of pickpocketing, armed robbery, and burglary," replies Boudreaux. "After all, those people get income from that."

"These politicians just want to be kind," I push back.

"It's not kind to people victimized by shoplifting. [It] raises the cost of operating grocery stores…which raises grocery prices that low-income families have to pay."

More often than not, government tries to help but makes things worse.

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