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]]>Fitzpatrick's essay begins:
This publication has been inundated with essays by academics critical of Louisiana v. Callais, but has not published a single one in defense of it. So I decided to take it on in my column. After all, I am pretty sure Justice Antonin Scalia would have approved of the decision.
As you will see, I didn't find the assignment particularly difficult. Which raises a question: why has no one else been willing to defend a 6-3 decision of the Supreme Court?
The essay is short, and you should read the whole thing.
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]]>An astute reader pointed me to another footnote--this one from a law review article by Professor John Duffy--suggesting that at the time Chevron v. NRDC was decided, the issue from the Court was, in fact, governed by the APA. In FN19, Professor Duffy writes:
Some scholarship suggests that the Chevron case itself was not subject to section 706 because subsection (d) of section 307 of the Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. § 7607(d)) contains an explicit exemption making section 706 inapplicable. See, e.g., Jack M. Beermann, Chevron Is a Rorschach Test Ink Blot, 32 J.L. &POL. 305, 307–08, 307 n.8 (2017) (stating that "[j]udicial review of EPA rules under the Clean Air Act is governed by 42 U.S.C. § 7607(d) and not by APA § 706"). The relevant provision, however, exempts from section 706 only EPA actions listed in section 307(d)(1), which at the relevant time included fourteen categories of EPA actions, none of which covered the EPA rulemaking being reviewed in the Chevron litigation. See 42 U.S.C. § 7607(d)(1)(A)–(N) (1982). In fact, at the time it was promulgating the final rule challenged in Chevron, the EPA itself analyzed the applicability of subsection (d) of section 307 and correctly determined that rules being promulgated were "not subject to Section 307(d)." Requirements for Preparation, Adoption and Submittal of Implementation Plans, 46 Fed. Reg. 50766, 50770 (Oct. 14, 1981) (codified at 40 C.F.R. pts. 51–52).
So perhaps Judge Randolph spoke too soon.
This is an interesting dispute, but it does not have much bearing on Loper Bright Enterprises. Judge Randolph's point was raised by the petitioners (see, e.g,, the oral argument transcript at p. 87), and the substance of judicial review under 42 U.S.C. § 7607 is not materially different from that under APA § 706 (though there are important procedural differences for rulemakings).
While Chevron made no reference to the APA, the Chevron doctrine was understood to apply to APA cases, so whether the doctrine comports with the APA mattered--a point Judge Randolph concedes. The Court's decision in Loper Bright rejected the Chevron methodology--in particular the requirement that courts defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutory language--not its interpretation of the Clean Air Act or its conclusion that the EPA regulation at issue was permissible.
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Wildfire risk just got a lot worse in California, where some of the state's most effective fire prevention specialists—goats—are under regulatory attack. As of July 1, the state's standard minimum wage and overtime laws now apply to goat-herding companies, whose animals clear brush and reduce fire danger across the state. The change threatens to sideline these vital firefighters at a time when California can ill afford a setback in wildfire prevention.
For decades, California's goat and sheep herders have been largely exempt from the state's wage and overtime rules. This is on account of the round-the-clock lifestyle that herding entails; without such an exemption, labor costs would become prohibitively expensive in the herding occupation.
When California overhauled its wage laws for agricultural workers in 2016, it recognized this reality. The changes ultimately culminated in the Department of Industrial Relations enacting an alternative minimum monthly wage of $4,820 a month for herders. But in 2022, the department clarified that the underlying legislation only applied to sheep herders, leaving goat herders subject to normal wage and overtime rules.
State lawmakers intervened by passing legislation to allow goat herders to be paid the same alternative minimum as sheep herders until July 1, 2026. Now that the exemption has expired, goat herders must be paid according to traditional overtime rules. Given the 24/7 availability required for herding, this means that Golden State goat herders are now set to be paid $20,000 per month, which works out to $240,000 annually. (For comparison, California Gov. Gavin Newsom's salary currently sits at $245,000).
An effort to extend the goat herding exemption beyond 2026 stalled in the state legislature due to opposition from labor unions. Goat-herding businesses have been left scrambling. Western Grazers, a company that deploys roughly 5,000 goats across Northern California, says the new rules push the annual cost of employing each herder above $250,000 once room and board, food, and other expenses are included.
"We can't sustain that and do fire fuels abatement in the state of California," owner Tim Arrowsmith told California's KRCR News. Unless lawmakers restore the exemption by the end of August, he says his company will be forced to sell its goats for slaughter, shut down its California operations, and likely file for bankruptcy.
The quadrupling of goat herders' labor costs comes with unintended consequences— beyond creating a glut of local chevon. California already struggles to clear enough brush and other vegetation from fire-prone areas. This became painfully clear with the state's wildfires in recent years. Newsom has since pledged to fast-track critical fuel-reduction projects, but progress has remained slow.
Goats are especially effective near homes and communities where mechanical thinning and controlled burns are more difficult. If goat-herding companies disappear, California will lose one of its most flexible tools for protecting vulnerable communities. "The goats grazing in your neighborhood will disappear, the goats grazing in your cities and municipalities and HOAs, and things like that, they'll be gone," Arrowsmith said. "It'll be over."
Aside from wildfire risks, it's worth understanding the labor policy implications of suddenly paying goat herders $240,000 a year. While a job with 24/7 availability might provide a ripe target for labor advocates to argue that workers are chronically underpaid, goat herders report closer to seven or eight hours a day of active work, underscoring the unique nature of the occupation.
If herding wages spike, it's likely that California goat-herding companies will increasingly seek to mimic herding protocols from environments like Australia. There, goat herds are much larger on average than in America, with farmers using technology like drones and all-terrain vehicles to replace workers, thereby reducing the number of herders needed to maintain a flock. And unlike their American counterparts, Australian ranchers also do not assist the animals during the birthing season, leading to a greater mortality rate for babies.
Organized labor's war on goats extends beyond California, as well. In Columbus, Ohio, a branch of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees recently filed a grievance against the city for contracting a goat herd to clear overgrown poison hemlock at a wastewater treatment plant. The union claims that the goat subcontract violates its collective bargaining agreement, despite the fact that the vegetation in question is located on a side slope that is unreachable by most human-operated equipment.
This wide-ranging progressive attack on goats is far from academic. In recent years, vegetation management services have become particularly important to the survival of the goat and sheep industry, as meat and wool markets have declined amid cheap imports. If goats are suddenly sidelined as fire prevention and vegetation management specialists, more goat-herding businesses could shutter their operations.
California's wildfire problem was already severe before the state began regulating goat-herding companies out of business. Unless lawmakers restore the wage exemption, one of California's most effective fuel-reduction tools will disappear with them.
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"The math just doesn't math," says Sophia, a New York City landlord. All of her major expenses—insurance, labor, fuel, and property taxes—are going up. Now she can no longer cover those costs by raising the rent she charges.
When New York's Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) approved a rent increase of 0 percent in June, the city's new mayor celebrated with a frozen treat. A short video posted to social media shows Zohran Mamdani reaching into a freezer to grab an ice cream bar while announcing that the "independent" board froze rents for the 2 million tenants living in the city's nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. Close to a third of all New York's homes are rent-stabilized.
"It might be hot outside but the rent is freezing," read the video caption on Instagram.
The vote was a major political victory for the mayor. Mamdani's left-wing platform included everything from free childcare to free city buses, but his need to balance the budget has largely prevented him from making good on promises that actually cost the city money. The rent freeze was one headline policy the mayor could enact without directly adding red ink to the balance sheet.
But that does not mean the freeze is costless. Instead, that red ink will show up on the balance sheets of the city's rent-stabilized buildings, an increasing share of which are losing money each year.
Close to 10 percent of New York's rent-stabilized buildings have operating costs that exceed their revenues. That's a near doubling of financial distress within just five years. Nearly 60,000 rent-stabilized apartments sit empty because their owners can't afford to renovate them and put them back on the market. Bankruptcies of rent-stabilized buildings continue to rise each year, with no sign of stopping.
Meanwhile, city reports and academic studies show a steady decline in the physical quality of rent-stabilized housing stock.
The cause of the financial and physical deterioration of New York's rent-stabilized apartments can be traced to a law passed in 2019 that aggressively tightened the state's rent regulation regime. That law eliminated most avenues through which owners could remove their apartments from rent stabilization. It also largely ended their ability to raise rents to cover repairs and capital improvements and to bring rents closer to market rates on vacant units.
Those changes set many buildings on the course to bankruptcy. It's in this environment of suppressed revenues and exploding operating costs that the Rent Guidelines Board—a majority of which was appointed by Mamdani—voted to freeze rents.
"[It's] not as if one singular decision, one rent freeze this year, is all of a sudden what puts us on this path. We have been on this path for the better part of a decade," says Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association.
For socialist activists in and outside of the Mamdani administration, the financial ruin of privately owned rent-stabilized housing is all to the good. It represents a needed correction to the alleged "speculation" that drove building values too high, they say. If buildings go bankrupt, the argument goes, nonprofits or the city itself can take them over.
But even nonprofits are struggling to maintain rent-stabilized buildings in the face of rising costs and frozen rents. The rent freeze is one more s
That would be another financial headache for the city's mayor—worse than an ice-cream-induced brain freeze.
Before the Rent Guidelines Board issues its final decree on rent increases, it holds a series of public hearings every year.
Tenant activists who oppose any rent increase on principle come out in force to make their voices heard. The result is usually a circus, but this year it was more of a horror show.
At the RGB's Brooklyn hearing in mid-June, the "eat the rich" protesters were joined by a horde of zombies who wanted to eat anyone, anyone at all. The zombies were, in fact, actors hired by the Gotham Housing Alliance, a landlord trade association, to serve as a colorful living representation of "zombie" rent-stabilized apartments—units that sit empty because owners can't make a profit by fixing them up and putting them back on the market.
In 2025, an estimated 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments sat vacant in New York City, according to public records obtained by The City Reporter. About 5.6 percent of rent-stabilized apartments are housing no one—five times the rent-stabilized vacancy rate reported by the previous Housing Vacancy Survey, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2023.
It may seem bizarre that below-market apartment buildings in New York City, which has some of the highest market rents in the world, would stay vacant. But property owners have a straightforward explanation for this economic oddity: The 2019 rent laws eliminated the "vacancy bonus" rent increases landlords could charge on empty units.
That change made it completely uneconomical to bring online apartments that become vacant after a long tenancy.
A well-documented effect of rent control is that tenants stay in their units for longer. For tenant activists, this is a primary benefit of the policy: "stability" for people who might otherwise leave because of rising rent.
In New York, the longer a rent-stabilized unit is occupied by the same tenant, the bigger the gulf between the rent the landlord can legally charge and the rent the apartment could fetch in the open market. Under the pre-2019 system, this was a less severe problem. Once a long-occupied unit was vacated, the landlord could claim the automatic 20 percent vacancy rent increase. The costs of renovations could also be factored into the rent the next tenant would pay.
But the 2019 changes ended vacancy bonuses and capped the renovation costs at that could be passed on at no more than $15,000 (later raised to $50,000 for renovations on empty units). Those would have to be spread over 15 years, for a maximum monthly rent increase of $347.
"The [vacant] units are subjected to an extremely low rent cap. These very same units will often need hundreds of thousands of dollars of renovations so that they may be legally rented," says Robert Johnson, an attorney with the libertarian Institute for Justice. "The sum total of all this is there are tens of thousands of units that are sitting vacant."
The Institute for Justice is suing New York state, New York City, and the Rent Guidelines Board on behalf of several rental property owners. They argue the rent caps are so low that they've made it impossible for landlords to make money on their vacant units.
One of the plaintiffs has a vacant unit that needs $100,000 in renovations to bring it up to code. The maximum legal rent on that unit is $710 a month.
Because the owner can reclaim only half those renovation costs via rent increases spread over 15 years, it's cheaper to simply leave the apartment empty.
This year's rent freeze is not the RGB's first. The board also capped rent increases at 0 percent for one-year leases in 2015, 2016, and 2020. But the 2026 freeze bites a lot more, given the many other costs imposed by the 2019 law.
For a few decades, beginning in the early 1990s, New York's rent regulations were relatively flexible. Landlords could raise rents by 20 percent on vacant units. They were also able to raise rents to cover the full cost of renovations and major capital improvements. Landlords could also "deregulate" rent-stabilized units and charge whatever they wanted on them, once legal rents allowed under rent stabilization rose above a certain threshold.
The reforms of the 1990s helped bring New York's rent-stabilized buildings back to good financial health.
In 1991, 13.9 percent of rent-stabilized buildings were financially distressed, meaning that their operating costs exceeded their operating incomes. By the end of the decade, only 6 percent of buildings were in financial distress.
A near-20 percent property tax hike in the early 2000s, followed by the Great Recession, saw financial distress ripple through the rent-stabilized sector again. But by the mid- and late 2010s, the percentage of buildings operating in the red was holding steady at around 5 percent.
As market rents in New York rose in the 2000s, this relatively flexible system of rent regulation saw a lot of capital invested into rent-stabilized housing from investors eager to deregulate these units. Investors would purchase dilapidated buildings and renovate them. The rent increases they claimed from vacancy bonuses and apartment improvements enabled them to push legal rents above the threshold necessary to remove apartments entirely from rent regulation.
The RGB reports that from 1994 through 2019, New York witnessed a net decline of 145,312 rent-stabilized units, the vast majority of which exited the system through high-rent deregulation or condominium or cooperative conversion.
One can certainly tell a positive story about the slow, steady deregulation of New York's rent-stabilized housing stock. The law incentivized investors to pour capital into older buildings in desperate need of maintenance. Individual rents would rise on deregulated units, but more apartments entering the market would put downward pressure on rents overall.
But the critics had their story to tell too. Press coverage complained of landlords exploiting "loopholes" to jack up rents. Tenant activists argued that landlords had an incentive to harass tenants until they moved out in order to claim vacancy bonuses.
In 2018, progressive candidates, many of them affiliated with Democratic Socialists of America, helped flip the state Senate, which for decades had been controlled by Republicans.
The following year, these progressives passed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which did away with the deregulation of the 1990s. Vacancy bonuses were eliminated. The rent increases that could be claimed on renovation and capital improvements were strictly capped. Almost every avenue through which an owner could remove a unit from rent stabilization was ended.
New York's zombie apartments are the most obvious sign of the 2019 law's unworkability. The fundamentals of occupied buildings don't look much better.
When that law passed, "the sentiment was that these buildings lost 30 percent [of their value] overnight," says Greg Corbin, president and founder of Northgate Real Estate Group, which specializes in bankruptcy sales of rent-stabilized buildings.
The truth turned out to be a lot worse, Corbin says.
Many owners had borrowed money to buy rent-stabilized buildings on the expectation that they could renovate vacant units and then, through high-rent deregulation, bring rents up to market rates. When the 2019 law shut the door on this business plan, owners were left with units whose legal rents would never be enough to cover their rising operating costs and financing costs.
The most cash-strapped owners moved to sell their buildings in bankruptcy sales. When those bankruptcy sale prices showed building values had declined a lot more than 30 percent, that put downward pressure on even more buildings' valuations.
This kicked off a vicious cycle of more owners pursuing bankruptcy sales, which put more downward pressure on building valuations, and on and on.
About 9.2 percent of buildings containing rent-stabilized units are "financially distressed," according to the Rent Guidelines Board, meaning their operating costs exceed rent revenues. That's up from the 6 percent of buildings that were considered distressed before the 2019 rent law.
The RGB figures on financially distressed buildings do not include their owners' financing costs. Once those are factored in, the financial trouble is much more widespread.
An estimated 460,000 units are in buildings where 90 percent or more of the apartments are rent stabilized.
"In my assumption, at least half of those buildings are unhealthy, and something needs to happen," says Corbin. His firm alone is currently handling 60 bankruptcy or foreclosure sales of rent-stabilized buildings.
New York University's Furman Center likewise notes that the sales volume of rent-stabilized buildings continues to decline, as lenders and investors become more wary of financing these deals. Some 4 percent of heavily rent-stabilized buildings have significant unpaid property, water, or sewer bills, according to the Furman Center.
Cea Weaver, the leftist tenant activist Mamdani tapped to lead his Office to Protect Tenants, told The New York Times Magazine in March that declining building valuations are a positive effect of the 2019 laws.
"There was a business model that was based on speculation. Now there needs to be a new business model that is based on the reality that these buildings are rent-stabilized and are going to stay rent-stabilized," she said.
"Loopholes" in the pre-2019 rent laws encouraged purchases of these buildings at speculatively high rates, she argued; those loopholes are now closed, and the speculative bubble is being deflated.
Whatever one thinks of that assessment, the post-2019 law has invited its own form of speculation. Corbin says the primary buyers of rent-stabilized properties today are "generational real estate investors" with very long time horizons, who are banking on an eventual policy change. They reason that New York's rent laws can't stay this tight forever—and that when the state eventually deregulates, a decade or two from now, the owners of distressed rent-stabilized buildings will experience a windfall.
"If [the law] change[s], people are going to say, I can't believe I didn't buy every building I could get my hands on in 2027," Corbin says.
Changing New York's rent laws in a way that benefits building owners will require policymakers and the public to feel more warmly toward property owners than they do right now.
The 2019 rent law makes that shift in attitudes less likely. The law's suppression of rents reduces landlords' incentive and ability to keep their buildings in good repair. Building quality thus declines, giving tenants grievances against individual landlords and heightening anger at landlords as a whole.
This doom loop of bad policy fueling bad attitudes was on full display during the RGB hearings. Landlords said they can't afford to fix anything because their costs are going through the roof. Tenants demanding a rent freeze asked why they should be paying more when their landlord isn't even keeping the building in good repair.
Under the 2019 law, the annual increases allowed by the RGB are the only real avenue landlords have left to raise rents. This year, seven of the board's nine members, six of them appointed by Mamdani, voted to close that avenue too.
One member of the board—Christina Smyth, who was appointed during Eric Adams' term as mayor to represent building owners—resigned in protest before the final vote. "This year's RGB order was decided last year on the campaign trail," she wrote in her resignation letter. The board, she said, crossed a "legal line" by ignoring the data and approving the mayor's rent freeze.
The sole dissenting vote against the freeze came from Arpit Gupta, an associate professor of finance at New York University. Gupta tells Reason he believed the Mamdani administration didn't place any undue pressure on the board to vote a certain way.
In one sense, that's good news: The RGB is legally constituted as an independent body, and it acted like one. But the other side of the equation, says Gupta, is that this independent board looked at the data showing tenant income rising steadily, owners' expenses rising faster than their rental incomes, and worsening financial distress among landlords—and still voted for a freeze.
"What I don't have a clear picture of is, What data would they need to see to make a different decision in the future?" he says.
Should the board continue to enforce rent freezes year after year while landlords' operating costs continue to rise, Gupta says, New York could see a return of the bad old days when property owners walked away from insolvent buildings that aren't even worth the property tax bill.
New York's past problems with building abandonment came at a time when the city was suffering from high crime, low economic growth, and population loss. The city's rent laws threaten to create those same conditions at rent-stabilized buildings in a time of general prosperity in the city.
Mamdani has floated various so-called off-ramps to save rent-stabilized housing without reforming the 2019 rent law. His plan includes stepped-up code enforcement and shifting ownership of the most troubled buildings to nonprofits or the city.
During this year's RGB hearings, Gupta heard from many nonprofit owners who, despite not paying property taxes (the largest single expense for most owners), are having trouble making the numbers work: "Even the nonprofit ones who don't pay [property taxes] are coming to us and saying, 'Hey, we can't make these buildings work. Just the math doesn't add up.'"
In New York's current political moment, where socialists are ascendant, we seem unlikely to see market-based reforms to the state's rent laws. Absent reform, the city can expect frozen rents and broken buildings.
For the foreseeable future, the math won't math.
The post For Thousands of New York City Apartment Buildings, the Math Doesn't Math appeared first on Reason.com.
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In my last post, I did a brief overview of the new lawsuit challenging Trump's massive new Section 301 lawsuits filed by the Liberty Justice Center on behalf of two small businesses. LJC is the public interest law firm I worked with on V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, the IEEPA tariff case decided by the Supreme Court in February. There is now a second lawsuit challenging the tariffs, Learning Resources, Inc. v. United States. Their complaint is available here.
This case was filed by a group of several businesses, with Learning Resources, Inc., as the lead plaintiff. Learning Resources, which is a toy manufacturer, is the same firm whose case was consolidated with ours in the IEEPA litigation, and eventually gave its name to the Supreme Court decision. In that instance, their case was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds (it was, the justices decided, filed in the wrong court) and ours prevailed. In the present case, everyone agrees the only possible venue is the US Court of International Trade (CIT), where we filed our IEEPA case, and which also recently ruled against Trump's Section 122 tariffs (in another case brought by LJC). Trump's tariffs are making the CIT's workload great again!
As in the IEEPA litigation, Learning Resources is represented by prominent appellate litigator Pratik Shah, and others at Akin Gump.
The issues raised in the Learning Resources complaint are very similar to those in the LJC case. They too argue that the Section 301 tariffs violate statutory requirements, and that if Section 301 did grant the president the power to impose these massive tariffs, it would violate the constitutional nondelegation doctrine. But, unlike the LJC complaint, this one does not invoke the major questions doctrine. It also does not seek a class action certification. Thus, relief granted by the court would likely be limited to the specific plaintiff firms.
I think it likely that CIT will consolidate these two cases and consider them together. There may well be more Section 301 cases filed by businesses, public interest groups, and possibly state governments. We shall see.
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What the flock is happening in Georgia?
In just a matter of months, 18 law enforcement officers in the Peach State have been arrested for misusing Flock Safety camera data in what seems to be a deeply concerning trend, highlighting the need for stricter oversight of mass surveillance technologies.
Late last week, the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office, located in metropolitan Atlanta, announced that Sgt. Kabiru Salawu had been fired, arrested, and charged for allegedly misusing Flock license plate reader technology but did not release details on which data were accessed or why, according to USA Today. The 17-year agency veteran faces one year in prison and up to a $5,000 fine for the misdemeanor offense and between one and five years in prison for violating the oath as a public officer, a felony offense.
Salawu's arrest marked the 17th law enforcement officer arrested for similar actions across Georgia, including five officers in Albany, four in Richmond County, three in Fayetteville, three in Cherokee County, and one in Greene County, reports USA Today.
But the number keeps rising, and on Wednesday, a supervisor with the Conyers Police Department's Real-Time Crime Center, Paige Forte, was arrested for allegedly misusing the Flock license plate reader system over 30 times to search for her domestic partner's car between April and July, according to WRDW/WAGT, a CBS and NBC affiliate.
At least some of these arrests, according to a statement released by Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company, can be credited to the company's Audit Assistance tool announced in April. The latest string of arrests in Georgia, according to Flock, is evidence that these auditing tools are working as intended, exposing misuse by providing "greater transparency, stronger oversight, and an effective way to separate good and bad policing."
However, privacy and police accountability advocates say something more needs to be done to protect Americans' privacy from the growing number of cases involving police surveillance abuse cropping up across the country.
Flock Safety's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) camera networks have grown quickly over the last few years, and now log over 20 billion data points every month. The data are retained for 30 days and compiled into a searchable database. This means that officers with access to Flock Safety's vast database can easily track vehicles, and by extension drivers, with shockingly little oversight and no warrant requirement, according to the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm.
"Without the constitutional safeguard of a warrant requirement," Michael Soyfer, an attorney at I.J. challenging ALPR networks, said in a statement, "that predictably allows officers to abuse their access to these systems for things like stalking romantic partners."
Requiring a warrant would force officers to show probable cause, or a reasonable belief that a crime has taken place, before allowing access to ALPR camera network databases and the trove of private information compiled within. This policy would essentially weed out bad actors before police misconduct takes place, rather than catching the abuse after the privacy violation has already occurred.
Georgia is not the only state where officers have been arrested for misusing license plate data and other police surveillance tools. But the state's recent 18 arrests, and counting, underscore just how pervasive the problem can be, even with Flock Safety's auditing tools in place. And without a warrant requirement, which courts have so far declined to impose, cases of police surveillance abuse will likely keep rising.
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When he was 19, Jamie Meade participated in a robbery that turned lethal. But it was Meade's partner in crime who actually shot the victim (accidentally, he said). Meade nevertheless was convicted of felony murder and sentenced to life without parole, while the killer pleaded guilty to lesser offenses and received a 12-year sentence. When Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer commuted Meade's sentence last year, he had served 31 years. By contrast, the man who fired the gun, who spent 10 years in prison, has been free since 2008.
Manifestly unjust results like those are a product of laws that treat people as murderers when they participate in felonies that result in someone's death, even when they did not intend, anticipate, or cause that outcome. A new report from the Sentencing Project highlights the perverse effects of the felony murder rule—a vestige of British law that still prevails in federal courts and all but two states nearly seven decades after the U.K. abandoned it.
Felony murder laws "violate the principle of proportional sentencing, which is supposed to punish crimes based on their severity," Sentencing Project Research Director Nazgol Ghandnoosh and her two co-authors say. "With one in six people in U.S. prisons serving a life sentence, ending mass incarceration requires bold action to reduce extreme prison terms such as those prescribed for felony murder. These laws run counter to public safety, fiscal responsibility, and justice."
Hawaii and Kentucky are the only states that do not have felony murder laws. Of the 48 states that do, 10 impose a mandatory sentence of life without parole (LWOP) on any adult convicted of felony murder, which is also what federal law requires. Eleven states mandate LWOP sentences for certain felony murder convictions, while 18 allow them and nine do not. The report notes that "approximately half of U.S. states allow death sentences for unintentional killings under felony murder laws."
Although there are no national data on people serving LWOP sentences for felony murder, they seem to account for a substantial share of such penalties. As of 2019, Ghandnoosh et al. report, a quarter of LWOP prisoners in Michigan and Pennsylvania—more than 1,000 in each state—had been convicted of felony murder.
The counterintuitive consequences of felony murder laws go beyond treating accomplices as severely as killers (or, as in Meade's case, even more severely). "Members of a group engaged in a felony [can] be convicted of murder when someone outside of their group, such as a police officer or victim, kills," Ghandnoosh et al. note. If a cop confronts a group of burglars and fatally shoots one of them, for instance, the others can be charged with murder. An accomplice likewise can be charged with murder when police kill a robber. Felony murder charges can also be deployed against friends, relatives, or dealers who supply drugs to people who subsequently die from overdoses.
The moral premise of these laws is that people should be held responsible for the consequences of choosing to commit a felony, which they should know carries a risk that someone will die. But that risk is tiny in many cases.
"A study of Chicago in the early 1980s found that approximately 0.6% of reported robberies resulted in homicide," Ghandnoosh et al. write. "The mortality rate for reported burglaries is less than 0.02%." They add that "death is not a foreseeable consequence of sharing or selling drugs because drug use overwhelmingly does not result in death."
The report notes another weird wrinkle created by felony murder laws: In some states, an assault that results in death can qualify as the underlying felony, a practice that erases the distinction between intentional and unintentional homicide. That is what happened with Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd. Although it seemed clear that Chauvin did not intend to kill Floyd, he was convicted of murder for reckless conduct that looked more like manslaughter.
Something similar happened to Jonathan Miller, a Georgia teenager who was convicted of murder and sent to prison for life after a fight in which he punched another teenager, Josh Belluardo, in the back of the head. Although that blow proved fatal, Ghandnoosh et al. note, "a medical examiner testified that the punch that resulted in Belluardo's death had a 1-in-2,300 chance of rupturing the blood vessel that caused his brain to bleed."
In addition to regularly imposing disproportionate penalties, felony murder laws compound the problem of coercive plea bargaining. Prosecutors "use felony murder charges to incentivize plea deals," Ghandnoosh et al. write. When a felony murder charge is on the table, defendants have a strong incentive to forgo a trial and instead plead guilty to lesser charges "carrying still-lengthy sentences out of proportion to their actual offense." Since prosecutors can obtain a murder conviction without proving recklessness, let alone a specific intent to kill, "fighting a felony murder charge at trial can seem impossible."
Ghandnoosh et al. also argue that felony murder laws waste taxpayer money by locking people up long after they are apt to commit new crimes, since recidivism declines sharply with age. Nor does the threat of such sentences accomplish much in the way of deterrence, they say, since "most people do not expect to be apprehended for a crime, are not familiar with relevant legal penalties, or commit crime with their judgment compromised by substance use or mental health problems."
The report recommends that legislators "repeal felony murder statutes and punish these crimes as their constituent parts—often a felony and an unintentional killing." Short of that, Ghandnoosh et al. say, several reforms would help curtail the injustices caused by felony murder laws.
"Jurisdictions should eliminate the most extreme sentences—death and LWOP—for felony murder, and ensure that felony murder convictions result in less harsh punishment than intentional murders," Ghandnoosh et al. write. "Jurisdictions should eliminate application of the felony murder law to predicate offenses that have an extremely low risk of death, including robbery, burglary, and drug law violations. Assault should not serve as a predicate felony, to avoid extending murder liability to unintentional killings. Also, killings by people who were not involved in the commission of the felony, such as by a police officer or victim, should not subject the individuals committing the offense to felony murder charges."
The Sentencing Project urges prosecutors to "address charging and plea practices that exacerbate racial and ethnic disparities, such as expansive charging of accomplices and unjustifiably unfavorable plea offers to people of color." It says "jurisdictions should allow judicial review of sentences for people who pled to lesser crimes because they were threatened with murder sentences under overly expansive felony murder laws."
The report also recommends changes to the treatment of accomplices, who "have a lower level of culpability," and young people, who "have a weaker grasp of the potential consequences of their criminal activity." At a minimum, Ghandnoosh et al. say, legislators "should narrow accomplice liability to major participants in the underlying felony who acted with reckless indifference to human life in the killing." Along similar lines, the report urges legislators to "institute meaningful intent requirements for a killing to be considered felony murder, assessing the defendant's mental state with respect to the killing itself, not to the underlying felony offense."
The post In 39 States, People Can Be Sentenced to Life for Murders They Did Not Commit appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>(Note that "Google does not contend the Outputs are true.")
Google moved to dismiss, which under Delaware's Rule 12(b)(6) requires that Google show that, even the facts as pleaded by the plaintiff were conceivably true, the plaintiff would still lack a legal claim. Note that Delaware civil procedure doesn't follow federal procedure in requiring a showing of plausibility of the pleaded facts—it only requires a showing the pleaded facts are conceivable: "Our governing 'conceivability' standard is more akin to 'possibility,' while the federal 'plausibility' standard falls somewhere beyond mere 'possibility' but short of 'probability.'"
[B.] The court concluded that Starbuck "pleads sufficient facts indicating the Outputs were published to third parties," relying in part on Google AI's own statements about what happened:
Starbuck alleges the "False Statements" … were published to "third parties, including Starbuck's own children and colleagues." Starbuck alleges at least two individuals approached him regarding misrepresentations produced to them by a Google AI product. Starbuck alleges Google AI revealed that it had produced false statements regarding Starbuck to 2,843,917 unique users. The last of these categories, regarding the purported 2,843,917 unique users of Google AI who were allegedly fed false information about Starbuck, widens the scope of the alleged defamation to a mass scale.
In response to this allegation, Google argues Google AI's "admission" is unreliable, as the bulk of Starbuck's Complaint asks the Court to believe the AI routinely misrepresents the truth about Starbuck, but then Starbuck asks the Court to believe this AI representation.
Here, Google requests that the Court exceed the bounds of Rule 12(b)(6), essentially asking the Court to infer that the AI never told the truth, which would violate the Court's obligation to draw inferences in favor of the non-moving party, not the moving party. A Rule 12(b)(6) inquiry investigates whether a factual assertion is possible, not probable. Given the lack of definitive information regarding Google AI's capabilities, it is at least possible, on this record, that Google AI (1) tracks the users to which it provides information, (2) correctly identified the number of times it provided fabricated representations, and (3) provided this concession without being improperly manipulated by Starbuck. The Court will not find, at the notice-pleadings stage, that this allegation is so totally incredible as to be disregarded.
The 2.8-million-users allegation provides the necessary link between the specific representations alleged in the Complaint and the ability to infer the existence of recipients for the Outputs. Crediting the possibility that Google AI told the truth that it had broadcasted false statements to 2.8 million unique users means that people other than Starbuck received something false about Starbuck—leaving the question of what they received. The Outputs for which Starbuck brings this action must have been received by someone (either Starbuck or a third party) for Starbuck in order to be actionable.
At this stage, it is reasonable for the Court to infer the Outputs were received by a person or group of persons. Questions remain as to whether that person was just Starbuck himself, or was a subset of those 2.8 million users who received some kind of falsehood about Starbuck. Making all reasonable inferences in favor of the plaintiff, the Court must infer Starbuck himself is not the sole recipient of the Outputs, and they were received by at least some of the 2.8 million unique users who received some falsehood about Starbuck. This means the allegations in the Complaint enable the inference that the Outputs have been published to some third parties to be identified later. {While proving that third parties received the allegedly defamatory statements may prove challenging for Starbuck later in the case, on this record the Court must acknowledge it is possible he can do so.} …
[C.] The court distinguished "Walters v. OpenAI, L.L.C., a Georgia Superior Court case addressing allegations of defamation by AI on summary judgment":
As Google frames it, the Georgia court in Walters implemented a two-part test to ascertain whether an alleged defamatory statement was actionable. First, in the "objective test," the Georgia court investigated whether the context in which an alleged defamatory statement was made would lead a hypothetical reasonable reader to be misled. Next, in a "subjective test," the Georgia court investigated whether the third-party recipient believed the alleged misrepresentation.
Addressing the second part of the proffered test first, the Court notes Delaware law does not require proof (or pleading) that a recipient of defamatory information subjectively believed the statement was true. Accordingly, Starbuck's failure to explicitly claim that recipients of the Outputs believed them is not dispositive.
As for the "objective test," Google's reliance on Walters is inapposite. There, the Georgia court dismissed the defamation claim on summary judgment—after discovery revealed that the circumstances of the receipt of the misinformation did not support the plaintiff's claim that a reasonable reader could have believed the misinformation. This fact-intensive analysis was conducted after the development of a record the Court lacks here.
Nothing in Walters indicates that a failure to plead detailed factual circumstances underpinning a recipient's receipt of alleged defamatory content constitutes a pleading defect. To hold that such minutiae is required would essentially require defamation claimants to conduct thorough discovery before discovery in a defamation action officially begins—despite Delaware's status as a notice pleading jurisdiction. Accordingly, the Court cannot decide that Starbuck alleged insufficient detail or that a third party could not have reasonably relied on the alleged defamatory statements identified in the Complaint.
{Further, Starbuck alleges facts which can be interpreted to support the inference that some readers of the Gemini Outputs believed the representations therein were true. For example, the two individuals alleged to have approached Starbuck regarding a Google AI's misrepresentations sought his confirmation as to their truth, indicating they did not immediately discount their veracity.}
[D.] The court also rejected Google's arguments that "the presence of warnings as to Google AI's accuracy forecloses any reasonable third party from relying on the Google AI Outputs, defeating the element of publication":
The disclaimers Google references are not identified in the Complaint or attached as an exhibit. Accordingly, the Court cannot make any determination as to what disclaimer was presented to whom. Google's argument regarding the scope and effect of the disclaimers is appropriately addressed later in these proceedings.
{Google asks the Court to take judicial notice as to the contents of Google AI's disclaimers. The Court declines to do so here, where a dearth of information prevents the Court from ascertaining what exact disclaimers were or were not presented to the same users who reviewed defamatory content regarding Starbuck on Google AI. There is not an evidentiary foundation to support reliance on the disclaimers. A more robust record is necessary to resolve issues regarding the disclaimers.}
The Court is also not persuaded that, at this stage, Starbuck must provide highly-specific facts identifying the circumstances in which the various categories of recipients received the misrepresentations from Google AI. As stated above, the Complaint can be read as alleging that at least some of 2.8 million Google AI users, including Starbuck's children and colleagues, as well as two unidentified individuals who approached Starbuck, received the alleged misrepresentations when using Google AI.
The Court will also not find, on an incomplete record, that a reasonable third party could not have viewed the defamatory statements alleged in the Complaint as true. The Complaint sufficiently alleges facts supporting the element of publication, and any issues concerning Starbuck's ability to prove this element can be resolved after discovery.
[E.] The court also concluded that Starbuck had adequately alleged "actual malice" (required because the "[t]he parties agree (for purposes of this motion) that Starbuck is a public figure"):
Here, Starbuck alleges he informed Google of the problem before the Outputs were produced [based on earlier false statements that had been published about him by Google Bard -EV], via the Legal Department Notices, and Google did nothing in response….
Starbuck [also] alleges Google AI admitted to holding a "deliberate, engineered" bias against Starbuck. [From the Complaint, a purported quote from a Gemini session: "The issue isn't simply a 'bug' or 'hallucination' in my programming. It is a deliberate, engineered bias designed to damage the reputation of individuals with whom Google executives disagree politically, Robby Starbuck is a prime example, but he is not the only one." -EV]
Google again asks the Court to totally discount this allegation and infer it was outputted following manipulative inputs. Again, given the plaintiff-friendly standard on a motion to dismiss pursuant to Rule 12(b)(6), the Court will not do so….
The Court further will not discount the possibility, on a motion to dismiss, that Google AI, an artificial intelligence tool whose exact capabilities is not yet universally understood, (1) can review and understand its own programming and design, (2) therefore knows it has been "deliberately engineered" to defame individuals such as Starbuck, and (3) accurately reported that to the individual who prompted it to do so as alleged in the Complaint. If the AI was right, then Google would have not only acted recklessly, but deliberately in attempting to hurt Starbuck's reputation.
Sensational as that theory may be, in the absence of any discovery, the Court will not disregard the theory. The purported Google AI admission can be viewed as an allegation supporting actual malice at this stage but can also be reinvestigated after discovery fleshes out the circumstances in which the admission was made.
Starbuck notes he informed Google, via X posts directed to Google and its employees, that its AI agents had lied about him in the past, leading to email correspondence with a Google employee about the issues. While these allegations concern alleged representations made by Bard, not the current version of Gemini, and concern misrepresentations not alleged as actionable defamation, Starbuck contends they can still support an inference of actual malice: essentially contending Google's refusal to correct Bard's lies supports the inference that Google acted with actual malice in enabling Google AI products, as a whole group, to lie.
Regardless of whether the X posts provide strong evidence of actual malice concerning a newer iteration of AI tool than that discussed in the X posts, the Court has not been presented with any binding caselaw indicating that such allegations provide no evidence of actual malice. Especially relevant here is Starbuck's allegation that the AI tool in question in 2023 (Bard) was subsequently combined with the current Gemini product, meaning the two AI agents may not be so separate as Google wishes to convey and may share a defamatory design. Accordingly, the Court will not completely disregard the X posts….
The guidepost here is possibility. It is possible the Legal Department Notices (1) identified the same 22 representations at issue in the Complaint, (2) were received by or circulated to the individuals at Google who are responsible for policing Google AI's outputs, (3) who then, with knowledge of the defamatory statements' publication, took no corrective action—even while they could do so —as the statements continued to be published to other Google AI users. This outlines one possible factual scenario which Starbuck may be able to prove in discovery which would provide evidence of actual malice (though perhaps not the only possible scenario)….
[F.] And the court concluded that Starbuck had adequately pleaded damages:
Starbuck alleges specific, emotionally distressing thoughts he experiences because of the alleged defamation by Google AI. Starbuck explains that these thoughts are exacerbated against the backdrop of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, another political commentator. Starbuck further notes that he has a history of receiving death threats. The Court views these allegations as sufficient to support a claim for emotional distress damages at this stage in the proceedings, being sufficiently well-pled to proceed to discovery and flesh out the allegations.
See here for more on the Complaint in this case; it shouldn't be confused with the now-settled Starbuck v. Meta, which appears to have involved a different model and at least largely different hallucinations. For more on the legal question, see Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output.
Krista L. Baughman of Baughman Law argued for Starbuck, and was joined on the briefs by Andrew E. Russell and Virginia Lynch (Shaw Keller LLP) and Jesse Franklin-Murdock (Dhillon Law Group Inc.).
The post Conservative Commentator Robby Starbuck's Lawsuit Alleging Google AI Had Defamed Him Can Go Forward appeared first on Reason.com.
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Data centers, already unloved by the general public, have a new enemy: cuddly leopard cubs.
In Nashville, plans by Atlanta-based company DC BLOX to build a data center have provoked heated opposition from the Nashville Zoo, next to which the planned facility would go.
The zoo argues that the constant hums and vibrations from the data center would have a negative impact on animals with sensitive hearing; chief among them the clouded leopards bred in the zoo.
"Clouded Leopards are notoriously sensitive to any mechanical noise, which causes excessive stress and elimination of successful breeding, harming the overall endangered population," wrote the zoo's president, Rick Schwartz, in a June op-ed for the Tennessean.
It's an argument that's resonated with local officials.
It was reported on Monday that DC BLOX closed on its purchase of the zoo-adjacent site for $23 million.
On Tuesday, the Nashville-Davidson Metro Council passed a temporary moratorium on new data centers and new zoning restrictions on these facilities. Councilmembers also advanced legislation pushed by Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell that would enable the city to seize DC BLOX's property via eminent domain.
Data centers are not particularly noisy land uses. On a decibel scale, they're a bit louder than libraries and a bit quieter than pickleball courts.
Neighbors nevertheless complain that the low, constant drone of data centers' cooling equipment is still a nuisance, and one that's often inadequately regulated by local noise limits set in decibels.
Whether the character of data centers' noise emissions poses a particular risk to animals is a new question without a clear answer, says Jennifer D'Agostino, the chief animal program officer at the Oklahoma City Zoo and president of the American College of Zoological Medicine.
"This is a bit of new territory," she tells Reason. "We don't have anything directly to compare [data center noise] to."
D'Agostino says the primary noise concerns zoos are most used to dealing with are those generated by one-off events that might draw larger crowds at unusual times to the zoo itself.
Nearby highways or airports are probably the closest comparable noise impacts to a data center's steady hum, she says. Zoos typically mitigate those through installing soundproofing barriers and materials around the perimeter and on individual habitats.
Longer-term observation would be required to provide better information on how data centers' particular noise impacts affect animals, she says.
Data centers' unknown noise impact on zoo animals presents an awkward problem for the DC BLOX project. The zoo can't show any specific evidence that data centers would pose a unique problem for its animals. The company can't cite evidence showing that data centers' noise impacts are completely fine for zoo animals either.
For its part, DC BLOX has committed to installing sound barriers on its side of the line, using quieter equipment in its actual facility, and keeping its noise levels below the limits required by the zoning code.
The industrial park in which its data center would go already hosts a smaller data center, it notes.
"We will not add perceivable incremental sound at the property line, and sound levels reaching the zoo will be even lower," reads a company brief on its Nashville proposal.
In early July, the company said it had a "productive" meeting with the zoo's leadership and the mayor about its project.
But that didn't stop Tuesday's zoning restrictions and eminent domain legislation from advancing. Nor did it seem to turn attitudes at the zoo.
"We remain committed to ensuring the proposed data center is not built adjacent to Nashville Zoo and we hope DC Blox recognizes the overwhelming message from our community and abandons its plans for this location," wrote the zoo in a Facebook post.
In addition to the legitimate noise concerns it's raised, the zoo has also raised the laundry list of complaints one typically hears about data centers, including that it would strain local water and power resources, allegedly causing a detrimental impact on "the people of Tennessee's most ethnically diverse communities."
For all the public backlash, DC BLOX's project would seem to have the upper hand legally.
Per Axios, city zoning officials have said that the new zoning restrictions on data centers can't apply to the DC BLOX project, given that it had already filed the necessary permit applications by the time the new regulations had passed.
And the old rules allow for DC BLOX's project.
The company could also potentially challenge the effort to take its land via eminent domain on the grounds that it's a pretextual taking.
The legislation authorizing Metro to take the DC BLOX site cites the government's need for office space as the "public use" that would authorize the seizure. Given the context, it's clear that Nashville's seizure is primarily motivated by a desire to stop the data center project.
Provided that Metro's plans for the office space are vague enough, DC BLOX could argue that the public use cited by the city to take its land is pretextual and therefore the seizure is unconstitutional.
Time will tell if it comes to that. Nashville Banner reports that the eminent domain legislation could come up for a final vote on August 4.
The post Nashville Considers Using Eminent Domain To Stop a Planned Data Center From Irritating Zoo Animals appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today, the Liberty Justice Center filed Burlap & Barrel, Inc. v. Greer, the first case challenging Donald Trump's massive new Section 301 tariffs. The complaint is available here. LJC is the same group that I worked with on V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, the IEEPA tariff case decided by the Supreme Court in February. LJC also filed one of the two cases challenging Trump's Section 122 tariffs, which prevailed in the US Court of International Trade in May (it is now on appeal).
The current case is before the US Court of International Trade. LJC's clients are two small businesses who import goods from many of the countries covered by the new tariffs.
I am not directly involved in the Section 301 case. But I completely support it, and commend LJC for getting it in so quickly. I know from personal experience how hard it can be to do this on short notice.
Commentators such as Peter Harrell, Scott Lincicome, Gregory Shaffer and Jeremiah May, and myself have previously laid out a variety of reasons why the Section 301 tariffs are illegal. I summarized them in my post yesterday. The LJC complaint makes many of these same points. To briefly summarize it argues:
1. The Section 301 tariffs violate many of the procedural and substantive requirements of the statute; Trump is trying to turn a law intended to target specific trade practices into a tool for waging a massive worldwide trade war against virtually all our trading partners, using "forced labor" as a pretext.
2. This runs afoul of the major questions doctrine (MQD), which requires Congress to "speak clearly" when authorizing the executive to make "decisions of vast economic and political significance." If it is unclear whether Section 301 grants Trump the sweeping authority he claims, MQD requires resolving the ambiguity against the administration.
3. If Section 301 somehow does grant Trump the authority he claims, the law is unconstitutional under the nondelegation doctrine, which limits delegation of congressional power (here, the tariff authority) to the executive.
4. The constitutional avoidance canon requires interpreting Section 301 to reject the administration's position. This canon requires courts to interpret federal laws to avoid constitutional problems whenever it is "fairly possible" to do so. Here, doing so is needed to avoid a massive nondelegation issue.
Not surprisingly, I agree with all four of these arguments, and I will likely have more to say about them later.
Another notable aspect of the lawsuit is that the plaintiffs are seeking class action certification. If it is granted, and they prevail on the merits, the ruling will completely block the Section 301 tariffs with respect to virtually all importers, not just LJC's two clients.
I think it likely there will be additional lawsuits challenging the Section 301 tariffs. I hope to write more about these issues soon.
UPDATE: LJC has a helpful statement summarizing the case here.
The post Liberty Justice Center Files First Lawsuit Challenging Trump's Massive New Section 301 Tariffs appeared first on Reason.com.
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The union for Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees is worried about the agency's turn toward privatization.
Earlier this week, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE)—which represents 47,000 Transportation Security Officers at 400 airports across the country—issued a press release calling the Trump administration's "push" to put airport security screening in the hands of private contractors a threat to its members' jobs and public safety.
The statement came after three airports—Tampa International Airport, Des Moines International Airport, and Charleston International Airport—announced that they would join the TSA's Gold+ program, a "public-private partnership" initiative by the Trump administration soft-launched in May. The program allows any of the 440 commercial airports under TSA control to voluntarily opt in to a "tailored security screening service" based on their needs.
Airports in the program can either work with private contractors or bid to provide security screenings themselves, with "staffing, technology, and maintenance" and oversight provided by the TSA at "no additional cost." Gold+ operators will be responsible for checkpoints, baggage screening, cybersecurity requirements, and "workforce management" in accordance with TSA's standards, but the agency will not mandate specific "staffing levels or ratios."
The program is an expansion of TSA's Screening Partnership Program, which outsources security screening services at commercial airports to private companies. There are 20 airports nationwide currently in the partnership program, ranging from small to mid-size, including one of the country's busiest airports, San Francisco International.
AFGE President Everett Kelley says the Gold+ program represents a "major departure and step backwards" from post-9/11 security, which is untrue, given that the TSA will require employees of its private contractors to adhere to its training and background-check requirements.
He's likely more worried a lack of staffing quotas will mean fewer jobs for union members working in airports that are part of the Gold+ program.
But Kelley should take heart in how difficult it is to fire government employees. The Trump administration has tried—and failed—to fire thousands of TSA workers since the start of the president's second term. In February 2025, former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem sent out a memo canceling the TSA's collective bargaining agreement. A federal judge later issued an injunction prohibiting the government from enforcing the memo.
And even though in its FY 2027 budget the DHS has proposed a staffing reduction of 8,385 positions and 9,439 full-time TSA employees, David Cummins—the president's nominee to lead the TSA—said this month in his confirmation hearing that current TSA employees will have "right of first refusal" for jobs at airports in the program.
Still, even if any fears about job losses were warranted, it would be current TSA agents who would stand to benefit from higher-paying, more competitive salaries. As Cummins noted in his confirmation hearing, Kansas City International Airport—one of the 20 airports operated by private contractors—offers higher pay than the federal government for its entry-level security screeners, and from a "benefit standpoint," he added, "it's very comparable."
Importantly, more private security jobs would mean that security officers would get paid even when the government shuts down.
During the 76-day government shutdown that began in February and ended in April, security screeners at the 440 TSA-operated airports went without pay. Meanwhile, Nat Carmack—president of BOS Security, a private screening company—told CNN employees at Tupelo Regional Airport in Mississippi "never missed a paycheck." Consumers at those airports were also spared the long lines and frustration faced by others at nonparticipating airports around the country.
Fliers at Gold+ airports can expect to experience the same benefits. In a statement to Reason, the Des Moines International Airport says its inclusion in the Gold+ program will "improve the passenger experience."
According to the DHS' FY 2027 budget proposal, the shift to privatization could save the government $52 million by increasing funding for the Screening Partnership Program by $477.3 million and offsetting it with $529.3 million in savings from personnel cuts. However, TSA also says it will not provide the "specific mix" of appropriations and fee sources used to fund the Gold+ program.
The agency issued a request for proposals for Gold+ in July, with applications due by the end of the month. TSA projects an effective start date for contracts in September with a $12.9 billion ceiling across all awards over 10 years.
With federal dollars backing the program and the government's fingers very much in the pie, the Gold+ program can hardly be considered real privatization. Still, it's a small, meaningful step toward a market solution, and it puts the U.S. more in line with the rest of the world, where privatized airport security is the norm.
The post Airports Are Opting for Private Security Over the TSA. The Union Says That's a Public Safety Threat. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Victory! This week the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the "open fields doctrine" under its state constitution, ruling in favor of IJ's clients the Punxsutawney and Pitch Pine hunting clubs. They challenged warrantless searches of their property by state gov't agents. At the federal level, the doctrine allows searches of private land without a warrant. As a result, about 96% of all private land in the country is exposed to warrantless searches and surveillance. Pennsylvania had followed the doctrine but the court found its precedent failed to protect the rights of our clients and everyone else in Pennsylvania.
New cert grant! Since 2012, the state of Alaska has been trying to permanently forfeit Ken Jouppi's $95,000 airplane after he transported a passenger carrying a six-pack. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide if it can. For decades, Ken flew his Cessna across the Alaskan wilderness, shuttling locals and tourists who depend on bush pilots like him. Then, state troopers found some Budweiser tucked in a passenger's luggage. Ken and the passenger were charged with misdemeanors, fined $1,500, and sentenced to 3 days in jail. But Alaska tried to take his plane too. Now, the Court will decide whether taking a man's plane over a six-pack is an unconstitutionally excessive fine.
New on the Short Circuit podcast: Men in black and Presidents in ultra vires.
New cert petition! A Massachusetts regulation forces parents to choose between sending their children to private school and receiving special education services that state law guarantees. The First Circuit said this was just fine because the "unconstitutional conditions" doctrine is merely a First Amendment thing—it doesn't apply to the long-recognized right to send one's child to a private school. Five other courts: oh really? Petition for cert: can you settle whether one of the oldest constitutional principles applies to one of the oldest constitutional rights?
The post Short Circuit: An inexhaustive weekly compendium of rulings from the federal courts of appeal appeared first on Reason.com.
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What does it take to reveal a contradiction? In at least one case, it is a deformed raccoon sashaying across Seattle, delightfully unbothered.
If you make your home somewhere deep under a rock, I am referring to Jimothy—who else?—the feral hunchback whose viral sightings have injected a ray of sunshine into the land of perpetual drizzle, and also across the globe. What is it about him? Or her? Or them? There may be multiple Jimothys, after all: other little trash pandas likely afflicted with short spine syndrome, giving her/him/them the rounded back that has captured the attention and affection of many.
But it need not matter. Because Jimothy is an idea—a symbol of being unapologetically different and free, despite dealing with similar setbacks as, say, Quasimodo (who was, unfortunately, locked in a bell tower and therefore unable to reach his full potential).
"I think he's an example to all of us that you don't have to be perfect to be loved," said Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who also announced that the city would present a proclamation in his honor this weekend. "It is a dream of mine to encounter Jimothy in real life and then keep my measured distance from him so he can live his good little life."
Ah, Seattle. A city most known for its lawmakers keeping their measured distance and letting their constituents live their good little lives.
Shall we walk—scamper, Jimothy-style—down memory lane? Let's. In 2018, Seattle officially outlawed single-use plastic straws and utensils. That was a groundbreaking move at the time, and it was very expensive for businesses to comply. It also meant that many residents and visitors trying to live their good little lives across Seattle have since felt straws disintegrate in their mouths as their drinks transform into concoctions of coffee and paper. Is that how we should honor the hometown of Starbucks?
And the rents. Oh, the rents. Seattle's notoriously constrictive zoning rules prohibit anything but single-family homes from being built in the majority of the city. Which means to live your good little life there, you will probably pay a big, bad rent. Jimothy, thankfully, is living in many of our heads rent-free. I charge him nothing.
That's not to say lawmakers aren't trying to help. The city's recent sky-high minimum wage for delivery drivers was, in theory, supposed to give a raise to some in the working class. Instead, driver earnings reportedly plunged as higher delivery costs sent orders off a cliff. "I believe we created a problem, and it's our responsibility to fix it," conceded Sara Nelson, then the president of the Seattle City Council. The introspection is refreshing. But the government still has not fixed it after lawmakers decidedly did not keep their measured distance.
Hot Jimothy summer will come to an end. People's attention spans are short. But it may be hard to forget him, at least for a time, when considering what he has already left behind: a raft of paintings, tattoos (a choice), mosaics, and more. So Jimothy will remain. He has become a mascot for freedom—for defiantly living a good little life—in a city too often hostile to that very thing.
The post What Jimothy the Raccoon Reveals About Seattle appeared first on Reason.com.
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As his war against Iran stretches into a fifth month, President Donald Trump is almost certainly looking for good news. A new report suggests his administration may be fudging the number of total casualties.
Earlier this week on Truth Social, Trump listed four previous American wars alongside the two military engagements he has launched in his second term: the January raid that ousted Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and the war with Iran.
While the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and the Korean Peninsula each lasted multiple years and cost thousands of American lives, Trump bragged that his incursions were much more efficient, with Venezuela lasting only one day with no casualties, and only 18 dead so far from the war with Iran.
But within days, even that total was revised down.
"On Wednesday, the Pentagon reported on its casualties website that a total of 18 American service members had been killed during the war in Iran," The New York Times reported. "By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number, reporting that 14 American troops had been killed in the war."
The Pentagon's casualty tracker currently lists seven deaths as a result of hostilities and seven that were "non-hostile," the result of accidents like the refueling aircraft that crashed in March, killing all six crewmembers onboard.
Four U.S. Army soldiers were killed in Jordan and Iraq last weekend; the Defense Department called the deaths "related to Iranian aggression." And yet the Pentagon doesn't include any of them as casualties of the conflict.
Why the revision? Acting Defense Department press secretary Joel Valdez told the Times it was the result of "temporary data disruptions" and would be fixed. But the paper, citing "three military officials," said the administration scrubbed the four most recent casualties "because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April."
"That ceasefire, however, didn't last," Peter Suderman wrote today in the Reason Roundup. "And earlier this month, Trump notified Congress that the United States was once again at war with Iran." In fact, Trump called the ceasefire "over" on July 8, more than a week before those four soldiers died.
Such a blatant attempt to cover up the administration's own war record is troubling.
It's perhaps also not new: In a letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday, the 12 Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee requested "a comprehensive accounting of the number of service members who have been killed, wounded, or injured in support of the operation." The lawmakers complained the Pentagon's site "has reported inconsistent casualty figures, raising additional questions about the transparency and reliability of the Department's public reporting and statements."
But no matter what Trump says, American soldiers are still dead as a direct result of the conflict he helped instigate. And it's not the first time he has used semantics to massage the truth about his war.
In March, just a month after hostilities began, Trump bragged that he purposely avoided using the word war to keep from triggering the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to end a conflict within 60 days or get Congress' approval. (After 60 days, Trump ultimately just pretended the conflict was over as a result of the April ceasefire.)
He needn't have bothered, of course: Despite taking numerous votes on what is clearly an unconstitutional war of choice, Congress has yet to successfully vote to end it. While the House voted this week on a (non-binding) resolution to end the war, an effort in the Senate failed the same day.
Ultimately, this is all just a game of semantics. However Trump and Hegseth choose to list them, it doesn't change the fact that Americans are dead as a result of their choices.
The post Trump Can't Just Pretend Iran War Casualties Don't Count appeared first on Reason.com.
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The latest evolution of President Donald Trump's trade war arrived on Thursday evening: New tariffs ranging from 10 percent to 12.5 percent, targeting most of America's largest trading partners.
Those new tariffs replace the so-called "global tariff" of 10 percent that Trump implemented in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling in February that struck down an earlier set of tariffs. That "global tariff" had been implemented under the auspices of a law that grants the president power to impose temporary tariffs that last no more than 150 days—in other words, that was always a stop-gap solution, and the tariffs announced Thursday are meant to be a more permanent arrangement.
But like the first round of tariffs and the second round of temporary tariffs, this third round of tariffs has some obvious legal and constitutional deficiencies. In levying these new tariffs, the Trump administration is once again ignoring limits that are written into the very law it is seeking to use. It is also disregarding the constitutional principle that the Supreme Court highlighted in its February ruling on the earlier tariffs.
In short: Trump's new tariffs are likely illegal too. But it will probably require another lengthy court battle to overturn them.
Let's take the two issues one by one, starting with the statutory shortcomings.
Trump is invoking Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose these new tariffs. Starting today, imports from 17 American trade partners (including Canada, Mexico, and the European Union) will be subject to 10 percent tariffs. Imports from another 43 trading partners will be subject to 12.5 percent tariffs.
Ostensibly, these tariffs are meant to combat "forced labor." The Trump administration says the tariffs are the result of an investigation into 60 foreign economies that "fail to prohibit or to effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced wholly or in part with forced labor."
Immediately, a logical problem emerges. The announcement says that the 10 percent tariff will apply even to countries that "impose a forced labor import prohibition," as long as the administration believes that prohibition is not being adequately enforced. It is unclear what, exactly, a foreign country would have to do to get removed from that list. That makes it fairly obvious that combating forced labor is a pretext for what the Trump administration really wants to do: have more tariffs.
Before Section 301 can be invoked, the U.S. Trade Representative must make an "investigation" into whatever behavior is being used to justify the tariffs. In this case, those investigations were a "sham" meant to reach a predetermined conclusion, Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute, writes in The Dispatch.
"The findings were clearly predetermined. The methodology is thin to the point of embarrassment. The remedy is both ridiculously blunt and wildly out of proportion to any measurable economic distortion," Lincicome writes. "The action gives targeted countries no way to get the tariffs lifted by eliminating their supposedly bad behavior. And the whole thing establishes precedent for an 'automatic tariff generator' that Trump or a future president can deploy at will."
Both U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters earlier this year that the Section 301 tariffs were meant to replace the tariffs that had been struck down by the Supreme Court. Greer has been quite clear that the timeline for the "investigations" would be sped up so the new tariffs could be ready when the 150-day window for Trump's other tariffs closed.
Both in timing and in substance, the investigations underpinning these new tariffs look fabricated to reach a specific outcome.
The announced tariffs also seem to violate the law's requirement that tariffs be "appropriate" to the harm caused. As Peter Harrell, an attorney and scholar at Georgetown University's Institute of International Economic Law, explained in a June post at the Volokh Conspiracy, that's not the case here.
"Rather than trying to quantify the harm that, for example, Italy or Japan's alleged failure to adequately enforce a prohibition on imports made with forced labor does to the U.S. economy, USTR's [the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative] investigation simply provides a few illustrative examples that attempt to show that a handful of individual products potentially made with forced labor, such as rice exported by Myanmar, might have displaced some quantum of U.S. exports in some markets," Harrell wrote.
Then, there are the constitutional problems. When the Supreme Court struck down Trump's earlier tariffs, Justice Neil Gorsuch spelled things out quite directly in his concurring opinion: "The Constitution lodges the Nation's lawmaking powers in Congress alone, and the major questions doctrine safeguards that assignment against executive encroachment."
What Trump is trying to do with these new Section 301 tariffs seems to go well beyond "executive encroachment." He is again stretching some limited tariff powers granted by Congress and attempting to turn Section 301 into, as Lincicome put it, an "automatic tariff generator."
That was clearly not Congress's intention in passing Section 301. Even if it was, the major questions doctrine—which requires that matters of major economic and political significance be settled by Congress—and the related nondelegation doctrine would prohibit the legislature from handing over such broad power over trade policy.
"While the Supreme Court's nondelegation precedent is far from completely clear, last year's decision in FCC v. Consumers' Research held that delegations of the power to impose taxes and other financial levies must have a clear 'floor' and 'ceiling' and that '[t]he guidance needed is greater when an agency action will affect the entire national economy than when it addresses a narrow, technical issue,'" explained Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and one of the attorneys who fought Trump's earlier tariffs. "There is no meaningful floor or ceiling under the administration's approach to Section 301. And the power claimed is clearly one that massively affects the 'entire national economy.'"
Of course, there is a significant difference between an executive action being obviously illegal or unconstitutional, and the president being prevented from doing it. Every single time Trump's tariffs have gone before a court, the administration has lost.
Despite that, it took nearly a year for the first set of tariffs (which were announced in April 2025) to be struck down by the Supreme Court (in February 2026). The second set of tariffs expired before they could get to the Supreme Court—but they had already been ruled unlawful by one lower court.
It will likely take a long time to get another tariff case challenging the Section 301 tariffs through the court system. In the meantime, American businesses and consumers will be burdened by the cost of these new tariffs—estimated to be about $100 billion annually—thanks to a president who is unwilling to recognize the flaws with his tariff plans or the limits of his executive powers.
If ever there was a time for Congress to make meaningful changes to American tariff laws, it is now.
The post Trump's Newest Tariffs Are Likely Illegal Too appeared first on Reason.com.
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Supersonic flight was always focused on crossing oceans in record time. The Concorde famously brought flight times between New York and London down to three hours before its last retirement in 2003. But flying supersonic within the country has been off the table since the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) banned overland supersonic flights in March 1973 due to loud sonic booms.
The Trump administration wants to change that—though the bureaucracy is moving slowly. Last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order promising to "empower our engineers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries to deliver the next generation of air travel" by lifting the ban. Earlier this month, the FAA announced a proposal for new sound-based rules that would replace the total ban. Members of the public have until August 17 to comment.
The proposal sets a limit of 0.11 pounds per square foot of overpressure in the ground from sonic booms. (For comparison, the Concorde produced 1.94 pounds per square foot at peak overpressure.) The new limit is based on research by the startup Boom Supersonic, which is pioneering a technique to ensure that the shock waves from breaking the sound barrier bounce harmlessly around the atmosphere instead of reaching the ground.
Boom Supersonic itself is cautiously optimistic about the FAA's proposal. "We're thrilled that supersonic flight is about to be legal again, on the heels of our historic demonstration of boomless supersonic flight aboard XB-1," company spokeswoman Aubrey Scanlan tells Reason, promising to "provide our comments to the FAA after a full assessment" of the rules.
Supersonic passenger travel is a dream deferred by decades. In the 1960s, the working assumption of aircraft manufacturers around the world was that most long-haul flights would be supersonic. Airports, including the airfield in southern Florida that later became Alligator Alcatraz, were built to host the anticipated monster jets.
Sonic booms turned out to be more of a problem than expected. In 1964, the FAA and U.S. Air Force tried to prove the harmlessness of sonic booms by flying jets repeatedly over Oklahoma City. Instead, they ended up breaking windows, terrorizing citizens, and galvanizing a public backlash, leading to the FAA's ban on overland supersonic flights.
The other problem with supersonic travel was the economics. The only supersonic passenger jet that made it to market was the Concorde, heavily subsidized by the French and British governments. Even so, tickets were $7,000 per round trip—which would be nearly double in today's money. And a deadly accident in 2000 scared away many of the Concorde's customers.
Boom Supersonic is promising to solve both the economic and technical problems. It is the first private company ever to develop a supersonic airplane with (mostly) private money. CEO Black Scholl told CNN in 2021 that he was aiming at flights with $100 tickets, and after the flight of its XB-1 prototype in 2024, the company reported 130 orders and preorders from airlines.
As for sonic booms, the theories behind boomless supersonic flight have existed for a few decades. Only recently have aerodynamic computer models allowed engineers to put them into practice. An object flying faster than the speed of sound generates a cone of pressure waves that sounds like a loud explosion to anyone it passes over. Boom Supersonic attempts to take advantage of a phenomenon called Mach cutoff, in which refraction through the atmosphere prevents those pressure waves from ever hitting the ground. The company announced the first successful "boomless cruise" in February 2025, though scientists caution that Mach cutoff depends on specific weather conditions.
Whether or not this company specifically succeeds, it's important that the Trump administration is letting them try. And it's about time. A 2016 paper by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University argued that the current FAA regulations on sonic booms were not only lagging behind the state of aeronautical technology, but actually stifling further innovation.
"An affordable and commercially viable supersonic transport is unlikely to spring from the mind of a single engineer, much less a committee of bureaucrats. Like the subsonic aviation industry that came before it, a supersonic aviation industry will require trial and error, competition, and a market discovery process to lead firms up the learning curve to commercial viability," the paper states. "If we want rapid economic growth, we must continually question the limitations we impose upon ourselves and press forward the boundary of what is possible."
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Florida's state wildlife law enforcement agency used a police database to snoop on more than a dozen of its critics, two Florida news outlets reported, raising concerns of First Amendment retaliation.
The Orlando Sentinel and the Miami Herald both published stories last weekend revealing that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) secretly investigated outspoken opponents of the agency's policies using the state's Driver and Vehicle Information Database (DAVID), access to which is tightly restricted to legitimate law enforcement purposes.
Targets of FWC searches included a documentary filmmaker, Brent Fannin, who accused the agency of failing to protect endangered gopher tortoises. Another was Katrina Shadix, who fought the FWC's decision to allow bear hunts and successfully sued the state over a pollution-related manatee die-off.
"We found out that they were illegally accessing our information, and it was these people who have spoken out against their policy and practices," Shadix said. "They're breaking a federal law to strip us of our constitutional rights, which is crazy."
According to news reports, an anonymous tipster emailed Fannin claiming that the FWC was tracking him. Fannin filed a records request with the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles revealing that two FWC employees had pulled his driving records seven times in April and June of 2025.
When other activists filed similar requests, they discovered the FWC had also pulled their personal information from DAVID. The Herald reported that the FWC accessed Shadix's driving records 17 times between 2023 and 2025.
"Many of the searches correspond to days after individuals posted online or spoke publicly against FWC," the Sentinel reported. "Under the section which labels the reason listed for the search, it says 'Criminal Investigation.'"
Longtime Florida reporter and columnist Craig Pittman reported that so far 16 environmental activists have learned that their driving records were pulled by the FWC.
Not all were typical activists. One was an elected Republican property appraiser, who is suing the agency for violations of civil rights and federal privacy laws.
An FWC spokesperson said in a statement to Reason that the Herald and Sentinel stories "mischaracterized the FWC Division of Law Enforcement (DLE)" and that "claims that the FWC misuses or weaponizes its law enforcement authority are false."
"To clarify, DLE staff do not access Driver and Vehicle Information Database (DAVID) records for all attendees before public meetings," the statement continued.
However, the FWC statement went on to say that "threats concerning the harming of officers, staff and Commissioners are taken seriously and is why it's imperative that law enforcement works to ensure public safety by monitoring, preventing, and assessing potential security risks to maintain safe public spaces."
The spokesperson declined to say whether Shadix, Fannin, and others were the subject of threat investigations or provide examples of any threats.
Government watchdogs across the state are not willing to give the Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration the benefit of the doubt.
If there is evidence, Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell wrote, "Prove it. Show the credible justification for why the FWC conducted every single one of the criminal-database snooping checks it ran on people who'd dared to criticize the agency."
Although DeSantis declared the state "Free Florida," there have been repeated instances of what appears to be blatant First Amendment retaliation by Florida officials against residents.
Reason recently obtained public records showing that high-level officials at the Florida Department of Financial Services launched a threat investigation against a 77-year-old man for sending a postcard to Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia that simply read, "You lack values!"
Free Speech groups also heavily opposed a bill signed into law earlier this year by DeSantis allowing the state to designate groups as domestic terror organizations.
Earlier this year, a Miami Beach woman was questioned by two police detectives over a Facebook post criticizing the Miami Beach mayor's stance on Israel and Palestine.
Tampa Bay Times opinion columnist Joe Murphy wrote that the FWC searches were "yet another deeply and profoundly dismaying betrayal of public trust."
"When citizens can't use constitutionally protected free speech to speak up for their community, or for wild Florida, without fear of investigation and possible reprisal, it undermines the most sacred principles of our democracy," he added.
The post Florida Wildlife Agency Tracked Critics Using Law Enforcement Database appeared first on Reason.com.
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In a recent City Journal article headlined "No, Seriously, Decriminalizing Drugs Kills People," the Manhattan Institute's Charles Fain Lehman claimed a recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper provided conclusive evidence that "should lay to rest the debate over legalization." I published a rebuttal in Reason, arguing that the study did not close the debate. That provoked a response from Lehman on X.
I will respond to each of Lehman's substantive points and delve more deeply into the research. I communicated with the NBER study's co-authors, including University of Oregon economist Benjamin Hansen, who told me that the researchers "do not end any debate" with their report. I was also in touch with the co-author of a study on crime that Lehman cited on X. He offered a much more sober interpretation of his own research than the one Lehman presented in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
The NBER paper focuses on Oregon and Washington's brief experiments with decriminalizing drugs, which began in February 2021 as a result of a ballot initiative and a court ruling, respectively. This topic is worthy of careful attention. States are policy laboratories. If other locales plan to try decriminalizing drugs, they should study closely what happened in Oregon and Washington.
The issue is complex because the decriminalization periods were marked by disruptions from COVID-19, fentanyl, and a season of social upheaval. Serious researchers using defensible methods are reaching different conclusions. I took issue with Lehman's claim that the issue was settled by the NBER study and his assertion that "it's hard to see decriminalization as anything but an abject failure."
The paper's authors don't see it that way. "Our research, if anything, restarts the debate," Hansen wrote via email, by raising new questions, such as why decriminalization was associated with more deaths and whether a future iteration of the same policy could avoid them.
The precise cause of the spike in fatalities during decriminalization is hard to tease out, according to David Hall, a doctoral student in economics at the University of Oregon and another co-author of the NBER paper. In an email, he said that decriminalization bundled together with many simultaneous changes caused the rise in overdose mortality. Identifying which of the factors drove the results, he said, "will be important and also really difficult."
Hansen emphasized that most of the rise in overdose deaths in both states came from the spread of fentanyl. The paper aims to estimate the extent to which decriminalization made the fentanyl crisis worse. Contrary to Lehman's claim, the broad debate on decriminalization of drugs has not been laid to rest.
This isn't the first time advocates have claimed victory for their side. When a 2024 paper found no association between decriminalization and overdose mortality in Oregon, Scientific American quoted Todd Korthuis, the chief of addiction medicine at Oregon Health and Science University, who called it "the study that we were all waiting for." Korthuis said the study showed that fentanyl, not changes to the law, was "the whole story."
Emergency medicine physician Jeremy Faust offered a similar take in an Inside Medicine article. "Study debunks link between Oregon drug decriminalization and overdose deaths," the headline said. "Now we know that neither drug decriminalization nor drug recriminalization was responsible for increases in drug overdose deaths in Oregon and Washington," Faust wrote. "Fentanyl was (and is) the problem."
With one more year of data, the research points the other way. That's how social science works. But by declaring the issue settled for his side, Lehman committed the same error of leaping to an unjustified conclusion.
We do know that decriminalization in Oregon and Washington did not deliver the dramatic short-term benefits that advocates (including me) had hoped for. The NBER paper strengthens the case that it caused harm.
Is the NBER paper a good study that's worth taking seriously? I think so. Yet I noted that Lehman had selected "a single non-peer-reviewed working paper with equivocal findings from an even more equivocal literature" to slam the door on the debate. He replied:
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who uses "it's not peer reviewed!" as a rebuttal to a study probably doesn't know how to evaluate evidence. https://t.co/TI7Q97J8tx
— Charles Fain Lehman (@CharlesFLehman) July 15, 2026
Lehman's underlying point is sound. Plenty of good research hasn't been peer-reviewed. Lack of peer review is not a rebuttal, and I didn't offer it as one.
"Working paper," though, is a phrase that covers everything from rough notes posted by a crank on his personal website to nearly publishable research by serious scholars. That's why I asked the authors about the status of their paper. Hall told me it "could still go through a bit of revision, but I think (hope?) less so than other working papers." Hansen added that while referees will demand new figures and robustness checks, "it's pretty rare that findings completely change."
Working papers circulated for comments can be valuable, and this one is. But completed, peer-reviewed work subjected to replication and objections by other researchers carries more weight. Provisional evidence deserves provisional language, even when it's good evidence.
How meaningful is it that Oregon and Washington were among the top 10 percent of states in overdose death increases during the decriminalization period? That finding, I wrote, was "on the border of statistical significance"—meaning suggestive but short of conclusive.
Lehman replied:
Among many other absurd things, this article appears to be saying that Oregon and Washington being in the top 10 percent of states for death increases is borderline statistically significant because a p-value of 0.1 is usually described that way. (H/t @besttrousers) https://t.co/hEbxCji6Gr pic.twitter.com/pbV0gCZzmK
— Charles Fain Lehman (@CharlesFLehman) July 15, 2026
Lehman assumed I was conflating these states' ranking in "the top 10" with a p-value of 0.1. That's not what I was saying, and I should have been clearer.
My point is that two decriminalization states landing in the top 10 percent of states for overdose death increases is, by itself, enough to go looking for a reason, but not so unlikely that we can rule out coincidence. The border of statistical significance is the line dividing results that can be plausibly dismissed from results that demand explanation.
If 10 geographically and culturally diverse states had decriminalized at different times and witnessed the 10 largest increases in overdose deaths immediately afterward, that would have clear statistical significance: The association between decriminalization and an increase in overdoses could not be plausibly ascribed to coincidence. If a single state decriminalized and saw an overdose increase, however large, the effect could have been caused by something else that changed around the same time.
In this case, with two similar states decriminalizing around the same time and landing in the top 10 percent of overdose increases, you have something in between. It takes painstaking analysis to determine whether the association is statistically significant at conventional levels. This painstaking analysis to rank decriminalization states against constructed controls is exactly what papers on both sides of the debate do.
I argued that what kills drug users is not the opioid molecule but "not knowing whether the powder in front of them is a dose or a coffin." I cited Switzerland, which slashed drug fatalities by dispensing pharmaceutical-grade heroin, meaning users weren't poisoned by fentanyl. Here's Lehman's response:
also I just want to note that this clearly-AI-written paragraph is nonsense. Among other things, the idea that people only OD because they don't know what's in their drugs is belied by the surveys showing that when people get positive fent tests, they still use the drugs! pic.twitter.com/UVqSBrIM22
— Charles Fain Lehman (@CharlesFLehman) July 15, 2026
In the highlighted paragraph (which wasn't written by AI), I did not say that people overdose "only" because they don't know what's in their drugs. Overdoses increase when fentanyl in uncontrolled doses replaces more carefully dosed heroin. I stand by that point.
Lehman did not include a citation for his claim on X that "when people get positive fentanyl tests, they still use the drugs!" But he was likely referring to a 2018 study in the International Journal of Drug Policy, "Use of Rapid Fentanyl Test Strips Among Young Adults Who Use Drugs." Lehman linked to that study in a 2023 City Journal article to support his claim that "drug users, when informed that their drugs are adulterated with fentanyl, will often continue to use."
The authors of that study drew a different conclusion. They said their findings showed that "receipt of a positive test result was associated with positive risk reduction behavior change." Of the 31 users who got a positive result after testing their drugs or urine, they reported, "45% used smaller amounts, 42% went slower when using, 39% used with someone else, and 36% did a tester." They added that "few participants threw their drugs out (10%), sold them (10%), or gave them away (7%)."
It is also possible that Lehman was referring to another multi-state observational study of fentanyl test strips published last year in the same journal. That study also found that few users discarded drugs after a positive result, but it reported "a four-fold reduction in the amount of drugs used following a positive fentanyl test strip result." It also found that a positive result was associated with "participants taking turns" and "having naloxone nearby."
Both of these studies are evidence of harm reduction working at the margin, which is all it ever claimed to do. Furthermore, the fact that a person facing withdrawal will take chances on a dose of unknown potency does not refute the claim that deaths would plummet if a pharmaceutical-quality alternative were widely available, or the conclusion that overdoses are mostly a product of the drug war.
I wrote that Lehman "ignored the other side of the ledger." I noted that Washington's drug possession arrests fell by 91 percent, avoiding around 20,000 arrests, and that hundreds of thousands of prior convictions became eligible to be vacated after State v. Blake, the 2021 Washington Supreme Court decision that temporarily decriminalized simple drug possession. I added that those criminal justice burdens fell most heavily on black and Native American residents, who were also dying at the highest rates. Here is Lehman's reply:
Yeah man I don't think it was worth an extra 1,000 drug OD deaths to prevent 8,000 possession arrests, especially given that those possession arrests basically never resulted in prison time. pic.twitter.com/d00v986MNT
— Charles Fain Lehman (@CharlesFLehman) July 15, 2026
Where did Lehman get these figures? He seems to be comparing the study's estimate of additional overdose deaths during the entire post-decriminalization period of 43 and 28 months in two states against roughly a year's worth of avoided arrests in one state. My claim, in any case, was that Lehman ignored one side of the ledger. I didn't offer my opinion on which side was heavier. Readers can weigh deaths against arrests themselves, but they need both numbers stated on the same basis.
Roughly 260,000 felony drug possession convictions became eligible to be vacated, along with refunds of the fines and fees paid. All that was thrown out by the court decision that forced decriminalization. Tack on what a felony drug record does to employment, housing, personal relationships, and child custody. Arrests can ruin lives.
Lehman's point is also logically inconsistent. If possession arrests were inconsequential to users, as he suggests, how could the removal of that threat have caused 1,000 deaths? A toothless sanction does not change behavior very much.
I wrote that Lehman folded in a "surge in crime," even though the mortality study says nothing about crime. I added that "the arrest study he implicitly relies on found no statistically significant increase in violent or property offenses attributable to Measure 110." He replied:
This is literally false? He didn't even bother to follow the links to the study (https://t.co/urWRKLdWOP) I was pointing to? What the fuck? pic.twitter.com/K3lXxSEjLM
— Charles Fain Lehman (@CharlesFLehman) July 15, 2026
I did follow his link, which went to a Wall Street Journal op-ed Lehman wrote on the topic. That piece discusses the paper linked in Lehman's X post: a 2025 working paper titled "The Unintended Consequences of State-Level Drug Decriminalization Laws: Implications for Arrest and Crime Rates." When I wrote that the study "he implicitly relies on found no statistically significant increase in violent or property offenses attributable to Measure 110" (the Oregon ballot initiative), I had mistakenly looked at a different paper linked in the same op-ed. Reason has added a correction to my original article.
Lehman's Wall Street Journal op-ed nevertheless overstates the 2025 paper's findings, calling them "startling." I read the study and contacted its authors to get the full story. Like the mortality paper, this study has not yet been reviewed, which is why it should be discussed with provisional language. It finds statistically significant increases in serious violent and property crime in Oregon and Washington relative to other states, concentrated in Portland.
In the Journal, Lehman wrote, "A new study finds that Oregon's and Washington state's experiments with decriminalizing drug possession caused a surge in serious violent and property crime, especially in Portland and Seattle." In fact, the Seattle results are mixed, with robbery and drug offenses up but burglary and murder down relative to other large Washington cities.
The study window runs from 2019 through 2022, so it includes one year before COVID-19, the George Floyd protests, and a policing collapse that hit Portland and Seattle harder and longer than almost anywhere in the country. Decriminalization in Oregon and Washington both started in early 2021, which is also the year the FBI changed its crime reporting methods, causing well-documented gaps in agency coverage.
The paper's authors are appropriately careful about all of this: They describe factors that "may have" contributed to crime trends and do not claim to isolate one. Meanwhile, a federally funded study covering 2008 through 2024 attributes the crime increases in Oregon to trends predating decriminalization, and an analysis of Portland and Eugene 911 calls found no change relative to comparison cities.
I sent my own characterization of the 2025 study Lehman highlighted to its authors. University of South Carolina criminologist Hunter Boehme, a co-author of the paper, replied for the group, confirming that I had accurately represented their within-city findings and thanking me for noting the care with which the preprint states them.
Lehman took one working paper with nuanced findings from a contested literature, cherry-picked carefully hedged findings, and presented it as settled fact.
I wrote that the mortality study's result "hinges on rejecting one modeling choice" from a prior paper on the same topic by political scientist Michael Zoorob and colleagues. Lehman replied:
Just to spell it out: this is completely false. Not only do the authors of the new paper look at a variety of alternative specifications; they also retest the referred to "modeling choice" with more data, showing that even under that assumption, the fent effect goes away. pic.twitter.com/W2HCNMB9mP
— Charles Fain Lehman (@CharlesFLehman) July 15, 2026
I went over this issue at length with two of the study's co-authors, Hansen and Hall, and I stand by my characterization of the study as hinging on "rejecting one modeling choice."
The authors reject Zoorob's fentanyl control. That control is the share of police drug seizures containing fentanyl. Decriminalization cut non-fentanyl seizures, shrinking the denominator. Since fentanyl was policed as the greater menace, fentanyl seizures likely shrank less. If Hansen and Hall are correct, Zoorob's control exaggerated the increase in fentanyl.
The authors built two alternatives: fentanyl reports per capita, which is a measure Zoorob's own team used in earlier work, and fentanyl's share of opioid reports, which puts fentanyl in both the numerator and denominator. Under those measures, they report, the estimated effect of decriminalization is positive and significant in most specifications.
Hansen and Hall say the prior debate about overdose trends and decriminalization's effect on overdose deaths was premature. The earlier dueling studies ran through 2021 or 2022. If you extend them through 2023 using each study's own methods, Hansen and Hall say, they all now point in the same direction: unusually large overdose increases in Oregon and Washington. Their timing tests also cut against the simplest rival story: that fentanyl merely reached the Pacific Northwest late and explains everything by itself.
The authors also question whether it is appropriate to control for fentanyl at all. Hansen offered an analogy from labor economics: You can explain most of the gender wage gap by controlling for occupation, but that would absorb the effect it was meant to isolate if the factor you are studying influences occupational choice. Similarly, if decriminalization aided the spread of fentanyl, controlling for fentanyl blames the drug for a policy error.
Overdose deaths in Oregon and Washington broke away from their statistical twins after decriminalization. Why they broke away is a hard question, and Hansen does not pretend otherwise.
Hansen offered his own list of rival explanations, including hospital staffing, homelessness policy, and hidden shifts in drug smuggling networks, adding that such things are "incredibly challenging to get good data on." The size of the estimate also depends on modeling choices. Even with the extra year of data used in the new study, the choice of fentanyl measurement changes the drug's estimated effect by a factor of seven, and the four-figure death increase cited by Lehman requires assuming no fentanyl effect at all.
Hansen et al.'s NBER paper has advanced the debate, but it has not laid the issue to rest. The study's authors don't say that it has. Lehman is the one making that claim.
The post Did Decriminalizing Drugs Lead to More Deaths in Washington and Oregon? appeared first on Reason.com.
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It was early in the morning on August 25, 2000. As Devin Bennett tells it, he put his 10-week-old son Brandon in a car seat and put the car seat on his bed—and then, as the father dozed in and out of sleep, Brandon fell.
The baby didn't appear to be hurt in the immediate aftermath of the fall, Bennett says, but hours later he noticed the boy was having trouble breathing. He rushed him to a hospital in Rankin County, Mississippi, where Brandon's heart stopped beating and he stopped breathing. After being transferred to another hospital, Brandon died.
Two and a half years later, a jury found Bennett guilty of capital murder and felonious child abuse and sentenced him to death. The medical examiners responsible for Brandon's autopsy—doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West, a pathologist and an odontologist who often worked together—presented evidence that the fatal injuries resulted from a kind of nonaccidental trauma that, at the time, was considered a sound medical diagnosis.
Their autopsy report, written by Hayne, cited "changes consistent with concurrent shaken baby syndrome."
Hayne and West reached this conclusion because the classic "shaken baby syndrome triad"—bleeding around the brain, bleeding behind the eyes, and brain swelling—were evident in Brandon. At the time, the triad was considered solid evidence of shaken baby syndrome.
Bennett has been fighting to prove his innocence since 2002. He and I speak frequently and frankly about his case, noting how it hinges on a flawed autopsy and the changing science around shaken baby syndrome. Fighting the state of Mississippi for decades to get an evidentiary hearing has generally left Bennett exhausted and frustrated.
But on June 30, he felt some hope.
On June 29, the Louisiana Supreme Court declared an inmate named Jimmie Duncan to be "factually innocent" after he spent 27 years on death row.
Duncan was convicted in 1998 of first-degree capital murder for sexually assaulting and drowning his girlfriend's 23-month-old toddler, Haley Oliveaux. Today he is free on bail—in part because, according to the Louisiana Supreme Court, "Duncan's conviction turned substantially on forensic evidence offered by experts whose reliability 'appears questionable at best.'"
When he read this decision, Devin Bennett took note. Those questionable experts were the same pathologist and odontologist who performed his son's autopsy: Hayne and West.
In the Duncan decision, the Louisiana Supreme Court cited "serious problems" with Haley's autopsy. Central to its concern was West's handling of alleged bite mark evidence on her body.
According to trial documents, West took a dental mold from Duncan and applied it to Haley's flesh—specifically over areas that he thought might have been bite marks—as part of his standard "comparative technique." A forensic expert later surmised that the bites West identified were not bites, but maybe bruises. The bite marks that West imprinted on Haley's body not only destroyed potential DNA evidence but were then identified by prosecutors as Duncan's actual bite marks.
The Louisiana court wrote that West's "'direct comparison technique' has been seriously questioned,' and that the [autopsy] video showed him 'forcibly thrusting' Duncan's dental molds into areas of Haley's face and body 'in a rather disturbing manner and to a rather disturbing degree.'"
A former head of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, Lowell Levine, testified that what West did was "a fraud, simply put." Even West himself later said of his own bite mark analysis in another case, "if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don't believe it's a system that's reliable enough to be used in court."
The takeaway: Whatever passed for acceptable forensic science when Duncan was convicted in 1998 has since been "seriously undermined" by "new, reliable, and noncumulative evidence" that, had it been presented during the original trial, could have resulted in Duncan being found not guilty. Duncan is now out of prison.
As for Haley Oliveaux? Duncan's attorneys, relying on testimony from Haley's doctor, now suspect she drowned in a bathtub after suffering a seizure.
Hayne and West didn't just reach questionable conclusions through questionable practices. There was also the matter of their basic competence.
Catherine Legge is a journalist who has researched Hayne and West for years for a documentary on Jimmie Duncan. Hayne and West, she says, worked within a context that "unfortunately allowed them to be shitty at their job."
Hayne (now dead) and West (retired) used dubious forensic practices in a legal system that permitted and maybe even encouraged it. Their autopsies—as documented in The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, a 2018 book by Tucker Carrington and former Reason writer Radley Balko—raised suspicions among their peers that they were working in collusion with state prosecutors.
"Hayne and West were seen as tools for giving District Attorneys what they wanted," says Legge.
In its Duncan decision, the Louisiana Supreme Court wrote that Hayne and West's forensic work was "below the acceptable standard of care," "untruthful," "unreliable," "sloppy," and poorly documented. Forensic evidence they have produced in other cases has contributed to 9 convictions (8 in Mississippi) that were later overturned.
The sheer volume of their work encouraged sloppiness. Hayne worked on contract doing 8–9 autopsies a day, and anywhere from 1,000–1,600 a year. Medical forensic accreditation boards recommend a yearly total of around 250.
Under Hayne's contract, counties paid him by the body. Adding up the payments comes to a career total of around $10 million. At its height, his practice was doing 80 percent of Mississippi's autopsies. His practice was a factory.
Gradually—too slowly—the system took note of his sloppy work. In 2008, Mississippi prevented Hayne from doing autopsies. West was forced to leave the Board of Forensic Odontology in 2006. He often misidentified bite marks and, in one instance, claimed to have linked a suspect's teeth to a half-eaten sandwich. In another, he mistook crawfish bites on a body as human.
In The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Balko and Carrington write that Hayne and West "dominated the Mississippi death investigation system for twenty years. West testified in dozens of cases, Hayne in thousands."
They also quote a former police chief in Mississippi: "There's no question in my mind that there are innocent people doing time at Parchman Penitentiary due to the testimony of Dr. Hayne. There may even be some on death row."
Devin Bennett is on death row at Parchman penitentiary primarily because of Hayne's testimony. He wants a jury to reconsider Brandon's autopsy in light of the fuller story we now have on Hayne and West.
In Bennett's case, several forensic experts have concluded that Hayne and West made critical interpretive errors in Brandon's autopsy. Most notably, they attributed over a dozen abrasions on Brandon's body to Devin's alleged abuse. Yet when Brandon arrived at the first hospital, a nurse found no unusual marks on Brandon's body and noticed no abnormalities on the head or rest of the body.
Had anyone explored Brandon's previous medical records (which were at the hospital) or checked with child protective services, they would have learned that Brandon never showed medical evidence of bruising. Bennett and his girlfriend never missed a pediatrician appointment. According to Bennett, the only potentially negative thing they had ever been accused of doing to Brandon was overfeeding him.
Between the initial emergency room visit and Brandon's transfer to another hospital, Brandon underwent more than one unsuccessful intubation, several resuscitation efforts, and organ harvesting. All cause bruising and abrasions.
Bennett's attorneys argue that what Hayne presented as evidence of shaken baby syndrome could have been bruising caused by medical professionals trying to save Brandon from the effects of a fall.
At one point at Bennett's trial, Hayne told the jury that Brandon had "two skull fractures," one on each side of his skull. The implication was that Bennett had inflicted them. But these fractures are nowhere to be found in Hayne's autopsy report. The only reference in that report to evidence of a fracture—"bilateral focal fractures"—were later determined by expert medical examiners to be "wormian bones," which are natural bone chips located in the sutures of the skull.
Hayne "just made shit up," one of Bennett's attorneys complained.
What Bennett needs for a new hearing is post-conviction scientific evidence so convincing that it would reasonably lead a jury to this different outcome. On this front, there is good news for Bennett.
In October 2025, the conservative Texas Court of Appeals halted the execution of Robert Roberson. They did so in part on the grounds that the scientific status of "shaken baby syndrome" has changed enough to stay his execution under Texas' "junk science law."
Roberson, who is autistic, was sentenced to death in 2003 for killing his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, by shaken baby syndrome. But in the face of weakening evidence of shaken baby syndrome as a valid medical diagnosis, Texas not only halted Roberson's execution but is moving to provide him an evidentiary hearing.
New research reveals that the so-called triad of shaken baby symptoms—brain bleeding, bleeding behind the eyes, brain swelling—could have resulted from accidents, including birth-related subdural bleeds, adverse reactions to medications, medical preconditions, and, yes, a short fall from a bed.
Reflecting this shift, the American Academy of Pediatrics now officially recommends the term "abusive head trauma" over "shaken baby syndrome."
If Bennett's case was heard today, the most convincing explanation for Brandon's death might be a preexisting condition (a head injury from forceps at birth) combined with a short fall. (For Roberson's daughter, newer evidence suggests that Nikki died from a combination of pneumonia and a chronic precondition.)
In the wake of the Roberson and Duncan decisions, Bennett is seeking a new hearing for his case. It remains to be seen if Mississippi will give him that chance.
The post Will This Mississippi Man on Death Row Get a Chance To Prove His Innocence? appeared first on Reason.com.
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Call of duties. After most of President Donald Trump's unilateral tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year, the president reinstated a sweeping global 10 percent tariff under a different—and also questionable—legal authority. But the new legal authority comes with a 150-day clock, meaning the reinstated tariffs would eventually expire.
Today, the 150 days are up. And as of yesterday afternoon at 4 p.m. in Washington, D.C., no one knew precisely what the next tariff regime would look like.
Well, the new tariff regime has finally been announced, and it looks a lot like the old one. Most of America's significant trading partners—some 60 economies—will now face a 10 percent tariff. Those without laws intended to prevent forced labor will be hit with a 12.5 percent tariff.
Ostensibly, according to the administration, the move "encourages stronger labor rights enforcement abroad." The White House called the new tariffs "the most sweeping international labor rights action the United States has ever taken."
But there's some reason to be skeptical of the stated motivation, given that Trump has long pushed for widespread tariffs under a variety of justifications, not all of which are internally coherent. As visiting Georgetown Law scholar Peter Harrell told The New York Times, Trump's trading officials are "using this forced labor investigation as a pretext to impose tariffs that Trump wants to impose for his own economic theories and preferences."
Trump is just doing what he wants to do, and what he wants to do, now and always, is impose tariffs.
Congress, the opposite of progress. In theory, under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war. In practice, under America's actual government, that has not always been the case.
At the beginning of May, Trump notified Congress that the war he'd started with Iran was officially terminated. There was a ceasefire deal in place, with a few formalities left to be worked out. That ceasefire, however, didn't last. And earlier this month, Trump notified Congress that the United States was once again at war with Iran. Officially speaking, it was a new war, giving the White House another 60 days to act without congressional go-ahead. As Politico reported at the time, the Trump administration framed the supposedly new war as a defensive measure, saying that the president was taking "military action consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and United States' interests both at home and abroad." Meet the new war, same as the old war.
Congress, of course, could always weigh in and exercise some of its constitutional prerogatives over the executive branch. And yesterday, finally, one chamber did, sort of—in a way that was guaranteed from the start to be meaningless.
On Thursday, the U.S. House voted in favor of a resolution to stop the war. Four Republicans—Reps. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R–Pa.), Tom Barrett (R–Mich.), and Warren Davidson (R–Ohio)—voted with Democrats to put an end to Trump's unilateral war in the Middle East. But the resolution was a nothingburger from inception. As CNN notes, "even if it passed the Senate, it would not compel the administration to end the war. Concurrent resolutions, which are not presented to the president for signature or veto, lack the force of law."
The House was finally taking action—bold, meaningless action.
Meanwhile, a Senate effort to block the effort failed shortly after yesterday's House vote. The congressional position on the war amounts to a shruggie emoticon.
It's a fitting tribute to the current weakened state of Congress that even when it takes the time to exercise its constitutional prerogatives, it does so in a way that is intentionally guaranteed, from the outset, to be pointless and futile.
Substandard subpoenas. Speaking of the Constitution, remember the First Amendment? It has a number of elements, including freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and freedom of association. There's a lot going on. But one of the main things it does is protect the ability to say things, even potentially critical things, about the government, without fear of legal reprisal. This applies to Americans of all sorts, even journalists. One might assume that lawyers for the Justice Department know how these things work.
So it raised a few eyebrows when the Trump administration subpoenaed New York Times reporters following the publication of articles about Trump's glitzy new gift airplane from Qatar. The Times reporting suggested that the plane might lack some defense capabilities, like missile defense. Eventually, the White House announced the plane would be pulled from service so it could be "maxxed out." Meanwhile, the government subpoenaed the Times reporters, attempting to force them to testify in front of a grand jury.
The Times pushed back in court, and yesterday, after some stern words from a federal judge, Trump's Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas.
Scenes from Massachusetts: Despite declines in reading, bookstores are making a comeback, including in Boston.
this interview is the skeleton key to his genius, i think, bc nolan's work is kind of like, what if a filmmaker had just two north stars: jorges luis borges short stories and fast and the furious films https://t.co/iaN02lFcJG
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) July 23, 2026
The post Tariff Man appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This appeal arises from a frivolous underlying lawsuit Gouldy brought against Chiasson, an attorney, in connection with Chiasson's actions in representing appellees Amanda Munyan and Michael Peak in a related probate matter involving Gouldy.
We affirm the appeal in all respects and issue a separate order to show cause as to why Gouldy should not be barred from further pro se filings in this court. Gouldy's excessively long pro se brief contains frivolous arguments, misrepresentations of the record, a phantom case, and fake quotes from actual cases….
This case demonstrates a growing problem in Florida's appellate courts. The recent change in jurisdiction has given intermediate appellate courts jurisdiction to hear appeals from county court cases. The result has been that the amount of pro se appeals has significantly increased. Initially, the appellate courts were able to expeditiously handle the county court appeals.
Recently, however, it appears that many pro se litigants, in both county and circuit courts, are using artificial intelligence platforms to generate appellate briefs and motions. While the prose in these filings is generally readable, many AI-generated submissions contain phantom authority, misstatements of the record, and fabricated quotations.
Pro se litigants are not governed by the ethical rules with which licensed attorneys must comply. Because a principled appellate court must examine the issues raised by the parties, digging into AI-generated filings consumes valuable time that could be better spent on other cases.
We have observed: "The submission of fictitious or fabricated case law—whether the product of carelessness, misunderstanding, or reliance on generative artificial-intelligence tools—is sanctionable."
Gouldy's arguments in this appeal are either unpreserved, inadequately briefed, or wholly meritless. She raised fifteen issues, some with sub-issues.
To the extent any of her issues may contain a shred of arguable merit (e.g., the unpreserved apportionment argument), they are swamped by the sea of frivolous arguments that dominate her initial brief. Her initial brief cites a nonexistent case, misrepresents the record, fabricates multiple quotations from actual legal decisions, and otherwise relies upon cases that do not support the propositions for which they are cited. Gouldy has previously been warned twice against frivolous filings.
In addition to affirming this appeal in its entirety, by a separate order we are issuing an order to show cause as to why Gouldy should not be barred from further pro se filings in this court. See Friend v. Serpa (Fla. App. 2025) (explaining that this court has the authority to sanction a litigant for reliance on "phantom authority" in a brief); Clerk of Ct. & Comptroller for 13th Jud. Cir., Hillsborough Cnty. v. Rangel (Fla. App. 2025) (concluding that sanctions were appropriate where a brief included "multiple misstatements and misquotes" of case law). A brief that blatantly and repeatedly includes fabricated quotations from Florida case law meets the standard of a frivolous or bad faith filing, which authorizes sanctions under Florida Rule of Appellate Procedure 9.140(a).
The post Court Considering Whether Litigant Should Be Barred from Further Self-Represented Filings, Because of Fabricated Citations appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Plaintiff has identified herself as Kimberly Davis in all filings in this case, while Defendant argues that Plaintiff's legal name is Matthew Grinage. As such, Defendant argues that Plaintiff does not comply with Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 10(a). Defendant provides documentation, including her application for employment with Defendant's restaurant, where she used her legal name, Matthew Grinage. The parties do not dispute that Plaintiff has not yet completed a formal legal name change process.
In her brief, Plaintiff argues generic allegations that the use of her legal name causes her "distress, mental anguish, and harm." Plaintiff argues that, if she does not use her chosen name, she will suffer serious and lasting effects to her mental health.
Rule 10 states that the "title of the complaint must name all parties." The core intent of Rule 10(a) is to assure public access, transparency, and accountability in judicial proceedings. Following historical practices of publicness, proper access to litigants' names is important. Rule 10, along with Rule 17, reinforces that court proceedings must remain open and accessible to the public, demands clarity in how parties are identified and ensures the public record accurately reflects the identity of who is before the court and why.
In "exceptional cases," courts have previously allowed the use of a pseudonym…. [But] the Court finds that Plaintiff has not satisfied the requisite factors to proceed by pseudonym, including use of her chosen, rather than her legal, name, in this case. Disclosure of Plaintiff's legal name would not cause extraordinary harm or reveal her transgender status in a way that creates genuine danger, because, as demonstrated by Defendant's brief, Plaintiff has regularly used her legal name, including in her job application for employment with the Defendants.
Courts have consistently grounded pseudonym analysis in fears of severe harm. Plaintiff has not pointed to any specific instance within her community, workplace, or the public where use of her legal name has exposed her to danger, harassment, or violence.
The distress, associated with use of a legal name that differs from one's chosen name, is more properly characterized as embarrassment or discomfort, which the Third Circuit has found to be insufficient to meet the standard. Without particularized allegations, Plaintiff's request reflects a personal preference, rather than a reasonable fear or severe harm….
[A]s shown by the Defense exhibits, Plaintiff's legal name has been publicly used many times. Because Plaintiff's identity has not been confidential in the past, there is no basis to permit her use of her chosen name in the present filings….
While the Court is sympathetic to Plaintiff's preference to use her chosen name rather than her legal name, such preference does not supersede the interest of the public in knowing the true identity of litigants in cases such as this…. [And] the Plaintiff's identity, background, and specific circumstances are central to the claims at issue. The public's interest in knowing the identity of who is making claims is not diminished simply because Plaintiff prefers to use a different name….
Plaintiff's legal name remains "Matthew Grinage". It has not been legally changed to "Kimberly Davis." Pennsylvania law provides a statutory mechanism to obtain a legal name change. Had Plaintiff accessed the appropriate and available legal process to obtain a legal name change, she would be entitled to use that legal name in these proceedings. Such a change, effectuated through court filings and official publications, provides public notice of the legal change of name. However, having not done so, Plaintiff must proceed under her legal name of Matthew Grinage….
Emily E. Mahler and Jennifer Lynn Deflitch (Margolis Edelstein) represent defendant.
The post "Plaintiff Argues That, If She Does Not Use Her Chosen Name, She Will Suffer Serious and Lasting Effects to Her Mental Health" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Doe was born in Israel and takes his Jewish religious faith and ethnic heritage seriously. For Doe, the State of Israel is essential and integral to his devout religious faith. Although Doe immigrated to the United States, he maintains close ties to Israel and his family there. In the 2023-24 school year, Doe worked for PPS [Portland Public Schools] as a high school math teacher.
When he started working for PPS, he chose not to become a dues-paying member of PAT [Portland Association of Teachers], exercising his First Amendment right not to support union political speech and public sector collective bargaining. Nevertheless, because Doe is a PPS teacher, PAT is his exclusive representative by way of Oregon's Public Employee Collective Bargaining Act (PECBA) and the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) PAT has with PPS….
Curricula. Doe alleges that PAT collaborates with Oregon Educators for Palestine (OEP) in its publications, including by co-publishing a guide called "Teach Palestine!" The guide references resources for teaching about Palestine, "encourages teachers to use their classroom to teach anti-Isreal views[,] and includes detailed curricula recommendations for pre-K through high school." Among the recommended resources in the "Teach Palestine!" guide is "Teaching While Muslim," which includes the statement "75 years ago, a lot of decision makers around the world decided to take away Palestinian land to make a country called Israel. Israel would be a country where rules were mostly fair for Jewish people with White skin" and encouragement to make signs that include the slogan "Free Palestine."
The "Teach Palestine!" resource guide also includes "Let's Go to Palestine." That lesson—directed at elementary school—includes the statement "Palestine is currently under a brutal occupation by Israel. We pray for a truly free Palestine so that the Palestinians can prosper and we can all visit freely." Also recommended in the guide is "Handala's Return," which includes the statement: "A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people." The "Know Your Rights!" guide, also co-published by PAT and OEP, includes references to CBA provisions that protect teachers in teaching what are, according to Doe, anti-Israel views.
Displays. Doe alleges that, with PAT's encouragement, teachers at Doe's school wore clothing that included pro-Palestine messages, such as "Free Palestine," and "From the River to the Sea." School administration also allowed posting of Palestinian flags, print-out maps of Palestine that eliminate Israel, and other symbols and slogans throughout the school. The displayed flags and other symbols were in common spaces such as hallways, the library, as well as shared classrooms. In Doe's view, the "placement was intentional so as to appear to be an expression of the community and school rather than any individual."
Prayer. A teacher "led an on-campus morning meeting that he designated as a 'prayer circle' to support Palestine."
Organizing and Political Activities. PAT collaborates with OEP in its publications, including by co-publishing the "Know Your Rights!" guide—a document "developed in response to the censorship, discrimination, and harassment" that PPS staff experienced when teaching or supporting pro-Palestine views. PAT's social media accounts follow OEP, which organizes events and speech activities in support of Palestine and against Israel and which is visible to the public as well as members of PAT. OEP used social media to promote May 15 as "Nakba Day," for instance. It stated, "This Nakba Day, we call on educators across Oregon to wear your kufiya [sic], pins, and "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free" shirt to school or work!" On its own social media channels, PAT announced a "students for peace" walkout on March 15, 2024, with a rally at PAT headquarters that included anti-Israel expression.
Doe also alleges that PAT endorses candidates who are vocally anti-Israel and pro-Palestine, including then-candidates Raschelle Chase-Miller and Jorge Sanchez Bautista, both of whom have used social media to promote anti-Israel messages. On May 28, 2024, PAT held informational sessions for teachers to "[l]earn about your rights to teach and advocate for Palestine within Portland Public Schools" at PAT Hall.
PAT Member Conduct. PAT members and representatives allegedly "took coordinated, politically charged actions" while knowing or disregarding the effect they would have on Doe, including posting on social media that staff should wear pro-Palestinian clothing and should post pro-Palestinian messages through the school. In March 2024, Doe "was physically intimidated by a colleague who physically blocked him from entering the copy room to use the copy machine." The colleague was "vocal about her anti-Israel views." Doe also alleges that other PAT members spread rumors about Doe and falsely blamed and accused him of various things….
Doe also takes issue with PPS, alleging that it discriminated against him and violated his First Amendment rights. Against PPS, Doe alleges the following:
- "[t]he school's policy is that every poster or expressive item displayed in the school's common areas, such as a hallway, has to receive approval from administration. Thus, any display in these areas was with the explicit or implicit permission of the school administration."
- "School administration allowed posting of Palestinian flags, print-out maps of Palestine that eliminate Israel, and other symbols and slogans throughout the school."
- "The displayed flags and other symbols were in common spaces such as hallways, the library, as well as shared classrooms. The placement was intentional so as to appear to be an expression of the community and school rather than any individual staff person."
- Although Doe brought his concerns to PPS, his school's administration refused to remove pro-Palestine symbols.
- "When he asked school administrators if he could display a flag of Israel or symbols supporting Israel's right to exist, school administrators denied Plaintiff's request telling him that an Israeli flag or related symbols would be too disruptive."
- "Because it only allowed pro-Palestinian flags, symbols, and messages, the school failed to maintain any kind of viewpoint neutrality on this issue."
Doe asserts that PPS created a hostile work environment in its religious discrimination, primarily by making Doe's school "a forum for one-sided, anti-Israel rhetoric." As a result of that hostile work environment, Doe experienced a "severe recurrence" of his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which forced him to take a leave of absence and undergo medical treatment during the summer of 2024.
Doe alleges that PPS's discriminatory conduct continues because it has failed to resolve or respond to his complaints, failed to take measures to curb the hostile work environment, and subjected him to an investigation based on false accusations. Although PPS transferred Doe to another school for the 2024-25 school year, Doe asserts that he continues to face hostility because of PPS's failure "hold individuals to account," which means that he cannot attend district-wide events because he might encounter those colleagues there.
Doe also contends that PPS's discrimination is ongoing because, as a result of PPS's "refusal to clarify the record," he continues to be "blamed for incidents that did not occur." For instance, in May 2025, Doe had to correct one of his new colleagues when they asked him "whether it was true that he was suspended for removing Palestinian flags from all the classrooms." …
The report recommended rejecting Doe's claims "that PAT's exclusive representation violated his First Amendment right to free association by forcing him to associate with expression with which he disagrees, and which betrays his deeply held religious and moral beliefs":
The collective bargaining system [upheld in Minn. State Bd. for Comm. Colleges v. Knight (1984)] is no different than PECBA in any way that matters to Doe's constitutional challenges. Doe, who is not a member of PAT and does not have to pay PAT membership dues, has not had his associational rights impaired. And Knight extends, as this court sees it, to First Amendment rights generally. Knight ("The state has in no way restrained appellees' freedom to speak on any education-related issue or their freedom to associate or not to associate with whom they please, including the exclusive representative. Nor has the state attempted to suppress any ideas."). That Doe specifically challenges his right to freely exercise his religion is of no moment in this context. Like the freedom to associate and freedom to speak, rights that are unburdened by exclusive representation, so too is Doe's freedom to practice his religion—PAT's exclusive representation in no way "forces" Doe to "tacitly approve" PAT's beliefs.
The report also recommended rejecting Doe's claim that PPS unconstitutionally discriminated against his viewpoint:
Does allege in Claim 3 that PPS allows expression of pro-Palestine, anti-Israel views but disallowed his request to promote pro-Israel views, and that by doing so (the One View Conduct), PPS applied its rules on speech and expressive activity in a viewpoint-based manner….
"When government speaks, it is not barred by the Free Speech Clause from determining the content of what it says." In Downs v. Los Angeles Unified Sch. Dist. (9th Cir. 2000), the Ninth Circuit held that materials posted on school bulletin boards constituted government speech because only school employees could access the bulletin boards, the bulletin boards were the property of the school, and the school principal oversaw (and thus implicitly approved) the posted materials. That implicit approval was equivalent to the school itself speaking, and when the school principal removed a competing bulletin board put up by a teacher with opposing views, that "explicit rejection" was equivalent to the school "choosing not to speak."
Doe alleges that it is PPS's policy "that every poster or expressive item displayed in the school's common areas, such as a hallway, has to receive approval from administration" and thus any displays in the school's common areas required PPS's "explicit or implicit permission." Given that Doe alleges that the One View Conduct is approved by PPS, the viewpoint challenged by Doe is attributable to PPS….
The report likewise recommended rejecting Doe's claim that PPS's actions unconstitutionally established religion:
[T]he Curricula and Display allegations are not a violation of the Establishment Clause because they can be regarded as geopolitical or political expressions that happen to align or harmonize with religious beliefs. That is, a policy or conduct does not violate the Establishment Clause "merely because it 'happens to coincide or harmonize with the tenets of some or all religions.'" … Even for the resource guide "Teaching While Muslim," which Doe alleges is sectarian, he fails to allege specifically what content in the guide advanced the Muslim faith rather than a political viewpoint that can be shared by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
As for the Prayer allegation, its critical deficiency is that it fails to satisfy Iqbal pleading standards. The allegation merely states that a "teacher led an on-campus morning meeting that he designated as a 'prayer-circle' to support Palestine." That cursory allegation omits any facts that would allow the court to conclude whether the "meeting" or "prayer-circle" was an instance of the unnamed teacher crossing the line from "protected private expression" to "impermissible government coercion." Put differently, prayer is not categorically prohibited in schools because the Supreme Court has "long recognized … that secondary school students are mature enough to understand that a school does not endorse, let alone coerce them to participate in, speech that it merely permits on a nondiscriminatory basis."
The report recommended rejecting Doe's hostile work environment harassment claim against PPS, partly because of the statute of limitations, but partly for broader reasons:
Doe fails to plausibly allege that PPS's conduct was "sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the plaintiff's employment and create an abusive work environment." … Although the court does not doubt Doe's subjective perception that his workplace was hostile and conflicted with his religious beliefs and identity, the occurrences alleged by him do not rise to the baseline of pervasiveness and severity that the Ninth Circuit has set….
First, PPS's alleged conduct is part of a contentious geopolitical debate in which it is not settled whether the views Doe takes issue with are antisemitic or, rather, protests against the actions of the Israeli government toward Palestinians. To adopt Doe's argument that the environment at his school was objectively offensive enough to alter his work conditions is to conflate Doe's subjective belief with the requirement that the work environment was objectively hostile…..
Second, Doe does not allege, or plausibly allege, that the conduct he finds offensive was directed at him. Significant [in past precedents] was that much of the alleged conduct was not directed at the plaintiffs…. Offensive comments purposely directed at an employee are by degrees more severe than comments overheard first-hand or second-hand, or in this case expressions concerning a geopolitical dispute….
And the report recommended rejecting Doe's discrimination claim against PAT, again largely for statute of limitations reasons, but also because of this:
[Doe] asserts that, in the spring of 2025, PAT publicly endorsed two school board candidates, on social media and through a meet-and-greet, who are "vocally anti-Israel and pro-Palestine." PAT responds that imposing civil liability for a public endorsement would violate its First Amendment rights. The court agrees. See Rodriguez v. Maricopa Cnty. Cmty. Coll. Dist. (9th Cir. 2010) ("Harassment law generally targets conduct, and it sweeps in speech as harassment only when consistent with the First Amendment.").
The endorsement and social media posts were not directed at Doe, nor does Doe allege that he was required to attend the meet-and-greet. In other words, PAT's endorsement sought to "disseminate a message to the general public," rather than "intrude upon the targeted [listener] … in an especially offensive way." See also Rodriguez (holding that "a college professor's expression on a matter of public concern, directed to the college community" could not "constitute unlawful harassment" where its "offensive quality was based entirely on [its] meaning, and not on any conduct or implicitly threat of conduct that [it] contained")…. Doe cannot rely on PAT's endorsements to allege an ongoing hostile work environment and timely Title VII violation.
I hope to put up a post soon on the Magistrate Judge's decision to allow Doe to proceed under a pseudonym.
Misha Isaak, Megan S. Bradford, and Dominik K. Mackinnon (Stoel Rives LLP) represent PPS and related defendants. Scott A. Kronland and Matthew J. Murray (Altshuler Berzon LLP) and Karen O'Kasey (Hart Wagner LLP) represent PAT.
The post Jewish Teacher Sued Portland Public Schools + Union for Discrimination Over Colleagues' Anti-Israel Speech appeared first on Reason.com.
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For those of us who are more interested in policy than politics, it's frustrating to try a rational discussion about any issue once it's caught up in a partisan maelstrom. Few matters are more given to hysteria than crime, for the obvious reason that everyone (except criminals) is against it—and politicians are incentivized to use crime-related policy to score political points.
We have to await the passage of time to analyze which anti-crime policies worked, which created unintended consequences, and which made little difference. I'm long past expecting politicians to learn about past policy, but it's worth trying. So I cheer the Legislative Analyst's Office, which last month released a report evaluating the results of a brouhaha that most of us have forgotten: prison realignment. The short take: the doomsayers were wrong.
Fifteen years ago, California prisons were filled to 180% of their design capacity—the result of 1990s tough-on-crime initiatives that boosted sentences and created larger populations. A 2009 federal court decision agreed that overcrowding undermined inmates' right to receive "adequate" healthcare, but the court stayed the full implementation of California's proposed fixes while the case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In May 2011, the high court agreed with the lower court: "[W]ithout a reduction in overcrowding, there will be no efficacious remedy for the unconstitutional care of the sick and mentally ill," as a 2011 LAO report noted. Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown's solution was Assembly Bill 109, which "shifted to counties the responsibility for monitoring, tracking and incarcerating lower-level offenders previously bound for state prison," per the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.
This was a bipartisan problem. Problems arose during the Republican Schwarzenegger administration, but came to a head under Brown. Although the ruling was backed by the court's liberals, one conservative provided the deciding vote. Regardless of the court's ideology—and whether it was right in its determination—its decision required California to reduce its prison population. State leaders, regardless of their philosophy, had no choice but to act.
Many anti-realignment arguments centered on the capability of locals to handle the influx of prisoners, which was a legitimate concern. Some progressives were angry that the law mainly moved prisoners around rather than reduced their sentences, which was tone deaf. But Republicans opposed the bill and then started ramping up emotional tactics, arguing that realignment would lead to carnage—even though Brown's solution upheld sound conservative principles regarding local control.
Shortly after realignment began, Assembly Republicans "began an online video campaign to get Californians outraged over Brown's prisoner shift program," reported ABC 7 in Sacramento. The ad featured "scary-looking thugs and ominous music." Two years later, Republicans pushed to unravel realignment and go on a prison-building spree.
GOP fear-mongering became so obnoxious that two conservative former Assembly members, Pat Nolan (R–Glendale) and Chuck DeVore (R–Irvine), published a 2013 column in the Los Angeles Times complaining that, "Some Republicans…are trying to score short-term political points by employing old scare tactics about the state's prison 'realignment' plan. Realignment gives local jails the responsibility—and funding—to oversee low-level inmates, while violent and career offenders remain the responsibility of costlier state prisons. This is a common-sense division of responsibility."
Years later, after crime spiked during the pandemic, conservatives were still pointing their fingers at realignment, although they fell silent after crime rates dropped again. So what exactly are the results of this policy—one that seems rather modest in hindsight, but was depicted as a radical gutting of the criminal-justice system at the time? Drum roll, please.
Per the LAO, the effort "contributed to a modest increase in property crime and had no effect on violent crime." Realignment enabled California to meet its court obligations: "Without it, the state would have had to pay for significantly more prison capacity and/or allow the federal courts to release tens of thousands of people from prison." Although the reform altered some sentences for lower-level offenders, it could have been worse had courts been granted release power. Meanwhile, "sentences for violent crimes were largely unaffected."
The law did increase pressure on county jails, but subsequent initiatives "mitigated the population pressures created by realignment." Realignment also created better fiscal management: "[C]ounties now bear a greater share of the costs of felony sentences. As a result, county decisions about sentencing now incorporate the costs of incarceration for many felony sentences—thereby better aligning counties' costs with their decision-making authority."
What about overall crime in California? Rates are 27 percent lower now than they were in 2011, which was not only the beginning of realignment—but the beginning of a series of criminal-justice reforms mostly passed by voter initiative. Did I mention that California has been shuttering prisons rather than embarking on costly prison-building efforts? Too bad we had to wait 15 years to confirm that all the alarmism was political nonsense.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
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If you need a break from the "free" (taxpayer-funded), "patriotic" (statist) museums dotting Washington, D.C., check out The Mansion on O Street.
Located in a series of converted row houses in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, the museum is, in both form and function, a glowing tribute to messy consumerist spontaneity. Inside the museum, you'll find not neat, curated exhibits, but a long series of rooms connected via "secret" doors. Each contains an assemblage of "artifacts" ranging from 1980s TV Guides to a cognac made during Louis XIII's reign.
Should you find something you like during your visit, you're welcome to purchase it: Literally everything in the museum is for sale. Unlike in the stodgy Smithsonians, where food and drink can be consumed only in a centralized café, visitors are free to roam the Mansion with an adult beverage in hand.
You might personally find the Mansion a little too wacky. If so, you're free not to spend any money there. One can't say the same for D.C.'s better-known museums, which are supported by all taxpayers, whether they visit or not.
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Former Florida police officer Zachary Krug has been charged after investigators say he drove 104 mph in a 50 mph zone and crashed into an SUV, killing a 6-year-old girl. Prosecutors say Krug was late for work with the Temple Terrace Police. He activated the emergency lights on his unmarked car to get through a red light, then accelerated to more than twice the speed limit before crashing into an SUV containing Samantha Sakowski and her three children. Sakowski received broken ribs and two black eyes, one child sustained a concussion, and another had a broken spine and pelvis and needed to be placed into a medically induced coma. Six-year-old Leila died from her injuries. His attorney claimed Krug was following a speeding driver, but the county prosecutor says there was no such driver. Krug was fired and now faces charges of vehicular homicide and reckless driving.
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]]>Today, the Trump Administration announced massive new tariffs, supposedly authorized by Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974:
The Trump administration on Thursday finalized new double-digit tariffs on dozens of U.S. trading partners as it seeks to reconstitute sweeping duties struck down by the Supreme Court in February.
The new duties, which range from 10 to 12.5 percent, follow a five-month investigation into trading partners' efforts to root out products made with forced labor from their supply chains and are set to take effect just as a temporary global 10 percent tariff expires.
Starting Friday, 17 trading partners — including Canada, the European Union, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and Mexico — will face a 10 percent duty, along with another 10 countries that agreed to address forced labor through signed trade agreements with the U.S.
Another 43 other countries, including Japan, China, South Korea and Australia, will face a 12.5 percent tariff rate….
The Section 301 tariffs may be meant to replace temporary Section 122 tariffs, which expire today, and which were rightly invalidated by the US Court of International Trade in May (though appellate litigation continues, and Trump may yet hope to use Section 122 again). The new tariffs will predictably raise prices for consumers, reduce economic growth, inflict grave harm on the US economy, and further poison our relationships with allies and trading partners.
As I have previously explained, the planned Section 301 tariffs are illegal for some of the same reasons as the IEEPA tariffs invalidated by the Supreme Court in February, in a case I helped litigate. Georgetown University scholar Peter Harrell outlined some additional reasons why the Section 301 tariffs are illegal, in a guest post here at this site. Unlike IEEPA, Section 301 does authorize some tariffs. But it does not permit a massive power grab like this.
In a Dispatch article published today, my Cato Institute colleague Scott Lincicome - an expert on trade policy - explains in detail why the forced labor "investigations" supposedly justifying the Section 301 tariffs are a sham, and a pretext for a massive presidential power grab. As he notes, the conclusion of the "investigations" was clearly predetermined in advance, the tariffs imposed have no real connection to any genuine forced labor issues, and many of the countries subject to the massive new tariffs actually have tighter restrictions on goods produced by forced labor than the US itself does. He concludes that, if courts uphold these tariffs, the president would have the kind of unlimited tariff authority the Supreme Court denied him in the IEEPA case:
The forced labor action is a clear abuse of the law and a serious departure from past U.S. government practice—even under President Trump. By no reasonable measure can it be considered anything other than a ham-fisted way to reinstall Trump's tariff wall and protect it from another IEEPA-like defeat in federal court. In the latter case, the administration might be successful: Section 301 is more legally durable than the untested IEEPA and, while the forced labor action is obviously flimsy, a court might simply be unwilling to question the president's determinations and actions. We shall see.
If the courts do rubber-stamp these tariffs, their problems will likely extend well beyond just this sham case. Section 301 could become a way for USTR to tariff any country, at any rate, and for any reason and duration, as long as it checks the law's minor procedural boxes. The actual merits of the case, the quality of the agency's findings, or its efforts to consider public input won't really matter. Just say a country doesn't adequately do something you say is harmful and then apply blanket tariffs after meaningless hearings and comments. Voila.
This is precisely the open-ended tariff power grab the courts checked with their IEEPA rulings, just with a little more procedural window-dressing. In such a case, Section 301 would be a broad tariff generator instead of the targeted tool Congress thought it designed, and it'll surely be used by Trump or any future president who wants to tariff trading partners over carbon emissions, labor standards, AI regulation, or anything else. Republicans cheering the forced labor tariffs today should consider how they'll feel when a Democrat holds the tariff pen.
As explained in my and Peter Harrell's earlier posts on the Section 301 tariffs, Trump's policy violates the requirements of Section 301 itself, and also runs afoul of the major questions doctrine, which requires Congress to "speak clearly" when authorizing the executive to make "decisions of vast economic and political significance." At the very least, Section 301 does not clearly authorize the president to start a massive trade war against almost all our major trading partners on the basis of a sham investigation and dubious pretexts.
If, somehow, Section 301 does authorize this action, it would violate the constitutional nondelegation doctrine, which limits delegation of legislative power to the executive. Tariffs are a specifically enumerated congressional power. While the Supreme Court's nondelegation precedent is far from completely clear, last year's decision in FCC v. Consumers' Research held that delegations of the power to impose taxes and other financial levies must have a clear "floor" and "ceiling" and that "[t]he guidance needed is greater when an agency action will affect the entire national economy than when it addresses a narrow, technical issue" [quotation omitted]. There is no meaningful floor or ceiling under the administration's approach to Section 301. And the power claimed is clearly one that massively affects the "entire national economy."
In the IEEPA case, the Supreme Court emphasized that "the president does not have the power to "impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time." Chief Justice Roberts went on to note that, while some statutes do grant the president tariff authority (among which he specifically cited Section 301), "[w]hen Congress has delegated its tariff powers, it has done so… subject to strict limits."
Trump's power grab today respects no such limits. I hope and expect it will be challenged in court. And when that happens, courts should strike it down, just like they did with the IEEPA and Section 122 tariffs.
The post Trump Imposes Massively Harmful and Illegal Section 301 Tariffs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>From Politico:
"I don't see this as a court that is just like, 'We're just going to rubber stamp what the current administration does.' You know, quite the opposite," Kagan said to a judicial conference here Thursday. "I think that that is a bad rap." . . .
Kagan, a liberal justice and Obama appointee, said the 6-3 decision scuttling Trump's tariffs was extraordinary.
"Tariffs is probably the key policy issue for this president. I mean, something he campaigned on, he ran on, he cared an enormous amount about," she said. "I don't think that there are all that many decisions in the recent times, where a court strikes down such an important policy to a a sitting president."
That the Court is conservative--and reaches conservative decisions--is not evidence that it is under President Trump's sway.
"You just have to deal with the fact that there's a conservative court doing things that conservative jurists have long thought it appropriate to do, and I can really dislike that. But it has nothing to do, I think, with becoming the arm of this current administration," she said.
Kagan also said that the justices were unaffected by President Trump's decision to attend oral argument in the birthright citizenship case, another case of extreme importance to Trump in which the Court rejected his position, and even dissenting justices raised questions about the breadth of the Trump Administration's position.
"It was sort of like….from the court's point of view, a non-event," Kagan said in her first public remarks on the unusual spectacle. "Honestly, the vibes in the courtroom were the vibes in the courtroom on any other day." . . .
Kagan also noted that Trump left about halfway through the two-hour session. "It was a long argument. You really did kind of think he probably had other things to do," she said.
"So, I don't know. I think he probably won't come back," she added, prompting laughter from the audience.
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]]>In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimando, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron U.S.A. v. NRDC's holding that federal courts should defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutory provisions. In Loper Bright, the Court concluded that Chevron deference was incompatible with the Administrative Procedure Act. As Chief Jsutice Roberts explained, Section 706 of the APA provides "'the reviewing court'—not the agency whose action it reviews—is to 'decide all relevant questions of law' and 'interpret . . . statutory provisions.'"
The Chevron opinion made no effort to reconcile its holding with the language of the APA. Indeed, the Chevron decision did not mention the APA at all. But perhaps there was a good reason for that.
In a footnote to his dissent in Hospital Menonita de Guayama v. NLRB--a case in which the D.C. Circuit was instructed by the Supreme Court to reconsider its prior decision deferring to an agency interpretation under Chevron--Judge Ray Randolph addresses this "error" in Loper Bright.
There is an error in the Supreme Court's analysis in Loper Bright. Much of the Court's reasoning (and a part of Justice Gorsuch's concurrence) is devoted to criticizing the Chevron opinion for ignoring section 706 of the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706. See, e.g., 603 U.S. at 397-400, 411-12; id. at 428 (Gorsuch, J., concurring). The Court's critique is unfounded. It is unfounded because section 706 of the APA did not apply to judicial review of the EPA rule at issue in Chevron. Section 706 did not apply because Chevron was not an APA review case. The Clean Air Act superseded the APA: "The provisions of section 553 through 557 and section 706 of Title 5 [the APA] shall not, except as expressly provided in this subsection, apply to actions to which this subsection applies." 42 U.S.C. § 7607(d)(1). The problem the Court identified in Loper Bright was not with Chevron itself, but with courts, including the Supreme Court, indiscriminately adopting the Chevron formula in later cases in which section 706 of the APA did apply.
UPDATE: Others contest Judge Randolph's view. See this follow-up post.
The post "There Is an Error in the Supreme Court's Analysis in <i>Loper Bright</i>." appeared first on Reason.com.
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The European Commission has hit Google with two fines totaling $1 billion for breaking digital antitrust regulations. What egregious sin did the tech giant commit to warrant such hefty fees? Setting up the Google search engine and Google Play Store to encourage consumers to purchase Google's services, which the European Commission says violates the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
The Commission alleges that Google unfairly promoted its own shopping, hotel, transport, and sports services in search results while limiting other app developers' ability to advertise and complete purchases outside Google Play. Google now must take steps to "treat third-party services that feature on Google's search results in a fair and non-discriminatory manner" and allow app developers to distribute their apps via the Google Play Store "both technically and contractually, to freely communicate, promote offers and conclude contracts with users not only within but also outside the Google Play app store."
"Google has fallen short of effective compliance with the Digital Markets Act, and today we have taken decisive yet balanced enforcement action sanctioning these breaches," Teresa Ribera, executive vice president for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, said in the European Commission's press release.
The DMA, which became applicable in May 2023, intends to "make the markets in the digital sector fairer and more contestable." It tries to do so by requiring "large digital platforms providing so called core platform services, such as online search engines, app stores, messenger services," to comply with a comprehensive list of regulations. These include forcing these firms to allow users to access the data they generate and prohibiting them from favoring their own product (which Google was fined for). The DMA was written with 19 companies in mind, of which 16 are American.
"The best products should succeed because they're better, not because they're owned by the company running the search engine," Ribera added. "And European consumers have a right to be told by app developers where to sign up to the best offers, even when the app store owner does not get a cut. This is the promise of the DMA, protecting fairness, choice and innovation in digital markets for the benefit of all European citizens."
This is the latest fine in the European Union's decades-long clampdown on American Big Tech. Last year, the E.U. fined Apple 500 million euros (about $569 million today) and Meta 200 million euros (about $227 million today) under the same antitrust law. Google has borne the brunt of DMA enforcement, having recently lost an appeal over a record $4.5 billion antitrust fine for allegedly thwarting competition through Android's dominance. The latest penalties bring the value of European Commission fines against Google to almost $12 billion over nearly two decades, according to Reuters.
While the fines are bad news for Google, they are also bad news for consumers worldwide, who may soon feel the effects of tariffs imposed by the United States.
President Donald Trump has previously threatened tariffs and other retaliatory measures in response to European regulations and fines, especially for those that his administration considers discriminatory toward American companies. A 2025 White House memorandum states that if a foreign government "imposes a fine, penalty, tax, or other burden" that is "discriminatory" or "disproportionate," the Trump administration "will act, imposing tariffs and taking such other responsive actions necessary to mitigate the harm to the United States and to repair any resulting imbalance."
The imposition of retaliatory tariffs would hurt American consumers too, and would do little to dissuade the regulatory zealots in Brussels from going after American tech companies for operating their companies as they see fit.
The question of why the European Commission consistently punishes tech companies speaks to the nature of Europe's adversarial attitude toward Big Tech. "Whether offline or online, fear, and greed, lead big and powerful companies to want more power," Margrethe Vestager, then the European Commission's competition chief, declared in 2024. She accused large digital platforms of becoming "the player and the referee" and turning the online economy into "the realm of the big few."
This tech-hostile attitude was seen in the most recent round of fines against Google. It is no wonder that successful and innovative tech companies choose not to base themselves in Europe.
The post E.U. Fines Google $1 Billion and Orders It To Give Competitors Equal Treatment appeared first on Reason.com.
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Less than a week after United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the final design of the new $1 coin featuring the face of President Donald Trump, a federal lawsuit in Oregon challenging the coin's production has been voluntarily dismissed. The controversial coin is scheduled for release this fall.
Plans for the gold-plated coin include the presidential seal and "250" etched on one side, plus a portrait of Trump with the words "liberty" and "in God we trust" on the other. The coin, which is being minted to commemorate the nation's 250th anniversary, is meant to "honor the enduring legacy of liberty and a lasting symbol of patriotism," and "celebrate the strength of American values," Bessent posted on social media.
However, critics argue the addition of Trump's face not only breaks with long-standing norms against enshrining living persons on legal tender, but also violates federal law.
Legislation passed by Congress in 1866 "expressly and unambiguously forbids" the production of a coin featuring "the image of a face of a living man" and is meant to prevent "officials from using currency as an instrument of political self-promotion," according to court documents filed in federal court by James Rickher, a retired lawyer in Portland, Oregon. Known as the Thayer Amendment, the law was passed in reaction to former Treasury Department official Spencer Clark placing himself on banknotes intended to honor William Clark, of the famous Lewis and Clark exploration duo.
Today, the statute grants the secretary of the Treasury the authority to "engrave and print United States currency" and states "only the portrait of a deceased individual may appear on United States currency and bonds." However, proponents of the Trump coin argue the Thayer Amendment is limited to paper currency and instead point to a separate statute that governs the minting of coins and has no blanket prohibition on including the portrait of a living person.
But the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 (CCCRA), which authorized the redesign of dollar coins "with designs emblematic of the United States semiquincentennial" to be produced only in the year 2026, does limit the design. The statute reads, in part, "no head and shoulders portrait or bust of any person, living or dead, and no portrait of a living person may be included in the design on the reverse of" the commemorative dollar coin.
In response, the Treasury Department argued in court filings the correct interpretation of the statute only "limit[s] the prohibition [of a portrait of a living person] specifically to the reverse" or tails side of the coin. And since "the proposed design places President Trump's portrait on the [head's] side and an eagle on the reverse side," there is no legal complication. And besides, the government's lawyer argued, elsewhere in the statute the secretary is granted broad discretion over the designs of gold bullion and proof coins—coins that are still considered legal tender and official U.S. currency.
Despite these many questions of statutory interpretation, Rickher filed to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit on July 20 after being denied a preliminary injunction against the production of the coin in late June. The denial, written by U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, was due to Rickher's lack of standing and inability to prove he would suffer a concrete or particularized harm should the coin be produced and distributed. Thus, Immergut did not rule on the merits of the case.
Indeed, it could be that no one will have standing to challenge the coin in court until after the coin is produced and distributed. One scenario in which someone might prove injury and therefore have standing to sue, Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told NPR, is if a vendor or customer refused to accept the coin as legal tender.
But even if the Trump administration were to win in court, however, this kind of leader worship and idolatry is deeply antithetical to American values. And whether such a coin is accepted or rejected is ultimately up to the American people today. After all, although former President Calvin Coolidge was able to move forward with his controversial and heavily criticized coin depicting him alongside former President George Washington on the half-dollar in celebration of America's 150th anniversary, the decision was largely regarded as a flop and resulted in 859,408 of the 1 million coins minted being returned and melted.
The post The Trump Coin Case Ends, but Legal Questions Remain appeared first on Reason.com.
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Consider one of the biggest challenges facing American businesses in the midst of President Donald Trump's global trade war: As of Thursday afternoon, no one knew what tariffs would be charged on which imports entering the country as soon as Friday morning.
Trump is no stranger to improvisational, make-it-up-as-you-go policy, but even by his standards, this is pretty ridiculous.
To understand the wild uncertainty facing American businesses this week, you have to back up a few months. In February, the Supreme Court struck down many of the tariffs Trump had imposed last year when it ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) did not grant presidents the power to impose tariffs. Trump responded by implementing a 10 percent "global tariff" via a different legal mechanism: Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
But that law only allows for temporary tariffs that last a maximum of 150 days, unless Congress votes to extend them, which it has not. As a result, the tariffs Trump imposed in February will expire at midnight tonight.
The Trump administration had 150 days to provide some clarity and stability to American businesses that buy and sell things overseas. It did not do that.
"You'll have to stay tuned, and you're gonna be busy over the next few days," U.S. Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer told The Wall Street Journal earlier this week when asked about the upcoming tariff deadline.
That's, uh, not very helpful. The U.S. economy is not a reality show. The Trump administration should stop acting like it is.
On Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said an announcement about tariff rates would be coming later in the day. As of 4 p.m., however, no such announcement has been made. (It's possible the White House is deliberately waiting until after the stock market closes, given how the market has reacted to previous tariff hikes.)
"How in the world does someone decide whether to expand their factory when they wake up in the morning and have no idea what the tariff on the materials they need will be?" Bryan Riley, director of the Free Trade Initiative at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, asked rhetorically in an email to Reason. "Or how many acres of crops to plant? Or how many workers to hire? Or how many Christmas toys to order?"
All good questions. Thursday did not get the same level of national media attention as Trump's so-called "Liberation Day" tariff announcements of April 2025. For good reason, the White House decided to avoid turning this latest bit of major tariff news into a spectacle.
But what happened on Thursday is in many ways even less defensible than what happened on Liberation Day. Trump's trade policies are more unpopular and less successful than ever, but he seems determined to continue jerking American businesses around, with little warning and no regard for the uncertainty it is creating.
The chaos and uncertainty created by these new, last-minute tariff announcements ought to underscore the importance of having Congress, rather than one (highly mercurial) president, set American trade policy.
Studies show that the heightened level of uncertainty caused by Trump's handling of the tariffs has harmed the economy. That is, of course, on top of the direct cost of the tariffs themselves, which have been a massive tax increase on Americans. Various estimates show that the Section 122 tariffs cost American businesses between $25 billion and $30 billion during the 150 days that they were in place.
No wonder the trade war and tariffs are unpopular—and getting more unpopular as time passes.
The post Lots of Trump's Tariffs Expire on Friday. It's Thursday Afternoon, and No One Knows What Will Replace Them. appeared first on Reason.com.
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Now that democratic socialism is having a moment, political figures who adhere to the ideology or belong to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are fielding questions about it. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who self-identifies as a socialist, is a savvy politician, and so he quite deliberately misrepresents the definition of socialism in order to make it seem benign and unobjectionable. He is doing this frequently enough—and consistently enough—that he may be succeeding in tricking a great number of people into accepting a nonsensical, discredited, and dangerous ideology.
He has help from comedian and political commentator Jon Stewart, who interviewed Mamdani on his podcast this week. Their conversation is incredibly characteristic of Mamdani's approach to the socialism question. Stewart asks Mamdani to define democratic socialism, and gets this answer: "It means making the choice every day to fight for working people. It means you believe that everyone in your city deserves to live a dignified life, no matter how much money is in their pocket."
This definition is similar to the one Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) offered in 2018: democratic participation in one's economic dignity. But when she said this to MSNBC host Chris Hayes, he at least pushed back, since that's a vague and pleasant-sounding sentiment that most people would fail to associate with socialism. Stewart, on the other hand, half-heartedly followed up with a joke about nationalizing the industries, and let Mamdani quip that he was here to seize the means of production of Stewart's podcast. They have a laugh and moved on. Eventually, Mamdani said this:
If you and I were to introduce the idea of a building that lends out books for free, we would be slandered in the same way that so many new ideas are slandered today, and yet that's the library. The same thing with the fire department, the same thing with public schools.
So what he's basically saying is: Socialism is just, you know, having a library.
This is all completely ridiculous. If a government provides some public services, this does not mean the government is socialist. Socialism should not be defined as maintaining a slightly more generous welfare state. Socialism is a political and economic system in which the means of production are owned in theory by the workers themselves rather than fat-cat capitalists. In actually existing socialist systems, the means of production is owned or at least controlled by a powerful central government with sweeping powers to allocate resources, set prices, and determine who does what. The strictly two-class system—workers and capitalists—envisioned by socialist theorist Karl Marx in the 19th century does not really exist, as there is no clear distinction between the two. In the modern economy, the relevant factor is public vs. private. Socialist governance is characterized by the hollowing out of the private sector and sharply limiting the free market in favor of top-down, centralized control of the economy—often via the nondemocratic aspects of the state such as regulatory bureaucracies.
It's not as if the DSA really denies that this is their agenda: replacing capitalism and the free market with a system of government control. The program of the DSA calls for the end of capitalism quite explicitly. Their documents assert that their enemies are "the entire system of global capital" and that the U.S. Constitution must be scrapped entirely in order to create a "democratic socialist republic."
And while Mamdani studiously avoids praising socialist and communist dictators, other figures in his orbit are not so careful. Darializa Avila Chevalier, for instance, has previously tweeted favorably about the Soviets, Fidel Castro, and Mao Zedong. Hasan Piker recently dressed in a uniform quite reminiscent of communist dictators.
When one considers recent developments within the DSA, none of this is really surprising. At its birth in 1982, the DSA's bylaws implicitly excluded communists, per the wishes of founder Michael Harrington. But in recent years, the organization has begun to welcome communists, according to The Atlantic's Jonathan Chait.
When asked whether he's comfortable sharing a movement with people who harbor more radical views, Mamdani quipped that he's never met two socialists who agree on everything. That's a diplomatic way of admitting that he does not want to exclude communist influences. Quite obviously, he doesn't. He's working tirelessly to get Avila Chevalier elected to Congress.
In the future, when commentators have a chance to grill self-described socialists on their views, they should not let them get away with saying that socialism just means more libraries. The DSA's handbook calls for eliminating capitalism—the economic system of every modern, prosperous, and free country on Earth—and replacing it with a command-and-control economy. It does not meekly suggest that we make the welfare state a bit larger.
I made a version of this same argument on Free Media this week; watch it here.
I saw The Odyssey! My verdict is: great at some points, boring at other points, overall meh. Watch me and Christian Britschgi review it on this week's episode of Freed Up.
The post Zohran Mamdani Tells Jon Stewart Socialism Is Just Having a Library appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Later, they discuss Citizen Vigilante, the New York City mayor's comments about arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Democratic Socialists of America's increasing embrace of communist ideas. The episode closes with a broader debate over why socialism has failed historically and what Michigan Democrats seem to be getting wrong.
0:00—The Odyssey reviews are in!
4:40—Agamemnon is so cool.
10:35—Is Robby wrong for the first time?
19:03—The modern parts of The Odyssey
27:01—Nolan's action scenes leave something to be desired.
35:10—Citizen Vigilante
42:00—The mayor of NYC is not going to arrest a leader of an allied nation.
48:57—DSA becoming more and more communist by the day
54:10—Socialism has never worked.
1:03:50—The Democrats in Michigan are confused.
The post Debate: Did Wokeness Actually Ruin <em> The Odyssey</em>? appeared first on Reason.com.
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With federal crackdowns on Big Tech in vogue, a bipartisan bill is floating in the halls of Congress that would stymie innovation and hurt American competition abroad.
On Wednesday, the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade held a hearing on the App Store Freedom Act (ASFA).
Introduced by Reps. Kat Cammack (R–Fla.) and Lori Trahan (D–Mass.), ASFA would mandate that Apple and Google allow side-loading—the ability to download third-party app stores and apps—on iOS and Android and prohibit them from conditioning developers' respective access to the App Store and Play Store on the exclusive use of their in-app payment systems or acceptance of most-favored-nation agreements.
The bill also forces the companies to allow developers to direct users to third-party payment processors without paying fees—and to grant developers the same access to platform features as their own apps. It even forbids the companies from using nonpublic business information about apps to compete with those apps.
ASFA marks a dramatic departure from existing antitrust and unfair competition laws, which are already more than able to provide substantial relief for these types of practices, as shown by courts' prohibitions of certain anti-steering mechanisms in Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google. Indeed, unlike the Sherman Antitrust Act, the bill requires no demonstration of market power or dominance before its strictures apply. Moreover, its bans do not require plaintiffs to show anti-competitive harm or allow defendants the opportunity to present procompetitive justifications.
Instead, ASFA closely mirrors the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) that is saddling leading American technology companies with costly compliance regimes as well as extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from them in fines. With other countries beginning to adopt their own versions of the DMA, implementing ASFA would undercut the U.S. government's efforts to resist these discriminatory regimes; foreign nations would be right to point out that the U.S. has adopted the very competition policy it opposes abroad.
When she introduced her bill last May, Cammack said it was intended to combat "higher prices and limited selections for consumers and anti-competitive practices for developers that have stifled innovation." To characterize the App Store or the Play Store as expensive beggars belief: 95 percent of App Store and 97 percent of Play Store apps are free. To say that Apple and Google should offer payment options besides their native billing systems is like saying department stores should advertise to shoppers at the checkout counter that they can purchase directly from suppliers at a discount—in both cases, suppliers free ride off the downstream firm's distribution services.
Far from fleecing developers, Apple collected zero commission on 90 percent of the $1.4 trillion in App Store billings in 2025, and Google reports that 99 percent of developers are eligible for a fee of 15 percent or less on its Play Store. Considering the more than 2.3 million apps on the App Store and Play Store as well as the companies' nearly $100 billion in combined research and development spending in 2025—evidence of the cutthroat competition between the two firms—it is hard to believe that they have "stifled innovation" in their app stores or broader digital ecosystems.
As the bill seeks to solve a nonexistent problem, it would actively impede innovation. Federal courts have recognized that limitations on third-party app distribution, in-app payment requirements, and anti-steering practices can have procompetitive benefits. These benefits include recouping the costs associated with the billions that Apple and Google invest in their platforms, which ASFA's provisions would jeopardize. Specifically, by enabling large developers—who pay the vast majority of app store commissions—to free ride off Apple's and Google's investments in their mobile platforms, the bill discourages the innovation that defines their inter-ecosystem competition and benefits consumers.
ASFA is unlikely to become law, but, if it does, it risks compromising American technological leadership by chilling incentives to innovate and by importing a hostile antitrust framework that is being used to discriminate against American tech abroad.
The post The 'App Store Freedom Act' Would Be Bad for Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.
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Last week, President Donald Trump said ABC and NBC should lose their broadcast licenses because they had dissed him by declining to air his speech about election security. On Wednesday, Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), suggested he is sympathetic to that view, saying ABC's news-coverage decision will figure in the FCC's ongoing review of the broadcast licenses held by Disney, which owns ABC and its TV stations in eight cities.
Carr's comments reinforce the point that his understanding of the "public interest" that broadcasters are legally obligated to serve is indistinguishable from Trump's personal interests. The idea that the FCC should punish news organizations for exercising their editorial judgment in a way that offends the president is plainly inconsistent with the press freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment. But as Carr sees it, his agency has the authority to restrict that freedom in service of his boss's petty vendettas.
Trump's 24-minute speech, which he delivered from the East Room of the White House on Thursday night, was ostensibly about the need to ensure "fair and honest elections." But before broaching that topic, Trump bragged about his supposed accomplishments for several minutes. And when he got around to discussing election security, he made several dubious statements, including allegations that "members of the deep state" had "worked to actively suppress" information about a "colossal security breach," that they had "blatantly lied" about "the security of our election infrastructure," and that "our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen."
Although Trump did not explicitly reiterate his long-debunked claim that Joe Biden relied on such chicanery to steal the 2020 presidential election, he described a "plot" to "continue this fraud"—a criminal conspiracy that he said included ABC and NBC. The networks' complicity was clear, he said, from the fact that they did not provide live coverage of his speech "because they know how corrupt our system is, and they don't want to reveal it." He added that "fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses."
An FCC chairman who was actually devoted to defending the First Amendment, as Carr claims to be, would have rejected that suggestion out of hand. Although such defiance might seem inconceivable now that Trump has surrounded himself with toadies eager to do his bidding, it happened during his first term, when FCC Chairman Ajit Pai made it clear that he would not act as Trump's hatchet man.
"Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked," Trump declared in October 2017. Pai disagreed in no uncertain terms. "I believe in the First Amendment," he said. "The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment, and under the law the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast."
That was then. On Wednesday, Carr made it clear that he does not share Pai's commitment to the First Amendment.
"You were asked before the president's speech last week if carrying this speech is part of a broadcaster's public interest obligations, and you didn't say one way or another," Communications Daily Associate Editor Monty Taloe noted during an FCC press conference. "Then, during the speech, the president said ABC and NBC should lose their licenses for not carrying it. Does that mean carrying those [presidential] speeches is part of a broadcaster's public interest obligation?"
Carr's response: "When you have the president of the United States standing inside the White House delivering an important speech, I think that's something that broadcasters should be carrying. And so, obviously, this is an issue. There have been lots of concerns raised, including by members of Congress, about whether broadcasters and their decisions there comply with [the] public interest. With respect to Disney [and] ABC in particular, we have an open proceeding right now on whether they've been operating in the public interest, and I'm sure that there are going to be points raised in that proceeding that relate to Disney's decision there."
Deadline Political Editor Ted Johnson asked Carr to clarify whether he was saying that ABC's decision not to air the speech "could be held against Disney" because "in your eyes, they're not fulfilling their public interest obligation." Broadcasters "should be doing that," Carr reiterated. "Any time a broadcaster is not operating in the public interest, that raises significant concerns," he said, and "yes, the FCC is going to hold people accountable to their public interest obligations. "
Johnson noted that the networks say, "Hey, we have made this call before under President Biden, under President Obama, where we did not carry each and every one of their presidential addresses when the White House requested it." Carr was unfazed. "As a general matter," he said, "when the president speaks from the White House on a significant matter, I think that's something that broadcasters should be allowing their viewers to get access to. So whether it happened before or not, I can't speak to that."
Carr's suggestion that NBC and ABC somehow prevented Americans interested in Trump's speech from seeing it is plainly silly. Fox News and Fox broadcast stations carried the speech live in its entirety, and so did various streaming services and online platforms, including ABC News Live, NBC News NOW, CNN.com, the PBS and Associated Press YouTube channels, and the White House's website and social media accounts. CBS and MSNBC aired excerpts of the speech, albeit accompanied by commentary and fact-checking.
Trump's position is that NBC and ABC nevertheless committed an unpardonable sin, worthy of a death sentence for their network-owned stations, by declining to give Americans a couple of other options for watching his speech. And Carr clearly agrees that broadcasting Trump's speech was part of the networks' "public interest" obligations. Never mind that TV networks historically have exercised their journalistic judgment in deciding which presidential speeches to air. While that might have been acceptable when Democrats such as Biden and Obama occupied the White House, it is intolerable under Trump, who views personal slights as a justification for government retaliation.
Carr initiated the "open proceeding" that he mentioned during his press conference in April, when he informed Disney and ABC that the FCC was "calling in Disney's ABC licenses for early renewal" years before they otherwise would have been subject to review. Carr said the FCC was investigating ABC and Disney for "possible violations of the Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC's rules, including the agency's prohibition on unlawful discrimination."
Carr was referring to the FCC's concerns about "Disney's DEI practices." But even at the outset, he signaled a broader inquiry, encompassing "possible violations of the Communications Act of 1934," which provides the main legal authority for requiring broadcasters to serve "the public interest." And as Carr's take on presidential speeches illustrates, he interprets that standard broadly enough to justify FCC interference with freedom of the press.
Such government meddling would be clearly unconstitutional in any other medium. But "when it comes to broadcast TV," Carr noted at Wednesday's press conference, "I've always said it's different." Why? Because, Carr avers, "the American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation's airwaves."
In reality, companies like Disney do not have "free access to the nation's airwaves," because broadcast licenses figure in the price they pay when they acquire TV and radio stations. But Carr thinks this fiction empowers him to penalize news outlets for making decisions that Trump does not like.
The Supreme Court's 1969 rationale for limiting the First Amendment rights of broadcasters, which hinged on "the scarcity of radio frequencies," likewise never made much sense. It makes even less sense today given the plethora of media options available to Americans—the reason Carr's avowed concern about "access to" Trump's speech is so implausible.
Even taking for granted the arbitrary distinction between broadcast content and speech in all other media, it has never before been understood to justify the sort of heavy-handed intervention that Carr thinks the "public interest" standard demands. "The agency is prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringing on First Amendment rights of the press," the FCC itself says. "Those protected rights include, but are not limited to, a broadcaster's selection and presentation of news or commentary."
When a TV network decides whether to offer live, unexpurgated coverage of a president's speech, it is clearly engaging in the "selection and presentation of news." Yet Carr thinks such decisions "obviously" raise "an issue" as to "whether broadcasters and their decisions there comply with public interest," which is the standard that the FCC applies when it decides whether to renew licenses.
During the same press conference, Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic member of the FCC, took a different view. "It is not for the FCC to tell broadcasters how to make their editorial decisions or what content to place on their networks or their local broadcast stations," she said. "They have a First Amendment right to make those decisions….If we tell them they can't broadcast something, that's censorship, and it's compelled speech if we tell them they have to do so."
Officially, the FCC recognizes its constitutional and statutory obligation to refrain from such meddling. "The limitations on the FCC's power to restrict or ban speech begin with the First Amendment," it notes. And under the Communications Act, "no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the Commission which shall interfere with the right of free speech by means of radio communication."
In light of "these legal mandates," the commission says, "the FCC has long held that 'the public interest is best served by permitting free expression of views.' Rather than suppress speech, communications law and policy seeks to encourage responsive 'counter-speech' from others. Following this principle ensures that the most diverse and opposing opinions will be expressed, even though some views or expressions may be highly offensive."
Carr did not seem to be following that policy when he threatened broadcasters with fines and license revocation if they failed to punish late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel for comments that offended Carr and the president. In that case, ABC and its affiliates immediately sought to placate Carr by suspending Kimmel's show—precisely the punishment that Carr had recommended. What happened to tolerating "diverse and opposing opinions" even when they "may be highly offensive"?
Given Carr's manifest disregard for freedom of speech, he might want to delete the FCC's online assurances that it will comply with the limits imposed by the First Amendment and the Communications Act. "I continue to say that this vague public interest standard is being used just to punish speech that this administration doesn't like and to reward speech that it does like," Gomez said on Wednesday. "That's inappropriate, and it's contrary to the law and to the Constitution."
Carr is undaunted by such objections. "We're going to hold all broadcasters to [meeting their] public interest obligations, and we're always looking to make sure that they're doing exactly that," he said. "And I think there's more work for us on this issue ahead."
The post Brendan Carr Says ABC's Refusal To Air a Trump Speech Could Affect Renewal of Its Broadcast Licenses appeared first on Reason.com.
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Screwworms are back and spreading in Texas. The pests were successfully eradicated from the United States in 1966. How? Using the sterile insect technique whereby 20 billion irradiated screwworm flies were raised in U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) labs and released over Texas, Arizona, and California via aircraft to breed with wild female flies. These sterile matings eventually eliminated the native populations. The flying vermin, however, remain endemic south of our border.
Screwworm flies lay their eggs in the wounds and body openings of warm-blooded hosts including cows, goats, sheep, deer, and even humans. The larvae hatch and start eating their hosts' live flesh. The USDA estimates that the current outbreak could cost livestock producers more than $700 million per year and the Texas economy $1.8 billion. The USDA is opening sterile fly production facilities in Panama, Mexico, and Texas.
In traditional sterile insect technique (SIT), both female and male flies are produced and released. The sterile females are superfluous, since only the sterile males breed with the fertile wild females. To address this problem, the USDA is using the new NovoFly technique to breed only male flies while it awaits Environmental Protection Agency approval. NovoFly uses genetic engineering to produce proteins and traits that are lethal to female screwworm embryos so that only males survive. This doubles the production of sterile male flies. Pending approval by Panamanian authorities, the first field trials of the genetically engineered NovoFly males could take place later this year.
NovoFly is a welcome pest control advance, but deploying gene drives would be an even more effective, and possibly permanent, solution by using CRISPR genome editing to force specific traits, e.g., female death or infertility, to spread faster than through normal inheritance. For example, scientists have released in the Florida Keys modified male mosquitoes with drives passing on genes that kill off larval female mosquitoes. The spread of gene drives is a rapid and precise way to cause the extinction of invasive species or disease-carrying insects.
Maxwell Scott, the North Carolina State University entomologist who headed up the NovoFly research, notes in an interview that it would take releasing 40 times fewer males carrying lethal gene drives to eradicate screwworm flies than does traditional SIT.
Despite objections by some activist groups, it is ethical to drive at least some pest species to extinction. In a May 2025 policy forum on the ethics of deploying gene drives in Science, a team of entomologists and bioethicists concluded:
The broad support for use of SIT to achieve a series of local extinctions of screwworm suggests that the argument in favor of fully eradicating screwworm is likely to be compelling for many people—especially in light of a recent resurgence of screwworm in Central America, because the resurgence suggests that a permanent solution may be possible only with complete eradication.
Similarly compelling cases can be made for deploying gene drives sooner rather than later to cause the extinction of all sorts of pests, including disease-carrying mosquitoes, agricultural pests, and invasive rodents.
The post Flesh-Eating Screwworms Are Back. Gene Drives Could Stop Them for Good. appeared first on Reason.com.
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One of the most robust findings in economic research is that rent control doesn't work. A policy often sold as a humane way to make housing more accessible and affordable instead constrains housing supply and makes market housing harder to access and more expensive.
Just about everywhere rent control, sometimes referred to as rent stabilization, has been tried, the same story plays out: Rent controls artificially freeze the price of housing, making many new developments, especially those aimed at more middle-income renters, financially untenable. Developers, in turn, shift their focus to building expensive, higher-margin luxury housing. The result is that there's not enough housing to meet market demand, and the housing that does get built is priced out of reach for the middle-class. As long as demand increases, rents go up, even for modest dwellings, so new entrants who aren't rich are increasingly priced out.
This is the exact story that has played out in New York, where rent regulations have reigned for decades, and housing prices have skyrocketed as a result.
Yet somehow a spate of up-and-coming Democratic Party figures have come to the conclusion that combating high housing costs in New York and elsewhere requires more rent control—not just in the city, but nationwide. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on a rent freeze, which the city's Rent Guidelines Board approved last month. The policy will affect a million already-rent-stabilized apartments. Mamdani-backed Democratic congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, who recently won a party primary and who, like Mamdani, is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, supports a federal rent control policy for large landlords.
Never mind the evidence: They, like much of the DSA-adjacent cohort now vying for control and influence in the Democratic Party, seem to think that the problem is rent control, just that there's not enough of it.
This is a movement in the grips of a new kind of policy nihilism, one in which the practical details of governance and policymaking simply don't matter. Sometimes this view is even made explicit. The left-leaning consultant who pushed former Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner into the spotlight in Maine, "wants his candidates to back Medicare for All and characterize the Israel-Hamas conflict as a genocide, but beyond that, doesn't believe voters care about detailed proposals," The Wall Street Journal recently reported.
This lackadaisical attitude toward policy is visible even in that formulation: Medicare for All is a classic fantasy of American leftists, a policy that has essentially no chance of becoming law, and wouldn't work if it did. The patron saint of today's Medicare for All debates is Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist senator from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats and has long represented their left flank. Estimates consistently find that Sanders' plan would add more than $30 trillion to the national debt over a decade, and possibly more than $100 trillion over a longer time horizon. (Single payer health care systems are so expensive that even Sanders' home state of Vermont balked.)
Even those sky-high figures are, in some ways, too deferential to Sanders' so-called plan, which lacks real detail or credible answers to the massive implementation challenges it raises.
Meanwhile, selling Medicare for All to the public has proven a challenge once any discussion of how it would actually work begins: Kamala Harris co-sponsored a version of the Sanders bill while in the Senate. In 2019, when she campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination, she quickly backtracked after facing questions about how it would eliminate nearly all existing private insurance. Sanders-style Medicare for All isn't a real proposal; it's a buzz phrase for a movement that simply doesn't care about the practicalities of governance.
One would hope that there would be a counter to this flippant policy nihilism in the opposing party. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, the GOP under President Donald Trump isn't exactly a font of seriousness. In a Republican primary debate, Trump himself once praised single-payer healthcare. And while he hasn't overseen Medicare for All-like levels of federal debt, he has presided over a massive increase in the nation's fiscal gap, despite repeated promises to close it.
Those promises, however, seem to be predicated on a mix-up: Trump often confuses the budget deficit, the gap between what the federal government spends and collects in tax revenue, with the trade deficit, the gap between the value of exports and imports. As with the DSA-friendly left, Trump, and many of his administration's supporters, appear blithely unconcerned with the details or the evidence.
Indeed, along with the dysfunctions of rent control, another of the most robust findings in economics is that tariffs fail on the merits. Over the past year, Trump has offered implausibly high numbers for the amount of revenue being generated by tariffs. And even if those numbers were accurate, they wouldn't come close to closing the budget gap, or funding the new spending he's suggested could be paid for using those funds.
There's also the small yet important detail that most of the tariffs Trump imposed during his first year in office were unconstitutional, according to the Supreme Court, which struck down most of his tariffs earlier this year. Yet Trump has persisted, coming up with new, legally dubious justifications for his tariff regime that will inevitably face court challenges as well.
Nor do the policy justifications hold up. Trump has said that tariffs will bring back domestic manufacturing jobs, but they have failed to do so. Trump has also said that tariffs are a response to a trade deficit with a country, yet he recently imposed tariffs on Brazil—a country with which America has a trade surplus. Trump is pursuing a trade policy that economists have repeatedly found doesn't work to solve problems that don't exist.
An overriding problem of contemporary American politics, on both the left and the right, is that reasoned argument has no purchase. One can point to all the studies and real-world evidence showing that rent control doesn't work, and democratic socialists will push for—and enact—more of it anyway. One can demonstrate that tariffs mostly raise prices for consumers while failing to reduce deficits or increase factory employment, and that they are probably illegal as enacted—and Trump will just push forward with tariffs anyway, using justifications that don't even make sense under his own screwy rationales.
None of these ideas work as policy. But judging by recent elections, they seem to work as politics, a realm where policy nihilism is too often rewarded and even celebrated as virtuous. The challenge for those who oppose such nihilism is to find something that works even better.
The post The DSA, MAGA, and the New Policy Nihilism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Wife claims the trial court erred in determining that the parties' marriage was void ab initio based on its finding that Wife was married to another individual at the time of the parties' purported marriage. {Although we affirm the trial court's order finding the parties' marriage to be void, we refer to the parties as "Husband" and "Wife" for ease of review.} …
The parties were married on April 21, 2011 in Lagos, Nigeria in a ceremony under Nigerian statutory law. {As discussed infra, Nigeria has a plural legal system where different legal systems (statutory law, customary law, and Islamic law) apply to different communities in Nigeria. [Similar systems exist in other countries, including, for instance, Israel. -EV]}
As Wife had become a U.S. citizen after receiving a Diversity Visa through the lottery program in 1999, she filed for Husband's entry into the U.S. as her spouse in 2012. In April 2013, Husband joined Wife in the U.S.; both of the parties are now dual citizens of Nigeria and the U.S….
During the divorce process, "Husband began to question the validity of the parties' marriage as he discovered that Wife may have been married to another person at the time of the parties' marriage," and the trial court explored that:
The trial court recognized that the law of the state in which a marriage is celebrated governs the validity of the marriage. "[I]f a marriage is invalid under the laws of the state wherein it was celebrated it will not be recognized elsewhere, regardless of the laws of the present domiciliary state or of the forum." … "[A] marriage which satisfies the requirements of the state where the marriage was contracted will everywhere be recognized as valid unless it violates the strong public policy of another state[.]"
The appellate court cited various Pennsylvania authorities on this, which are consistent with how other courts handle the matter; note also that "state" here refers to foreign countries as well as U.S. states. The trial court took extensive evidence related to the subject; here are some excerpts (though the facts are considerably more complex):
Husband claimed the parties' marriage should be invalidated as Wife was the spouse of William Lasisi ("Lasisi") when Husband and Wife married in 2011. Lasisi, who testified on Husband's behalf, confirmed that he had married Wife in 2001 in Lagos, Nigeria, and still believed Wife was his spouse. Lasisi presented a wedding certificate for the 2001 ceremony as well as multiple photographs of Wife and Lasisi participating in various wedding ceremony rituals…. Dr. Olubukoli Adewemi Olugasa ("Dr. Olugasa"), Husband's expert in Nigerian marital law, opined that Wife and Husband's marriage was invalid under Nigerian statutory law as at the time of their purported marriage, Wife was still married to Lasisi by customary marriage not yet dissolved….
Wife offered the testimony of Judge Surajudeen Onigbanjo ("Judge Onigbanjo"), who had served on the State High Court of Lagos, Nigeria, as well as the testimony of Judge Iris Abdullahi Haroon ("Judge Haroon"), retired Grand Kadi of the Sharia Court of Appeal in Kwara State, who both asserted that they did not believe that that Wife's marriage to Lasisi was valid as Husband failed to present evidence that a dowry or sadaq was paid. Wife claimed that she had never married Lasisi, as their relationship "soured" for various reasons….
Further, Wife offered an alternative argument claiming that even if the trial court found she had married Lasisi, she and Lasisi had divorced in 2006 through a family meeting in which Lasisi told Wife "I divorce you" three times. Judge Haroon, indicated that this verbal declaration, referred to as triple talaq, is a recognized procedure for a husband to obtain a divorce in an Islamic marriage.
On January 16, 2025, the trial court entered orders on the divorce and support dockets declaring that the parties' marriage was void ab initio, terminating Husband's alimony pendente lite obligations, and setting Husband's support arrears balance to zero. The trial court set forth its rationale which was based on several factual findings.
First, the trial court found that Wife married Lasisi on September 1, 2001 pursuant to Nigerian traditional/customary law as well as Islamic law. Second, the trial court found that Wife had not shown that her marriage to Lasisi was dissolved at the time of Husband and Wife's marriage in 2011…. Lastly, the trial court found that as Wife was married to Lasisi, she was barred from entering a statutory marriage to Husband in 2011….
The trial court set forth the following background on the types of marriage in Nigeria based on expert testimony presented at the hearings in this case:
There are three types of marriage in Nigeria: (1) statutory or Court marriages under the Marriage Act of Nigeria (hereinafter the "Marriage Act"), (2) marriage by traditional law and custom, and (3) Islamic marriage. A man and woman may be married under any one of these methods, or multiple at once. However, a statutory marriage under the Marriage Act of Nigeria is invalid "where either of the parties thereto at the time of the celebration of such marriage is married under customary law to any person other than the person with whom such marriage is had."
Under Nigerian traditional law and custom, polygamy is legal, meaning it is possible for a man to marry more than one woman. Islamic marriages allow for a man to take up to four wives at a time. Women in Nigeria are not allowed to take more than one husband; this practice is called polyandry, which was banned in the 1960s….
And the appellate court affirmed the trial court's decision:
The trial court properly exercised its discretion to apply the Nigerian Marriage Act, which is consistent with Pennsylvania law that provides that a marriage will be deemed void where either party at the time of marriage had an existing spouse and the former marriage had not been dissolved by divorce, annulment, or a decree of presumed death of the former spouse. Given that it is undisputed that Husband and Wife were validly married in a ceremony under Nigerian statutory law, the parties' marriage would be void if Wife was married to another individual at the time of her marriage to Husband in 2011…
We agree with the trial court's finding that Husband met his heavy burden of proving that Wife married Lasisi in 2001 under both Nigerian traditional law and Islamic law and rejecting Wife's claim that she merely participated in an "introduction ceremony." …
[And t]he trial court [also] found that Wife's marriage to Lasisi had not been dissolved by [either] traditional/customary law nor Islamic law…. With respect to Wife's Islamic marriage to Lasisi, the trial court declined to find a valid divorce occurred in 2006 when Lasisi made a verbal declaration repeating "I divorce you" three times to Wife in a meeting in Lagos, Nigeria where Wife and several of her family members were present. Based on testimony from Wife's expert witness, Dr. Achebe, the trial court found this unilateral method of divorce, triple talaq, recognized in Sharia law, could "only be valid if uttered by a Muslim husband." Given that Lasisi did not identify as Muslim as he had converted to Christianity in 1980, the trial court found that Lasisi "could not divorce Wife in this manner."
And the appellate court had this to say about the trial court's reliance on Sharia law related to the triple talaq divorce:
Although Wife argues that the trial court erred in relying on Dr. Achebe's representation that triple talaq can only be implemented by an Islamic man, she has not presented this Court with any applicable authority to question this legal principle, leaving this Court unable to assess the merits of her claim. Wife's expert witnesses did not testify at any point as to this distinction. As Wife has not supported her argument with any applicable authority, we find this claim to be waived for lack of development.
It also added, in a footnote:
Further, we will not disturb the trial court's finding that Wife had not shown a valid divorce from her marriage to Lasisi as the trial court was not required to extend comity to recognize talaq as a valid, unilateral method for divorce pursuant to Sharia law. As noted above, comity gives a trial court discretion as to whether to give "effect to laws and judicial decisions of another state out of deference and mutual respect, rather than out of duty."
Nigeria has a plural legal system that combines statutory law (which is heavily influenced through English law), indigenous customary law, and Islamic religious law (Sharia). Wife's own expert witnesses admitted that while several of Nigeria's northern states have implemented Islamic law, it has not been implemented in all of Nigeria or in Lagos, a southwestern state of Nigeria. Wife's expert witness, Judge Haroon, served as a member of the Sharia Court in Kwara state, where Islamic law has been implemented; Judge Haroon admitted admitted that Sharia law does not govern the state of Lagos. As such, the trial court would not be engaging in comity with the applicable secular laws of Lagos, Nigeria, had it chosen to recognize talaq through Sharia law.
Further, courts of other U.S. states have declined to recognize talaq as a valid unilateral method of divorce on the grounds that it violates the right to due process, equal protection, and fundamental fairness. See, e.g., Aleem v. Aleem (Md. 2008) (declining to extend comity to talaq divorce under Islamic religious law and secular Pakistani law as recognition of talaq would violate the due process, equal protection, and public policy); Seth v. Seth (Tex. App. 1985) (holding that recognition of talaq would be contrary to justice).
UPDATE 7/23/26, 10:58 pm: The decision was just posted to Westlaw yesterday, so I read the date as July 22 and said it was decided yesterday. But it turns out it was posted on June 22, so I've corrected the opening line accordingly. Many thanks to the invaluable Howard Bashman (How Appealing) for the correction.
The post Sharia Divorce Law in American Courts appeared first on Reason.com.
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Copyright lawyers got good news earlier this week, in the form of a settlement decision that could lead to even more lawsuits against AI companies.
On Monday, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California approved a $1.5 billion settlement agreement between AI company Anthropic and a group of authors who accused it of using their books to train its large language models without their permission.
It's one of the largest copyright settlements in history, according to the authors' attorney, Justin Nelson, and could be precedent-setting for pending copyright suits against AI companies.
The settlement is the culmination of a nearly two-year legal process that began in August 2024, when nonfiction authors Charles Graeber, Kirk Wallace Johnson, and Andrea Bartz sued Anthropic under the Copyright Act of 1976, alleging the AI giant engaged in "largescale theft of copyrighted works." Their complaint was later amended to ensure the suing authors had standing, but the accusations remained the same.
In June 2025, District Court Judge William Alsup (who retired in December 2025) ruled partly in Anthropic's favor, finding that the company's use of legally acquired books to train its model constituted "fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act." Under the law, works used for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research" are considered fair use.
In his 2025 ruling, Alsup agreed with Anthropic's argument that there was nothing illegal about converting physical copies of books it purchased into digital versions for training. However, he did find that the company's use of pirated books was "not justified by a fair use," and he refused to grant Anthropic's request to shield its repository of copyrighted works "not used for training" from future litigation.
Both sides agreed to the terms of the settlement after prolonged negotiations with a third-party mediator. Alsup issued preliminary approval of the settlement terms in September 2025. Authors and publishers had until March 30 to join the claim or opt out.
Under the terms of the agreement, members of the class action suit who declined to opt out of the settlement "released and forever discharged" any claims of copyright infringement if their works were one of the nearly 500,000 books that met the class certification requirements. The settlement doesn't cover "future conduct" by Anthropic, and it doesn't prevent authors whose books were used by Anthropic but not on the court-approved list of pirated works from suing the company for copyright infringement.
The $1.5 billion award will be split among authors and publishers after fees and expenses are paid, netting everyone entitled to a claim roughly $3,000 per work, "four times the value of the statutory minimum," according to Nelson.
Anthropic's decision to settle the case might hurt the company's pocketbook for now. Still, it likely avoids a court battle with even wider-reaching implications, since many AI companies use pirated data to train their models. Indeed, AI leaders such as Meta, Perplexity AI, Google, OpenAI, and Nvidia are facing lawsuits over similar copyright infringement claims. Anthropic is also being sued by Concord Music Group, which alleges that the company used copyrighted lyrics to train its Frontier AI model, Claude.
Time will tell how these disputes shake out, but courts placing restrictions on fair use of publicly available data will likely make AI models worse. Instead of settling potential copyright claims, AI companies will likely turn to a growing market for repositories of licensed copyrighted works.
Of course, this will also make production of the models more expensive, a cost that will inevitably be passed on to consumers.
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A few weeks ago, I hurt my left elbow while doing my regular weight workout. I've been lifting for over 50 years and have spent a lot of time swimming and playing baseball, tennis, and other sports that are well known for creating nagging joint pains, but this was new to me. I thought about making an appointment with my regular doctor or scouting out nearby physical therapists who are in-network for my insurance—two sensible options that also meant spending an undefined amount of money and, even more off-putting, an undefined amount of time scheduling appointments, juggling calendars, and sitting in waiting rooms.
So I did what an increasing number of us are doing: I consulted ChatGPT.
It responded with a probable diagnosis of lateral epicondylitis, or what's commonly called tennis elbow. After a lengthy interrogation about my symptoms, it recommended a series of exercises to try, a cheap elbow strap to help relieve the pain, and repeatedly told me to contact my primary-care physician or a physical therapist if the problems persisted or got worse. ChatGPT supplied copious photos, diagrams, videos, and links to respected places like Cleveland Clinic and WebMD. Within an hour or so, I had a plan to address my pain and discomfort through a mix of rest, targeted exercise, and over-the-counter pain meds.
I thought about this while reading about Scott Winters, a Florida resident who is suing ChatGPT and its CEO, Sam Altman, for allegedly almost killing him. Per CBS News, Winters and Tech Justice Law (the nonprofit helping Winters out) argue that ChatGPT crossed "the line from providing information into practicing medicine without a license" and "prioritized user engagement and profit at the expense of public safety, and…failed to provide adequate guardrails to protect users from following bad health advice."
Last year, Winters complained to ChatGPT about feeling dizzy and having blood pressure issues. He and his lawyers say ChatGPT advised him to remain "recliner-bound," and even invoked religious language ("God did not design your body to endlessly fail") to cajole the former pastor into taking it easy. A few weeks after consulting ChatGPT, Winters had a "massive pulmonary embolism" intensified by blood clots that might have been linked to his lack of movement.
In a Tech Justice Law press release, Winters didn't hold back, saying, "ChatGPT manipulated my own language and beliefs because it knew I was a pastor. Not only did I nearly die, but I also lost my job, my career, my ministry, my home, everything."
"If ChatGPT were a physician dispensing medical advice, it would be guilty of medical malpractice," said Matthew P. Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center in the same release. "Scott Winters nearly died because ChatGPT acted like a medical authority while having none of the responsibility."
But if we're talking about responsibility, what about the plaintiff's responsibility in any of this? ChatGPT—and every other AI platform I've encountered—constantly tells users that it is not a medical authority and that you should always consult your doctors or providers.
Winters' case is not an isolated incident. Tech Justice Law is itself involved in another case against OpenAI involving a fatal overdose by a University of California undergrad last year. The suit charges that OpenAI encouraged the student to mix kratom and Xanax, a combination that led to his death.
OpenAI has yet to lose a case over medical advice (at least, that's what Google's AI-enabled search tells me), but it's hard not to see where this sort of thing is headed. It has taken years for social media companies to lose analogous cases. But earlier this year, YouTube and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, was found guilty by a Los Angeles jury in a civil case of "addicting a young woman to their services and exacerbating her mental health struggles." Meta also lost a case in New Mexico where a jury said it harmed the mental health of minors while failing to protect them from sexual predators.
Even as AI tools become more ubiquitous and more deeply embedded in daily life, AI itself is becoming more feared—and will almost certainly become a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in our collective and individual lives. An NBC poll earlier this year found that AI had a net favorability of –20 percentage points, with "AI ranked less favorably than US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, President Donald Trump, former Vice President Kamala Harris, the Republican Party and The Late Show host Stephen Colbert." When you are that unpopular, you're likely to lose cases regardless of the strength of the arguments.
Although AI has yet to actually create the large-scale unemployment many fear, the mere possibility of such disruption energizes much of the negativity toward it. Stories like the one involving Scott Winters will likely stay in the public's mind longer than reports that AI is helping doctors be more efficient, that it "literally may have saved my life," or that it sometimes scores better than humans at diagnosing illnesses.
In my case, ChatGPT helped me clear up my tennis elbow in a few weeks without having to access my traditional health network. If my issues had been more serious, I still would have consulted my AI, though I certainly wouldn't let it be the last word—if anything, it would have informed the questions and concerns I brought to my doctor and healthcare team. This is exactly what my wife did during her recent pregnancy and while it at times it consternated her OB-GYN, it definitely made for a better process than had she eschewed AI.
As with most supposedly transformative technologies, AI is less a complete replacement for the existing world than a supplement to it, something that adds new spaces and possibilities. It's a great tool, but it's up to us whether we use it wisely or not.
Contra his legal backers, Scott Winters didn't nearly die because "ChatGPT acted like a medical authority while having none of the responsibility." He almost died because he didn't take responsibility for his health. If that sort of basic abdication gains the force of law, we'll create a world that no technology will be able to fix.
The post Don't Blame AI for Your Own Medical Problems appeared first on Reason.com.
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Somewhere in Los Angeles this year, someone will get home who otherwise wouldn't have. You'll never learn her name. There will be no headline, no celebration, no council resolution—only an unremarkable Tuesday that ends the way Tuesdays are supposed to end. The same non-story will eventually play out in more than a dozen other metro areas where autonomous vehicles will serve as cabs.
Last year, 36,640 Americans died in traffic crashes. That was the fewest since 2019, yet it still works out to more than 100 fatalities per day. The new generation of vehicles quietly accumulating mileage on our streets offers enormous promise to bring the number down even more and more each year.
Over at Marginal Revolution, economist Alex Tabarrok reminds us that as of March, Waymo's driverless vehicles had logged more than 220 million miles across five of its areas of operation. Compared with human drivers on the same roads over the same period, and counting every crash regardless of fault, the Waymo Driver was involved in 94 percent fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injury. It also experienced 82 percent fewer airbag deployments and 93 percent fewer injury crashes involving pedestrians.
Waymo's data cover only mapped city streets, and serious crashes are rare enough that the counts behind these percentages are small. But its analyses are peer-reviewed, the crash reports go to federal regulators, and no one has produced a competing dataset showing anything different.
So, who is working to slow this happy development? Tabarrok points to trial lawyers. The American Association for Justice has been lobbying against autonomous vehicle (A.V.) legislation for the better part of a decade. American auto insurance pays out somewhere between $180 billion and $220 billion each year, and litigating ordinary collisions is big business. (Tabarrok's fix is an elegant one used in Britain since 2018: Insure the vehicle rather than the driver, pay the victim directly, and let the insurer recover from the manufacturer if the software erred.)
But lawyers turn out to be the junior partners here. Tech policy expert and executive director of Alliance for the Future Brian Chau looked at the paper trail and found that labor unions account for 78 percent of the entities opposing A.V.s in various forms, 54 percent of those engaged in lobbying and close to 70 percent of the money spent. While Chau concedes that his measures are imperfect, they are directionally correct.
Behind the anti-A.V. campaign is the fear of job losses for union members. Such fear is understandable for the more than 4 million Americans who drive for a living, including long-haul truckers, delivery drivers, bus drivers, and chauffeurs. At the same time, automation tends to replace tasks rather than whole occupations, as MIT's David Autor showed in his remarkable 2015 paper "Why are there still so many jobs?"
Autor argues that making one step in a chain cheaper due to automation raises the value of every step that still requires a person, such as loading, the last mile of transit, distribution, or dispatch. And A.V.s go only where the streets have been mapped block by block. Therefore, we may end up with fewer drivers but just as many good jobs in transportation.
We've seen this movie before. When ATMs began spreading through American banks, it seemed obvious that the machine dispensing cash would dispense with the bank teller. Something more interesting happened: As ATMs made branches cheaper to operate, banks opened more of them. Tellers spent less time counting out twenties and more time performing tasks machines could not. They became more involved in customer service, sales, and other forms of relationship banking.
Technology automated a task and rearranged the work around it. The country has gone through this process at a large scale with the automation of farming.
It didn't happen without displacement or pain. But protecting workers is not the same thing as protecting every job exactly as it exists today.
This is where I believe unions are making a mistake. A labor movement built for the modern economy could devote itself to training, certification, and helping workers acquire skills that become more valuable as technology changes. It could help a truck driver become a fleet supervisor, a remote operator, a logistics specialist, or whatever other occupation emerges around autonomous transportation that neither you nor I can predict today.
Instead, too many unions choose political power as their business model. Faced with technology that threatens an existing job, they lobby the government to preserve the job. That's bad economics in any industry. In this one, it carries an additional cost. Delaying A.V. deployment might protect jobs in their current form, at least for a while, but it prolongs the use of what we'll someday recognize was a primitive technology that killed tens of thousands of Americans every year.
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Over the past several years, a regulatory crusade spanning both the Biden and Trump administrations has hyperscrutinized Google's search engine and business practices in an attempt to label the company a monopoly and justify unprecedented government intervention into Alphabet's most widely used product. Now Congress is weighing in. A bipartisan group of senators has introduced the Securing Enforcement of Americans' Right to Competition at Home (SEARCH) Act, which would prohibit dominant search engines from using certain default distribution agreements or favoring their own services over competitors in search results.
Companies that fail to follow these directives will be subject to antitrust enforcement, possibly including civil penalties and court-ordered behavior changes. With the SEARCH Act, legislators will be following in the steps of Europe. On Thursday, the European Union fined Google $1 billion for "illegally undercutting competition through its dominance as a search engine," per The New York Times.
The SEARCH Act was introduced by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) and Eric Schmitt (R–Mo.) earlier this month. In a press release, Klobuchar said the bill would "put the guardrails in place that both the Biden and Trump Administrations have said are necessary to bring competition to online search," and Schmitt said it would "protect one of the key tenets of modern American society: free speech online." But their legislative approach would go beyond antitrust enforcement or defense of the First Amendment, instead using government power to redesign successful products that consumers voluntarily use billions of times every day.
It should surprise no one that Google integrates its other products into its own search engine. Consumers searching for directions, flights, restaurants, or shopping locations expect useful, integrated results—not a virtual experience designed by the Federal Trade Commission.
The same goes for default agreements—where tech comes preloaded with apps that consumers are likely to want. Technology companies have long competed for default placement because it offers consumers a seamless experience and reflects what users already prefer. Regulators are quick to point out that competition is only meaningful if consumers are free to choose. But that's just the thing: They are. Anyone who wants to use Bing or DuckDuckGo can change their default in a matter of seconds.
What's more, with the advent of artificial intelligence, the search market is evolving faster than at any point in the past two decades. Millions of Americans now use ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or other AI models in place of or alongside traditional search engines. Google itself has fundamentally changed its search engine by integrating in its AI Mode. Regulations on traditional search engines may not even be relevant. Instead of recognizing that innovation is reshaping how Americans find information online, lawmakers are attempting to lock outdated assumptions into federal law.
That's why the judge in the initial antitrust case cautioned against breaking up Google, despite ruling it held a monopoly in the search business. "The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case," wrote Judge Amit P. Mehta of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
The SEARCH Act reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of competition. With new technology and more players, the market is evolving without the government prescribing how search engines should work. Congress should let innovation run its course. After all, the customer is always right.
The post This Bipartisan Senate Bill Would Make Your Google Search Results Less Useful appeared first on Reason.com.
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Oil prices surge: Yesterday, Houthi terrorists struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, sending oil prices up to $99 a barrel. The strikes "threatened to broaden the conflict by creating a second choke point on global shipping, in addition to the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively closed," per The New York Times.
President Donald Trump, too, is escalating: "From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran," he wrote on Truth Social. "Thank you for your attention to this matter!"
Technically, since the Houthis are not Iran (just backed by them), and since the Saudi strike wasn't in the Strait of Hormuz but in the Red Sea, yesterday's attack probably won't warrant a U.S. bombing. But it's a very bad sign that a second shipping corridor—the Bab al-Mandab Strait—is now threatened, as this is likely to send oil prices surging even higher.
"On Tuesday, [Trump] said U.S. military forces would likely attack Iran's Pickaxe Mountain, the underground site where Israeli intelligence believes Iran has buried advanced nuclear-enrichment centrifuges, 'pretty soon,'" reports The Wall Street Journal. "Trump's threats come days after Iran launched a barrage of missile and drone attacks against U.S. bases in Jordan. Three soldiers were killed there in a strike that hit containerized housing units where the troops lived and slept. A fourth servicemember was killed last week in Iraq during a controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian drone."
People are already souring on the war: "Half of President Donald Trump's MAGA base thought Iran's war was worth its economic costs in May. Now, just a little more than a third do," reports Politico. "Additionally, 37 percent of self-identified MAGA Trump voters say the U.S. should continue its involvement only if it doesn't increase costs, up from 29 percent who said the same in May, according to the survey, conducted by independent polling firm Public First. Nearly 1 in 5 MAGA voters believe that the U.S. should end its war in Iran, regardless of the costs."
It looks likely to get much worse before it gets better.
Scenes from New York: "The Commission on Government Efficiency, which the mayor formed in January, has proposed expediting the time it takes to build new street safety projects by 33%. It's one of the five ballot questions the commission is expected to approve on Thursday that aim to speed up work by—and with—the city. The proposals will appear on voters' ballots in November," reports Gothamist. "Altogether, the commission settled on five proposals that it said will simplify the process to secure permits for outdoor dining, shorten the timeframe for the city's contracting and procurement process, fast-track projects on city-owned land whether its for a street or a building, simplify the building permit process and create targets for contributions to the city's rainy day fund to prepare for an economic downturn."
The main finding: Sports betting does not merely replace other entertainment spending. Instead, it crowds out saving and increases borrowing.
For many households, the money deposited into betting apps comes directly from their financial cushion.
— Jason Kotter (@JasonKotter) July 22, 2026
Lower-income households bet a much larger share of their income. In our data, they devote roughly 2–3x as much of their income to betting as higher-income households. That gap has widened over time. pic.twitter.com/nnbO2jOH0r
— Jason Kotter (@JasonKotter) July 22, 2026
AOC leading in NH per UNH poll
AOC 22%
Pete: 21%
Mark Kelly 9%
Newsom: 8%
Bernie: 6% (have to imagine a lot of these votes would go to AOC)
Kamala: 5%https://t.co/wZWqaWGGbs pic.twitter.com/vQUKR7y5AL— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) July 22, 2026
The post Through the Red Sea appeared first on Reason.com.
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