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Brendan Carr Says ABC's Refusal To Air a Trump Speech Could Affect Renewal of Its Broadcast Licenses

2026-07-23T18:54:49Z

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 ran 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 into 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.

Flesh-Eating Screwworms Are Back. Gene Drives Could Stop Them for Good.

2026-07-23T18:13:14Z

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.

The DSA, MAGA, and the New Policy Nihilism

2026-07-23T17:55:46Z

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.

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Sharia Divorce Law in American Court

2026-07-23T17:53:24Z

From yesterday's Pennsylvania appellate decision in Adewale v. Adewale, decided by Judge Correale Stevens, joined by Judge Anne Lazarus and Jack Panella:

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).

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Anthropic's $1.5 Billion Copyright Settlement Sets a Bad Precedent

2026-07-23T17:29:38Z

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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Don't Blame AI for Your Own Medical Problems

2026-07-23T16:09:03Z

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.

The People Fighting Technology That Could Save Thousands of Lives

2026-07-23T15:30:12Z

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.

The post The People Fighting Technology That Could Save Thousands of Lives appeared first on Reason.com.

This Bipartisan Senate Bill Would Make Your Google Search Results Less Useful

2026-07-23T15:23:55Z

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.

Through the Red Sea

2026-07-23T13:27:16Z

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."

QUICK HITS

"Florida's fish and wildlife officials were caught using law-enforcement tools to probe everyday citizens who'd criticized the agency," writes Scott Maxwell for The Orlando Sentinel.
"The Supreme Court agreed last month to hear a case that asks a remarkable question: Can the government require a homeowner to obtain a permit before inviting friends to his house for prayer?" reports The Washington Post. "Grand v. City of University Heights centers on an Orthodox Jewish minyan—a prayer quorum consisting of at least 10 adult men—but the legal principles at stake extend well beyond one faith. In January 2021, Daniel Grand, an Orthodox Jewish homeowner in University Heights, Ohio, emailed roughly a dozen friends inviting them to his house for a Shabbat minyan. Soon afterward, a neighbor informed the city about Grand's email, complaining and asking the mayor to 'put a stop to this.' Under the city's zoning ordinance, 'houses of worship' require a special-use permit. Acting on the complaint, the mayor called Grand regarding what he described as an 'urgent matter.' Later that day, a city official ordered Grand to 'immediately cease and desist' using his home as a 'place of religious assembly' until he obtained the permit. Although Grand maintained that hosting a minyan in his home did not make it a house of worship, he complied. He canceled the gathering and applied for the permit the city demanded. What followed was a contentious zoning process." (They should try to get my ass, because I host bible study all the time.)
Back in 2018, the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) in Murphy v. NCAA, allowing states to once again legalize sports betting. So how bad is the gambling situation now? A new paper says…very bad.

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

I'm calling it here, and it brings me no pleasure to report, but I'm pretty sure it's AOC time:

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.

No Pseudonymity for Sex Offender Immigration Detainee Who Speculates He May Face Harm in Syria if Identified

2026-07-23T01:20:44Z

From Alobid v. Marin, decided March 9, 2026 by Magistrate Judge Alka Sagar (C.D. Cal.), but just posted on Westlaw in the last couple of days:

Petitioner, an immigration detainee who is proceeding pro se, filed a Petition for a Writ of Habeas Corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 and also filed a Motion for Leave to Proceed Under a Pseudonym.

"As a general rule, 'the identity of the parties in any action, civil or criminal, should not be concealed except in an unusual case, where there is a need for the cloak of anonymity.'" A party's "use of [a] fictitious name[ ] runs afoul of the public's common law right of access to judicial proceedings, and [Fed. R. Civ. P.] 10(a)'s command that the title of every complaint 'include the names of all the parties[.]'"

Nevertheless, the Ninth Circuit has "allowed the use of pseudonyms in exceptional cases where necessary 'to protect a person from harassment, injury, ridicule or personal embarrassment.'" "When a party requests 'Doe' status, the factors to be 'balance[d] … against the general presumption that parties' identities are public information,' are: '(1) the severity of the threatened harm; (2) the reasonableness of the anonymous party's fears; and (3) the anonymous party's vulnerability to such retaliation.'" The party seeking anonymity has the burden of proving it should be allowed to proceed anonymously.

Petitioner seeks to proceed anonymously because he is a convicted sex offender who believes he may face danger in his country of origin—Syria—if removed there. However, the nature of Petitioner's criminal conviction is insufficient by itself to warrant Petitioner's use of a pseudonym in these proceedings. See U.S. v. Stoterau (9th Cir. 2008) ("If the nature of Stoterau's offense alone could qualify him for the use of a pseudonym, there would be no principled basis for denying pseudonymity to any defendant convicted of a similar sex offense. Such a significant broadening of the circumstances in which we have permitted pseudonymity is contrary to our long-established policy of upholding 'the public's common law right of access to judicial proceedings,' and contrary to our requirement that pseudonymity be limited to the 'unusual case.'").

And while "'retaliation from a foreign government is recognized by the Ninth Circuit and other district courts as a sufficient basis to proceed anonymously[,]'" Petitioner's conclusory and unsupported assertion that he may face danger if removed to Syria is insufficient to meet his burden of establishing he should be allowed to proceed anonymously in this action.

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The Homicide Rate Has Dropped to Historic Lows. Contrary to What Politicians Say, No One Really Knows Why.

2026-07-23T18:27:13Z

A new report from the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) suggests the national homicide rate this year will hit a historic low, continuing a downward trend that began in 2022. In January, the CCJ estimated that the 2025 homicide rate would be the lowest since at least 1900, and the latest numbers indicate that the 2026 rate will be even lower. Other kinds of crime are also down, in some cases dramatically.

That development is surely welcome news. But we should be skeptical of the explanations offered by politicians of both major parties, who habitually reduce a complex reality to evidence in favor of the policies they have long supported.

The CCJ collects crime data from 36 U.S. cities, ranging in size from Rochester (population: 200,000) to New York City (8.5 million). The homicide estimates are based on data from 30 cities that have consistently reported numbers for that crime since 2018.

After rising slightly in 2019, the average homicide rate in the CCJ sample shot up in 2020, consistent with FBI data indicating a 30 percent increase that year. The rate in the CCJ sample rose again in 2021 and fell slightly in 2022 before dropping dramatically in 2023, 2024, and 2025. According to the new report, the average homicide rate for the first half of this year was down 18 percent from the same period in 2025 and down 51 percent since the first half of 2022.

This trend goes beyond a reversion to the pre-2020 norm. "Across the sample cities," the CCJ says, "the 2026 average homicide rate" for January through June was "about 31% lower than in 2019."

The FBI's national numbers tell a similar story: Homicides fell by 11.6 percent in 2023, nearly 15 percent in 2024, and 18.1 percent in 2025 (based on a preliminary estimate). According to the FBI's preliminary data, murders during the year ending in April 2026 were down 18.2 percent from the previous 12 months.

A longer view puts these numbers in perspective. Between 1991 and 2014, according to the CCJ's national numbers, the homicide rate fell by more than 50 percent, then rose for a few years. But as of 2019, it was still about half the 1991 peak. The estimated rate for 2025, 4 per 100,000 residents, is even lower than the 2014 number (4.4), and it seems this year's rate will be lower still.

Looking further back, the lowest homicide rate recorded since 1900, according to the CCJ's graph, was 4.5 per 100,000, the rate in 1957 and 1958. Those numbers come from criminologist Randolph Roth's 2009 book American Homicide. "These data rely primarily on death registration records," the CCJ says, "and are widely regarded as the most reliable source for estimating homicide trends prior to the modern era of national crime reporting."

A Bureau of Justice Statistics report lists somewhat lower rates for the 1950s, as low as 4.0 in 1957. But "when the FBI went back with a new methodology in 1958," crime analyst Jeff Asher notes, "they looked at data from 1957 again and estimated that the actual 1957 murder rate was at 4.7 per 100,000." In other words, it looks like the current homicide rate is even lower than the historic lows recorded during the 1950s.

The CCJ also reports large declines in three other crimes based on data for the first half of each year. The carjacking and car theft rates, both of which peaked in 2023, have since fallen by 73 percent and 51 percent, respectively. The residential burglary rate in the first half of 2026 was 56 percent lower than its 2018 peak.

Comparing the first half of 2026 to the first half of 2025, the CCJ reports declines in aggravated assault (2 percent), gun assault (6 percent), larceny (6 percent), nonresidential burglary (10 percent), residential burglary (13 percent), robbery (17 percent), car theft (20 percent), and carjacking (47 percent). By contrast, sexual assault, shoplifting, and domestic violence rose by 3 percent, 4 percent, and 8 percent, respectively.

Overall, violent crime from January through June was "at or below levels in the first half of 2019," the CCJ says. Nonviolent crime also was "generally below levels seen in the first six months of 2019."

President Donald Trump would like to take credit for these positive trends. "Last year, the murder rate saw its single largest decline in recorded history," he bragged during his 2026 State of the Union address. "This is the biggest decline, think of it, in recorded history. The lowest number in over 125 years."

Inconveniently for Trump, the 2020 murder surge happened on his watch, and the rate began falling before he started his second term. In any case, it is doubtful that presidential policies have much impact on crime rates. Although Trump credits immigration enforcement, for example, his deportation campaign, contrary to the way he portrays it, is by no means carefully targeted at unauthorized residents who pose a threat to public safety.

The evidence also casts doubt on policy prescriptions that Democrats tend to offer. "Private gun ownership in America has surged in the past several years," the CCJ notes. "Meanwhile, violent crime, particularly homicide, saw a historic rise followed by a historic decline."

The CCJ suggests a few more plausible theories, although none is completely satisfying. "A range of crime researchers and practitioners broadly agree that there's no single explanation for the decline" in homicides, it says. "Instead, it reflects multiple forces moving in the same direction, from prevention efforts and law enforcement strategies to broader social changes following the pandemic shock."

Last February in USA Today, CCJ President Adam Gelb cautioned against "partisan platitudes" that offer simplistic explanations for the ongoing crime drop. "Murder and other crime are falling in cities that are governed by different political philosophies, operating under varied policing and prosecution models and facing distinct local economic conditions," he noted. "Local policies and programs surely matter. But the striking consistency of the crime decline across the country suggests that macro-level forces are exerting enormous influence as well."

It is plausible that the 2020 homicide spike, like the concomitant surge in drug-related deaths, had something to do with the social, economic, and educational upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the government's response to it. "As schools, workplaces, social programs, churches and civic institutions regained footing after COVID-19 disruption," Gelb noted, "emotional and economic stresses eased and daily routines strengthened."

Gelb added that "courts slowed by COVID-19 disruptions have largely resumed normal function"; that "police departments, on their heels after the protests of 2020, have reemphasized targeted enforcement strategies"; and that "communities have scaled up violence prevention efforts and prisoner reentry programs to unprecedented levels, aided in part by federal recovery funds." He conceded that "immigration enforcement has removed dangerous offenders" but added that it has swept up "many people who pose little or no public safety risk."

Gelb also credited "the spread of public and private surveillance cameras and license plate readers," which he said had "deterred would-be offenders while helping police solve more cases." He added that "the transition to digital transactions means fewer people carry cash, making them less attractive targets of a robbery." And he suggested that "the gravitational pull of cyberspace" may be "altering social routines historically associated with street violence."

Gelb mentioned several other possible factors, including changes in illicit drug markets, reduced alcohol consumption, less exposure to "environmental toxins" such as lead, and the "grim demographic reality" that homicides and drug overdoses may have "removed tens of thousands of high-risk people from the population." But he noted that "researchers are still struggling to confidently explain the long-term crime drop that began in the early 1990s," which suggests that "definitive answers about current trends will take time."

The honest answer to the question of why crime is falling, in short, is that we don't really know and may never be sure. As tempting as it may be for politicians, it is not safe to assume that any particular government policies have played an important role in the absence of evidence that they actually work.

The post The Homicide Rate Has Dropped to Historic Lows. Contrary to What Politicians Say, No One Really Knows Why. appeared first on Reason.com.

Today in Supreme Court History: July 23, 1936

2025-07-17T03:28:56Z

7/23/1936: Justice Anthony Kennedy's birthday.

Justice Anthony Kennedy

The post Today in Supreme Court History: July 23, 1936 appeared first on Reason.com.

From Weed to Whiskey: Is This the Supreme Court's Next Big Commerce Clause Case?

2026-07-23T12:10:21Z

Earlier this week, lawyers for Ohio craft brewery owner John Ream, who wants to distill hard liquor at home for his own personal use but is barred from doing so by federal law, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear what could prove to be a major case about the reach of federal power.

The case is Ream v. U.S. Department of the Treasury. At issue is the constitutionality of the federal ban on home distilling. According to the federal government, the ban on making hard liquor at home is a legitimate exercise of the congressional power "to regulate Commerce…among the several States." As an authority for that view, the government has cited Gonzales v. Raich (2005), in which the Supreme Court upheld the federal ban on marijuana as applied to California medical marijuana patients whose use of the plant was legal under state law and whose cultivation and consumption of the plant took place entirely within the confines of that single state. "If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause," protested Justice Clarence Thomas in dissent, "then it can regulate anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers."

The petition for writ of certiorari in Ream seeks to overturn the ruling in Raich that earned Thomas' ire. "At bottom," argues the brief filed by Ream's legal team, "this case asks whether the federal government must still identify an enumerated power before sending Americans to prison for what they do at home." As for the Raich precedent, the brief urges SCOTUS to "overrule Raich or at least clarify that Congress's commerce power does not extend to regulation of local, noncommercial conduct and that its exercise is subject to meaningful judicial scrutiny."

A case about the legality of home distilling would be a fitting addition to the Supreme Court's Commerce Clause jurisprudence. That's because the line of cases that led up to Raich effectively started with 1942's Wickard v. Filburn, another case about the home production of a federally regulated item.

Roscoe Filburn, the farmer at the center of that landmark case, grew extra wheat on his farm for his family's personal use, either to make flour for cooking or as feed for his livestock. The problem was that Filburn's extra wheat exceeded the maximum quota that had been set by federal regulators acting under the aegis of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The New Dealers had established such quotas in the hopes of boosting prices by artificially restricting supplies.

Filburn's extra wheat never entered the marketplace, nor did it cross any state lines. Still, according to the Supreme Court, that extra wheat nevertheless counted as "Commerce…among the several States" for federal regulatory purposes because Filburn's actions exerted a "substantial economic effect" on the national wheat market by growing a product that he might otherwise have bought.

The Raich case later extended that logic to cover the intrastate cultivation and consumption of medical marijuana and its "impact" on the national black market in controlled substances.

The Ream case now asks the Supreme Court to fundamentally change its course on the Commerce Clause by overturning Raich and setting strict limits on what actually counts as a federally regulatable activity.

Time will tell if a shot of homemade whiskey will produce a different legal result than a puff of homegrown weed.

The post From Weed to Whiskey: Is This the Supreme Court's Next Big Commerce Clause Case? appeared first on Reason.com.

Brickbat: Exactly Wrong

2026-07-21T01:44:26Z

Melbourne, Florida, Police officer William Markle has resigned after body camera video showed him and other officers mistakenly tackling and handcuffing a 15-year-old boy, leaving him with a broken arm. Police were searching for a runaway described as a white male in black clothes, but the teen they tackled was black, wearing a white shirt and jeans. Officers chased and forced him to the ground before realizing within minutes that he was not the person they were looking for. The teen suffered a broken arm during the arrest, and the officer who helped restrain him resigned about two weeks later.

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Open Thread

2026-07-23T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

Second Amendment Roundup: New Jersey Rifle and Magazine Bans Bite the Dust

2026-07-23T01:57:19Z

On July 17, the Third Circuit declared New Jersey's ban on semiautomatic rifles and magazines holding over ten rounds to violate the Second Amendment. The case is Ass'n of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs, Inc. v. Attorney General New Jersey (AJNRPC), and the 10 to 5 en banc opinion is authored by Judge Arianna J. Freeman. This is the first circuit court decision to invalidate an "assault firearm" and magazine ban.

Some members of the court would have waited until the Supreme Court decides Viramontes/Grant (see post here), but cert was not granted on the magazine issue in those cases, plus no party sought delay. My thought is that another good reason to decide the case is Justice Kavanaugh's statement in the Snope cert denial that further appellate decisions will be forthcoming that "should assist this Court's ultimate decisionmaking on the AR–15 issue." All of the other circuit decisions have upheld bans.

The common-use test, which derives itself from the historical tradition of the banning of "dangerous and unusual" weapons, is the focus of AJNRPC. First, "in common use" refers to "common use for lawful purposes at the time of the modern restriction." Second, "lawful purposes" refers not just to self-defense, but to hunting and other lawful uses including mere possession. Third, such use excludes a "dangerous and unusual" weapon.

Criticism of the common-use test as "a popularity poll" disregards that the Supreme Court requires this test, and "the popularity of the restricted weapons bears on [the] question" of common use for a lawful purpose. Moreover, possession – whether keeping or bearing – is protected, not just the active use of pulling a trigger to shoot bullets in self-defense scenarios.

"Bruen's first step is fundamentally a textual inquiry," but the common use inquiry is not located there. It neither appears in the Second Amendment's text nor is it part of the definition of "Arms," which as Wolford noted includes "any weapon customarily used for offensive or defensive purposes." "'Customarily' distinguishes items that can be used, offensively or defensively, as weapons (e.g., bricks) from weapons normally used for offensive or defensive purposes." So common use fits into Bruen's step two (the historical tradition step), as a part of "how" a modern regulation burdens the right in comparison with any relevant historical analogue. Here, as in Heller, the "how" is a "flat ban." Once the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated, the burden shifts to the state (here, New Jersey) to demonstrate a historical tradition that would warrant its modern-day law. Thus, in this arms ban case, New Jersey bears the burden to demonstrate that the semiautomatic rifles it bans are "dangerous and unusual" and, by necessity, not in common use.

Moving on to New Jersey's ban on its listings of firearm make and models, the AJNRPC court decides that the record encompasses the same result for all semiautomatic rifles, not just the Colt AR-15. For that, "we need not precisely define the quantity or qualities that make a weapon in common use for lawful purposes. Regardless of where those lines may be drawn, the many millions of semi-automatic rifles in circulation for lawful purposes are plainly in common use."

Contrary to the argument that rifles are not commonly "used" in self-defense, "even if a weapon is rarely employed in incidents requiring self-defense, it may still be commonly possessed for that lawful purpose or other lawful purposes, such as hunting." Moreover, "Even if semi-automatic rifles are disproportionately used in some crimes, those may still represent a small fraction of those weapons' overwhelmingly lawful use." Not to mention that interpersonal violence is "a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century," where Bruen's second step is "fairly straightforward."

Of course, the Third Circuit did not really need to engage in the level of analogical reasoning that it did, given that the Supreme Court in Heller had already engaged in the relevant historical spade work to identify the principle that arms that are "dangerous and unusual" can be banned consistent with the Second Amendment.

That's why antebellum and Reconstruction regulations of Bowie knives, blunt weapons, and pistols as potential analogues do not work: "They are too late in time, and none enacted an outright ban on a class of weapons in common use for lawful purposes." No Founding-era analogue exists for such restrictions, giving little weight to later restrictions. Third Circuit precedent, Lara v. Comm'r Pa. State Police (2025), holds that 1791 prevails over 1868 as the location of proper analogues.

The AJNRPC court next moves on to the magazine ban. Magazines are "arms" because they feed ammunition into certain firearms, making them functional. The label "large capacity magazine" (LCM) "is not objective: what is considered an LCM is statutorily defined." It used to be 15 rounds, now it is 10 rounds. "It would defy reason for a label devised by New Jersey's legislature to govern the reach of the Second Amendment's text." As to the argument that a firearm will still operate with a ten-round magazine, "the text of the Second Amendment does not limit 'Arms' to the minimum equipment necessary to operate a weapon."

In Bruen, the Supreme Court included "instruments that facilitate armed self defense" as part of the plain text definition of "arms." Magazines obviously do so by holding ammunition and allowing the lawful gun owner to discharge a firearm in self-defense and to train for self-defense scenarios without having manually to reload over and over.

The banned magazines easily meet the common-use test. "But the 24 million AR-15s and similar sports rifles in circulation—firearms that we have determined are in common use for lawful purposes—typically come standard with twenty- or thirty-round magazines. And there are over 100 million 30-round AR-15 magazines in circulation." (I would suggest there are far more.)

As for analogues, Founding-era gunpowder storage laws miss the mark – they were for fire safety, not crime control. Nor were concealed carry regulations, which were not outright bans, relevant.

The above resolves the unconstitutionality of New Jersey's ban on all of the listed semiautomatic rifles and on magazines. However, the court found the record too sparse about the shotguns and pistols defined as "assault firearms," which requires a remand to the district court for further factfinding.

Judge Paul Matey's concurrence minces no words: "Nothing has changed in the decades since the State launched its battle against the Second Amendment and its ongoing defiance of the law." The terms "LCM" and "assault firearm" have no objective meanings but are "marketing materials recycled into legislation." Although the opinion of the court doesn't mention features, Judge Matey explains, "There is too much evidence that all of the arms at issue—pistol grips, folding stocks, magazines containing eleven or more rounds, and the semiautomatic shotguns and pistols New Jersey lumped into the definition of 'assault weapons' with no real thought—are and have long been in common use for lawful purposes."

Concurring in part, Judge Peter Phipps stresses that proper historical analogues "have the purpose of regulating people who actually or imminently misuse firearms to harm or menace others." However, the New Jersey prohibitions are "based on their potential for misuse, however remote, and that is broader than actual or imminent misuse."

Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves concurs, but would have held the case pending the Supreme Court's resolution of Viramontes and Grant. Quoting the laws at issue in those cases, which could resolve AJNRPC, two definitions demonstrate (my observation) the utter irrationality of "assault weapon" bans. Cook County includes the feature of a rifle "without a stock attached," while Connecticut includes a rifle with a "folding or telescoping stock" attached. Which of these contradictory features pray tell make the rifle so dangerous?

Judge Jennifer Lee Mascott concurs in part, agreeing with Judge Matey that it is unnecessary to remand the case to the district court for further factfinding. She warns about misinterpretation of the "dangerous and unusual" concept: "But turning that designation into an antitype risks signaling to assertive State regulators that establishing a Second Amendment basis for regulation can be accomplished simply by labeling a firearm use 'dangerous and unusual' rather than affirmatively demonstrating historical evidence for the regulation as commanded by the Supreme Court."

Judge Cindy Chung concurs in part and dissents in part. She maintains that "common use" is determined at Bruen's step one and does not include "a type of weapon one would expect to be used for modern warfare; nor does the term embrace weapons most commonly used for criminal ends." Instead, common use includes a weapon "an ordinary person would have at home for purposes like protecting oneself against violent interpersonal confrontation, protecting the home, and hunting." At step two, Judge Chung writes that "a weapon not commonly worn in public causes a terror to the people." She opines that a remand is necessary to apply that standard.

Judge Patty Schwartz, joined by three other judges, dissents. The thrust of her opinion is that "the objective features of AR-15s and LCMs render them disproportionate to 'ordinary self-defense needs' and thus outside the scope of the Second Amendment's protection." Her opinion fails to articulate what exactly those "objective features" are. While no government in the world issues it as a standard service weapon, she asserts that the AR-15 is "an unusually dangerous tool used by the military and not an arm in common use by civilians for self-defense."

Judge Cheryl Ann Krause dissents, complaining that the majority disregards "the democratic will of the People of New Jersey" based on "the novel theory that these weapons are 'in common use' because modern-day manufacturers have pumped a sufficient (yet undefined) number of them into nationwide circulation and some (again, undefined) percentage of gunowners assert their subjective intent to use them only for lawful purposes." Apparently, consumers buy AR-15s because manufacturers make them do so, not because such rifles and magazines are superior to the inferior ones New Jersey foists upon them. And gunowners can't be trusted when they explain why they purchase them.

Finally, Judge D. Brooks Smith dissents, agreeing with two other dissents and "the persuasive reasoning of Judge Wilkinson" in the Bianchi case from the Fourth Circuit. That "persuasive reasoning" flouts the Supreme Court's common-use test and exaggerates the power of AR-15s, without regard to the caliber of any specific rifle.

It's been a long time coming. The New Jersey ban was originally enacted in 1990. I litigated a pre-Bruen challenge based on vagueness and equal protection, Coalition of New Jersey Sportsmen v. Whitman (D. N.J. 1999), aff'd (3d Cir. 2001) (no reported opinion). We demonstrated that several "assault firearm" listings like "Avtomat Kalashnikov" (which means a full automatic in Russian) are machine gun names. And the catchall "substantially identical" firearms alerted the public about like "other stuff like that" would. I recall one of the judges on the Third Circuit panel asserting that "everyone knows what an assault firearm is, it's a submachinegun with a silencer."

The Third Circuit has now taken Second Amendment rights seriously, and the tables appear to be turning.

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Russia Labels Libertarian Party a 'Foreign Agent,' Effectively Ending Its Political Activity

2026-07-22T20:40:40Z

Every Friday, the Russian Ministry of Justice adds new names to its dreaded Register of Foreign Agents, which identifies people and organizations who have allegedly received foreign support while engaging in political activities. This past week, the Libertarian Party of Russia (LPR) and 24 of its members were added to the list.

The registry lists the LPR as an unincorporated public association that disseminated materials of other "foreign agents" and "unreliable information" about the electoral system and policies of the Russian government. Among other allegations, the LPR has been accused of opposing the war in Ukraine and calling for violations of Russia's territorial integrity, according to Russian news agency Interfax.

Being placed on the register means the party can no longer engage in virtually any sort of activity, notably organizing events or participating in elections.

According to a statement provided to Reason, the LPR believes that the "foreign agent" designation was triggered by the Russian government's decision in February to name the International Alliance of Libertarian Parties (IALP) as an "undesirable organization." Although the LPR had no connection with the IALP and issued a public statement distancing itself from the organization, it appears this decision "may have been the first signal from the authorities that libertarians should abandon their fight for the rights and freedoms of Russians," says the party.

Adopted in 2012, Russia's "foreign agents" law empowers the Ministry of Justice to label NGOs as "foreign agents" if they receive foreign funding and engage in political activity. Amendments adopted in 2022 broadened the law to cover media organizations and individuals, including those who do not receive foreign funding but are considered to be "under foreign influence." The legislation, however, does not specify what qualifies as foreign influence, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which cited the Ministry of Justice in saying only 4 percent of the people and organizations added to the "foreign agents" register in 2025 were designated based on foreign funding.

Failing to comply with the vague requirements of Russia's foreign agent laws (which include labeling and reporting rules) will expose LPR members to administrative or criminal liability, including fines, searches, and imprisonment.

In a statement posted to Telegram and X, the LPR condemned the registry placement and denied receiving any foreign support or funding. It also called the move a politically motivated attack by the government to restrict speech and conduct critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"As advocates of individual liberty, freedom of speech, and freedom of association, all of which are enshrined in the Constitution of the Russian Federation, we condemn any attempts to exert pressure on our fellow party members, including the imposition of absurd statuses that have no legal basis, no connection to physical reality or common sense, and that contradict the country's fundamental law," the party said.

Many of those the Ministry of Justice designated as "foreign agents" are prominent figures in one faction of Russia's divided libertarian community, which currently includes two different organizations calling themselves the Libertarian Party of Russia. Among those listed are disputed LPR Chairman Marina Matsapulina and the politician and activist Mikhael Svetov, who was at the center of a party split in 2020. For individuals, the new status will make "their lives significantly more difficult," says the LPR, as they are now required to disclose their "foreign agent" designation in many contexts, which will negatively affect their employment and educational prospects.

Since its formation in 2008, the party has made several unsuccessful attempts to gain official registration. Nevertheless, the party has run candidates in elections, at times in coalition with the leading opposition party PARNAS. In 2012 and 2014, LPR candidates won at the municipal level. The party has also organized a series of large protests and rallies, each of which drew thousands throughout the last decade.

The LPR's open activism, though, has slowed down after authorities began widespread suppression of anti-government activity following the arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Others in the party left Russia after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. Many party members have faced prior direct persecution by the state, including Matsapulina, who was forced to leave Russia in 2022 after being accused of "telephone terrorism" due to her participation in anti-war protests.

While the LPR has sought legal counsel to appeal the government's decision, the overall assessment of their situation is pessimistic: "We do not expect that these restrictions and prohibitions can be overturned through the courts or by any other legal means," says the party. As a result, Russian libertarians will likely face even greater persecution in the future as Putin's authoritarian regime continues to tighten its grip.

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Global Hunger Falls From 35% in 1970 to 7.8%

2026-07-22T20:17:47Z

Global hunger declined for the third consecutive year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 report.

The new report estimates that 7.8 percent of the world's people were undernourished in 2025.

FAO

The FAO report notes that less than 2.5 percent of people living in the U.S., Canada, Eastern Asia, and Europe are undernourished. Therefore, its calculations chiefly encompass the extent of hunger in developing countries in Africa, Latin America, and the rest of Asia.

Armed conflict and violence remain the primary drivers of acute food insecurity in 12 out of 13 hunger hotspots identified by the World Food Programme and the FAO.

The drop to 7.8 percent is a huge improvement since 1970, when undernourishment afflicted nearly 35 percent of people living in developing countries.

The new estimate is down from 8.1 percent in 2024 and 8.5 percent in 2023. Overall, 645 million people were still facing hunger in 2025.

While that is good news, the new estimate remains above the pre-pandemic nadir of 7.2 percent in 2017. The FAO report projects that the level of hunger will decline by 20 percent during the rest of this decade, but that 510 million people will still be undernourished in 2030. This trend falls well short of the United Nations' sustainable development goal of zero hunger by 2030.

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France Passes Social Media Ban for Under-15s, Leading Europe's Crackdown on Internet Freedom

2026-07-22T20:02:02Z

Amidst the global push to crack down on kids' internet usage, France this week became the first member of the European Union to pass a social media ban for children under the age of 15.

French President Emmanuel Macron, whose term ends next year, has pushed for social media bans before. Last June, he urged the European Union to implement a social media ban for children under 15 after a 14-year-old boy fatally stabbed a teaching assistant during a bag search, reported Reuters. Macron told a French public broadcaster at the time that if the E.U. failed to act, France would take action.

On Tuesday, Macron finally got his wish, with both chambers of Parliament passing the legislation, which also includes a high school phone ban, by overwhelming margins. The bill still has to be finalized by the Constitutional Council before it becomes law.

"Under the terms of the law," The New York Times reports, "it would be up to social media platforms to use age verification systems to filter out underage users." Exceptions would exist for online encyclopedias and educational digital services. The ban would apply to existing accounts starting in January of next year, according to The Guardian.

Despite its popular support, the bill is not without its detractors. As the Associated Press reports, "lawmakers from the left-wing party France Unbowed opposed the bill, arguing that its constitutionality is unclear, that it would effectively end online anonymity, and that it would be impossible to enforce."

But critics of restrictive social media policies remain a minority, as the online "safety" movement gains global momentum. Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain are also drafting laws to restrict social media use, according to The New York Times. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has suggested that the European Union may soon face age-verification measures, and the United Kingdom has plans underway to enforce a social media ban for kids under 16 by next year. Notably, Australia passed a law banning kids under 16 from social media in 2024, but the country's young people have found sneaky ways to skirt the restrictions.

Even if tech-savvy kids can use VPNs and other workarounds to access age-restricted apps, government-imposed social media bans still create a chilling effect online. As Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has noted, whatever remains of the open internet may soon be upended by overly zealous regulators. When we allow governments to regulate the internet and social media, Brown recently wrote, "we normalize the idea that every online interaction should be traceable and every forum we visit should know who we are."

France's ban reinforces the idea that bureaucrats and the state, not parents or individuals, should control and gatekeep access to social media. Most disturbingly, few voices oppose these restrictive measures. In fact, much of the Western world appears ready to embrace these laws and relinquish online freedom in the name of "protecting children." The end of the open internet will be ushered in with popular support by the world's most "free" countries.

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Will Courts Uphold the EPA's Rescission of the "Endangerment Finding"?

2026-07-22T19:47:59Z

In February, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a regulation rescinding the so-called "endangerment finding"--the finding that the emission of greenhouse gases from mobile sources cause or contribute to air pollution that can be reasonably anticipated to endanger public health or welfare. As expected, environmental groups and blue states have already filed suit challenging the rescission. Some of the suits raise fanciful arguments, while others advance more traditional administrative law claims. The question is now in the courts.

Rescission of the endangerment finding was one of the Trump Administration's top environmental priorities, but some of us have been skeptical that endangerment repeal does much to advance the administration's deregulatory priorities (let alone a rational climate policy).

Reviewing the EPA's final rule and it justification, I believe my skepticism was justified. As I explain in the summer issue of Regulation, the EPA's move is "a costly, symbolic gesture that will divert administration resources from more meaningful deregulatory initiatives and does nothing to advance a rational climate change policy."

From the article:

The EPA's current position is that under the "best reading" of the CAA, Section 202 "does not authorize the Agency to prescribe emission standards in response to global climate change concerns." I have sympathy for this view, having drafted an amicus brief for the Cato Institute making just this argument. The problem is that the Supreme Court concluded otherwise in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007). The EPA offers other arguments to circumvent this holding, but they are wholly unpersuasive.

Contrary to the EPA's protestations, the Supreme Court in Massachusetts held squarely that the "EPA has the statutory authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles." Rejecting the George W. Bush administration's arguments that Congress had not authorized the EPA to address climate change, the Court declared it had "little trouble concluding" that Section 202 "authorizes EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles in the event that it forms a 'judgment' that such emissions contribute to climate change." So much for the agency's claim that the statute can be read to preclude EPA regulation "based on global climate change concerns." . . .

It does not matter if the EPA (again) believes the Massachusetts decision was wrong and the CAA was never meant to apply to greenhouse gases. The Court has given the act a definitive interpretation to the contrary, and the Court rarely reconsiders its own prior statutory interpretations. If the Court got a statute wrong, that is a mistake for Congress to fix.

The EPA tries to claim that intervening Supreme Court decisions, such as Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) and West Virginia v. EPA (2022), call for a new interpretation of the CAA, but those arguments also fall flat. In Massachusetts the Court found that the statutory text was clear and rejected the argument that it should pause before concluding Congress authorized the agency to regulate the most ubiquitous byproduct of modern civilization (what we would now call a "major question"). Were that not enough, in Loper Bright Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the majority opinion, went out of his way to make clear that the Court's decision did not "call into question" statutory interpretations reached in prior cases. Rather, he explained, the holdings of such cases, and the conclusions reached about what statutes require or what agency actions are lawful, "are still subject to statutory stare decisis."

The EPA puts forward some alternative arguments, but I do not find them any more persuasive.

Reading the EPA's rule, one might conclude that the agency understands its legal arguments are weak so long as Massachusetts v. EPA remains good law, and is hoping the Supreme Court will conclude this decision was wrongly decided and reverse it. I doubt this will happen, but would also suggest that the EPA and endangerment-finding-repeal supporters might not like what overturning Massachusetts could unleash..

Even if there are five votes to revisit Massachusetts v. EPA, those cheering endangerment rescission should be careful of what they wish for. Like it or not, it was the Supreme Court's conclusion that greenhouse gases are subject to regulation under the CAA that dictated the outcome in American Electric Power v. Connecticut (2011), in which the Court held that federal common law nuisance suits against fossil fuel emitters are displaced by federal statute. As the Court explained in American Electric Power, existing doctrine requires the displacement of federal common law causes of action where Congress has entered the field by enacting a relevant statute. Should the Massachusetts holding be undone, however, placing greenhouse gases and climate change concerns beyond the scope of the law, there would no longer be any basis to bar such suits from federal court. And were Massachusetts to be undone in this manner, it is possible that federal preemption of state greenhouse gas emission standards—such as those sought by California—would be cast aside as well. Congress may have put an end to CAA waivers for California greenhouse gas emission standards for new motor vehicles through the Congressional Review Act, but if greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles are no longer subject to CAA regulation, it is not clear why any such waiver would be required, or why such standards could only be adopted by California—though other statutes may still preclude state standards that operate as de facto fuel efficiency requirements.

I conclude:

The legal risks of rescinding the endangerment finding might be justified if there was no other way to scale back federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet that is not the case. The endangerment finding itself is no obstacle to the relaxation or rescission of existing greenhouse gas emission regulations, including those imposed on motor vehicles. The relevant statutory text provides ample basis for ending regulation of such emissions from stationary sources, and there are strong legal arguments having nothing to do with endangerment that the EPA lacks the statutory authority to push automakers toward the production and promotion of electric cars. Such deregulatory moves would be quite straightforward, but they do not have the symbolic appeal of rescinding endangerment.

Administrator Zeldin called the endangerment finding "the holy grail of the climate change religion." It may be more accurate to describe it as the great white whale of the second Trump administration's EPA.

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The End of Independent Agencies

2026-07-22T19:26:10Z

Members of the Federal Trade Commission are no longer protected from presidential removal without cause. Humphrey's Executor--or whatever was left of it--is dead. Congress may not limit the President's authority to remove principal officers who exercise executive power (save for members of the Federal Reserve, apparently). This is the consequence of Trump v. Slaughter.

The practical effects of Slaughter may not be immediately apparent, or so I suggest in my latest Civitas Outlook column. So-called "independent agencies," such as the Federal Trade Commission, have not been meaningfully independent for some time. For years, most such agencies have aligned their agendas with that of the President. But the Slaughter decision may have some other effects on the operation of such agencies that have been under-appreciated (or so I suggest). From my column:

Just as legislative leaders have exercised less independence from presidents of their own party, members of independent agencies have divided more clearly and consistently into reliable voting blocs. Here, as elsewhere, the separation of powers has become more the separation of parties. Combined with the increased centralization of power and control by the Chairs of some agencies, as appears to have occurred at the FTC during Lina Kahn's tenure as Chair, the composition of multi-member agencies has become far less important than who holds the Chair position. At the same time, it has become common practice for agency Chairs to step aside when a new President is inaugurated, as Kahn did once Trump began his second term, even though their terms often extend well beyond a four-year presidential term.

There are exceptions here, some of which are important. Slaughter would seem to indicate that the President can remove FEC commissioners at will, but this will not enable a president to control what the FEC does. Removing members of the FEC the President does not like will not ensure the FEC aligns with the President's agenda. But it appears to allow the President to disable the FEC from acting. In the wake of Slaughter, the President removed all remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, potentially leaving it unable to assist states with election administration or to establish rules governing mail voter registration applications.

Many of the affected boards and commissions also have quorum requirements that prevent them from taking certain actions without enough commissioners or board members in place. Removing members of such agencies may prevent them from acting contrary to the President's wishes, but it could also prevent the agency from acting at all, particularly if the Senate does not cooperate by quickly confirming a President's replacement nominees. Unlike traditional executive-branch agencies, vacancies on multi-member commissions cannot be filled with interim or acting appointments under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. So while a President may wish to remove members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) deemed too solicitous of unfair labor practice complaints filed by unions, if removing board members leaves the NLRB without a quorum, it could bar the Board from ruling in favor of complaints brought by employers as well, and prevent the revision or rejection of disfavored agency precedent.

You can read the whole thing here.

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FCC Wants To Ban Drones It Already Approved for Sale

2026-07-22T19:00:23Z

This week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed expanding a ban on drones from other countries—including products it had previously approved and that are currently being sold in stores.

Two FCC agencies "propose to prohibit the continued importation and marketing of certain previously authorized equipment that has been determined to 'pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons,'" according to a notice published July 17. "In particular, we propose to apply such prohibitions to certain previously-authorized foreign-produced uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and UAS critical components, and certain communications and video surveillance equipment."

The ban would apply not just to drones and drone parts but also components like cameras. The notice mentions nine manufacturers by name, which the FCC seems to suspect are just front companies repackaging and selling products by DJI, a Chinese company that accounts for over 90 percent of the consumer drone market worldwide. Earlier this month, after eight of the named companies did not respond to requests for information, the FCC proposed instituting a fine of $25,000 to each one.

Federal law directs the FCC to keep a list of "communications equipment or services that pose a national security risk." The agency then prohibits any equipment on the "covered" list from being sold, imported, or advertised in the U.S. by refusing to authorize its transmitters.

In December, the FCC banned all drones and drone components produced outside the U.S. "Ensuring a strong and resilient drone industrial base is an economic and national security priority. Relying on foreign-made UAS threatens national security," the notice read, though it gave no specifics.

But the new proposal goes a step further. The December ban clarified it "does not impact a consumer's ability to continue using drones they previously purchased or acquired," nor would it prevent "retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market" previously approved models. Now, the agency is explicitly proposing to ban devices it had already approved for sale, which in many cases are currently on store shelves.

The agency granted itself this authority in October 2025, voting to "revise" its rules "by adopting a mechanism to limit the continued importation and marketing of such previously authorized covered equipment." The new rule directed regulators to conduct a "public interest analysis" on each item, "giv[ing] particular weight to the fact that the relevant equipment was determined to pose 'an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the safety and security of United States persons.'"

"If the FCC's retroactive ban goes into effect, [covered products] should disappear from all major online retailers," Sean Hollister writes at The Verge, "and the company may even need to write off however many cameras are still sitting in US warehouses like Amazon's."

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has long supported banning DJI, calling for adding the company to the covered list in 2021. A 2017 Department of Homeland Security intelligence bulletin warned DJI was "likely providing U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to [the] Chinese government."

But for all its talk about DJI and other drone manufacturers posing a grave risk to Americans, the government has not been forthcoming with proof.

"The US government has never provided specific public evidence that foreign drones pose a national security threat to begin with, or why other products like cameras should be caught up in that ban," Hollister adds.

For its part, DJI claims that an independent security audit of its products found "no evidence of data transmission outside the United States," "no backdoors or unauthorized remote access mechanisms," and "no unexplained radio frequency emissions."

It's certainly possible for Chinese-made drones to pose a threat to national security. "Beijing's national security laws give the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) the ability to access any data collected by Chinese companies, including drone imagery," Chris Wingate of the Heritage Foundation wrote last year. "That means every flight over a power plant, a military facility, or a U.S. city risks feeding information back to an adversary."

But if the government decides on a whim that a consumer good it previously approved must be pulled from shelves and banned for sale, it should at least go to the trouble of proving its case.

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Where Can the Data Centers Go?

2026-07-22T18:41:05Z

During a discussion of data centers' environmental and public health impacts at yesterday's meeting of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) asked what one would assume she thought was a devastating rhetorical question.

"Ask Peter Thiel, ask Elon Musk, ask Mark Zuckerberg if they want one of these data centers in their own backyard," she said. "Ask any one of us here on this committee. If anyone wants to live right next to one of these data centers here on this committee, please raise your hand."

This is pretty standard populist demagoguery. The billionaires investing in data centers don't want to live next to them, so why should you have to?

The congresswoman is probably not wrong that few billionaires would want to live next to a data center. If you can afford the scenic ocean view, why choose a boxy warehouse building full of computers as your neighbor?

Ocasio-Cortez's latest anti-data center grandstanding does raise one question, though. Where exactly does she think data centers can go?

In her committee remarks, she references two specific data centers: xAI's massive new facility in southwest Memphis and Meta's site in Stanton Springs industrial park in rural Georgia.

The former has provoked local opposition because of power-generating gas turbines the company installed on-site that produce nitrogen oxide emissions.

Community groups and environmental organizations have sued xAI, alleging Clean Air Act violations.

For their part, the company and local officials say that many of the gas turbines have been turned off following the construction of a new substation to provide power to the site and that they were adding scrubbing technology to cut their emissions.

Meta's Stanton Springs site has been a steady staple of Ocasio-Cortez's committee hearing attacks on data centers. In May, she held up a jar of dirty water, which she claimed had been contaminated during the site's construction.

Meta itself strongly denies that its data center project has caused any pollution of local water sources. Local officials told the Environmental Protection Agency they hadn't seen any increased requests for well water testing. For context, the water pollution some have attributed to Meta's project is limited to a handful of private wells.

Meanwhile, xAI's Memphis data center is in an industrial area of the city that has long been host to pretty dirty industries, including "fossil fuel burning, steel, refining, and food processing industries."

One can understand why locals who've long contended with nearby polluting industries would want to limit any additional sources of harmful emissions.

Even so, if every industrial use in South Memphis were replaced by a data center, the air would almost certainly get a lot cleaner.

Compare South Memphis to a place like Loudon County, Virginia, which hosts the world's largest concentration of data centers. According to the American Lung Association, the county's air has continued to get a lot cleaner, even as data center construction has grown exponentially in the area.

All things considered, data centers are pretty innocuous land uses. They consume water and power and produce heat.

They can be dirtier if they, like xAI's Memphis facility, burn fuel to produce their own power on-site.

Their construction can also cause negative environmental impacts, although that's more attributable to the fact that these facilities are big than to the idea that data center operations are inherently dirty.

Regulation has a role to play in mitigating the pollution they do cause. But markets already do a lot to reduce data centers' local impacts.

These are big, land-hungry facilities. That's why most data centers are built in existing industrial zones and/or rural areas where land is cheap.

Land is cheap in those areas because there isn't a lot of competition for acreage from people and businesses that also want to locate there.

In other words, the economics of data centers encourage these facilities to be built in areas where there aren't a lot of people who'll be affected by their (usually minimal) local impacts.

Ocasio-Cortez is seizing on, at best, an outlier of a relatively dirty data center, in the case of xAI's Memphis site, and a likely made-up panic, in the case of Meta's Georgia facility, to argue that even rural and industrial areas are too pristine to host data centers.

It's worth noting that even when data centers are planned for the literal middle of nowhere, as is the case with the massive Stratos data center in rural Box Elder County, Utah, people still find reasons to oppose it.

But if one has any optimism about the prospects of AI, or even just likes streaming Spotify and using Google Docs, data centers have to go somewhere.

The post Where Can the Data Centers Go? appeared first on Reason.com.

Nobody Likes Red Tape, Not Even Mamdani

2026-07-22T17:31:16Z

New York City government isn't known for cutting red tape. But this week, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (yes, the democratic socialist) announced more than 50 reforms that would eliminate unnecessary regulations and high permitting and licensing fees for small businesses.

The reforms, unveiled on Monday, cover a variety of small business issues, from outdoor dining rules to pawnbroker licenses. During a speech in the Bronx, Mamdani announced that the city would work with the state to eliminate the frozen dessert permit, which requires restaurants that already have food permits to "seek out a superfluous second permit for what they're already doing."

He also said the current state of regulatory affairs for barbershops is "anti-fade," as shop owners must obtain three different permits to operate their business. Mamdani announced the city would work with the state to streamline those permits as well. Among dozens of other reforms, the Mamdani administration will also reduce street fair vendor permit fees, speed up restaurant inspections, and cut equipment registration fees from $110 to $0 for 12 months.

Not all reforms will be implemented immediately, and those that can't be carried out by city agencies will "require rule changes, City Council legislation, or cooperation from Albany before business owners see the effects," reported amNY.

In addition to these proposed regulatory changes, Mamdani signed an executive order on Monday creating a task force of city agencies that will continue to identify opportunities for reform. The executive order also expands the city's Business Express Service Team, which will assign new businesses a client manager to guide them through permitting, inspections, and licensing processes.

Mamdani's small business reform announcement is not surprising to those who have followed his rise. In January 2025, before he was a national figure, he released a video called "NYC is Suffering from Halalflation," in which he explained how licensing fees and regulatory hurdles made the street food more expensive. A few months later, he promised to cut fines and fees for small businesses by 50 percent in another campaign video. Then, two weeks after he took office, he signed an executive order that stated, "the City must ensure that it is not contributing to the affordability crisis through fees, civil penalties, or regulations that are outdated, unnecessary, or otherwise creating undue hardship for honest small businesses." The executive order directed city agencies to recommend ways to eliminate barriers facing small businesses. Monday's proposed reforms, outlined in the Overhauling Procedures and Expanding Navigation (OPEN) plan, are the "result of those conversations."

He has also attempted to improve government efficiency by creating the Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE). As Reason has noted before, COGE (a nod to Elon Musk's DOGE) is gathering input from New Yorkers about ways to streamline government processes, but it's unlikely the commission will meaningfully cut the size and scope of city government.

Mamdani is clearly no libertarian icon. He has proposed opening government-run grocery stores, pushed for freezing the rent, and has called for higher taxes on the city's top contributors. Mamdani's free-market critics are well justified in opposing these policies. But if Mamdani's critics are principled, they will welcome these pro-small business reforms.

The post Nobody Likes Red Tape, Not Even Mamdani appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump's New DOJ Nominee Wants To Ban Online Porn and Prosecute Big Tech

2026-07-22T17:09:38Z

Just when I thought that Biden-era antitrust antagonism against tech companies was starting to fade, President Donald Trump has nominated Adam Candeub to lead antitrust enforcement at the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Currently serving as general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission, Candeub recently penned a report about how we need to criminalize pornography in order to protect marriage and promote human flourishing. Earlier generations, which he calls on us to emulate, took "measures to curb access to [sexual material] so that sexual desire could be channeled more easily into marriage," he wrote.

Lest there's any doubt that Candeub doesn't simply want to target hardcore porn, he scoffs at 20th century judges who "imagined they had a moral duty to protect James Joyce's Ulysses."

That escalated quickly, no?

Candeub also appears to take an expansive view of antitrust enforcement, at least when it comes to Big Tech companies. In a chapter of the Heritage Foundation's infamous Project 2025, Candeub suggests taking social media's effect on our happiness into account when considering whether these platforms are violating antitrust laws.

Bringing Back Comstock

In "Restoring Obscenity Regulation in an Internet Age," put out by the Heritage Foundation, Candeub applauds the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which allowed for mandatory ID checks on websites with content that lawmakers deem "harmful to minors."

He also wants to take things further: "This decision opens the door both to a reconsideration of the current legal structure governing obscenity and, perhaps, to a return to the regulatory approach of the past," he wrote.

In the past, "speech restrictions that [furthered] public morality" were cool and "common law courts could sanction as libel 'any writings, pictures, or the like, of an immoral or illegal tendency," noted Candeub. In New York, the 1866 Obscene Literature Act "made it a crime for any person to sell or give away any 'obscene and indecent' book, pamphlet, drawing, painting, or photograph." Courts honored what was known as the Hicklin standard, under which determining whether material counted as criminal obscenity turned on whether it would "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" and "states brought legal actions against Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen, James Joyce's Ulysses—and even books like Cupid's Yoke, a polemical critique of marriage that recommended sex outside of conjugal bonds."

Are these the regulatory approaches of the past that Candeub wants to emulate? He doesn't explicitly endorse prosecuting people for literature. But he does go on to call our current approach to enforcing anti-obscenity laws "a social suicide pact."

Candeub might not want to start arresting sellers of Ulysses again today, but he does propose increasing online surveillance to enforce blocks on minors viewing sexual content ("age estimations can be made simply by analyzing publicly available online information such as your email address or even pictures of your hand movements"). And he advocates for using state and federal laws to prosecute porn websites and other online entities through which people might find porn.

"The most optimistic result under current law would be…obscenity actions for internet-distributed pornography in state courts; the existing federal laws, specifically the modern version of the Comstock Act, prohibit obscene material from interstate transmission," he wrote. "Motivated state and local prosecutors could still get convictions in conservative communities, and national prosecutors could go against the big platforms like Google, which do not enjoy immunity from federal laws, for distributing obscenity."

A Broader Agenda

Lest anyone think that Candeub's animosity toward internet entities only involves the sexual, Michael McGrady notes that "he also was a key player in the first Trump administration's effort to get rid of Section 230."

"Candeub's arguments are about far more than pornography," suggests McGrady. "He is contributing, from his position as a top government legal official, to a much broader effort to revive long-discredited obscenity and vice legal doctrines and expand government authority over lawful expression and activity."

As we've seen all too often over the past couple of decades, efforts to regulate the internet on the grounds of stopping porn, sex work, or sexual exploitation are all too often test cases for going after online speech and privacy more broadly.

But, you might ask, what does antitrust enforcement have to do with free speech?

Perhaps plenty, if Candeub-style antitrust maximalism starts taking off.

In his Project 2025 chapter on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Candeub signaled that he's open to the kind of perversion of longstanding antitrust theory that we saw from Biden-administration appointees like former FTC head Lina Khan and White House policy adviser Tim Wu.

Candeub Sounds Like Lina Khan

"Despite their enormous size, [large internet platforms] have avoided significant antitrust liability or prosecution," Candeub wrote in Project 2025. "The reasons for this are not entirely clear."

He admitted that Big Tech companies "have been incredibly innovative and have generated tremendous efficiencies for our society, with little to no evidence of traditional consumer harm in the form of higher prices, reduced output, or a lack of innovation." He further pointed out that "Americans report a high level of satisfaction in and trust regarding these companies."

But in deciding whether to go after Big Tech platforms with antitrust law, perhaps "traditional economic thinking" is inadequate, Candeau suggested.

After all, "social media makes Americans less happy," he wrote. "The FTC should be open to behavioral explanations, such as habit and small hedonic differences, as keys to
how platforms create and keep market power."

That sure sounds like a suggestion that the U.S. use antitrust law to investigate and possibly prosecute Big Tech companies for making their platforms too likable. And whatever you think about Big Tech companies, that would be an absurd expansion of government antitrust enforcement power—and set a precedent that could be used to go after all sorts of industries.

Candeub's chapter isn't all bad. He decries "regulatory capture" and the "'de-banking' of industries and individuals." He says that the FTC "must consider…the role of government itself in maintaining market concentration."

But he also derides concentrated economic power for "undermining small businesses and reducing their salubrious moral effect on American civil society"—again, shades of Kahn and Wu, who both argued that large size alone could be reason to regard a company as suspect.

That's not a great sign for Google or Apple. As DOJ antitrust head, Candeub would "take over DoJ's ongoing antitrust matters involving Big Tech, including Google's appeal of the landmark ruling deeming it an online search monopoly and the department's 2024 lawsuit accusing Apple of illegally monopolising smartphone markets," notes the Financial Times.

Using Antitrust to Accomplish Conservative Social Goals

The Times points out that "in Trump's first administration, Candeub helped execute the president's executive order cracking down on Big Tech over allegations that it muzzles conservative speech." And, in his Project 2025 chapter, he alludes to "collusion" between the Biden administration and Big Tech companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

The pressure put on large internet platforms by that administration—around the laptop story and other things—was certainly not good. But neither was the Trump administration's response. And saying sites lose Section 230 protection if they're not politically neutral would only lead to more government meddling in online content.

In Project 2025, Candeub suggested the FTC should investigate whether businesses are using "fashionable moral beliefs" like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or environment, social, and governance (ESG) for nefarious purposes. Additionally, "Congress should investigate ESG practices as a cover for anticompetitive activity and possible unfair trade practices," he wrote.

One need not like or support every harebrained corporate social responsibility scheme to understand how the federal government attacking companies over those policies is worse.

Ditto for government going after companies that refuse "to service a lawful activity, i.e., fossil fuel extraction or gun manufacturing." It's one thing to suggest that such policies are bad for business, unethical to shareholders, needlessly political, or so on. It's quite another to say we need the federal government investigating whether companies are engaging in a "political or social agenda that is unrelated to any conceivable branding" and punishing them if so.

Overall, Candeub appears comfortable wielding antitrust enforcement to accomplish government social goals, just as Kahn and other Biden-era officials did. Their goals may differ, but it's the same expansive enforcement vision.

In the News

Online "duty of care" bill to move forward again. A new version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), from Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, will get a markup in the Senate soon, and possibly this month. Blackburn has been opposing the heavy-handed House web-safety bill—but only because, in her opinion, it doesn't go far enough.

Blackburn wants to impose a "duty of care" on tech platforms that would effectively be an unprecedented online censorship machine, legally requiring tech platforms to shield minors—and, by extension, the rest of us—from exposure to all sorts of content.

It's at least heartening to hear Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) dismiss the new KOSA's chances of passing. "It's not clear to me at all that there are 60 votes for it," Cruz said Tuesday, "but I am happy to have a markup and see where the votes are."

"Blackburn's package also could include the NO FAKES Act—which would create new restrictions on AI deepfakes—and the Apps Store Accountability Act—which would require minors to obtain parental consent before downloading apps—according to a person granted anonymity to share private negotiations," reports Politico.

Read This Thread

Let's clear something up: the Long Island serial killer case is not evidence that the Nordic Model works. And yet it was presented like a smoking gun - as if a man capable of stalking, torturing, and killing multiple women was one solicitation charge away from a moral awakening.

— SWOP Behind Bars (@swopbehindbars.bsky.social) 2026-07-21T22:15:06.400Z

Follow-Up

More data that challenges "the end of reading" narrative. New York Times opinion writer David Wallace-Wells writes that he finds himself "growing more skeptical of the simplistic story that reading is going extinct," along with other simplistic tech stories:

We tell ourselves that the smartphone has brought about fertility decline, for instance, though those declines have been going on for three-quarters of a century. We tell ourselves phones have produced a teen mental health crisis, though in global surveys there is no obvious pattern to observe. We tell ourselves social media is the reason we have such intensely polarized politics, while failing to look at the historical patterns around the arrival of cable TV. That's not to say that smartphones aren't affecting any of these things. It's to say that no matter how ubiquitous, phones are just one piece of a very messy social landscape, which rarely shifts uniformly in one direction thanks to one discrete variable, let alone inevitably toward disarray and decline.

Wallace-Wells points out three key problems with the end-of-reading narrative recently promulgated by The Atlantic (which I also covered last week under the main section of this newsletter):

Average time spent reading daily was brief even before smartphones.
It hasn't declined that much (16.2 minutes per day in 2025, down from 21.9 minutes in 2003).
Older Americans are the ones driving the decline, while the amount of time spent reading has actually increased for Americans ages 15 to 24 and those aged 25 to 34.

So while reading comprehension may indeed be falling, "when you zoom out to take in decades of data, some recent declines are almost invisibly modest and others are higher than they were 50 years ago," notes Wallace-Wells:

Periodically, you'll hear lamentations that Americans don't spend enough time reading to their children, though the amount of time spent doing so hasn't declined over decades but actually crept up in recent years instead. And if you are imagining an idyllic earlier period in which parents devoted hours reading books to their children each day, you might want to know that in 1968 Nielsen reported that children under 6 were watching, on average, 54 hours of television each week.

Fifty-four hours?! I'm with Wallace-Wells that that seems "improbably high." But, as he points out, time with television on doesn't necessarily mean it was being watched exclusively or closely. In any event, that and other historical data on TV watching—U.S households had the TV on for an average of seven hours per day in the 1980s, for instance—suggest that some imagined utopia wherein we were eschewing screen time for more cerebral pursuits is, at the very least, long passed.

On Substack

Intelligence isn't everything. Ruxandra Teslo argues that AI-enabled medical breakthroughs are not enough—we need to get rid of "regulatory bottlenecks to medical progress," too. "No matter how 'intelligent' AI becomes, intelligence is often not the main bottleneck to things changing in the real world," Teslo points out:

One of the promises most often invoked to justify AI's risks is that it will "cure disease." Every major AI lab CEO says it, and investors seems to agree: any biotech startup with an AI story attached commands an impressive valuation, even as more conventional biotechs struggle for funding and die. But this whole enterprise, as I have long argued, is bottlenecked by many things that have little to do with "intelligence" as such, and the degree to which that often goes unacknowledged is strange to watch.
The evidence is everywhere, if you treat scientific advancement as a rough proxy for intelligence and ask whether it alone unblocks progress. Take Eroom's Law: the number of new drugs approved per dollar of R&D has fallen for decades, even as our scientific tools have grown vastly more powerful, the exact opposite of what the existence of more raw capability would predict. Or take a company like Adaptimmune, which has brought two transformative therapies to market in rare cancers and is nonetheless fighting to stay alive, due to the cost of developing them. Or one can listen to the scientists behind "baby KJ," the infant saved by a bespoke gene-editing therapy: they have everything they need scientifically and still cannot easily repeat it for the next child, because manufacturing costs, driven in part by regulatory requirements, stand in the way.

Clinical trials are a huge bottleneck, and "even here the binding constraint is not entirely intelligence," writes Teslo:

Quite often, it is governance. I keep talking to companies trying to build exactly these biomarkers, and what they run into, again and again, is how hard it is to access the underlying data. Some have been waiting for a year for the NIH to release imaging datasets they can use to produce better biomarkers. If one needs to interact with the FDA to get their endpoint validated, it is even worse: I have previously written about how the validation of Bone Mineral Density (BMD) for use as a surrogate endpoint in osteoporosis trials took 12 years (!), despite the fact that the data to support it already existed in full and the analyses done were basically regressions.

More here.

More Sex & Tech News

Americans of all ages are having less sex than they used (per @ryanburge). What are the main reasons? Watch this great @OpentoDebateOrg discussion I (a Boomer) led with a Gen Xer, Millennial, and Zoomer: https://t.co/WAVdLcUje8 pic.twitter.com/kx0nGnLxpH

— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) July 20, 2026

• "France has become the first country in the European Union to ban children under 15 from using social media after lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the measure on Tuesday," Daily Beast reports. French President Emmanuel Macron "hailed the vote on X, declaring that 'social media will be banned for children under 15 starting this school year.'"

• Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) is calling on the Department of Justice to criminally investigate an abortion pill manufacturer and Plan C, a group that informs people about how to get abortion pills in the mail. He suggests they may be guilty of criminal conspiracy, despite the fact that abortion pills are legal at the federal level and so is shipping them.

• Government-owned AI is a terrible idea, suggests Michael Bloomberg. "When the government becomes a shareholder in a private-sector entity, the positive effects of market competition can break down. Politics trump profits, favoritism and cronyism take root, innovation suffers, competitiveness erodes, and regulation is corrupted."

The post Trump's New DOJ Nominee Wants To Ban Online Porn and Prosecute Big Tech appeared first on Reason.com.

U Tennessee Track & Field Head Coach Seeks Preliminary Injunction Against "Untruthful, Derogatory and Offensive Statements" Plus More Commentary

2026-07-22T16:53:41Z

From a Report and Recommendations today by Magistrate Judge Jill McCook (E.D. Tenn.) in Ross v. Lambert:

According to the allegations in the Complaint, Plaintiff is a former collegiate track and field champion, 2004 Olympian, and the current Head Coach and Director of Track & Field at the University of Tennessee." In August 2022, Plaintiff hired Defendant "to serve as the track and field Recruiting Coordinator—which was a non-coaching, administrative position." Plaintiff alleges that less than a year later, in May 2023, he "advised [Defendant] that he was being terminated from his position as Recruiting Coordinator at the University of Tennessee." He claims that he "gave [Defendant] the option of 'voluntarily resigning' from his position in lieu of being fired for cause[,]" which Defendant accepted.

Plaintiff contends that on May 30, 2024, Defendant sent the Office of General Counsel at the University of Tennessee ("University") a demand letter ("May 30 Letter"), "threatening to sue the University and [Plaintiff] for 'wrongful termination and discrimination' if he did not receive payment of $150,000 from the University." According to Plaintiff, "Defendant … made a series of patently false and inflammatory allegations against [Plaintiff] in the [May 30] Letter and warned that he would go to the media with his allegations if the University did not settle." Specifically, the Complaint asserts that "[Defendant] made … knowingly false and derogatory statements[,]" including:

"Past Misconduct: Duane Ross has a documented history of questionable behavior. He received a two-year suspension from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for using performance-enhancing drugs, disqualifying all his results since November 2, 2001. His involvement in the BALCO steroid case further underscores his troubled past."

"Family Issues: His son, Randolph Ross Jr., has also been suspended for doping violations. Randolph Ross Jr.'s suspension through June 30, 2025, for whereabouts failures and tampering with an email raises questions about the environment and influence under Duane Ross's watch. Where do you think he learned that from?"

"Athlete Violations. Under His Watch: Under Duane Ross's leadership, North Carolina A&T faced multiple suspensions of top athletes for doping violations. Grace Nwokocha was suspended right before the World Championships for doping. Additionally, Ross used an athlete who was not cleared by the NCAA, resulting in the forfeiture of team titles and performances. These incidents, though they occurred before his tenure at Tennessee, are closely tied to him and paint a picture of ongoing integrity issues."

"Mr. Ross is not representing your brand appropriately, nor did he follow your procedures or policies, and I'm sure you provided him with all the tools to succeed and comply with your standards. This lack of competence raises serious questions about his ability to lead a program as esteemed as the University of Tennessee. At this point, he has proven to be a liability rather than an asset to the University."

The University rejected Defendant's demand.

Plaintiff claims that "[o]n or about March 3, 2025, less than two weeks before [Plaintiff's] team began competing at the 2025 NCAA Indoor National Championships, Defendant Lambert, under the pseudonym 'G. Fury,' released two songs on Apple Music and Spotify—titled 'Vault Talk' and 'Recruiter to Parent.'" "Both songs[,]" Plaintiff alleges, "contain defamatory lyrics impugning [Plaintiff's] character, including but not limited to allegations of drug use by [Plaintiff] and his athletes." Plaintiff states that Defendant also "published 'Vault Talk' and 'Recruiter to Parent' in a public Facebook group titled[,] The Real Deal Track & Field Group." "In early-to-mid March 2025," Plaintiff avers that "Defendant Lambert a/k/a G. Fury released three additional songs on Apple Music and Spotify." He asserts that one of those songs, "Laws of Attraction," "targeted [Plaintiff] with false and disparaging allegations of scandal and fraud." And later, Defendant sent "Laws of Attraction" to Plaintiff via text message.

"On March 13, 2025, Plaintiff submits that "Defendant … a/k/a G. Fury published another nine-track album titled, 'To C.A.P' on Apple Music and Spotify." Plaintiff claims that "[a] majority of the songs on the album are directed at [Plaintiff] and most, if not all of these songs, contain untruthful, derogatory and offensive statements about [him]" [Id.]. For instance, Plaintiff states that Defendant: "(i) alleges that [Plaintiff] and his son—who is an Olympic gold medalist and famous track and field star in his own right—of using [performance enhancing drugs]; (ii) claims that [Plaintiff] runs a dirty program at Tennessee; and (iii) accuses [Plaintiff] of infidelity." According to Plaintiff, Defendant's "album caught the attention of various social media personalities, who published stories about [Defendant's] music on various mediums."

"At or around this same time," Plaintiff represents that Defendant "began spreading rumors that [Plaintiff]—who is married with three children—had an affair with one of his female assistant coaches and fathered a daughter with that coach." He claims that Defendant, "in an intentional attempt to harass and embarrass [Plaintiff], posted on his Instagram and Facebook accounts multiple AI generated/doctored photographs of [Plaintiff's] three children along with the assistant coach's daughter … but digitally modified the girl's face to make it appear to be [Plaintiff's] face." Later, in June 2025, Plaintiff states that Defendant "released yet another song on Apple Music and Spotify titled 'S.L.A.P.,' which clearly and unmistakenly insinuates that a paternity test is needed to determine if [Plaintiff] fathered the assistant coach's daughter."

Plaintiff contends that Defendant "remained silent over the next several months until resurfacing on November 12, 2025, when he directly texted [Plaintiff] criticizing [his] recent signing of a new track and field recruit." But on December 5, 2025, Plaintiff states that Defendant "dramatically ramped up his malicious campaign of harassment and disparagement against [him]." According to Plaintiff, Defendant:

sent a defamatory and wildly inappropriate email to hundreds of individuals in the collegiate track and field community, including members of the University of Tennessee's athletic department as well as members of the athletic departments of various rival schools such as Vanderbilt University, the University of Florida, the University of South Carolina, the University of Alabama, and the University of Texas … The six-page email includes a bizarre fictional script ridiculing [Plaintiff] as well as links to over 50 songs (including each of the defamatory songs detailed above) recorded by [Defendant] and released on Apple Music and Spotify. An overwhelming majority of these songs target [Plaintiff] and are intended to defame, demean, and humiliate him[;]

posted a video on Instagram and Facebook of a fake newscast about the BALCO steroid doping scandal from the early 2000s (which [Defendant] has repeatedly tried to link to [Plaintiff]) and its purported connection to the University of Tennessee Track and Field program under [Plaintiff; and]

between December 12 and December 25, 2025, Defendant Lambert posted more than 20 videos on Instagram and Facebook attacking [Plaintiff's] character with blatantly false allegations of wrongdoing and/or creating highly offensive and demeaning fake videos using AI.

With respect to the AI generated videos, these include "video clips depicting [Plaintiff] … with Sean 'Diddy' Combs." Plaintiff alleges that Defendant continued making videos targeting him, which included accusations "of infidelity and impregnating (and then firing) his former assistant coach at the University."

Plaintiff contends that "on January 6, 2026, a few days before Tennessee's initial track and field meet of the 2026 season, Defendant … sent [Plaintiff] a text message in which he boasts that his campaign of defamation and cyber-harassment likely prevented [Plaintiff] from signing the top high school track recruit in the country to Tennessee's 2026 recruiting class." Plaintiff states that Defendant included in the text message "audio copies of two newly published songs by [Defendant] a/k/a/ 'G. Fury'— titled '3-years-left' and 'kinda-nice'—both of which defame [Plaintiff] and various athletes in the Tennessee program." According to Plaintiff, "[His] reputation—both professionally and personally—has been greatly damaged as a result of Defendant['s] … improper and wrongful conduct[,] and that [Defendant's] defamatory and offensive social media posts, music, and videos have been disseminated throughout the track and field community in the United States."

Plaintiff sought a TRO and preliminary injunction "enjoining Defendant from (1) contacting Plaintiff, (2) sending communications to various individuals, (3) publishing defamatory, disparaging, or offensive material that relate to Plaintiff or his family, and (4) making any public statements about certain topics {[i.e.,] about this litigation or about Plaintiff's conduct as a publicly employed coach at a state university}." But the Magistrate Judge recommended that no such injunction be issued; an excerpt:

"The First Amendment prohibits 'abridging the freedom of speech,' and the United States Supreme Court has interpreted this prohibition to forbid, among other things, 'prior restraints.'" "[P]ermanent injunctions—i.e., court orders that actually forbid speech activities—are classic examples of prior restraints." … "[I]n the case of a prior restraint on pure speech, the hurdle is substantially higher: publication must threaten an interest more fundamental than the First Amendment itself." The plaintiff's burden to establish that a prior restraint is warranted is heavy but "not impossible to overcome." Even so, "[P]rior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and least tolerable infringement on the First Amendment rights." …

[Plaintiff] asks the Court to enjoin Defendant from communicating with Plaintiff and others about Plaintiff, publishing statements about Plaintiff, and making any public statements about certain topics. In other words, he asks the Court to regulate Defendant's speech….

Plaintiff does not argue that the injunction is warranted to prevent an interest more fundamental than the First Amendment itself. Instead, Plaintiff claims that "the relief sought is narrowly tailored to protect [him] from serious and consequential harm while placing only minimal limitations on Defendant Lambert's First Amendment right to free speech." That is not sufficient to restrict Defendant's First Amendment rights at this juncture.

Moreover, although Plaintiff characterizes his proposed injunction as "narrow in scope," the Court finds otherwise. Plaintiff seeks to enjoin Defendant from sending "defamatory or disparaging statements" to various individuals and entities. "An injunction against defamatory statements, if permissible at all, must not through careless drafting forbid statements not yet determined to be defamatory, for by doing so it could restrict lawful expression."

He also seeks to enjoin Defendant from "[m]aking any public statements" about certain topics. This is overly broad….

"[I]t would be extraordinary for a federal court to enter a preliminary injunction on a defamation claim." … "It appears wholly unprecedented, however, for a federal court to enter a preliminary injunction in a defamation case. In those defamation cases upholding the constitutionality of restraints on future speech, the injunctions were entered after the claims were adjudicated on the merits, and the injunctions were limited to the speech that was actually found to be defamatory by the fact-finder."

{Plaintiff relies on Lothschuetz v. Carpenter (6th Cir. 1990) and In re Conservatorship of Turner (Tenn. Ct. App. 2014), stating that they recognize or adopted the "modern rule" that permits injunctions restricting defamation. But the modern rule to which Plaintiff refers relates to courts entering injunctions after a determination on the merits…. "Six federal circuit courts of appeal have held that injunctions are permissible to prevent libel, but only after a finding on the merits that the speech is unprotected." … "… [A]lthough the usual rule provides that defamation may be remedied only by an action for damages, even application of the modern rule bars plaintiffs' requested injunction" because "there has been no final determination that defendant's statements are false and libelous."

I think that's right; for more, see the analysis in Anti-Libel Injunctions.

The post U Tennessee Track & Field Head Coach Seeks Preliminary Injunction Against "Untruthful, Derogatory and Offensive Statements" Plus More Commentary appeared first on Reason.com.

American Public Schools Lost 1.4 Million Students Since COVID. Their Budgets Grew by 34% Anyway.

2026-07-22T20:20:27Z

Since 2019, public school enrollment has fallen by 2.84 percent nationwide, an exodus of roughly 1.4 million. K-12 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Yet the amount spent on public schools nationwide grew by 34 percent from 2019 to 2024, according to NCES data.

Much of that is thanks to the nearly $190 billion Congress provided to state and local governments through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER), in three separate batches from March 2020 to March 2021. Now that the ESSER funds are largely spent, school districts are grappling with staffing decisions made during a spending boom that seems unlikely to be repeated anytime soon.

In its 2026 American School District Panel (ASDP) survey of public school officials across the country, research organization RAND found that "54 percent of district leaders" were worried about a budget shortfall, even though educational spending has increased across all levels of government, even after adjusting for inflation. On average, the U.S. spends about $17,644 per student, according to NCES. It's an increase of 34 percent from the NCES' 2019 estimate of $13,187.

Still, more money hasn't led to better student outcomes. At each grade level and across subject areas, there's a decline in current achievement when compared to student benchmarks from 2019. In 2024, the most recent data available, only 60 percent of fourth graders and 67 percent of eighth graders were reading at or above a basic level, the lowest performance tier used by the National Center for Education Statistics.

It doesn't get better as students age, with just 68 percent of high school seniors reading at or above a basic level.

The middling level of achievement isn't new, so why does spending continue to climb? The answer lies in state and local budgets, which provide over 80 percent of funding for public schools.

During COVID, several school districts nationwide implemented "hold harmless" budget provisions that guaranteed schools would receive as much funding as the previous year, regardless of enrollment rates. Post-pandemic, about 60 percent of states use some version of a hold-harmless provision for school funding, according to the education nonprofit EdChoice.

In turn, this has led to an imbalance between where students learn and where taxpayer money is spent.

Thanks to its hold-harmless provision, New York City will spend $290 million in 2027 to prevent budget cuts at public schools with declining enrollment, more than double what the city spent "prior to the beginning" of the 2025–26 school year, according to Chalkbeat. In Pennsylvania, student enrollment at public schools is down 1.8 percent since 2019, yet the state has increased the number of support staff hired by 2.7 percent over the same period. Spending on public education in the commonwealth is up year over year, and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro's latest budget represents a "nearly 35 percent increase" compared to previous years.

These budgeting stopgaps might be good for politicians, but they've done nothing to assuage parents, who continue to enroll their children elsewhere. Charter schools, meanwhile, have seen enrollment increase by about 15 percent, while enrollment at independent schools has remained relatively steady over the same period.

It also hasn't quelled administrators' concern about cuts, with some deciding to trim salaries, wages, and employee benefit accounts, which account for 76.8 percent of elementary and secondary school budgets. Last week, Chicago public schools announced it would have to lay off "760 teachers, 801 teacher aides and 162 central office and citywide staff" to deal with its $732 million budget deficit, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

With little link between funding and student achievement, it's fair to ask why taxpayers are footing the bill for public education systems that are more of a burden than a boon.

The post American Public Schools Lost 1.4 Million Students Since COVID. Their Budgets Grew by 34% Anyway. appeared first on Reason.com.

Capitol Police Anticipated Drone Plot Against UFC a Month Before It Was Uncovered

2026-07-22T15:38:00Z

The U.S. Capitol Police anticipated a drone attack on the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Freedom 250 event at the White House before the FBI broke up a plot to do exactly that, documents obtained by Reason show. An intelligence assessment on May 20 mentioned the possibility of "nefarious actors plotting to use weaponized drones" or to fire from "high vantage points" against UFC spectators. A month later, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd announced the first arrest in "a plot to murder members of the federal government" with a combined drone and sniper assault.

The Trump administration has used the alleged attack plot as an argument for a $600 million expansion to the White House. (Despite the administration's claims, about half the cost will come from American taxpayers.) "This Project will support a highly sophisticated Drone Port and Sniper Nests atop the Ballroom that would destroy any effort to launch such an attack," Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate wrote in a June 16 letter to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which is hearing a lawsuit by the National Trust for Historic Preservation against the project. But the FBI announcement and the newly disclosed Capitol Police document show that old-fashioned police work—not expensive defensive works or mass surveillance—was enough to protect the White House.

Like Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin, the suspected drone attackers were caught because a family member proactively went to the authorities. In its indictment, the government says it caught wind of the drone plot on June 10, when an Ohio woman called the police over her 19-year-old son's "firearms purchases and communicating with certain individuals online." The FBI searched the house and interrogated the son, who admitted to plotting a mass assassination of politicians with friends from a TikTok group. Authorities have arrested a total of eight suspects across the country, some of whom allegedly bought weapons and made travel plans. Two have pleaded not guilty so far, and others haven't had time to enter a plea.

The Capitol Police intelligence assessment wasn't based on any special foreknowledge of the plot. (Reason obtained it from a fusion center, a liaison office between the Department of Homeland Security and local police, under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act.) The intelligence bureau simply deduced something that was obvious: "High-ranking government officials attending [250th anniversary] events present attractive targets for violent extremist attacks and ideologically-motivated disruptions." Noting that "drone incursions during such special events are most likely to come from unwitting operators," the assessment cited several failed "nefarious actors plotting to use weaponized drones" in the past.

During the soccer World Cup, which happened in different cities across America in the month after Freedom 250, the FBI seized at least 700 civilian drones for violating flight restrictions. Federal authorities impose an automatic three-nautical-mile no-fly zone around major sports games for both manned and remote-controlled aircraft. With 326 events associated with the World Cup, there were a lot of opportunities for hobbyists to accidentally stray into restricted airspace. Although critics in the drone industry have been calling the sporting-related restrictions overly broad for years, the SAFER Skies Act of 2026 only tightened them, and the plot against UFC Freedom 250 makes it less likely that the government will show leniency.

Much of the Capitol Plot intelligence assessment about Freedom 250 focuses on the threat from Iran and Al Qaeda—which didn't manifest at all. Instead, the alleged drone plotters were motivated by a mix of left-wing and right-wing grievances. The indictment claims that suspects talked about their "ultra-religious [Christian] and anti-government sentiments," their support for Adolf Hitler and hatred of Jews, their desire to restore the "old republic," their belief that sex predator Jeffrey Epstein's associates run the government, stopping "data centers taking up all the water in communities," and fighting Israeli influence in politics.

Freedom 250 was also controversial for much more mundane reasons. UFC President Dana White is a close personal friend of President Donald Trump, and in addition to hosting a UFC event at the White House, the Trump administration has been trying to integrate the UFC into the State Department and FBI. An unsuccessful lawsuit to stop Freedom 250 called it a "deeply corrupt" use of government property. That might be the biggest irony of them all: The administration is using the security vulnerabilities created by a big, taxpayer-subsidized boondoggle to push for another vanity project at the taxpayer's expense.

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We've Been Wrong About Nuclear Power

2026-07-21T20:58:08Z

Zion Lights is a former spokesperson for the radical environmental group Extinction Rebellion, whose members are known for causing mass transportation stoppages and gluing themselves to planes to call attention to what they say is a "climate and ecological emergency." She has gone from protesting nuclear power plants to aggressively campaigning for their expansion as a way of helping the global poor raise their living standards.

Raised in Great Britain by working-class immigrants from rural Punjab, her new book is Energy Is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear. She talks with Nick Gillespie about how she came to reject the ubiquitous arguments against nuclear energy she encountered as a child, how guilt-ridden countries such as Germany are increasing pollution by shutting down nuclear power, and why oil-rich Gulf States are betting on renewable and clean energy sources.

0:00—The significance of a saucepan

5:15—Thesis of Energy is Life

9:07—Prosperity and guilt

17:38—Extinction Rebellion

21:36—Hostility toward nuclear energy

27:35—The safety of nuclear energy

31:10—France and Germany

36:56—Zion's revelation on nuclear energy

43:57—The nuclear energy industry

50:50—China and the United Arab Emirates

53:16—Energy policy

56:42—Taking technology for granted

The post We've Been Wrong About Nuclear Power appeared first on Reason.com.

Jailing Netanyahu

2026-07-22T13:23:25Z

Nabbing the "war criminal": Yesterday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani urged the federal government to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—whom Mamdani calls a "war criminal"—when he comes to Manhattan for diplomatic purposes in September.

Mamdani has, per a video released yesterday and a New York Times podcast interview that went out this past weekend, spent his precious time exploring whether the New York City Police Department could legally arrest Netanyahu during his expected visit to the city in September. Apparently his lawyers said the city does not have "independent legal authority" to do so—much to his dismay. So now Mamdani is asking the feds to do it.

In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu as well as his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. They stand accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip following Hamas' massive attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, in which the terrorist group entered Israel and slaughtered children, music festivalgoers, and families living in kibbutzes, killing roughly 1,200 and taking 251 hostages. Israel has subsequently waged war on Hamas, killing roughly 70,000 Palestinians in the Strip, though actual numbers are somewhat hard to verify at this stage (and the Gazan Ministry of Health is controlled by Hamas).

This ICC arrest warrant is mostly symbolic, not actionable. The ICC has no police force or real ability to make arrests, and the U.S. is not a member nation. "The ICC poses an intolerable threat to U.S. sovereignty—it claims the authority to prosecute and even imprison American servicemen and officials operating on behalf of America's national interest," reads a State Department release from earlier this month. "Americans never signed up for this, and all American presidents since the ICC's ratification have maintained that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over Americans. The ICC previously opened an investigation into U.S. servicemen and intelligence officers and has since refused to close these cases."

"I want to be equally clear: Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large," said Mamdani. "But we cannot end the genocide on our own. We can decide whether our silence will become another weapon."

Setting aside all the precedent-setting problems that would ensue if the New York Police Department arrested Israel's prime minister based on an arrest warrant issued by an organization the U.S. isn't even a part of, I am just not interested in Mamdani's performativeness. As unsexy as it may feel to him, I would rather my mayor figure out how to keep the streets clean, how to streamline permits for new housing, and how to make the subways run on time than waste energy and political will on stunts like this one.

Me at Model UN in high school: https://t.co/FRaTbnyUsZ pic.twitter.com/ZMRgBAC3nL

— Jesse Arm (@Jesse_Leg) July 22, 2026

Scenes from New York: This explains basically all of Brooklyn's "commie corridor" (where I live, sadly):

Downwardly mobile elites are the bread-and-butter of the Dems. https://t.co/VxS3ETlpR4

— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) July 21, 2026

QUICK HITS

"On Tuesday, a handful of oil tankers appeared to pause their journeys as they approached Yemeni waters heading into the Red Sea, while other ships laden with Saudi oil u-turned and sailed north towards the Suez Canal, after the Houthi rebel group sent an email to shipowners warning against calling at Saudi Arabia's ports," reports Bloomberg. "Still, other tankers continued to sail toward the area, according to vessel tracking data, and a number of buyers in Asia said earlier in the day they were still hoping to load cargoes there."
SEEMS BAD: "OpenAI said on Tuesday that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of A.I. technology that is popular among developers," reports The New York Times.
Just an extraordinary headline from The Wall Street Journal: "A Locomotive Named Big Boy Is Making Grown Men Cry"
"David Jolly, the Democratic front-runner in the Florida governor's race, on Tuesday reiterated his push to pause data center construction statewide as the facilities' impacts become an increasingly hot-button political issue nationwide," reports Politico. "In a video posted to the social media site X, Jolly said he had proposed a moratorium on data centers and slammed Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-endorsed GOP front-runner, for his stance on regulating the industry. The comments also echo similar statements Jolly made in Lakeland last week, when he advocated for a pause and argued Florida lacked the necessary safeguards to protect workers and the environment from data centers." Just to be clear: This is a pro–data center newsletter and ALWAYS WILL BE. (Recent polling from Politico shows just how out of step my priors are with the rest of the American public.)

The post Jailing Netanyahu appeared first on Reason.com.

Deliberately Arming Oneself to Answer Door to Police May Be "Privileged" Against "Obstructing Official Business" Prosecution

2026-07-22T03:57:33Z

From State v. Conrad, decided Monday by the Ohio Court of Appeals, in an opinion by Judge Eugene Lucci, joined by Judges Matt Lynch and Scott Ylnch:

In 2025, Conrad was living with his girlfriend and their ten-month-old son in Conrad's home in Wickliffe, Ohio. In April 2025, Conrad and his girlfriend were involved in a verbal altercation. After the girlfriend allegedly damaged Conrad's PlayStation console in the basement, Conrad called 911. He informed the dispatcher that he would be armed "because the cops are coming in here." The dispatcher responded, "Do not pick it up with your hands, okay?" Conrad stated, "Absolutely." After ending the 911 call, Conrad armed himself by holstering a handgun on his right hip and then went upstairs to await law enforcement.

When the first officer arrived, Conrad observed him approaching the front door on foot, at which point Conrad opened the door for the officer and informed him that he was armed. The officer responded by stating "pardon me" or "excuse me," and Conrad responded again that he was armed. The officer saw the firearm on Conrad's hip and informed him that he was going to relieve him of the gun. Conrad initially refused, stating, "No you're not," and he changed his stance by turning his right hip away from the officer. Conrad then motioned to or placed his hand on his gun, at which point the officer drew his own firearm. After loudly arguing as to whether Conrad was permitted to be armed, Conrad raised his hands and told the officer to take his gun. Approximately 23 seconds elapsed between the officer entering the home and the officer disarming Conrad.

After disarming Conrad, the officer spoke with him for several minutes regarding his decision to arm himself. During this conversation, Conrad indicated he had armed himself because he believed men were typically arrested when police were called for domestic matters, and he wanted to "eve[n] the playing field" because he was unsure how officers would respond and did not trust them. After speaking with Conrad, the first responding officer joined other officers who had arrived and were speaking to Conrad's girlfriend in the basement. The girlfriend indicated that Conrad had pushed her, and she fell back, bumping her hip against a table, during their dispute.

Conrad was acquitted of domestic violence, but convicted of violating R.C. 2921.31(A), which provides:

No person, without privilege to do so and with purpose to prevent, obstruct, or delay the performance by a public official of any authorized act within the public official's official capacity, shall do any act that hampers or impedes a public official in the performance of the public official's lawful duties.

The court reversed the conviction, on the grounds that the trial court "erred in failing to instruct the jury that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, Article I, Section 4 of the Ohio Constitution, and R.C. 2923.12(C)(1)(d) each independently supplied a 'privilege' within the meaning of R.C. 2921.31(A)":

The "without privilege" element … is a substantive element of the offense, and the State bears the burden of proving its absence beyond a reasonable doubt….

Two Ohio appellate decisions confirm that constitutional rights are themselves sources of privilege within the meaning of the obstruction statute. In State v. Robinson (Ohio App. 1995), the First District discussed a defendant's refusal to consent to a warrantless entry into his home. The court stated: "privilege is a defense to a charge of obstructing official business, and an obstruction charge requires proof that the official be obstructed 'in the performance of his lawful duties.' … [T]he Fourth Amendment confers the right to refuse consent to enter. The assertion of that right cannot be a crime." Robinson applies the relevant frame: a constitutional right of refusal cannot be repurposed as the actus reus of an obstruction prosecution, because the official whose order is refused is not, in that circumstance, performing a "lawful duty," and the privilege element of the offense is satisfied by the defendant's exercise of the constitutional right.

The Tenth District applied the same principle in State v. Dickman (Ohio App. 2015). The court held that "[a] predicate for the crime of obstruction of official business is that the official business be an 'authorized act.'" Where the underlying official act exceeds the officer's lawful authority, the court held, the "assertion of [constitutional] rights was not a basis to suspect that he had committed a crime." Dickman thus articulates the converse of Robinson: where the officer's command is itself unauthorized, the defendant's assertion of constitutional rights cannot supply the basis for criminal liability under R.C. 2921.31(A). Robinson and Dickman together stand for the proposition that the "without privilege" and "lawful duties" elements of R.C. 2921.31(A) are interlocking and constitutionally significant….

[Conrad's] possession of a holstered handgun in his own home for self-defense is conduct that sits at the very core of the right Heller identified. The Second Amendment, as construed by the Supreme Court in Heller, McDonald, Bruen, and Rahimi, "confers" upon him—to use Robinson's phrase—the right to that possession…. The Ohio Constitution [also] provides: "The people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security …." … Ohio's constitutional guarantee is no less protective than its federal counterpart in the in-home context. [And Ohio R.C. 2923.12(C)(1)(d)] expressly exempts from the concealed-carry prohibition "[a] person's … storage or possession of a firearm … in the actor's own home for any lawful purpose." This is an express statutory grant of authority to possess a firearm in one's own home, which falls squarely within the definition of privilege as provided in R.C. 2901.01(A)(12).

The General Assembly has further declared in R.C. 9.68(A) that "[t]he individual right to keep and bear arms" is "a fundamental individual right that predates the United States Constitution and Ohio Constitution, and … a constitutionally protected right in every part of Ohio…." While R.C. 9.68 is principally directed at preempting conflicting local ordinances, it confirms the legislative judgment that the right is "fundamental" and "constitutionally protected"—language that bears directly on whether the corresponding statutory exemption qualifies as "privilege" under R.C. 2921.31(A).

Each of the three sources Conrad identified—the Second Amendment, Article I, Section 4, and R.C. 2923.12(C)(1)(d)—qualifies as a source of "privilege" to possess a firearm within the meaning of R.C. 2921.31(A) under the statutory definition…. However, the trial court gave only the OJI [Ohio Jury Instructions] definition tracking R.C. 2901.01(A)(12)—that "privilege" is any "immunity, license, or right conferred by law" or "bestowed by express or implied grant." That instruction states the generic statutory definition of privilege.

The jury heard what privilege means in the abstract. A jury cannot be expected to determine, as a matter of legal interpretation untaught, whether a constitutional right is "conferred by law" within the OJI sense or whether an Ohio statutory exemption qualifies as a "right bestowed by express grant." Moreover, a jury cannot be expected to determine when such a right yields to a seizure by law enforcement—whether such a seizure exceeds the officer's lawful duties. Those are questions of law for the trial court to resolve through proper instruction, not questions of legal exegesis for the jury to undertake without guidance….

A properly instructed jury—told that the Second Amendment, Article I, Section 4, and R.C. 2923.12(C)(1)(d) each independently confer a right to possess a firearm in one's own home—would have had a legally supported path to a finding that the State failed to prove the "without privilege" element beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury was deprived of that path, and the conviction cannot stand.

We emphasize the limited scope of our holding. We hold only that, on the record before us—where Conrad is a non-disqualified person under R.C. 2923.13, was inside his own residence at all relevant times, and possessed a holstered firearm during a 911-initiated police encounter—the constitutional and statutory sources of privilege he identified entitle him to a specific instruction on those sources.

The privilege we recognize today is a privilege of possession subject to lawful disarming. Nothing in this opinion should be read as conferring any right to physically resist a lawful police order or to draw or brandish a firearm in the presence of an officer, or to use a firearm in a manner that itself constitutes a separate offense. The constitutional right to keep a firearm in one's home for self-defense, recognized in Heller, and the statutory exemption in R.C. 2923.12(C)(1)(d), confer a right to have the firearm.

We add one further clarification, because the trial record may otherwise invite confusion on remand. An officer's knowledge at the moment of the order to disarm bears on the lawfulness of that order under the Fourth Amendment. The record reflects that Conrad's explanation of his reasons for arming himself—that he wished to "eve[n] the playing field" with the responding officers—was given to the officer only after the disarming was complete, in a post-disarming conversation, and was offered again at trial.

That sequence is significant, as the explanation cannot retroactively supply the articulable basis for the order; under Terry v. Ohio (1968), the constitutional sufficiency of an investigative seizure is judged by the facts known to the officer at the moment of the seizure. On remand, the jury must be instructed on the privilege framework with sufficient particularity to perform its factfinding role.

Our holding is narrow. We do not hold that the Second Amendment, Article I, Section 4, or R.C. 2923.12(C)(1)(d) confers any right to physically resist a lawful police order, nor do we resolve whether the officer's seizure of the firearm in this case was itself a lawful exercise of authority.

We hold only that, where the State's prosecution under R.C. 2921.31(A) places the "without privilege" element squarely at issue, and where the defendant has identified specific constitutional and statutory sources of privilege supported by the evidence, the trial court must instruct the jury on those specific sources, and, where the facts suggest that the privilege yielded to seizure by a police officer, the trial court must also instruct the jury as to the standard applicable to determine the lawfulness of the seizure. The generic OJI definition is necessary but not sufficient….

The court also concluded that Conrad could indeed be retried, because enough evidence was introduced for a properly instructed jury to convict (that's the standard as to whether the Double Jeopardy Clause allows a retrial following the reversal of a conviction):

Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the State, the record contains testimony that, the officer was first to respond to the domestic dispute. Upon entering Conrad's home, he informed Conrad that he was going to relieve him of his holstered firearm. Conrad verbally refused, turned his armed hip away from the officer, and placed his hand on the holstered firearm; that the officer drew his sidearm in response and testified he was "rattled" and nearly discharged his weapon; that the standoff persisted for approximately twenty-three seconds before Conrad complied; and that the officer thereafter spent additional time deescalating the encounter by ascertaining why Conrad had armed himself. Viewed in a light most favorable to the State, a rational trier of fact, could have found each essential element of R.C. 2921.31(A), as set forth in our discussion of the third assigned error, proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

We hold only that the evidence at the first trial was legally sufficient to permit a rational juror to convict; we do not hold that conviction was required, nor do we resolve the question—properly preserved for retrial—whether the officer's order itself constituted the performance of a "lawful duty" within the meaning of R.C. 2921.31(A)….

Joseph R. Klammer (The Klammer Law Office, Ltd.) represents Conrad.

The post Deliberately Arming Oneself to Answer Door to Police May Be "Privileged" Against "Obstructing Official Business" Prosecution appeared first on Reason.com.

How Did Support for International Humanitarian Law and Norms Morph into Support for Hamas and its Goals?

2026-07-22T12:04:10Z

At his Substack, Shany Mor reflects on the revealed preferences since 10/7 of the Western NGOS, individuals, and governmental institutions "united by loosely overlapping commitments to global and transnational justice." This group, which he dubs "Humanitarians," could have responded to 10/7 in one of four general ways:

H1: Humanitarians, especially including scholars of international law regarding armed conflict, are neutral regarding the belligerent parties in the war, and the Humanitarians collectively are genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of civilians and noncombatants among both Israelis and Palestinians.

H2: Humanitarians are indifferent to the humanitarian needs of the Israelis but genuinely committed to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians. Operating on imperfect information in rapidly changing conditions, and limited by what is allowable in international law and what is politically or materially feasible, they seek whatever can be done to reduce or eliminate loss of life or suffering on the part of Palestinians either as a direct or indirect consequence of the war.

H3: Humanitarians are indifferent to the immediate humanitarian needs of Palestinian civilians, but they fervently wish to see Israel defeated in the war Hamas started on October 7. They fervently believe that the only moral conclusion to the war is one that is a net gain for the Palestinians and a net loss for the Israelis. To this end, they endeavor to act as force multipliers both in theatre to preserve Hamas' power and, especially, in Western states, to push for policies that limit Israel's freedom of action, cut it off from military supplies, and apply pressure on it.

H4: Humanitarians are indifferent to the war's strategic outcome and prefer to see more death and more suffering on the Palestinian side, not as an end in and of itself but rather as a means to confirm beliefs in Israel's essentially demonic nature, and as a way of mobilizing hatred and social isolation of Jews in the West. In particular, there is a preference for any rhetoric or political action which removes what are believed to be the unfair social privileges which western Jews hold due to the memory of the Holocaust.

As Mor elaborates: "Overwhelmingly … the majority of the real-life actions of the Humanitarians are in line with the predictions of H3, with a substantial minority also in line with H4. More strikingly, only a tiny amount are plausibly aligned with H2 and virtually none with H1."

This isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention, but it does beg the question: why? Why did concern about international humanitarian law and norms morph into support for Islamist terrorist groups and visceral hatred for Israel and often Jews in general, and a general lack of concern for the actual humanitarian needs even of the side they implicitly or explicitly support (H2)?

The simple answer is that the movement was taken over by a far left strongly influenced by a combination of anti-Western "anti-colonialist" theory and the massive investment of the late USSR is spreading "antizionist" propaganda. But how and why did the relevant institutions, once proudly "liberal" in the broad sense (e.g., Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) get taken over by the far left? There is a good book to be written on this, if anyone is so inclined.

The post How Did Support for International Humanitarian Law and Norms Morph into Support for Hamas and its Goals? appeared first on Reason.com.

Odd January 6 Trial Follow-On: Copying Expert's Report from Another Case, to File It in Your Case, May Infringe Copyright

2026-07-22T03:50:46Z

From Olson v. McBride Law Firm, PLLC, decided yesterday by Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald (S.D.N.Y.); seems correct to me:

In April 2022, plaintiff [Lindsay Olson] prepared an expert report titled "Multi-District Comparative Community Attitude Study" (the "Report") at the request of two attorneys representing two criminal defendants charged in the "Oath Keepers" trial, which arose from charges against members of the Oath Keepers, an organized militia group that participated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Report, prepared for use in support of motions to transfer venue, analyzed potential bias in the District of Columbia jury pool against defendants prosecuted for conduct arising from the January 6, 2021 attack and concluded that "the DC Community is saturated with potential jurors who harbor actual bias" against those defendants.

For a fee of $30,000, plaintiff licensed the Report to the two attorneys who commissioned it, authorizing its use in support of venue transfer motions. In April 2022, the attorneys filed the Report on the public docket in the "Oath Keepers" case in support of a motion to transfer venue.

Defendant Joseph D. McBride and his law firm, McBride Law Firm, PLLC, represented Richard Barnett, a defendant in a separate criminal case also arising from the January 6 Capitol attack. In September 2022, defendants obtained a copy of the Report, without plaintiff's authorization and without paying a licensing fee, and filed it in its entirety in United States v. Barnett, No. 1:21-cr-00038, as an exhibit in support of a motion to transfer venue….

Olson sued for copyright infringement, and the court denied a motion to dismiss. The court held that plaintiff had plausibly alleged that defendant's use was presumptively infringing:

Accepting [plaintiffs'] allegations as true, as the Court must at this stage, defendants took a copy of plaintiff's copyrighted work and caused a new copy of it to be created, filed, and thereby made available to the public through ECF and PACER….

The court declined to dismiss the case on fair use grounds:

Although fair use can be resolved on a motion to dismiss where the defense is apparent from the face of the complaint, defendants have not shown that this case presents the rare circumstance in which the issue can be resolved without discovery. To the contrary, application of each factor reveals disputed factual questions that cannot be resolved at this stage.

[A.] Purpose and Character …

The first factor considers the purpose and character of the secondary use, including whether the use is transformative; that is, whether it "adds something new" and whether it is commercial in nature. Defendants argue that their use of the Report in the Barnett case was transformative because it served the "judicial function" rather than the Report's "original purpose." But plaintiff's Complaint alleges the opposite: that the Report was created and licensed to persuade a court that criminal defendants charged in connection with the January 6 attack could not receive a fair trial in the District of Columbia and that venue should therefore be transferred elsewhere, and that defendants used it for precisely that purpose in support of their venue transfer motion in another January 6 prosecution.

Courts have recognized that using a work "for the precise reason it was created" cuts against a finding that the use was transformative. On the present record, where the parties dispute the very characterization of the Report's "original purpose" and whether defendants' use departed from it, the Court cannot resolve the issue of whether that use was transformative at this stage.

The commercial-use inquiry is similarly disputed…. Regardless of this Court's skepticism of defendants' position that they were not engaging in commercial exploitation, see Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters. (1985) (commercial use exists where "the user stands to profit from exploitation of the copyrighted material without paying the customary price"), this is a question not amenable to resolution in this case on a motion to dismiss.

The Court further notes that the very argument defendants advance here was addressed and rejected by … Olson v. Law Offices of Aubrey Webb, P.A., et al., No. 25-cv-24904 (S.D. Fla.) (Cecilia M. Altonaga, J.)….

[B.] Nature of the Copyrighted Work …

The degree of creativity reflected in the Report, as opposed to purely factual or informational content, is a question of fact not resolvable on the pleadings here.

[C.] Amount and Substantiality …

Where, as here, "the purpose of defendant's use is precisely the same as that of third parties who license the material from the plaintiff," courts have found that the question of whether the amount used was reasonable in relation to the purpose of the copying "must necessarily be answered in the negative." Defendants here have not established on the pleadings that the wholesale reproduction of the Report was necessary as a matter of law, particularly where plaintiff alleges that defendants could have summarized or otherwise referred the court to the Report without reproducing it in full.

[D.] Market Effects …

The Court rejects defendants' premise that a work's appearance in one court file extinguishes the copyright owner's market for licensing it elsewhere. If filing a copyrighted work on ECF in connection with a legal proceeding strips it of copyright protection for all future uses, the same would be true of a photograph, film script, book, article, or any other copyrighted work introduced as an exhibit in litigation. Nothing in the Copyright Act supports such a rule, and the Court declines to adopt one here….

[W]hether and to what extent defendants' conduct, if replicated by similarly situated litigants, would harm plaintiff's licensing market for the Report is a factual question dependent on evidence not currently before the Court, including the scope and durability of that market and the extent to which defendants' use displaced a sale plaintiff otherwise would have made. In sum, defendants have not shown that fair use is clearly established on the face of the Complaint.

The court also rejected defendants' argument that copyright liability would "undermine the public's right of access to judicial proceedings and records": "Defendants identify no authority holding that the [First Amendment] right of inspection [of court records] confers an independent right to reproduce and commercially exploit copyrighted material found within a court file, much less to immunize such reproduction from liability under copyright law…. [See also] Olson v. L. Offs. of Kira Anne W., 2026 WL 1459791 (D.D.C. May 25, 2026) [Beryl A. Howell, J.]."

And the court rejected defendants' due process argument:

Defendants point to no authority, and the Court is aware of none, supporting the proposition that a criminal defendant's right to mount a defense entitles his counsel to appropriate a third party's copyrighted work product without payment. According to the Complaint, the Report was not evidence of Barnett's guilt or innocence, but rather a commercially-licensed advocacy tool that defendants could have obtained through the same channel, a paid license, used by the attorneys who commissioned it. Defendants cite no authority recognizing a "litigation necessity" exception to the Copyright Act, and the Court declines to recognize one here….

James Henry Bartolomei, III represents Olson.

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Today in Supreme Court History: July 22, 1937

2025-07-17T03:26:11Z

7/22/1937: The Senate voted down President Roosevelt's Court-Packing plan, 70-20.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

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Brickbat: That's the PITs

2026-07-20T23:59:19Z

Four Georgia State Patrol troopers were fired after an internal investigation found they tried to profit from police pursuits by filing personal injury claims against the insurance companies of drivers they had chased. Investigators said the troopers used crash reports from pursuits they initiated, including crashes caused by PIT (Precision Immobilization Technique) maneuvers, to seek settlements for claims of stress, anxiety, and soreness, even though they had not reported injuries or sought medical treatment at the time. The investigation found that some troopers collected tens of thousands of dollars and admitted the claims were a way to supplement their income. A supervisor reported hearing troopers joke about getting a "check" after pursuits, which led to the investigation and the officers' dismissal. State Patrol policy bans troopers from making money from incidents that happen while they are on duty. If they are injured on the job, they must report the injury and seek benefits through the state's workers' compensation system, not by filing personal claims against a driver's insurance company.

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Open Thread

2026-07-22T07:00:00Z

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Trump's Threats To Yank Broadcast Licenses Are Part of a Speech-Chilling Intimidation Campaign

2026-07-21T17:19:27Z

Imagine how Republicans would react if a Democratic president reflexively threatened to yank the broadcast licenses of TV stations because he did not like their news coverage or programming decisions. President Donald Trump has been doing that since his first term, and he did it again last week after ABC and NBC declined to offer live coverage of his speech about election security.

These threats are part of an intimidation campaign that has already yielded striking concessions to Trump's whims. His weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is designed to chill constitutionally protected speech, establishing a precedent that Republicans may regret when their opponents take control of the White House.

Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed FCC chairman, seems to think broadcasters have a legal obligation to please the president. "Broadcasters must operate in the public interest," Carr declared in March, "and they will lose their licenses if they do not."

As Carr understands it, "the public interest" requires broadcasters to cover the president "fully, accurately, and fairly." It may also require them to eschew war reporting that embarrasses the president and punish late-night comedians whose jokes offend him.

Any attempt to impose such a vague, open-ended standard on speakers in other media would be plainly unconstitutional. But broadcasters are different, Carr avers, because "the American people have subsidized [them] to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation's airwaves."

Trump echoed that rationale for speech regulation last Thursday, when he said broadcasters "use our public, multibillion-dollar-in-value airways for absolutely no money." But that is plainly not true, since broadcast licenses figure in the prices that media companies pay when they acquire TV or radio stations.

Trump nevertheless relied on that false premise in arguing that the failure of ABC and NBC to give his speech the attention he thought it deserved "should mean a revocation of their licenses." Whether or not Carr follows through on that suggestion, he has made it clear that he views correcting anti-Trump bias as an important part of his job.

That understanding of the FCC's mission explains why Carr seriously entertained the possibility that CBS committed "broadcast news distortion" by editing a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris in a way that made her seem slightly more cogent. It explains why Carr bragged about requiring changes to journalistic practices at CBS as a condition for approving Skydance Media's acquisition of Paramount, the network's parent company.

Carr's conception of "the public interest" was also at the root of his most flagrant attempt to exert control over broadcast content: the regulatory threats that preceded ABC's suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! last September. It likewise underlies his warning that talk shows like The View can no longer rely on their longstanding exemption from the "equal time" rule—a change that would effectively prohibit them from interviewing political candidates.

So far, Carr has not delivered on Trump's oft-repeated threats to revoke broadcast licenses. But last April, he announced an early review of ABC's licenses, ostensibly because of concerns about "unlawful discrimination."

Actual license revocations are not necessary to cow broadcasters, as illustrated by what happened after Trump filed a ludicrous lawsuit alleging that the Harris interview qualified as consumer fraud under Texas and federal law. Although CBS accurately noted that Trump's complaint was "completely without merit" and vowed to "vigorously defend against it," Paramount ultimately agreed to a $16 million settlement.

That decision followed Trump's threats to revoke the network's broadcast licenses and Carr's initiation of the "news distortion" investigation. It came as the FCC was deciding whether to allow the Paramount/Skydance merger, which it finally approved a few weeks later based on the expectation of a Trump-friendlier CBS News.

That episode showed how easily "the public interest" can be conflated with the president's personal interests. It's a lesson that Republicans should take to heart if they allow for the possibility that they will not always control these levers of power.

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Fired U.S. Attorney In Washington Files Case That Should Overrule Whatever Remains Of Morrison v. Olson

2026-07-22T03:49:53Z

Randy Barnett and I recently finished maxing out (to use the lingo of the day) the Separation of Powers chapter for the Fifth Edition of our casebook. We went back-and-forth about whether it was even necessary to keep Morrison v. Olson. Ultimately we decided to, in large part, because Chief Justice Rehnquist explains the line of precedents from Myers to Humphrey's Executor. Moreover, Justice Scalia's iconic dissent would later be vindicated in Slaughter. Students should not forget how we got to the present moment.

Still, we recognized that very little of Morrison survived. The Independent Counsel statute, as well as the special prosecutor regulations, barely survived Trump v. United States, and are dead after Slaughter. But one facet of Morrison remains: can federal judges appoint prosecutors who are not subject to presidential removal. Now, there is a case to overrule that last glimmer of Morrison.

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington appointed Roger Rogoff as United States Attorney. Trump promptly fired Rogoff. Now Rogoff has sued Trump, seeking a preliminary injunction to invalidate the "purported removal." Rogoff argues that Trump's firing violates the Appointments Clause, even after. Slaughter.

Slaughter is not to the contrary because it did not address the propriety of removal protections for inferior officers. Before Slaughter, the Supreme Court had long recognized "two exceptions" to the general rule that the President enjoys unbounded removal power: the first authorized Congress to "provide tenure protections to certain inferior officers," and the second to limit removal in "expert agencies led by a group of principal officers." Seila Law, 591 U.S. at 204 (emphases omitted). Slaughter eliminated the latter but left the former in place. 2026 WL 1855612 at *15, *18 ("Nor do we determine the fate of officials not before us.").

And I call attention to Footnote 1 of the brief:

U.S. Attorneys are not the only Executive Branch prosecutors the Judiciary appoints. Historically, they have (on application) appointed independent counsel. 28 U.S.C. § 593; Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 676 (1988) ("[W]e do not think it impermissible for Congress Case 2:26-cv-02566 Document 8 Filed 07/21/26 Page 11 of 32 to vest the power to appoint independent counsel in a specially created federal court."). They likewise appoint special prosecutors pursuing criminal contempt. See Young v. U.S. ex rel. Vuitton et Fils S.A., 481 U.S. 787, 793 (1987) ("[I]t is long settled that courts possess inherent authority to initiate contempt proceedings for disobedience to their orders, authority which necessarily encompasses the ability to appoint a private attorney to prosecute the contempt."); see also United States v. Donziger, 38 F.4th 290, 294 (2d Cir. 2022) (appointment of special counsel by court did not violate separation of powers).

Yeah, about that. Morrison is not long for this world. The Second Circuit's decision in Donziger was wrong. Hey, if Justice Gorsuch and Steve Vladeck agree, they can't both be wrong! And I dare Judge Boasberg to appoint a private attorney to prosecute DOJ officials. He would deserve that benchslap.

Federal judges should not be allowed to make appointments to the executive branch--especially United States attorneys who cannot be fired by the President. Moreover, I am not at all convinced U.S. Attorneys are actually "inferior" officers. Lower courts have reached this holding with very conclusory logic, but the Supreme Court has never settled the issue.

If there is a conflict between the executive branch and congress, it should not fall to the judicial branch to resolve the matter.

I would expect the judges of this District Court to recuse, so some other well-meaning Washington judge will rule against Trump. And the Ninth Circuit will issue a decision that should be reversed.

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"So You're About to Start Law School"

2026-07-22T00:02:19Z

Last year, I recorded a 41-minute talk for incoming law students on how to approach the first month of law school. It's targeted at students who don't know much about how law school works, with the hope that they can start school more informed about the weird ways of studying law. You can watch it here:

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Chief Justice Roberts Broke The Fourth Wall in Cook

2026-07-22T02:38:25Z

For years, Justice Kagan was overtly critical of the Supreme Court's approach to emergency applications. In written dissents and public speeches, Kagan fed into the nefarious "shadow docket" narrative. She may as well have blurbed Steve Vladeck's book. Yet, I've noticed over the past year or so that rhetoric from Justice Kagan has faded. Indeed, Kagan testified that she would rather "not now . . . call it the shadow docket . . . because we have done . . . a better job . . . where appropriate [of] explaining ourselves, at least to a moderate degree." Kagan added, "we have gotten more experienced in these constant requests that are coming to us about requests for emergency relief . . . and we have issued opinions, and sometimes majority and dissenting opinions accordingly."

Kagan was almost certainly referring to Trump v. Cook, which might be the slowest emergency docket case of all time. Remember, President Trump purported to remove Governor Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve on August 25, 2025. Twelve days later the District Court granted a preliminary injunction. Four days after that, the D.C. Circuit denied the government's motion to stay. The case reached the Supreme Court on September 18, 2025. It would take the Court more than 280 days to decide the case in its "interim" posture, with more than 80 pages of majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions.

Justice Alito's dissent laid out the glacial chronology.

The President then applied for a stay from this Court. When that application arrived here, this litigation was just 21 days old. There had been only two rounds of abbreviated briefing below and no meaningful development of a factual record. Indeed, the record does not even contain copies of Cook's allegedly fraudulent mortgage applications. Of course, parties may appropriately seek (and courts may appropriately grant) stays early in a litigation. No court, including this Court, should sit on its hands when interim relief is appropriate. But this does not mean that the Court must reach out to opine on each issue that could conceivably arise in a case's future. Here, the incipiency of this case and the complexity of the issues that it presents counseled in favor of a light touch by this Court, regardless of whether we granted or denied the application. To that end, the Court should have resolved the President's application shortly after we received it. And in doing so, we should have focused on the few issues that the courts addressed below. If a majority had desired, we could have issued a statement explaining our decision. That is exactly how we have handled nearly all our stay applications in recent years.

Had the Court denied the stay in September or October of 2025, the lower courts could have proceeded to decide the case on the merits, and presented the Supreme Court with a regular appeal. But the Court (and by Court, I mean the Chief Justice) chose a different path. Alito explains further:

Although the panel performed admirably given the four days that it had to decide the President's stay motion, nobody can doubt that the panel would have produced more comprehensive opinions if it had even a fraction of the 280-plus days that this Court has spent with the case. Either way, this Court could have reentered the fray when we inevitably granted certiorari. Instead, the Court departed from its normal practice and "deferred" ruling on this application, bringing proceedings in the lower courts to a 9-month standstill. 606 U. S. 1062 (2025). We then ordered the parties to submit more briefing than they had filed at any other point in this litigation. In January, we held oral argument, marking just the second in-court proceeding in this entire suit. The Court now issues a full-length opinion that purports to resolve many complicated and novel legal questions on an underdeveloped record while ignoring lurking jurisdictional issues."Either out of humility or out of self-respect (one or the other), the Court should decline to answer" these "incredibly difficult" questions in this case's current posture. PGA TOUR, Inc. v. Martin, 532 U. S. 661, 700 (2001) (Scalia, J., dissenting).

Moreover, the Court reached out to decide several significant constitutional questions that were not necessary to decide. Is the Federal Reserve's so-called "independence" consistent with the separation of powers? Do the federal courts even have jurisdiction to review the President's termination of a Governor? Did Cook even have a "cause of action" to challenge her removal? Justice Barrett raises these, and other questions in her concurrence. But the Supreme Court was content to decide a landmark case on its "emergency" docket, leapfrogging over all prudence. This unusual posture was sure to placate Justice Kagan and the Court's critics, but is at odds with the Chief's self-professed modus operandi.

Indeed, something seems to have happened behind-the-scenes in this case. In most cases, the Chief Justice barely acknowledges the dissent, and offers sparse responses, if that. In Barbara, the dissents were more than five times as long as the majority. Roberts didn't care to respond because he had five votes.

Yet in Cook, Chief Justice Roberts responds nearly point-by-point to Justice Thomas. I think this was part of an effort to justify the Court's decision to reach the constitutional question. One would expect Roberts to simply say in a footnote "We need not reach the status of the constitutionality of the Federal Reserve's for-cause protections…" But no such luck. The Federal Reserve cannot be kept in "limbo" so let's respond to the brash Justice Thomas.

Then there is this passage where Roberts responds directly to his colleagues:

How much to say on our interim docket—and how much to say in response to a dissent—is not reducible to any mechanical formula; it is ultimately a matter of prudence, upon which reasonable minds can (and often do) disagree. See Mirabelli v. Bonta, 607 U. S. 492, 501 (2026) (BARRETT, J., concurring) ("Interim applications routinely require the Court to balance the lock-in risk of saying too much against the transparency cost of saying too little"); compare Trump v. Illinois, 607 U. S. ___ (2025), with id., at ___ (KAVANAUGH, J., concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 6), and id., at ___ (GORSUCH, J., dissenting) (slip op. at 2). In this extraordinary case, we have had the benefit of not only amici and oral argument but months of internal consultation and deliberation. We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our Nation's (and theworld's) most important financial institutions. Althoughwe appreciate that others may see matters differently, wewould not so quickly unsettle this "special arrangement sanctioned by history." Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Assn. of America, Ltd., 601 U. S. 416, 467, n. 16 (2024) (ALITO, J., dissenting).

First, Roberts faults Barrett for inconsistency. In Mirabelli (decided in March 2026), Barrett favored deciding the merits, even at the risk of lock-in. Indeed, the Chief Justice joined that opinion. I was surprised Roberts joined that concurrence, as he usually says nothing at all on emergency docket cases. But now that join comes into focus. Roberts joined Barrett's concurrence, even though Barrett chose not to join Roberts in Cook. Roberts may have even joined Barrett to nudge her into flipping in Cook. Roberts almost certainly wrote the narrow per curiam in Mirabelli. Why do more?

In Mirabelli, Barrett chose to reach the merits, but in Cook, she did not. Again, when Mirabelli was decided, Barrett had to have known what Roberts would say in Cook. I have this sinking feeling that Barrett's vote flipped in Cook. Maybe she was troubled so much by the lack of a cause of action that she just couldn't go along with the majority. Maybe she really liked Aditya Bamzai and Aaron Nielson's article, and did not think the Bank of the United States was a valid precedent. Something happened here.

Second, Roberts draws a contrast between Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence in Trump v. Illinois with Justice Gorsuch's dissent. In that case, Justice Kavanaugh would have ordered additional briefing and oral argument--exactly what was done in Cook. By contrast, in Illinois, Justice Gorsuch would not have decide the merits question with limited briefing. Here, I think Roberts was giving credence to Kavanaugh's concerns.

Third, the Chief Justice appears to break the fourth wall. He expressly references "months of internal consultation and deliberation." What is going on here? It goes without saying that the Justices will always consult and deliberate. But "months"? Again, the application was filed in September, the following month the Court set the case for oral argument, the case was argued in January, and decided on the last day of June. I get this feeling that deliberations continued well after the case was argued, maybe through the end of the term. Justice Kavanaugh and the Chief were locked in from the outset. This sentence provides some more proof that Justice Barrett may have vacillated in Cook.

There is much more that I will say about Cook in another piece, and contrast the case with Slaughter. But here I'll close on a note about Roberts.

I appreciate Richard Re's attempts to reconcile the Chief Justice's votes in Cook and Barbara, and decisions over the course of two decades. But the levels of explanation are getting tough to follow. He is an "institutionalist"; he is an "institutionalist" who practices the doctrine of "one last chance"; he is an institutionalist who practices the doctrine of "one last chance" but still "moderates from the front"; he is an institutionalist who practices the doctrine of "one last chance" but still "moderates from the front" except when "extremism in defense of stability is no vice."

The ancients who favored the geocentric model of the universe kept confronting evidence that conflicted with the model. So they started drawing "epicycles" to explain away the retrograde motion of certain planets. Over time, scientists recognized that the geocentric model was wrong, and the solar system revolved around the sun.

Our legal order has revolved around the Chief Justice for so long that it is tempting to offer a unifying theorem. But the most likely theory is the simplest. Robert is in charge--not because he is the smartest judge or puts forward the most compelling theories. Rather, just like when he was an advocate, he found a way to count to five when it mattered. Or more precisely, to count to four--he has his own vote in hand.

The conclusion I reached some time ago is that Roberts is entirely situational. He decides each case on its own terms based on the political climate of the day. Roberts does as much as he thinks he can get away with, no more and no less. In one case, minimalism. In another case, maximalism. Rules of prudence are thrown to the wind when the cause is just. And the Chief Justice uses whatever magic is needed to get there.

Roberts is not an institutionalist. He is an illusionist. But like all other illusionists, once he is off the stage, he will be quickly forgotten. Chief Justice Marshall's decisions are still revered. Will anyone even remember the sorts of political compromises the Roberts Court navigated? Why did he vote to save Obamacare? Why did he vote to save Roe? I can barely remember the situations from the first Trump administration. Roberts's opinions may as well be written with disappearing ink.

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Socialist Influencer Hasan Piker Is Praising Mao. Here's the Truth About Chinese Communism.

2026-07-21T21:33:33Z

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are having a moment: Candidates affiliated with this group are winning Democratic primaries all over the country—and that's bad. Very, very bad. Why? Well, because their ideas for how to run the country are wrong, and dangerous, and in many cases authoritarian. We know that because we can read their plans and listen to their speeches.

Now, I know what you're thinking: Don't Republicans call everybody who disagrees with President Donald Trump a socialist? Sure, that label as an insult has been overused before. But these people self-describe as socialists and communists—and they revere figures and governments from history that engaged in actual authoritarian communism.

Take Hasan Piker, a popular far-left commentator associated with the DSA. He recently spoke at a gathering of College Democrats and explained his plan to drive all the nonsocialists out of the Democratic Party:

Dressed like Mao and talking about how much he hates the majority of Democrats as an invited guest of @CollegeDems. Our party having a normal one. pic.twitter.com/y1QDuF7I9Q

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) July 19, 2026

You might have some questions about that, including, uh, what was he wearing? Well, it turns out he just so happened to dress in the uniform of one of his favorite great men of history: Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.

Mao did, in fact, change the world—by making it much worse. Under Mao's communist economic policies known as the Great Leap Forward, tens of millions of people starved to death in China. He also implemented widespread political repression and censorship, and encouraged state violence against dissenters. Several million more people died as a result of his Cultural Revolution, which was Mao's effort to maintain power despite the complete failure of his economic policies.

China's situation only began to improve following Mao's death in 1976, when his successors moved away from rigid central planning and allowed free markets to lift the people out of poverty.

Now, you might be thinking, Piker is just one random guy. Surely the DSA doesn't want to implement Maoist authoritarianism. Well, read its program: It sounds pretty Maoist to me.

According to official DSA materials, it would collectivize food, education, medicine, energy, and transportation: These would all be things the government made available rather than the market. The problem with that is that governments are bad at providing such services cheaply and efficiently. When private, profit-seeking firms compete with one another to offer you stuff at the best price, it works a lot better.

The DSA goes on to say that in its socialist utopia, you'd be free to spend your day however you want, and you'd never have to work if you don't feel like it. But that obviously doesn't make any sense. Somebody has to work to provide all those supposedly free things: grow the food, drive the transportation, build the power plants, offer the medical services. Under capitalism, you perform those tasks in exchange for money that you use to buy what you need. But under every actually existing socialist government in history, including Soviet Russia and Maoist China, the government ends up having to force people to work, since they don't have profits to motivate them, and you end up with both shortages and repression.

So let's not ignore the unworkable, radical nature of the DSA's agenda, which calls for scrapping the entire U.S. Constitution. It writes: "Our enemies are not just individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital."

That's right: It is declaring war on a system that has lifted billions of people out of poverty over the course of the last century.

But just because they're wrong about everything doesn't mean they're going to be easy to beat. Democrats are clearly furious with the leadership of their party for failing to stop Trump, and Democratic primary voters are lashing out at incumbents and instead picking the most left-leaning person in the race—even someone like Darializa Avila Chevalier, who has tweeted in support of communism, and yet is likely to be the next congresswoman from New York.

That has some more reasonable folks in the party worried. Van Jones recently sounded the alarm on CNN:

This weekend I shared a post voicing my concerns about the far left. The response has been overwhelming. Leaders in both parties called to tell me the same thing: this stuff has gone too far.

To be clear: I'm a progressive Democrat. My whole life, I've wanted to see a youth… pic.twitter.com/RZXKQw5DSB

— Van Jones (@VanJones68) July 21, 2026

Saying some of these people evince support for literal terrorists is no slur. Kyle Kulinski, another far-left commentator like Piker, recently appeared on a livestream and expressed his fears that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis were going to lose the Iranian government as a source of funding.

Now, I'm mostly against the current U.S. war on Iran because I think it's a waste of our tax dollars and unlikely to improve things in the Middle East, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be shedding any tears for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, which are terrorist groups that murder civilians. Kulinski feels differently, obviously. I wonder how many of his DSA friends agreed with him? Because you know who else appeared on that stream? Avila Chevalier, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, and possible 2028 presidential candidate Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.).

The bottom line is this: The DSA is about to take the entire Democratic Party on one wild ride. And while it's tempting to simply point and laugh at the idiot in the Mao uniform, if Democrats want to keep this tide at bay, they're going to have to do a little bit more than absolutely nothing about it.

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Pennsylvania's Top Court Unanimously Rejects Warrantless Searches of Private Land

2026-07-21T21:23:25Z

On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously ruled that warrantless searches of land marked as private violate that state's constitution. The seven justices agreed that the "open fields" doctrine, a sweeping exception to the Fourth Amendment that the U.S. Supreme Court first announced in 1924, does not apply to the Pennsylvania Constitution's privacy protections.

"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed that private land is not public property," says Joshua Windham, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which represented two hunting clubs that objected to warrantless surveillance of their land by the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC). "It's yours, and that means you get to decide who enters it."

The Punxsutawney Hunting Club and the Pitch Pine Hunting Club own land in Clearfield County: 4,400 acres and 1,100 acres, respectively. The properties include houses where members can stay overnight or longer. Although both clubs value their members' privacy and have marked their land with signs, fences, purple paint, and locked entrance gates, PGC officers have never treated those indicators as legally significant.

Since 2013, Warden Mark Gritzer and other PGC officers "have entered the Hunting Clubs' land without consent, a warrant, or probable cause at least 15 to 22 times to look for evidence of hunting offenses," Justice Kevin Brobson notes in Punxsutawney Hunting Club v. Pennsylvania Game Commission. "Warden Gritzer even placed a trail camera on Punxsutawney's property in an attempt to develop probable cause for charges of illegal elk feeding. That camera remained on Punxsutawney's property for 78 days."

Those intrusions were authorized by two provisions of the Pennsylvania Game and Wildlife Code. Section 303(c) allows PGC employees to "go upon or enter any property, posted or otherwise, outside of buildings" without consent, probable cause, or a warrant. Section 901(a)(2) similarly says a PGC officer has the power to "go upon any land or water outside of buildings, except curtilage, posted or otherwise, in the performance of [his] duty."

Those provisions, the hunting clubs argued, violate Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which is similar to the Fourth Amendment but had previously been read as providing more protection for privacy. Like the Fourth Amendment, Article I, Section 8 prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures." But it differs from the Fourth Amendment in explicitly protecting "possessions" (as opposed to "effects"), and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court deemed that detail significant, concluding that the original understanding of "possessions" included land.

In reaching that conclusion, the court overturned its 2007 ruling in Commonwealth v. Russo, which held that the "open fields" doctrine limits the scope of Article I, Section 8. The U.S. Supreme Court established that doctrine in the 1924 case Hester v. United States, which involved a warrantless search that had resulted in a South Carolina moonshiner's arrest and conviction.

"The special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their 'persons, houses, papers and effects,' is not extended to the open fields," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote for a unanimous Court. "The distinction between the latter and the house is as old as the common law."

Holmes was wrong about that. As Institute for Justice attorneys Robert Frommer and Anthony Sanders noted in a 2017 Supreme Court brief, Holmes misconstrued a discussion of burglary in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, erroneously thinking it justified the supposedly longstanding distinction he perceived. But despite the shaky basis for the "open fields" doctrine, the Court reaffirmed it in the 1984 case Oliver v. United States, which involved a marijuana farm discovered by Kentucky state police.

Seventeen years earlier in Katz v. United States, the Court had announced a new Fourth Amendment test, saying the ban on unreasonable searches applies when people have "a reasonable expectation of privacy." But in Oliver, the Court deemed the "open fields" exception consistent with the Katz test.

"In the case of open fields, the general rights of property protected by the common law of trespass have little or no relevance to the applicability of the Fourth Amendment," Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote in the majority opinion. Although the marijuana growers "erected fences and 'No Trespassing' signs around the property," the Court rejected "the suggestion that steps taken to protect privacy establish that expectations of privacy in an open field are legitimate."

The implication was that "open fields" need not actually be open. Even when private property is fenced and marked with "No Trespassing" signs, the Court said, "no expectation of privacy legitimately attaches to open fields."

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court applied the same logic in Russo, which involved a warrantless search of private land that turned up evidence of illegal bear hunting. That decision was mistaken, Brobson says, because it disregarded evidence that Article I, Section 8 extends beyond the "curtilage," the area immediately surrounding a home.

Judging from contemporaneous dictionary definitions, Founding-era statutes, and early decisions by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Brobson explains, the "possessions" protected by that constitutional provision include land. That conclusion, he says, is reinforced by the definition of trespassing under English common law and Pennsylvania statutes.

Brobson also notes that Article I, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution describes "acquiring, possessing and protecting property" as an "inherent and indefeasible" right. "It is axiomatic that, by granting the people the right to possess property in Article I, Section 1, the framers intended for all forms of property, including land, to constitute a 'possession' for purposes of Article I, Section 8," he writes.

Based on these considerations, Brobson concludes that "Russo was wrongly decided" and that Sections 303(c) and 901(a)(2) of the Pennsylvania Game and Wildlife Code "violate Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution," which "provides Pennsylvania citizens with greater protection than the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution as it relates to the open fields of any landowner" who "has demonstrated a reasonable expectation of privacy by taking sufficient steps to exclude intruders therefrom." That means PGC employees and other law enforcement officers "must obtain a warrant based upon probable cause or satisfy one of the recognized exceptions to the warrant requirement before entering such property."

With this decision, Pennsylvania joins six other states where courts have rejected the distinction that Holmes invented in 1924. "Courts in both Vermont and Tennessee have rejected warrantless searches of land by game wardens," Brobson notes. "The high courts from four other states—Washington, Oregon, New York, and Montana—all of which have adopted heightened privacy protections under their respective state constitutions, have similarly rejected the open fields doctrine."

Windham underlines the implications of that rejection. "If government officials want to invade your posted land without your consent and spy on you, they need to get a warrant," he says. "By restoring that foundational protection, the court bolstered the property and privacy rights of millions of Pennsylvanians—and sent a warning to officials across the country who still believe they can invade private land at will: Watch your step."

The post Pennsylvania's Top Court Unanimously Rejects Warrantless Searches of Private Land appeared first on Reason.com.

I've Seen Fake Cites on Both Sides Now (II)

2026-07-21T20:13:33Z

From Evans v. Robertson, decided today by Judge Judith Levy (E.D. Mich.) (for the original on the Magistrate Judge's September 2025 post decision in this case, see here):

Plaintiff and Defendant's objections will be stricken because they contain factitious citations.

The litigants in this case have been repeatedly warned that factitious citations will not be tolerated by the Court. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth A. Stafford ordered Plaintiff and Defendant to "include a written representation that [they have] personally checked each legal citation and each citation is accurate and stands for its asserted proposition" and warned that a failure to do so may result in sanctions. Despite Judge Stafford's order and this Court's repeated warnings, both Plaintiff and Defendant have violated the Court's express requirements numerous times.

On November 20, 2025, the Court imposed sanctions on both Plaintiff and Defendant for their repeated use of factitious citations and have stricken the parties' filings when they contain factitious citations. The parties have been warned that additional sanctions may be imposed if future filings contain factitious citations….

Plaintiff's objections contain factitious citations. Plaintiff declares in her objection that she "reviewed the citations and representations contained herein and that, to the best of [her] knowledge, information, and belief formed after reasonable inquiry, they are accurate and supported by the record." However, in her objections, Plaintiff argues,

Michigan's single-publication rule does not bar claims based on a new and discrete act of publication occurring within the statutory period. Where a defendant affirmatively reissues, relinks, re-amplifies, or otherwise causes renewed dissemination of allegedly defamatory material, that act may constitute a separate publication. Mitan v. Campbell, 474 Mich. 21[ ] (2005).

Plaintiff cites Mitan for a similar proposition later in her objection, stating, "Michigan law further provides that liability may attach where a defendant authorizes or affirmatively causes a republication. See Mitan v. Campbell, 474 Mich. 21 [ ] (2005)."

But Mitan does not remotely stand for Plaintiff's asserted proposition. In fact, the Mitan court states the opposite. Mitan, 474 Mich. at 24–25 (stating that "a defamation claim must be filed within one year from the date the claim first accrued" and that accrual of a claim is not extended "on the basis of republication")….

Defendant's objections also contain factitious citations. Defendant declares in her objection that she "checked all citations in this filing and, to the best of [her] knowledge, they are accurate." However, many of Defendant's citations are factitious.

For example, Defendant cites Delay v. Rosenthal Collins Group, LLC, 585 F.3d 1003, 1005 (6th Cir. 2009), for the statement, "Plaintiff bears the burden of establishing diversity jurisdiction." But at no point does the Delay opinion support that statement. Instead, the Sixth Circuit in Delay directed the defendants "to submit a jurisdictional statement identifying the citizenship of all its members" in its efforts to determine whether it had jurisdiction over the case. Delay, 585 F.3d at 1005.

Similarly, Defendant cites Everett v. Verizon Wireless, Inc., 460 F.3d 818 (6th Cir. 2006), for the contention that "Plaintiff bears the burden of establishing that the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000 under 28 U.S.C. § 1332." At no point does the Everett opinion support this contention. Instead, the Everett decision states that "[a] defendant wishing to remove a case bears the burden of satisfying the amount-in-controversy requirement." Everett, 460 F.3d at 822.

{Although the Court only describes two factitious citations here, numerous citations in Defendant's objections appears to be factitious. But even a single factitious citation is a violation of the Court's prior orders and is sanctionable.}

Despite the parties' certifications and the Court's numerous warnings, the parties' objections contain factitious citations. The parties were warned in previous Court orders that sanctions may be imposed if future filings contain factitious citations.

Yet again, the parties have violated the Court's express requirements, misrepresented the law to the Court, and wasted the Court's time. Plaintiff and Defendant's objections are stricken and will not be considered by the Court….

In response to the Order, Plaintiff sought to file an objection. She filed a motion for leave to file a late objection to the Order, as well as the late objection.

Plaintiff's motion for leave to file a late objection is stricken for failure to include the certification ordered by Judge Stafford on September 25, 2025. Plaintiff's late objection is also stricken for failure to include this certification.

On September 25, 2025, Judge Stafford set forth,

In each of their future filings, Evans and Robertson "must include a written representation that [they have] personally checked each legal citation and each citation is accurate and stands for its asserted proposition." See [Everett J. Prescott, Inc. v. Beall, No. 1:25-cv-00071, 2025 WL 2084353, at (D. Me. July 24, 2025)].

Judge Stafford warned that failure to do so may result in sanctions.

Here, Plaintiff's motion for leave to file a late objection and the objection to the Order do not include the required certification. As such, Plaintiff's motion and objection are stricken….

The post I've Seen Fake Cites on Both Sides Now (II) appeared first on Reason.com.

Nicaragua's Regime Drops the Pretense of Democracy

2026-07-21T18:18:32Z

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announced on Sunday that the country will no longer hold elections, preventing the opposition from competing for power and further cementing his authoritarian grip on the country.

"There will never be elections here again so that [the opposition] can try to seize the government, to seize power," Ortega said in front of thousands of state employees during an official ceremony marking the 47th anniversary of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, which first brought him into power.

"We will work with the National Assembly and the relevant institutions on laws, because we need laws that build a wall, a barrier, against the coup plotters and the traitors who sell out their country," he added.

General elections had been scheduled for November 2027. Ortega provided few details about the election ban, making it unclear whether the elections will be completely canceled or whether only the opposition will be prevented from taking part. Either way, the move eliminates the possibility of an electoral challenge to his rule.

Ortega, now 80 years old, is a former guerrilla fighter who first came to power after the Sandinista Revolution and served as president from 1985 to 1990. After suffering a defeat in 1990, he returned to power in 2007 and has remained there ever since.

His regime, which he now formally leads alongside his wife and "co-president," Rosario Murillo, had long since extinguished what remained of democracy in the country. Over the years, it has cracked down on political dissent, free speech, independent media, and civil society. Ortega's most recent announcement is just an escalation of that trend.

"This is simply a statement that unequivocally shows how the mask of a certain legality he had been trying to wear has fallen off," Félix Maradiaga, a former presidential candidate who is now exiled, told The New York Times.

Ortega's regime has repeatedly been accused of rigging elections. In 2016, he was reelected in a landslide after barring the country's main opposition coalition from participating. In 2021, he similarly claimed around 75 percent of the vote after imprisoning opposition candidates and outlawing genuine opposition parties.

The United States, the European Union, and international human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, condemned the 2021 election as a sham intended to keep Ortega in power. "The Ortega-Murillo government has deprived Nicaraguans of any real choice," and thereby "stripped the…vote of any real significance," the U.S. State Department said at the time.

The regime's repression intensified after widespread protests challenged Ortega's government in 2018. The government responded with a violent crackdown that left hundreds dead and thousands injured. Since then, authorities have revamped efforts to imprison political opponents, journalists, religious figures, and other critics.

At least 46 people currently remain imprisoned for political reasons, according to the Mechanism for the Recognition of Political Prisoners, a group that documents politically motivated detentions in Nicaragua. The government denies that it holds political prisoners.

The regime has also been accused of torture, extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detention, and weaponizing the justice system against its opponents. A 2023 investigation by a United Nations–appointed group of experts found evidence of widespread human rights violations amounting to crimes against humanity.

"What we uncovered is a tightly coordinated system of repression, extending from the presidency down to local officials," U.N. expert Ariela Peralta said of a subsequent 2025 investigation. "These are not random or isolated incidents—they are part of a deliberate and well-orchestrated State policy carried out by identifiable actors through defined chains of command."

The system of repression has extended beyond the imprisonment of individual opponents to the dismantling of nearly every independent institution in the country.

Since 2018, the government has shut down more than 5,000 organizations, most of them religious or civil society groups, but also universities, charities, and local civic organizations, because of the apparent threat they pose to the regime.

Freedom of the press has likewise been eroded, with independent media outlets shuttered and journalists harassed, imprisoned, or forced into exile. Reporters Without Borders described the situation as "a nightmare of censorship, intimidation and threats," in which "journalists are constantly stigmatised and face harassment campaigns, arbitrary arrest and death threats."

Earlier this month, the government stripped masses of lawyers of their licenses to practice without notice or explanation. Reed Brody, a member of the U.N. panel investigating Nicaragua, described the move as a "purge of the legal profession" aimed at eliminating the country's remaining democratic checks and balances.

The Ortega-Murillo regime has also stripped hundreds of opponents of Nicaraguan nationality, rendering many of them stateless, confiscating their property, and expelling them from the country.

Last year, Ortega introduced a series of constitutional reforms that extended the presidential term from five to six years, concentrated control over virtually every branch of government in the presidency, and made Murillo the country's co-president.

Sunday's announcement strips away whatever pretense of democratic legitimacy remains in the country. Whatever form the new measures ultimately take, they will formalize what has long been true: Nicaraguans have no meaningful say in who governs them.

The post Nicaragua's Regime Drops the Pretense of Democracy appeared first on Reason.com.

When Is a Park Fee Unconstitutional?

2026-07-21T16:58:56Z

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's newsletter includes stories on:

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's "Rental Ripoff Report" and its tacit admission that rent regulation is bankrupting the city's rent-stabilized buildings.
A new poll showing widespread support for reforming California's environmental review law.
San Francisco's attempt to boost construction by slashing affordability housing mandates.

But first, our lead story on a new constitutional challenge to the exorbitant park fees one California city is charging to approve a simple lot split the state law requires it to approve.

The case is an interesting example of traditionally conservative or libertarian Takings Clause arguments being levied in defense of more liberal-coded zoning reforms.

Developer Challenges City's $127,000 Park Fee on S.B. 9 Project

California developer Mircea Voskerician is suing the city of Menlo Park over a $127,000 "recreation in-lieu" fee it's charging him just to subdivide a lot owned by his company.

Per the complaint, Voskerician purchased an 18,500-square-foot lot in 2024 and shortly thereafter filed an application with the city to subdivide the property into two.

Under California's Senate Bill 9 (S.B.) 9 law, cities like Menlo Park are required to approve lot split applications "ministerially"—meaning without any public hearings or discretionary review from planning or elected officials.

Menlo Park complied with this requirement and approved Voskerician's application. It also charged the developer the six-figure parks fee for his trouble.

California gives localities lots of flexibility to charge impact fees on new housing, something localities have exploited to practically limit the number of S.B. 9 projects. (More on that later.)

While Menlo Park's fee might be kosher under state law, Voskerician's lawsuit contends it violates the U.S. Constitution.

The constitutional problem with high permit fees

In its Nollan and Dolan decisions, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment limits local governments to demanding that permit applicants surrender only the money or property necessary to mitigate the public impacts their proposed project would cause.

The court's 2024 decision in the Sheetz case confirmed that the Nollan-Dolan standards apply to permitting conditions imposed by local legislatures and not just local bureaucrats using their own administrative discretion.

In this new lawsuit, Voskerician, who is being represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), argues that his lot split is not creating some great new strain on recreational facilities in Menlo Park. Therefore, the city cannot charge him such a high park fee.

"The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that cities cannot force property owners to foot the bill for problems they didn't create. Menlo Park cannot ignore that precedent to demand a six-figure exaction for a routine subdivision," said David Deerson, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation.

Since Sheetz, property owners have filed a flurry of lawsuits arguing that the holding in that case makes various types of impact fees or affordable housing mandates unconstitutional.

In addition to Voskerician's case, PLF has litigated three cases challenging cities' application of fees or other exactions on S.B. 9 projects. Two of those cases have been settled, and fees refunded to the plaintiffs. Another, filed against San Luis Obispo, is still pending.

Voskerician's lawsuit gives the courts one more opportunity to rule against localities' common practice of shifting an undue share of the costs of public services onto new development via impact fees and similar mandates.

The practical problems of high permit fees

Bringing that burden back within constitutional limits would likely make a lot more new development financially feasible. It would certainly make S.B. 9 projects a lot more feasible.

When it was first working its way through the Legislature in 2021, proponents pitched S.B. 9 as a means of creating a lot more "missing middle" homes in California's choicest neighborhoods. By allowing property owners to subdivide single-family lots and build two new homes on each half, the law would allegedly kick off a building boom of affordable duplexes and starter homes.

Early estimates of the law's impact forecast it enabling 700,000 new homes. Four years on from its enactment, just 2,412 duplex project applications have been submitted, according to a state dashboard that tracks S.B. 9 implementation. Another 663 lot split applications have been submitted.

One reason for S.B. 9's dismal performance is the high impact fees localities can charge on projects making use of the law.

Since 2021, the California Legislature has considered a handful of S.B. 9 "clean up" bills to get the law working. Some have passed. The more comprehensive fixes have stalled out.

A successful constitutional challenge to impact fees could see courts make S.B. 9 more productive, where the legislative process has thus far failed.

Mamdani Releases 'Rental Ripoff Report'

Following a series of public "Rental Ripoff Hearings" held earlier this year, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration has released a report detailing how it intends to address the complaints tenants raised in those hearings about building quality and landlord business practices.

The report's policy recommendations include more proactive city code enforcement, higher penalties for code violations, and legal recognition of building tenant unions.

It also proposes legislation that would force landlords to choose between asking prospective tenants for their credit history or for proof of income. Many currently ask for both.

Many of these policies were already proposed in the mayor's Block by Block plan that was released in May.

"We are making it clear that every New Yorker deserves a safe home—and every landlord who refuses to provide one will be held accountable," said Mamdani on the release of the report.

Landlords contend that it is state and city regulations, not property owners' negligence, that are responsible for conditions of disrepair reported in the rent ripoff hearings.

"Buildings cannot be maintained on frozen revenue. Boilers, roofs, elevators, and facades do not repair themselves," says Kenny Burgos, president and CEO of the New York Apartment Association, in a statement referencing the Rent Guidelines Board's recent decision to freeze rents at the city's nearly one million rent-stabilized units.

Bigger picture, property owners argue that the state's 2019 rent law, which greatly limited landlords' ability to raise rents on vacant or renovated rent-stabilized units, has led to a physical decline of the rent-stabilized housing stock.

A recent brief by the New York University Furman Center found rent-stabilized units have cut maintenance spending following the 2019 law.

Reading between the lines, the Rental Ripoff Report tacitly accepts the premise that the 2019 law disincentivized building upkeep.

Under the pre-2019 regulations, "the main driver of tenant displacement shifted from abandonment and divestment to speculation and rising rents," reads the report.

To rephrase slightly, the pre-2019 rules incentivized landlords to invest in their buildings in pursuit of higher legal rents. Now, the rents are capped, and that incentive is gone. The old problems of disinvestment and building abandonment are now returning.

Mamdani's Rental Ripoff Hearings attracted criticism earlier in the year when it was revealed that they'd exclude the testimony of New York's public housing residents, who, by some accounts, rent from the city's worst landlord—the city's own housing authority.

The Rental Ripoff Report includes a brief section on public housing that notes NYC Housing Authority tenants are more likely to report multiple problems with their units. The report blames these heightened maintenance issues on "federal disinvestment"—another tacit recognition that it takes money to keep buildings in good repair.

The mayor is still banking on the idea that stepped-up enforcement can force private landlords to spend more money on their buildings. The obvious response is that that money has to come from somewhere, and it's not coming from the rent under the freeze and the 2019 law.

New Video on New York's 'Zombie Apartments'

Check out Reason's latest video on the rent freeze and its potential to create more zombie apartments.

San Francisco Cuts 'Inclusionary Housing' Requirements

In an effort to boost construction, San Francisco has slashed the required amount of affordable housing developers must include in their projects.

Last Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors voted 9–2 to reduce the percentage of units developers must offer at below-market rates from 15 percent to 5 percent across most of the city. In the Mission District, these "inclusionary housing" requirements were reduced from 17 percent to 8 percent.

The Board also exempted projects of 24 units or less from the inclusionary housing requirements entirely. Under the prior regulations, only projects of ten or fewer units were excluded.

The changes come on the heels of the latest triennial study from the Controller's Office finding that the city's inclusionary requirements rendered all forms of development financially infeasible and that the burden of the policy was "significantly worse" than when it was last studied in 2023.

Hundreds of cities across the country have "inclusionary zoning" policies that require or incentivize developers to include below-market-rate units in their projects.

The research on inclusionary zoning policies is generally pretty negative.

By requiring builders to include money-losing units in their projects, the policy effectively imposes a high rate of tax levied on a very narrow base of new construction projects. The result is less construction and higher housing costs—presumably the opposite result one would want from an affordable housing policy.

The San Francisco Controller's last study from 2023—which likewise found the city's affordable housing mandates were having a depressive effect on new development—prompted the Board of Supervisors to temporarily reduce the inclusionary requirement to 12 percent of a new project's units.

Those temporary reductions are set to expire in November. With this year's controller report finding an even more challenging environment for new development, the Board opted to permanently slash its inclusionary requirements.

Mission Local reports that the reduction in the city's inclusionary requirements is part of a wider deal between Mayor Daniel Lurie, supervisors, and affordable housing groups that also places an initiative on the city's November ballot to spend increased property tax revenues on affordable housing subsidies.

In 2026's challenging development environment, a number of cities have moved to lessen the burden of their inclusionary zoning policies on new construction.

Albany, New York, cut its inclusionary requirements from 13 percent to 5 percent earlier this year, while also hiking the per-unit lieu fees developers pay to opt out of building the units themselves.

The Oregon Legislature passed a bill requiring cities in the Portland metro region to offer tax breaks that fully offset the cost of any inclusionary zoning mandates they apply. Portland, Oregon, adopted a similar local policy in 2024.

Poll Shows Widespread Support for CEQA Reform

A new poll shows overwhelming support for a ballot initiative that would substantially pare back the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the state's landmark environmental review law.

The poll, conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) between June 29 and July 6, found that 73 percent of voters would vote "yes" on Proposition 45.

The initiative would set binding timelines for CEQA reviews of "essential projects" (broadly defined as new housing, transportation infrastructure, water and energy projects, and more) and dramatically limit the scope of what those reviews would require.

Today, CEQA requires that the builders of everything from new housing to new bike lanes study a wide, indeterminate list of environmental impacts their project might cause and then mitigate those impacts where possible. These studies can take years, and litigation over allegedly insufficient reviews can add additional years, and in extreme cases, decades, to project timelines.

The proposed reforms on the November ballot, which are being sponsored by the California Chamber of Commerce, would limit CEQA reviews to checking whether a project is in compliance with existing laws and regulations.

Reviews would have to be completed within 365 days. Lawsuits challenging the adequacy of those reviews would have to be decided within another 270 days.

Most CEQA reforms in recent years have exempted certain classes of projects (student housing, urban infill housing, etc) from the law entirely. Proponents of the Chamber's initiative argue its amendments to the law are more modest. It streamlines CEQA reviews but still requires that projects undergo that review.

Others argue the measure represents a much more significant update of the law.

Converting the "study everything" law into a checklist of regulatory compliance "would be a huge change," Christopher Elmendorf, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, told Reason back in May. "Basically, it ends CEQA in anything like the form we've known it."

It's still a long way to November. Time will tell if the support for Proposition 45 reported by the PPIC holds.

Quick Links

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson proposes a raft of new regulations that would limit landlords' ability to not renew current tenants' leases. Richard Day offers some critical comments at his Chicago-focused Substack A City That Works.
A federal judge dismissed a Santa Barbara landlords' challenge to their city's rent freeze. An attorney for the property owners told local outlet Noozhawk that the plaintiffs were considering filing an amended complaint by next month and that the lawsuit is "not over."
A recent report from researchers at Rutgers University catalogs the last decade of housing construction on land owned by religious institutions.
Indianapolis considers eliminating parking mandates.
An initiative that would have imposed a two-year rent freeze on housing in Washington, D.C., fails to make the ballot.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signs legislation restricting landlords from using rent recommendation software. This software has gotten a lot of (unfair) blame for raising rents above market rates.

The post When Is a Park Fee Unconstitutional? appeared first on Reason.com.

Supreme Court Will Consider Excessive Fines Clause Asset Forfeiture Case

2026-07-21T23:28:53Z

Ken Jouppi. (Institute for Justice)

In Timbs v. Indiana (2019), the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment is incorporated against state governments. It also ruled that asset forfeitures - confiscation of property that may have been used to facilitate commission of a crime - qualify as fines. But it gave little guidance on what exactly qualifies as "excessive." This lack of clarity stimulated all sorts of uncertainty and disagreement in lower state and federal courts.

Recently, the Court decided to hear the case of Jouppi v. Alaska. Jouppi is an Alaska "bush pilot," flying passengers to remote areas. In 2012, Alaska authorities caught him transporting a passenger who had 72 cans of beer with her, to a "dry" village where importation of alcohol is banned. State law criminalizes transportation of alcoholic beverages there.

For this crime, Jouppi was fined $1500 and sentenced to three days in jail. But the state then used its asset forfeiture law to confiscate Jouppi's plane (worth about $95,000). There is some dispute about whether Jouppi was aware of all 72 cans, or just the one six-pack that was visible. But the Alaska Supreme Court concluded this issue is irrelevant, because courts must heavily defer to the legislature on the issue of what qualifies as a serious enough offense to justify massive forfeitures, and "[i]t is clear to us that the legislature determined that the harm from even a six-pack of beer knowingly imported into a dry village is severe enough to warrant forfeiture of an aircraft."

I think it is obvious that even the illegal transportation of 72 cans of beer (let alone just six) is nowhere near severe enough an offense to justify forfeiture of a plane worth $95,000. In a previous case, the Supreme indicated that a fine is "excessive" if it is "grossly disproportionate" to the "gravity" of the underlying offense. That's far from a clear standard, and the Court should flesh it out in greater detail. But if the Jouppi forfeiture is not "grossly disproportionate," I do not know what is.

In addition, the Alaska Supreme Court was wrong to rule that courts must give the legislature broad deference on such issues. That defeats the whole point of the Excessive Fines Clause, which is to limit legislative power. By this logic, the legislature could exempt almost any fine from invalidation so long as it claims the underlying offense is really, really bad. You could, for example, justify the forfeiture of a $1 million house because the owner used it to store an illegally purchased cigarette. Indeed, that fact pattern isn't so much worse than what happened in Jouppi!

The Alaska Supreme Court's reasoning is another example of the tendency of many jurists to defer to the legislature on property rights issues in a way they would never accept when it comes to other constitutional rights. The Kelo "public use" takings case is a particularly notorious example of this problem.

There are other problems with the Alaska Supreme Court's decision. Its reasoning about the severity of the crime here is not premised on any notion that illegal transportation of alcohol is itself a grave offense, but that it indirectly contributes to excessive drinking, which in turns leads to crime and social pathology in rural parts of Alaska, where (as the lower court found) law enforcement has limited resources to deal with it.

This whole chain of reasoning is extremely dubious. The experience of the Prohibition era showed that prohibiting alcohol sales is a poor strategy for combating crime, and indeed actually exacerbates it, by facilitating the rise of organized crime and its associated violence. And if the problem is that Alaska law enforcement has too few resources to deal with crimes arising from alcohol abuse, then it shouldn't be wasting those scarce resources on the less effective tactic of enforcing prohibition! Instead, have more cops on the beat actually targeting violent crime.

These last few points might be seen as policy considerations, normally left to the legislature. But courts should scrutinize them if - as in this case - they are part of the government's rationale for arguing that the fine here is not "excessive." In that event, the accuracy of the state's claims is relevant to the court's resolution of the constitutional issue before it.

Jouppi is represented by the Institute for Justice, the libertarian-leaning public interest law firm that also successfully litigated the Timbs case. I am guardedly optimistic they will prevail here, too. If we are lucky, the Court might in the process establish a clearer and more restrictive standard for what qualifies as an "excessive" fine. But, all too often, these kinds of predictions aren't worth much more than what you're not paying for them!

NOTE: As indicated above, Jouppi is represented by the Institute for Justice. I have longstanding connections with IJ, and for which I have done pro bono work on other property rights cases. I did not, however, have any involvement in this case. IJ has an informative website devoted to the Jouppi case here.

The post Supreme Court Will Consider Excessive Fines Clause Asset Forfeiture Case appeared first on Reason.com.

Did no one else notice Justices Kagan and Barrett's Sartorial Choices?

2026-07-21T16:42:06Z

I apologize for the light blogging of late. Well, light for me at least. Randy and I just submitted the final chapter of the Fifth Edition of our casebook to the publisher. It took us nearly two weeks to figure out how to present Trump v. Barbara. I think we figured out a really innovative and accessible way of presenting the different issues, so students can easily contrast the majority and dissenting opinions. We hope to share an excerpt once the page proofs are ready.

I still have not finished reading all of the opinions from the end of the term. Plus, I have a host of half-finished posts about Slaughter, Cook, Barbara, the TPS case, West Virginia v. B.P.J., and more. I hope to get those done over the next few weeks. (I could not resist dumping on the "Aloha spirit" breaking news.)

Now, as I slowly climb out of the backlog, let me highlight something that I was surprised didn't get much attention: Justice Kagan and Barrett's sartorial choices.

Did no one else notice that Justice Kagan was wearing a bright red suit while Justice Barrett was wearing a dark blue suit? You see, the colors are reversed! I suppose this could have been coincidental. I found a few photos of Kagan wearing red in the past. Still, I'd like to think this was a subliminal attempt at bipartisanship.

I agree with David Lat and others that Kagan and Barrett are the perfect spokespersons for the Court at this moment. I wrote an essay that should be out this summer about why the Justices should hold regular press conferences to help rehabilitate the public's image. Kagan and Barrett should be the first ones to the mic.

The post Did no one else notice Justices Kagan and Barrett's Sartorial Choices? appeared first on Reason.com.

Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Case of Alaska Pilot Whose $95,000 Plane Was Seized Over a 6-Pack of Beer

2026-07-21T16:11:48Z

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider an Alaska pilot's challenge to the government seizure of his airplane for transporting an illicit six-pack of beer.

In an orders list, the Court granted the petition of Ken Jouppi, a retired 82-year-old Alaskan bush pilot who argues that the seizure of his $95,000 Cessna U206D is an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment.

Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2012 when Alaska state troopers searched his plane before takeoff and discovered that a passenger was attempting to bring several cases of beer to a "dry" village where alcohol is prohibited. (Jouppi was only culpable for a single six-pack of Budweiser that troopers said was in plain sight.)

And for the last 14 years, Jouppi has fought to stop the Alaska state government from taking his Cessna through asset forfeiture, a process which allows police and prosecutors to seize property connected to criminal activity.

The Alaska Supreme Court ruled against Jouppi last year, leading to his Supreme Court petition. Jouppi is represented by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm.

"I'm thrilled that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case, because this case isn't just about me or my airplane anymore," Jouppi said in an Institute for Justice press release. "I'm in my 80s now, and I've been fighting this for over a decade because I see it as my duty to ensure that the Bill of Rights actually means something in protecting against government overreach."

For the Institute for Justice, Jouppi's case is also an opportunity to build on a landmark 2019 Supreme Court ruling that held that the Eighth Amendment applied to states. Specifically, Jouppi's case asks the Supreme Court to rule on whether states should consider the gravity of a defendant's specific offense, rather than take an abstract view of the general crime.

"The Excessive Fines Clause of the Constitution was built for cases like this," said Sam Gedge, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, in the press release. "As government agencies increasingly exploit fines and forfeitures to pad their budgets, it's vital that the Supreme Court make clear that the Excessive Fines Clause is a meaningful check on government overreach. We're confident that it will do so here."

In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in response to an Institute for Justice lawsuit that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines and fees applies to states under the incorporation doctrine. In the underlying case, Indiana police had seized a Land Rover from a man named Tyson Timbs for a minor drug crime.

But while the Supreme Court ruled that states are bound by the Eighth Amendment, the justices left it up to state courts to determine what constitutes an excessive fine.

Many states adopted proportionality tests that involve some analysis of personal culpability. In 2021, for example, the Indiana Supreme Court rejected prosecutors' arguments that there should be no proportionality limit on seizures in drug cases like Timbs', and it ordered Timbs' car to be returned to him after eight years in legal limbo.

However, other courts, such as the Alaska Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, have focused instead on the maximum penalties for worst-case offenders and more abstract social ills that the criminal statutes in question sought to address.

Under that logic, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the forfeiture of Jouppi's plane was not excessive.

"Alcohol abuse in rural Alaska leads to increased crime; disorders, such as alcoholism; conditions, such as fetal alcohol spectrum disorder; and death, imposing substantial costs on public health and the administration of justice. Within this context, it is clear that the illegal importation of even a six-pack of beer causes grave societal harm," the ruling states. "This factor strongly suggests that the forfeiture is not grossly disproportional."

The Institute for Justice argued in Jouppi's petition to the Supreme Court that this interpretation is contrary to the historical understanding of the Excessive Fines Clause, and that the question of proportionality "implicates the Constitution's most textually explicit check on extravagant economic sanctions—including both civil and criminal forfeitures."

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