#Suits and Litigation (Civil)

[10bmnews]

Tesla Board Chair Robyn Denholm Made $198 Million Selling Stock as Profit Fell

In March, after a steep decline in Tesla’s share price, Elon Musk told employees, “Hang on to your stock.” The chair of Tesla’s board, Robyn Denholm, has not heeded his advice. Ms. Denholm has made $198 million in the past six months selling Tesla stock that she earned for serving on the board, according to a New York Times analysis of securities filings. That brings her total profit on the sale…

[khabari24]

C.I.A. Fires Top Doctor Targeted by Far-Right Activist

The C.I.A. fired its top doctor after she was targeted by far-right activists who have worked to oust government officials they see as disloyal, according to a lawsuit filed Friday evening. Late last year, the C.I.A. recruited the doctor, Terry Adirim, to take a top medical job as the director of the agency’s Center for Global Health Services. Within days, Ivan Raiklin, a far-right provocateur,…

[youthchronical]

Pro-Palestinian Activists Sue U.C.L.A. Over Encampment Attack

According to the suit, many of the counterprotesters were not students but community members, including a Beverly Hills jeweler, a Laguna Beach attorney and a Los Angeles teenager, who are named as defendants. Many could not be reached or did not respond to requests for comment. One who responded, David Merabi, an attorney in Los Angeles, said he is 70 and has back problems and was not at the…

[klasewwkd]

12.08.2024

[emergencymanagementnews]

The utility company’s share price has tumbled after lawsuits were filed seeking to hold it accountable for the blaze, which has killed more than 100 people.

[cleoselene]

from facebook of all places

posted by Jay Michaelson, and sourced by him as well:

Hello! I'm posting in response to the many sincerely anguished claims that not enough is being done to stop Trump. This is not reflected in the facts. - Represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group and State Democracy Defenders Fund, the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) filed suit on Monday against the Treasury Department “for sharing confidential data with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), run by Elon Musk.” Go to Public Citizen's website to learn all about this lawsuit, which is very likely to prevail. - On USAID, appearing with other Democratic lawmakers outside USAID offices on Monday, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) shouted, “Elon Musk, you didn't create USAID. The United States Congress did for the American people … like Elon Musk did not create USAID, he doesn't have the power to destroy it. And who's going to stop him? We are... This a constitutional crisis that we are in today.” Lawsuits have also been filed in this matter, and are also likely to prevail. - Hakeem Jeffries has announced lawsuits have been filed regarding the firings of inspectors general. - On Jan 21, Democracy Forward, was filed at 12:01 p.m. ET on Monday and accused Elon Musk's DOGE of being a "shadow operation led by unelected billionaires" that flouts federal transparency rules. That should win. - National Security Counselors filed a suit arguing that DOGE meets the requirements to be a federal advisory committee and is therefore legally required to have "fairly balanced" representation, keep regular minutes of meetings and allow public access to meetings. Clearly accurate. - Eighteen state attorneys general and a slew of immigrants' rights groups brought swift legal action against Trump after he signed his executive order seeking to ban birthright citizenship for some children born in the U.S., arguing that it violates the Fourteenth Amendment. Obviously, clearly unconstitutional. - "Schedule F" has been challenged in court by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees in 37 agencies and departments. - Several immigrant rights groups in the United States, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have filed a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s ban on asylum claims. - GLAD Law and the National Center For Lesbian Rights (NCLR) have sued to stop Trump's ban on trans people in the military. And there are many more - I'll link to a great list of them in the comments. Yes, there are Trump judges in the courts, and if Aileen Cannon types get these cases, Trump may prevail. But most judges are not like her. These actions are clearly illegal and/or unconstitutional, and they WILL be stopped. Just like the tariffs were not meant to prevail -- Trump won that round, "forcing" Canada and Mexico to take "action" on fentanyl -- these actions are not meant to prevail. They're meant to flood the zone with shit, confuse and immobilize us. They said they'd do "Shock and Awe" and that's what they've done. Nothing here should be surprising. Shock and Awe is up to YOU. I am not shocked, I am not in awe. Oh, and the "mainstream media" has reported on all of these. The info above has come from Newsweek, the NY Times, and other mainstream sources. Please stop attacking journalists when we are being threatened by the FBI. Who do you think you're helping by doing that? Stop it with the doomsaying and gloomsaying. Want to make a difference? Give thousands of dollars to Public Citizen, the ACLU, and similar groups. Show up at marches. Put your ass on the line and help protect people from ICE. If you're safe, do simple symbolic things (like changing your social media pictures) to support people who are not safe. Just like we should not obey in advance, we should not panic in advance either. This is not the end of democracy. That is just what the bad guys want you to think. Get over it and fight.

I don't know how many times I've heard "Dems do nothing!" when they are in fact doing a lot of things. You just don't hear about it because the mainstream news doesn't pay attention or you don't see out news beyond your social media feeds.

The other thing is, Dems don't break laws in their fights the way Republicans do. Your desire to turn every Dem POTUS into the Dick Cheney Version of the Executive but then screaming injustice! when the GOP does it -- you see the problem there?

[eoieopda]

in limine (teaser) | wjh

in limine (latin): at the threshold, in the beginning

synopsis: you think that by remaining single this year, you’ve found a loophole in your string of shitty valentine’s days. the universe thinks you should lose your paralegal on the eve of a major trial and see if you wouldn’t rather have all of those untimely breakups and missed dates instead. pairing: wen junhui x reader au: law firm, coworkers to something genre: fluff, minor angst, smut word count: 1.2k (teaser), est. 11-15k (fic) content/warnings: attorney!reader, attorney!junhui, pov switches, civil litigation (derogatory), forced proximity, discussions of shitty relationships, i haven’t practiced in this field of law in years, recreational drinking, explicit sexual content. reader notes: afab, no pronouns used, no descriptions of hair/complexion/body/ethnicity/nationality/etc., canonically queer. a/n 1: this fic will be posted by 2/17/25 as part of the lonely hearts club café collab, hosted by @camandemstudios! please check out the rest of this masterlist, as well as their previous collabs! 💕 update: as of 2/13/25, she’s live here! a/n 2: it took me *checks watch* over two (2) years for me (an attorney) to write a fic about attorneys — and it’s not even the area of law i practice. asdfghj. everything here is based on u.s. law, even though the setting is nondescript. family law attorneys: i’m sorry.

As soon as he crosses the threshold into that sole, lit room, Junhui stops. The massive table that normally occupies the center of it has been shoved up against the interior wall, along with all its chairs. In its place, evidence boxes form a haphazard little fairy circle on the rug. You sit cross-legged in the middle, nose all but buried in a case file, wearing leggings and a crewneck instead of the suit you likely came here in.

“You look comfortable,” he muses.

It becomes abundantly clear very quickly that you, too, thought you were here alone. You jolt at the sound of his voice. All the papers you were holding drop and scatter, both across your lap and the floor you’re monopolizing.

Junhui’s hands fly up. “Whoa, sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

The look on your face is far from startled, though. Even from a few meters away, he can see how tightly your jaw is clenched. If he listens closely, he’d likely hear your teeth grinding one another into dust. 

He can also sense how stiff your posture is, now that you feel his eyes on you. His gaze shifts to the piles of paper near your knotted limbs; and he tells himself that he’s averting his eyes out of respect, not the tiny tremble of intimidation he feels working its way down his spine.

At this point, Junhui knows you by reputation only. He’s rarely at any of the courthouses you frequent, and his specific line of work keeps him out of the office, more often than not. Whenever he is here, you’re not — too busy with that massive caseload of yours to catch much of a breather.

The two of you may be passing ships in the night, but you have a lot of people in common. He can’t say that he’s made much of an impression on them so far. You, on the other hand, are both widely known and discussed. 

So far, anyone that’s ever mentioned you to him speaks about you as if they’re describing a force of nature. It’s the kind of awe people usually save for something fearsome yet worthy of respect, like a tsunami — with the sole exception being that sanctimonious cunt, Tom Santi, who most recently described you as a nightmare bitch from hell.

Of course, Junhui has no firsthand knowledge to back any of these claims up, but he figures it can’t be that far out of character for you to be here now, working too hard. For all he knows, it could also be on-brand for you to snap his neck for distracting you.

“Do you…?”

One of your eyebrows arches quizzically. His question dies on his tongue, halfway finished, because he doesn’t know where it was headed in the first place. Just the same, he can’t tell if that expression on your face is due to stress, annoyance at being interrupted, or some secret, third thing.

…Want me to leave?

Junhui points awkwardly to the espresso machine in the corner, which you’ve unintentionally barricaded behind the conference room table. Like a fucking buffoon, all he says is: “Espresso?”

Your face scrunches a tiny bit. For the second time, he finds himself completely unable to read you. Is it disgust? Suspicion?

No, he realizes, it’s neither. He sees the tiniest flicker of it when the corner of your lips twitch: amusement. While the smile doesn’t overtake your mouth, there’s a glimmer of it in your eyes. It’s reason enough for Junhui to breathe for the first time since he walked in.

“Yes, I do espresso.” You nod with your lips bitten between your teeth, like you’re seconds away from laughing. 

Too eagerly, Junhui nods, too. “Right. Got it. Order up.”

Order up?

Running away isn’t an option; and he can’t dig a hole to hide in without a shovel. All he has left to do is shuffle over towards the corner and slink through the obstacle course you’ve built. With what he feels is impressive agility, he makes it all the way to the machine before pausing suddenly. 

Under his breath, he curses, “Fuck.”

The jig is up now. Junhui has no idea which buttons to press or where the espresso beans are. Unfortunately for both of you, the only way for him to find out is to interrupt you further. 

Whoever handles his eulogy better leave out how little time it took him to provoke you into killing him.

Bracing himself for impact, he squeezes his eyes shut and smiles sheepishly. “Do you happen to know how to… use this?”

There’s a groan from the center of the room. Junhui cracks one eye open and searches for the fist coming his way. Instead, he finds you on your feet, twisting at the waist and stretching.

While twisting, you lock eyes — well, eye — with him, then you freeze with your torso still rotated in his direction. Your hinged arms stay where they are, held up at your sides.

“I’ve been sitting here like a goblin for too long,” you explain, tone self-conscious. “If you just heard every joint in my body pop…. no, you didn’t.”

Before Junhui can think of a quip in response — he’s capable of coherent speech, he swears — you step over the shoes you’ve discarded and make your way over to him, patterned socks clashing with the neutral carpet below. He steps back on instinct, although there isn’t really anywhere left for him to go. 

You either don’t notice how close you get to him, or you don’t care. Entirely unfazed, you set to work, grinding and tamping like it’s all second nature to you.

Junhui knows he should use this time to observe your processes carefully, but he doesn’t. That’s not to say the learning opportunity is entirely squandered, though. 

And he’s a quick study.

In less than a minute, he learns more about you than he has in the last three months. His first discovery is that you’re wearing a watch on your dominant wrist, which is weird as hell — until he spots the small tattoo hiding beneath it. He catches the very faint notes of patchouli at the base of your perfume, too, underneath the cassis and freesia.

It’s nice, he thinks, even better than the overwhelming scent of coffee that swoops in to drown it out.

“This goes here —”

The silver piece in your hand twists into place with a click, drawing his attention back to where it should’ve been all along. 

Fuck. 

Have you been talking this entire time?

“— and then you press the start button to release the hot water.”

You glance up at him then to confirm that he understood you. Junhui blinks, buffering while he tries to play this out.

“You’re good at this,” he improvises, although he admittedly has no idea if this is true. 

“No compliments until you survive drinking it.” You offer him a wry smile to go with the drink you’ve made him. “I’ve quite literally never touched this thing before in my life.”

With your vaguely expectant eyes on him, he takes a small sip, then he murmurs with his lips still hidden behind the glass, “I don’t think I believe that.”

“Why?” You smirk and tilt your head to the side. “Because it’s just that good?”

No, in fact, it’s terrible, but you don’t need to know that.

Junhui nods his head towards the center of the room. His reply is simple, and despite not being the full truth, it’s not a lie: “I’d expect more practice from someone who seems to live here.”

the full fic is now available here, as of 2/13/35!

[appellatedefender]

Some thoughts about Matt’s client, Leroy Bradford. I did appellate indigent criminal defense work for 20 years and had quite a few clients like Leroy (except that most of them were long-term guests of the state, unlike Leroy, who is facing a misdemeanor theft charge).

Matt gets an early morning phone call from Kirsten, asking him to cover an appearance in Leroy's case. So Matt puts on his suit and heads downtown. If anyone was wondering what a lawyer's life is like, this is it. Having to scramble to cover an appearance or a deposition or a meeting for a partner or associate at the last minute is part of the job. Very realistic if you're a criminal defense lawyer or a civil litigator.

Leroy has a shitty life and has had a shitty life since day one: absent/addicted/incarcerated parent or parents, bad neighborhood, bad housing, bad schools, bad diet, bad or no healthcare, no job, no money. Maybe it was even worse, and he grew up in foster care. The system that is supposed to help him is difficult or impossible for him to navigate and sometimes makes things worse instead of helping him. You want to empathize with him, you do empathize with him. But he’s not a likeable guy (and not only because of his ableist comments about Matt’s blindness), and you have to admit he’s brought a lot of his troubles on himself. Matt’s comment about not thinking about the consequences of his actions is right on the mark.

So what do you do as his lawyer? You can’t fix his shitty life. You’re his lawyer, not a social worker. So you put aside his unlikeability and, in Matt’s case, his ableist comments, and you do your best for him. In this case that means getting the best possible deal for your client. Which Matt did.

It’s a little unrealistic that Leroy would be pissed off at Matt when he comes back to tell Leroy about the offer. He’s been through the legal system enough times to know that it’s a very good deal. Finally he shrugs and says it doesn't matter.

On a happier note, Matt’s negotiation with the ADA is a delight. In real life, there probably would be a line of attorneys waiting to talk to Sofija, and little or no time for flirting, but who cares about real life when you can get a scene like this?

The scene takes place in the misdemeanor arraignment courtroom. Sofija has a whole stack of cases she’s handling. The goal is to “dispo” (get a disposition in) as many cases as possible so they can be removed from the court’s docket. So she’s negotiating with Matt to try to dispo Leroy’s case. As has been suggested elsewhere, maybe she didn’t get the DA’s memo (after the Ayala trial) instructing her not to cooperate with Matt. Or maybe she's just doing her job. Or maybe flirting with him is too much fun to pass up. Whatever the case, she and Matt negotiate at the same time as they are flirting and eventually strike a deal. Priceless.

One final thought about Leroy. Sadly, our society considers people like him disposable and begrudges every penny spent on them. Yet as Leroy correctly observes, feeding him would be cheaper (and more cost-effective) than incarcerating him.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ken White for The UnPopulist:

In modern America, defamation cases—like war—are the continuation of politics by other means. The politics in question can be anything from ludicrously petty to historically consequential. Americans use defamation claims to fight everything from social media spats to rap beefs. Increasingly, America’s rich and powerful—especially President Donald Trump—use them to attack political opponents and to litigate political disputes over who won national elections. Notice that I didn’t say we use defamation claims to resolve those disputes. Most defamation claims ultimately fail, and almost none of them reach trial. But winning often isn’t the point. The point is inflicting ruinous expense and suffering on the defendants and soliciting attention, support, and sometimes fundraising for the plaintiffs. It works. That’s why you see rich and powerful people increasingly abusing defamation lawsuits—sometimes dressed up unconvincingly as fraud lawsuits—to harass political enemies. This is a grave threat to free speech and the people who do it—like Donald Trump and Elon Musk—are ascendant. Trump, who has long favored bogus litigation as a weapon against his enemies, has been on a censorial bender. In the last year alone he: sued a pollster for bad poll results; CBS for supposedly editing a Kamala Harris interview to make her look better; and ABC and George Stephanopoulos for bungling a description of E. Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse verdict against him. Musk, meanwhile, has sued both Media Matters and the Center for Countering Digital Hate for reporting about hate speech on X.

The Justice System Is Broken

Political litigation works because the justice system is broken. It’s cheap and easy to file a defamation complaint, even a big splashy one. I could draft one in 20 minutes and file it in state or federal court for less than a thousand bucks. But it’s ruinously expensive to defend a case, even if the claim is bogus. It costs a minimum of tens of thousands and up to hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend a civil suit in America. When Donald Trump was awarded more than $300,000 in attorney fees for defeating Stormy Daniels’ defamation case at an early stage, litigators weren’t surprised. The vast majority of Americans cannot possibly afford to defend themselves if someone sues them for their speech, even if that speech is clearly protected by the First Amendment. This is bad for everyone, not just the folks who get sued. When a lawyer sends you a threatening letter demanding that you take down a Facebook post or retract a letter to the editor or apologize for a comment, giving in may be the only economically rational choice, freedom of expression be damned. It’s cold comfort to know that your free speech rights would be vindicated at trial if it will bankrupt you to get to that stage. Moreover, penury isn’t the only threat. Whether you win a defamation suit or lose, you’ll suffer the whole time. Litigation is humiliating, terrifying, and will destroy your health, your relationships, and your joy in life. I’ve never had a client enjoy litigation. They’re always grateful for it to be over.

[...]

State Anti-SLAPP Statutes Aren’t Enough

Numerous states have followed California’s example and enacted anti-SLAPP statutes. Ohio just passed one this month. Unfortunately, their quality is inconsistent; some states’ statutes protect only a very narrow range of speech or lack the procedural protections that make statutes effective. There’s also a bigger problem: state anti-SLAPP statutes don’t apply to federal claims. Even worse, the different Circuits of the United States Court of Appeals disagree for arcane reasons about whether state anti-SLAPP statutes apply to state claims heard in federal court. Drake sued UMG in federal court in New York, which has a robust anti-SLAPP statute, but UMG won’t get its benefit because federal courts in the Second Circuit don’t apply state anti-SLAPP statutes. The same goes for Texas, within the Fifth Circuit, a popular defamation tourist destination—Trump sued CBS and Musk sued Media Matters there, thwarting defendants’ ability to use state anti-SLAPP laws.

Fortunately, there’s a solution: a federal anti-SLAPP statute that would apply in federal courts across the nation to both federal and state claims heard in federal court. This is the most effective way of thwarting forum-shopping litigants who rush to Texas to suppress speech. It would mean that performative, retaliatory lawsuits like those filed by Trump and Musk would be halted in their tracks and, if meritless, dismissed. The defendants could recover fees and feel justifiably more secure in their speech rights. Plaintiffs without deep pockets would be deterred from filing bogus cases in the first place. Anti-SLAPP statutes have already proven effective in thwarting the powerful—consider Elon Musk’s humiliating loss against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, or Sheldon Adelson’s loss to the National Jewish Democratic Council. In both cases, the defendants prevailed through an anti-SLAPP statute.

Congress has repeatedly considered federal anti-SLAPP statutes, but they’ve never passed one. In December 2024 members of Congress from both sides of the aisle proposed a new one. It has strong and diverse backing. It ought to pass on its merits. After all, both parties pay lip service to free speech and purport to oppose frivolous lawsuits, and there are plenty of nonpartisan stories of financially ruinous and frivolous litigation. This can be spun in a way that appeals to everyone.

Yet the proponents face a grim political reality. Donald Trump has a compliant Republican Congress that is sensitive to his extreme tenderness to offense. Even if backers don’t spin the bill as a rebuke to Trump’s habit of bad-faith litigation, Republicans may perceive the bill as such. Trump himself has a long history of wanting to make it easier, not harder, to sue for defamation, repeatedly saying that he wants to “open up” libel laws to allow aggrieved plaintiffs to “sue them and win money.” The bill’s sponsors need to find a way to frame this fight so that it flatters his ego, or he’ll veto it out of pique.

But nobody promised fighting for free speech would be easy. Anti-SLAPP statutes are so stunningly effective that it’s worth our time to agitate for this one, even under these grim circumstances. The Public Participation Project will continue to promote anti-SLAPP bills in Congress law and provide information about supporting such bills, so follow them. Nobody likes a bully. Bullies like SLAPP suits. Regrettably, America is overrun by bullies—and some of them, like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, have absolutely no scruple about abusing the legal system to punish their political enemies. Support state and federal anti-SLAPP statutes to help stick a thumb in the bullies’ eyes.

Anti-SLAPP laws with real teeth are needed, because malcontents like Elon Musk and MAGA acolytes are using it to silence dissenters against their wicked and Satanic agenda.

[10bmnews]

Farmers Sued Over Deleted Climate Data. So the Government Will Put It Back.

The Agriculture Department will restore information about climate change that was scrubbed from its website when President Trump took office, according to court documents filed on Monday in a lawsuit over the deletion. The deleted data included pages on federal funding and loans, forest conservation and rural clean energy projects. It also included sections of the U.S. Forest Service and Natural…

[youthchronical]

Deported Professor Rasha Alawieh Attended Hezbollah Leader’s Funeral, D.H.S. Says

The Department of Homeland Security said on Monday that it had deported a Brown University professor and doctor with a valid visa because they said she attended a Hezbollah leader’s funeral in February during a trip to Lebanon. When questioned by Customs and Border Protection officers upon her return to the United States, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, who is Lebanese, “openly admitted” her support for the…

[jadedbirch]

In light of the illegal, bigoted, and morally repugnant bullshit that's been coming out of the White House lately, I've been really worrying about the trans and gender-diverse community here in the States. I wanted to share this Legal Tracker with you so that you can see the lawsuits that are already underway to stop this discriminatory and cruel attempt to change the law. You can find the complaints related to trans rights under the "Civil Liberties And Rights" topic. You can read the text of the law suits under "Complaint" and honestly, it made me feel a bit better to do so.

Finally, I know this is a really difficult time, especially for the trans and immigrant communities, but really for anyone who isn't a cishet white man. If any of my friends and followers are struggling, I love you, you're in my heart, please feel free to reach out ❤️❤️❤️. How can I support you? We can overcome this Nazi shit together!

[mariacallous]

The Supreme Court delivered a string of major losses for liberal Americans in recent weeks. Two in particular stand out: In United States v. Skrmetti, the Court’s conservative majority upheld a state law outlawing minors’ access to puberty blockers and hormones to treat gender dysphoria. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the justices created a new constitutional entitlement for religious parents to shield their children from learning about LGBTQ people in public schools.

Defeats like these have become the norm since Donald Trump jolted the Court rightward. For many progressives, the narrative is straightforward: Ambitious, doctrinaire, Republican-appointed justices are systematically dismantling liberal precedents over the impassioned but impotent dissents of their Democratic-appointed colleagues.

This account accurately captures the speed, scope, and partisanship of the Court’s conservative counterrevolution. Yet it obscures a difficult truth: Progressive lawyers paved the road to these losses. Rulings such as those in Skrmetti and Mahmoud are the predictable consequences of liberal litigation strategies that invite a hostile Court to codify an agenda that the Court’s conservative majority was handpicked to establish.

The Supreme Court cannot act without cases. It cannot initiate litigation. To reshape doctrine in the ways the justices want, they depend on litigants to bring suits to them. Both of these cases represent unforced errors; liberal lawyers chose to fight for ideas the justices were explicitly appointed to oppose. Poorly chosen liberal challenges are a gift to a conservative majority eager to recast constitutional law.

Progressive lawyers need a strategic recalibration, something I argue in a forthcoming Cornell Law Review article. They need to stop reflexively turning to federal courts, and especially the Supreme Court. Avoiding high-risk, high-profile litigation in inhospitable forums does not mean abandoning constitutional advocacy. It means redirecting that advocacy toward the democratic arenas of constitutional politics, such as legislatures, ballot initiatives, grassroots organizing, and the broader public square. In these spaces, progressives can build popular support, blunt the impact of adverse rulings, and shape the constitutional culture that, over time, influences judicial doctrine itself.

The Skrmetti case began in April 2023, when the American Civil Liberties Union sued Tennessee to block the state from banning certain treatments of gender dysphoria for minors. (I’d worked at the ACLU as a legal fellow a year earlier but had no involvement in the case.) After an initial trial-court victory for the liberal plaintiffs, the state appealed the decision to the Sixth Circuit. That court overturned the lower court’s decision and upheld the ban.

The ACLU could have accepted this regional setback. The Sixth Circuit’s decisions bind just four states—Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Although the outcome was surely painful for the plaintiffs, the ruling did not overturn other lower-court decisions protecting transgender rights that had been decided in other states. Declining to appeal need not constitute an endorsement of the decision. Rather, it would have reflected a pragmatic assessment that the Court’s conservative justices were more likely to amplify than alleviate harm.

Instead, the ACLU (later joined by the Biden administration) petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case. The Court’s conservative majority obliged and accepted the case for full review in June 2024. The decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts earlier this month, which was joined by all of his fellow Republican appointees, is the unhappy result.

In concrete terms, the decision allows states with previously blocked bans to seek their restoration, and emboldens states without bans to enact them, assured of constitutional cover. Yet when the Supreme Court adjudicates, it does more than resolve a dispute between two parties. It shapes the trajectory of constitutional interpretation and political contestation. Its rulings influence not just courts and legislatures but also public discourse and perception. By affirming the result and much of the rationale of the Sixth Circuit—and condoning the open animus toward transgender people voiced by Tennessee lawmakers—the Court didn’t merely uphold one type of law. It radiated anti-transgender sentiment in explicit constitutional doctrine and the wider constitutional culture that shapes politics, law, and public dialogue.

Legally, Skrmetti deprives transgender advocates of a key sex-discrimination argument and signals to lower courts that the highest court takes a skeptical view of transgender-rights claims made under equal-protection law. Politically, it encourages Republican officials to pursue even more restrictive laws targeting transgender people. Attorney General Pam Bondi and other Trump-administration figures praised the ruling and vowed to escalate their crackdown on transgender rights, including access to gender-affirming care treatments for minors in blue states.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Skrmetti concurrence—joined in full by Justice Clarence Thomas and substantively endorsed by Justice Samuel Alito—goes further in inviting discrimination against transgender people. Before oral argument, some progressives had hoped that Barrett would serve as a swing vote to strike down the law. Instead, she staked out a position even more extreme than the majority opinion, writing that transgender people do not qualify as a suspect or quasi-suspect class under the equal-protection clause.

Her reasoning, if embraced by lower courts, would uphold sweeping discriminatory policies targeting transgender adults—such as bans on receiving gender-affirming care and using public facilities—under the guise of “legitimate regulatory policy.” And it telegraphs to lawmakers agitating for more aggressive attacks on transgender people that the Court will not stand in their way.

Advocates should know that this is a risk they are taking. Supreme Court justices have little stopping them from addressing unraised issues and disturbing unrelated precedent. The Roberts Court has made something of a habit of doing so, with its conservative justices frequently reaching to decide questions not before them. In Skrmetti, instead of merely applying precedent on the appropriate standard for evaluating Tennessee’s law and then remanding to the Sixth Circuit for further proceedings, the conservative majority decided the law’s constitutionality outright—an aggressive and unnecessary move.

That this was totally avoidableunderscores that liberal advocates would be wise to refrain from channeling long-shot cases to unsympathetic courts—not just the Supreme Court but many federal appellate courts as well, which are filled with ideologically vetted conservative judges from the previous Trump term. Even if liberals do occasionally win at appellate courts, those victories can prove Pyrrhic, setting up conservatives with a fast track to the Supreme Court.

Mahmoud v. Taylor offers a cautionary tale of initial liberal wins turning into bigger defeats. After adding books with LGBTQ characters and themes to elementary curricula, the public-school district in Montgomery County, Maryland, created a notice and opt-out system for parents who wanted to withdraw their kids from instruction with the materials. The district later removed the opt-out system following protests from LGBTQ families that found it stigmatizing and discriminatory.

Then a coalition of Muslim and Christian parents with young children objected to the removal. By all accounts, these parents were sincere in their religious convictions. They sought accommodations that neighboring school districts had given similarly situated parents; none wanted to ban the books entirely from the school. Many of the objecting parents were comfortable with their kids reading the books at more advanced ages. Yet the district refused to compromise, dismissing hundreds of parental complaints requesting a restoration of the opt-out. What could have been resolved through negotiation transformed into a culture-war flash point and a lawsuit.

From the outset of litigation, the school district should have seen the warning signs. The Becket Fund, a powerhouse religious-liberty organization that has won eight (and lost zero) Supreme Court cases in the past decade, represented the parents in their suit, and conservative media outlets regularly covered even routine procedural developments. That should have alerted the district that the stakes were far greater than local policy.

A strategic retreat—restoring the opt-out and pursuing legal maneuvers to moot the case, including after the Court granted certiorari—would have shown prudence, not capitulation. Instead, the district pressed on. Its temporary wins at the trial and appellate stages then teed up the Supreme Court reversal that has now reshaped constitutional doctrine nationwide. In ruling for the parents, the Roberts Court extended a nearly unbroken streak of favoring free-exercise claimants, largely conservative Christians.

Mahmoud imposes a rigid, nationwide rule that sharply limits schools’ ability to balance inclusion with parental concerns. Discovering a new constitutional right for parents to opt out of teaching “subtle” themes that conflict with their religious beliefs, the decision strips locally elected school boards of the power to make nuanced curricular judgments and hands it to federal judges. It saddles schools with new administrative burdens, inhibits the development of pluralistic curricula, and invites ideological censorship masquerading as religious accommodation.

Ironically, a local effort to affirm LGBTQ dignity in a county of 1 million residents led the Supreme Court to inflict a blow to that dignity across a nation of 340 million. Much was lost in the crossfire. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent, Mahmoud threatens the “very essence” of American public education and democracy.

For advocates in the progressive legal world, deprioritizing litigation will require a theoretical shift, a move away from the court-centric constitutional vision that has defined progressive legal thought since the Warren and early Burger Courts and has been sustained by occasional liberal victories in the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. It will necessitate recognizing that the Court is not the sole or even primary engine of constitutional interpretation.

The Court’s pronouncements on constitutional law are important, of course. But other institutions and spaces—legislatures, referenda, classrooms, workplaces, media, even group chats and other parts of the public square—have a role to play in the articulation of constitutional ideas. De-emphasizing the courts as sources of legal interpretation and policy change can allow progressives to correctly conceptualize constitutional politics as a participatory, democratic project with institutional and noninstitutional dimensions, not a top-down one outsourced to nine people on the Supreme Court.

The public’s views should matter a great deal. No Court, however reactionary, operates in a vacuum or with impunity. Justices are shaped by the same gravitational social and political forces as everyone else. As Justice Benjamin Cardozo observed in 1921, “The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by.”

Polling shows that most Americans, including four out of every five Republicans, support restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors. Even in liberal Maryland, two-thirds of voters oppose LGBTQ-focused curricula for young students. Asking a conservative court to override that sentiment—to go where many Democratic voters have yet to go—was never viable. Without public opinion on their side, liberal litigators had little leverage or hope of winning.

I saw this disconnect up close at the ACLU. My colleagues were smart and dedicated, carrying the immense emotional weight of fighting for the fundamental dignity of vulnerable people in a climate of growing prejudice and political attack. But many treated any doubts about transgender rights as simple bigotry. Although this approach foregrounded empathy for transgender people, it often failed to genuinely engage with the majority of Americans, who had questions about athletic competition and medical decisions for minors.

Rather than speak directly to these concerns, liberal litigators sometimes scorned public opinion, confident in the righteousness of their views. As a recent New York Times Magazine feature revealed, the legal advocates behind Skrmetti operated from academic and activist theories of sex and gender that were out of the mainstream. While public support for transgender rights and the medical consensus on treatments for minors’ gender dysphoria fractured, advocates such as the ACLU doubled down on rhetorical purity rather than persuasion. In one widely shared post, the ACLU declared, “Men who get their periods are men. Men who get pregnant and give birth are men.” Another post dismissed as a “MYTH” the near–universally held view that “sex is binary, apparent at birth.” This kind of messaging garners engagement in insular, algorithm-driven online spaces but does not create a cultural foundation that moves skeptical voters and conservative judges. A political and legal strategy anchored in Judith Butler is not going to convince Brett Kavanaugh.

This recalibration doesn’t mean giving up on litigation altogether. But it does mean approaching it with greater realism, aiming for incremental change, not sweeping wins. It requires reading the judicial landscape honestly, studying conservative legal thinking carefully, recognizing when legal action may do more harm than good, and accepting some losses in order to preempt even bigger ones. For example, the Sixth Circuit’s Skrmetti opinion, written by Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, clearly foreshadowed where Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were likely to land, given Sutton’s influence on contemporary conservative legal thought and the intellectual proximity of his approach and their own. Ditto for Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., a Trump appointee to the Fourth Circuit who dissented in Mahmoud.

There’s a revealing paradox in contemporary liberal legal advocacy at the Supreme Court. Many progressives describe the current Court as dangerously rogue and reactionary. Yet their actions suggest a lingering faith in the Court’s legitimacy and potentiality as an agent of progressive change. This dissonance surfaces when an ACLU lawyer who calls the Supreme Court a “vile institution” is the same person who brought Skrmetti to it. Ultimately, a Court that cannot be trusted to protect rights should not be empowered to undermine them.

The path forward lies in organizing, legislating, and persuading, not in supplicating before an antipathetic bench. If they take this new path, progressives may find that they can cultivate constitutional power in places the Court cannot reach.

[beardedmrbean]

A coalition of parents attempting to block a state law that would require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms by next year have won a legal battle in federal court.

U.S. District Judge John deGravelles issued an order Tuesday granting the plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction, which means the state can't begin its plan to promote and create rules surrounding the law as soon as Friday while the litigation plays out.

The judge wrote that the law is "facially unconstitutional" and "in all applications," barring Louisiana from enforcing it and adopting rules around it that require all public K-12 schools and colleges to exhibit posters of the Ten Commandments.

DeGravelles, who heard arguments over the legislation on Oct. 21, also ordered the state attorney general's office to "provide notice to all schools that the Act has been found unconstitutional."

The law had dictated that schools have by Jan. 1 to comply. Attorney General Liz Murrill did not immediately respond to the judge's ruling but is expected to appeal.

Gov. Jeff Landry signed the GOP-backed legislation in June, part of his conservative agenda that has reshaped Louisiana's cultural landscape, from abortion rights to criminal justice to education.

The move prompted a coalition of parents — Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist and nonreligious — to sue the state in federal court. They argued that the law "substantially interferes with and burdens" their First Amendment right to raise their children with whatever religious doctrine they want.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom from Religion Foundation have supported the suit.

In their complaint, the parents said the law "sends the harmful and religiously divisive message that students who do not subscribe to the Ten Commandments ... do not belong in their own school community and should refrain from expressing any faith practices or beliefs that are not aligned with the state's religious preferences."

Steven Green, a professor of law, history and religious studies at Willamette University in Oregon, testified against the law during the federal court hearing, arguing that the Ten Commandments are not at the core of the U.S. government and its founding, and if anything, the Founding Fathers believed in a separation of church and state.

At a news conference after the hearing, Murrill dismissed Green's testimony as not being relevant as to whether the posters themselves violate the First Amendment.

"This law, I believe, is constitutional, and we've illustrated it in numerous ways that the law is constitutional. We've shown that in our briefs by creating a number of posters," Murrill told reporters. "Again, you don't have to like the posters. The point is you can make posters that comply with the Constitution."

In August, Murrill and Landry presented examples of how posters of the Ten Commandments could be designed and hung up in classrooms for educational purposes. The displays included historical context for the commandments that the state believes makes its law constitutional.

One poster compared Moses and Martin Luther King Jr., while another riffed off the song "Ten Duel Commandments" from the musical "Hamilton."

Murrill said no public funds will be required to be spent on printing the posters and they can be supplied through private donations, but questions remain about what happens to educators that refuse to comply with the law.

The state has anticipated that the case could go to the U.S. Supreme Court, which last weighed in on the issue in 1980, when the justices ruled 5-4 that Kentucky's posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools was unconstitutional.

Another state, Oklahoma, is facing similar lawsuits over a requirement that the Bible be part of lesson plans in public school grades five through 12, and that the Bible be stocked in every classroom.

When asked what he would tell parents concerned about having the Ten Commandments in public schools, Landry said in August: "Tell your child not to look at them."