But in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court accepted the FCC argument that carriers could have obtained jury trials if they refused to pay the fines and the government tried to collect. Carriers could either pay the fines and challenge them in circuit appeals courts, or not pay the fines and wait for the government to collect in a process that ultimately would result in a jury trial for each carrier.
“The FCC’s forfeiture proceedings fit comfortably within” the Supreme Court’s Seventh Amendment precedents, Roberts wrote. “The orders at issue did not settle the carriers’ legal obligations because, stated simply, they did not create an obligation to pay. And the orders did not reflect the ultimate determination of any fact because, before the carriers could have been made to pay, the Government was required to prove its case to a jury.”
During oral arguments, justices expressed skepticism of AT&T and Verizon’s claims and seemed to agree that FCC fine decisions are nonbinding until enforced by a court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh described the case as a victory for carriers either way, because the government acknowledged its orders are nonbinding without a jury trial. //
“The Commission now agrees that AT&T and Verizon would have been entitled to a jury trial de novo in an Article III court had they declined to pay,” Thomas wrote. The majority, Thomas said, “accepts the Government’s newfound account that under the Act, the Commission’s self-styled ‘orders’ were mere nonbinding notices that the regulated parties were free to ignore.”
Thomas supports this interpretation and said it “should govern future proceedings so as to bring the Commission’s enforcement practices into harmony with the Constitution.” But as for the case involving AT&T and Verizon, Thomas argued that the FCC did not comply with the limits described in today’s Supreme Court ruling.
“If AT&T and Verizon did not pay, they arguably were subject to immediate statutory penalties for defying Commission forfeiture orders,” Thomas wrote. “The procedure for judicial review of the orders that is the basis for this Court’s jurisdiction treated them not as requests for voluntary payment, but as ‘final orders.’”
Thomas wrote that “AT&T and Verizon did what courts ordinarily encourage: They paid under protest and filed suit to get their payments back. Today, the Court punishes AT&T and Verizon for complying with a government order that they in good faith believed was obligatory, diligently preserving their objection to that order, and then litigating that objection so effectively as to cause the Government to change its position years later.”
Williams has not ruled on any of the underlying claims. What she has done is hand a win to a group founded by one of Trump's impeachment lawyers, who filed a motion with a judge appointed by Barack Obama and got exactly the result they were looking for. //
Tech in RL
3 hours ago
Sure, re-open the case and press forward for $10 billion. Trump is in a no-lose situation. He either wins a huge award for weaponization of government because guilt is certain since a guy went to jail for it, or the people get a weaponization fund. If Trump wins a big award from this, he can set up his own fund without worrying about politics. //
Old Texan
2 hours ago edited
"whether the case should be reopened because "the court was the victim of a fraud"
Perhaps she should review the thousands of cases filed against everything Trump does, and then let me know if the judiciary is not committing fraud on a regular basis. Perhaps then I will give credence to her concerns. //
anon-isiz
2 hours ago
What are the 35 judges’ standing to question the settlement? None.
District9 anon-isiz
30 minutes ago
Democrat challengers automatically have standing everywhere. Standing only comes into play when Republicans question something.
A new DOJ lawsuit represents a vital step toward ending an un-American war on disfavored attorneys and defenders of disfavored causes — a war that would do irrevocable damage to our justice system and republic. //
With a new landmark lawsuit, the Trump Justice Department is finally fighting this “barfare” —leftist efforts to render the right defenseless by crushing or chilling conservative attorneys via stress-inducing probes, costly trials, and crippling penalties that include disbarment. On May 13, the DOJ filed a complaint against the bar disciplinary authorities of Washington, D.C., in defense of former Trump I DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, the Constitution, and the rule of law itself.
Those authorities investigated, tried, and convicted the accomplished litigator for a novel “thoughtcrime”: preparing a document proposing a legal course of action based on a reading of evidence that his DOJ superiors disagreed with. //
So after the contest he drafted a letter on the department’s behalf to Peach State leaders to address such matters. He designated the letter as “Pre-Decisional & Deliberative/Attorney-Client or Legal Work Product” and “FOR INTERNAL … USE ONLY,” and dubbed it a “Proof of Concept” document. The letter indicated that the DOJ had identified potential election-swinging issues and called on the state to convene a special legislative session to review and remedy such matters.
Clark presented the letter to his bosses, including Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, for review. They disagreed with its claims regarding 2020 election integrity issues and Clark’s plan to address them. Ultimately, the document would go unsent, only to leak after President Trump had left office during Democrats’ Jan. 6-related political and legal jihad. //
In July 2022, D.C. bar disciplinary authorities charged Clark with ethical violations, including “conduct involving dishonesty,” over his drafting and defending of the document. The then-Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee allegedly spurred the case by lodging an ethics complaint with the D.C. regime. //
What was the tribunal’s reasoning? That Clark’s views did not comport with those of his superiors, his superiors by default represented those of the department, and therefore, by ascribing his conflicting views to the department in his draft, unsent, “pre-decisional” letter, he was somehow being dishonest.
Despite admitting that there were “no factually comparable prior disciplinary cases,” the tribunal recommended that Clark be disbarred.
Clark is appealing the absurd and outrageous case — one that would render it potentially career-ending to provide legal advice that might conflict with that of one’s superiors. The case would also seem to make it fair game for disciplinary authorities to review and potentially render punishment over internal draft documents containing hypothetical legal proposals. //
In addition, the Justice Department notes the D.C. bar disciplinary tribunal’s lenient treatment of leftists in contrast to its treatment of conservatives: When FBI Attorney Kevin Clinesmith was caught doctoring an email to convince the FISA Court to let the feds spy on Trump adviser Carter Page, the D.C. bar gave him a “slap on the wrist” with a retroactive one-year license suspension.
The suit closes with a trio of legal arguments that transcend Clark’s case or claims of a bar disciplinary authority run amok: first, that the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause prohibits state and local bar disciplinary authorities from regulating the work of federal officials like Clark via bar disciplinary proceedings; second, that such authorities engage in unlawful discrimination by subjecting federal lawyers to disciplinary cases never before brought against non-federal lawyers; third, that by targeting federal attorneys over their work, such authorities are unlawfully interfering with presidential power. //
The DOJ’s lawsuit does not directly address lawfare activists’ targeting of non-government lawyers with disbarment and destruction for taking up verboten causes, such as constitutional scholar John Eastman’s work contesting the 2020 presidential election. Still, it may prove far more effective than the Justice Department’s proposed rule giving the agency the right to review (but not to quash) efforts to cripple conservative federal lawyers via the likes of the D.C. bar disciplinary authorities.
But those customers don't count. They aren't real Apple customers, because they want to do things that benefit them, not Apple's shareholders. In other words: they're holding it wrong.
Law, not technology, is the true battlefield in the War on General Purpose Computing, a subject I've been raising the alarm about for decades now:
https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/
The fact that there's no technical way to enforce these restrictions means that the companies that benefit from them have to pitch their arguments to lawmakers, not customers. If you have something that works, you use it in your sales pitch, like Signal, whose actual, working security is a big part of its appeal to users.
If you have something that doesn't work, you use it in your lobbying pitch, like Apple, who justify their 30% ripoff app tax – which they can only charge because it's a felony to reverse-engineer your iPhone so you can use a different app store – by telling lawmakers that locking down their platform is essential to the security and privacy of iPhone owners:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones
Google lost a brutal antitrust case brought by Epic Games, makers of Fortnite:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger
Epic's suit contended that Google had violated antitrust law by creating exclusivity deals with carriers and device makers that locked Android users into Google's app store, which meant that Epic had to surrender 30% of its mobile earnings to Google.
Google lost that case – badly. It turns out that judges don't like it when you deliberately destroy evidence:
They say that when you find yourself in a hole, you should stop digging, but Google can't put down the shovel. After the court ordered Google to open up its app store, the company just ignored the order, which is a thing that judges hate even more than destroying evidence:
https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/epic-games-inc-v-google-llc
So it was that last month, Google found itself with just two weeks to comply with the open app store order, or else:
https://www.theverge.com/news/717440/google-epic-open-play-store-emergency-stay
Google was ordered to make it possible to install new app stores as apps, so you could go into Google Play, search for a different app store, and, with a single click, install it on your phone, and switch to getting your apps from that store, rather than Google's.
That's what's behind Google's new ban on "sideloading": this is a form of malicious compliance with the court orders stemming from its losses to Epic Games. In fact, it's not even malicious compliance – it's malicious noncompliance
In the O.J. Simpson case, one of its early lawsuit efforts, DirecTV had an investigator on-site who physically turned on Simpson’s TVs and saw the unscrambled DirecTV programming. But this kind of evidence was hugely expensive to collect and required law enforcement help. Most later DirecTV cases were based merely on device purchase lists; DirecTV had no idea what people like Treworgy were actually doing inside the walls of their homes.
In the Treworgy case, both the district court and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that simple ownership did not create “a private right of action against a person in possession of access devices in violation of section 2512(1) (b).” In other words, DirecTV couldn’t sue people just for buying a card or a bootloader; they had to show actual illegal activity. //
After the judge ruled against Simpson, the only remaining issue was how much he would owe in damages.
DirecTV had requested $20,000 under each of two separate laws, for a total of $40,000. The judge noted that Simpson had not “used the devices commercially or for resale,” so she declined to award the full request. Instead, DirecTV got $15,000 in damages under the first statute and $10,000 under the second, for a total of $25,000.
The higher cost, though, came from legal fees. DirecTV submitted a motion for Simpson to pay its lawyers after his loss, and the judge agreed to a $33,678 legal bill.
The court granted final judgment on November 29, 2005, ruling that “the Juice” owed DirecTV a grand total of $58,678. It was pricey, yes—but in a way, Simpson got off cheap. When the recording industry launched its own mass lawsuit campaign, college students and single moms were eventually hit with $675,000 or even $1.92 million verdicts.
In my eleven years, I have processed disclosures from members of Congress who traded on:
Pending FDA approvals they learned about in committee.
Defense appropriations they voted on.
Trade policy they negotiated.
Pandemic response measures they drafted.
Interest rate decisions they were briefed on before the public.
None of them have been charged. None of them have been investigated by the Department of Justice. None of them have been referred to the SEC. The STOCK Act has produced zero prosecutions since it was signed on April 4th, 2012.
Fourteen years. Five hundred and thirty-five members. $635 million in trades last year alone. Zero cases. //
The soldier made $409,881 and faces decades in prison. Nancy Pelosi entered Congress in 1987 with a portfolio worth approximately $785,000. It is now worth $133.7 million. That is a return of 16,930%. The Dow Jones returned 2,300% over the same period. Professional fund managers who beat the market for three consecutive years are considered exceptional. She has beaten it for thirty-seven. If a hedge fund produced those returns, the SEC would subpoena the records on a Thursday. She produced them from a building with a chapel and a gift shop.
She announced her retirement last year. No investigation was opened. No disclosure was flagged. Her filings were on time. In my office, on time means compliant. Compliant means closed. //
The soldier used classified information to make $409,881 on a prediction market. He has been charged with five federal crimes. The Department of Justice announced the case on the same day I processed three disclosures from members who traded on committee knowledge worth a combined $3.8 million.
The difference between the soldier and the members is not what they did. It is the building they did it in. He did it from Fort Bragg. They did it from the Capitol. He used a prediction market. They used the New York Stock Exchange. //
The soldier flew to Caracas. He breached a compound. He put his body between a mission and a bullet. The people who ordered the operation were in a building with a credenza and sparkling water. They did not go to Caracas. They went to their brokerage accounts. The soldier made $409,881 and is now in federal custody. The people who knew what he was going to do before he did it made more and filed less. His prosecution is not a failure of the system. It is the system. One conviction per decade, at the lowest level, so the briefing slides can say enforcement exists. The $409,881 is not the crime. It is the cost of making $635 million look supervised.
In my field, we call this self-regulation.
Never mind that the indictment is literally not for "paying informants." It's for crimes supposedly committed in making payments to the extremists in question. //
None of this was unexpected, though. The moment this news dropped, there was never any chance Democrats would be honest about it. Heck, by the end of the week, you can expect the narrative to have morphed into "the DOJ is protecting extremists by indicting the SPLC." //
PoIiMath @politicalmath
·
There is a pending community note on this, but it is infuriating that a huge newspaper will just flat-out lie about the news
SPLC was not "indicted for paying sources". They were indicted for wire fraud and making false statements. Just tell us the truth! It's not that hard!
USA TODAY @USATODAY
The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted for paying sources to infiltrate hate groups, a tactic federal agencies have used for decades. https://usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/04/22/splc-indicted-paying-sources-fbi-pays-informants/89726011007/?taid=69e8aef47728b40001f5a5f5&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
10:14 AM · Apr 22, 2026
Delaware’s business-friendly reputation is why the state has just about one million residents, but two million registered business entities.
That is, until the state's corporate-focused Court of Chancery twice denied Tesla's proposed pay package for Musk, even though it was fully shareholder-approved. The decision was exactly the kind of nanny-statism that companies incorporated in Delaware to avoid.
So Tesla reincorporated in Texas — Wall Street firms have major outposts there now, too, as well as in Florida — and SpaceX quickly followed.
Serving as a corporate P.O. box accounts for as much as one-third of Delaware's state revenues. But clearly that's changing almost as quickly as the Court of Chancery sabotaged the state's reputation in a fit of suicidal pique over Musk's politics. //
What's amazing about Delaware's "bad luck" is just how quickly things began to unravel. It's been more than a century since Delaware became the favorite place for businesses located anywhere to incorporate, thanks to expert Chancery Court judges, predictable corporate legal precedents, and a light regulatory touch. The First State quickly became the legal home for most Fortune 500 companies. No factories. No fancy headquarters. Just a P.O. box. //
Capital finds a way, to misquote Dr. Ian Malcolm.
But as Elon Musk could tell you — and probably did, if you follow him on X — it's a helluva lot easier to move a corporate P.O. box than it is to relocate a billion-dollar HQ.
Delaware forgot that. The exodus has begun.
At Friday’s hearing of the Colorado Senate Business, Labor, and Technology committee, lawmakers voted unanimously to move Colorado state bill SB26-090—titled Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair—out of committee and into the state senate and house for a vote.
The bill modifies Colorado’s Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment act, which was passed in 2024 and went into effect in January 2026. While the protections secured by that act are wide, the new SB26-090 bill aims to “exempt information technology equipment that is intended for use in critical infrastructure from Colorado’s consumer right to repair laws.” //
“I can point out at least five problems with the bill as drafted,” Gay Gordon-Byrne, the executive director at the Repair Association, said during the hearing. “The definition of critical infrastructure is completely inadequate. The definition that has been proposed in this bill is not even a definition.” //
Repair advocates also say that limiting this kind of repairability is the exact opposite of keeping devices secure. If something goes wrong with a critical piece of technology, the people using it need to fix it and not have to wait for manufacturer approval.
“There’s a general principle in cybersecurity that obscurity is not security,” iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said in the hearing. “The money that’s behind the scenes, that’s what’s driving the bill.” //
DarthSlack Ars Legatus Legionis
12y
23,110
Subscriptor++
So critical infrastructure is, well, critical, right? Like you need it to keep working because if it stops you're in a world of hurt? So isn't that the stuff you really, really, really want to be able to repair when it breaks and not sitting on your ass waiting for some clownshoes to show up and charge you a small fortune to turn a screw or apply a patch?
On Thursday, Elon Musk lost his lawsuit alleging that advertisers violated antitrust law by colluding on an ad boycott after he took over Twitter, gutted content moderation teams, and disbanded the Trust and Safety Council.
In her opinion, US District Judge Jane Boyle wrote that the lawsuit was dismissed because Musk failed to state a claim. His arguments that advertisers acted against their own best interests by avoiding advertising on his platform, now called X, did not plead facts showing that consumers were harmed. Without consumer harm, there can be no antitrust violation, the judge wrote, deeming the ad boycott perfectly legal.
The Supreme Court today decided that Internet service providers cannot be held liable for their customers’ copyright infringement unless they take specific steps that cause users to violate copyrights. The court ruled unanimously in favor of Internet provider Cox Communications, though two justices did not agree with the majority’s reasoning.
The ruling effectively means that ISPs do not have to conduct mass terminations of Internet users accused of illegally downloading or uploading pirated files. If the court had ruled otherwise, ISPs could have been compelled to strictly police their networks for piracy in order to avoid billion-dollar court verdicts under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). //
The court decided today that a service is tailored to infringement if it is not capable of “substantial” or “commercially significant” noninfringing uses. The court cited Sony’s 1984 victory in the Betamax case, in which justices found that the Betamax was capable of noninfringing uses and that Sony’s sale of it did not constitute contributory infringement. Sony’s win in 1984 thus contributed to its loss today.
So what does the law truly say across all 50 U.S. states? We've dug through every state's department or bureau of transportation resources and compiled a breakdown of what we found to help shed some light on the matter. All told, we found 23 states with laws that required the use of both wipers and headlights in bad weather, although many more have rules related to the use of headlights in low visibility conditions.
The distinction among the several types of federal courts in the United States has gone almost unremarked in the academic literature. Instead, attention focuses on Article III “constitutional” courts with occasional discussion of how they differ from what are referred to as “non-constitutional” or “legislative” courts. At best, these labels are misleading: all federal courts have a constitutional locus. Most (but not all) are brought into being via legislation. The binary approach ignores the full range of adjudicatory bodies, which find root in different constitutional provisions: Article III, Section 1, Article I, Section 8; Article IV, Section 3; Article II, Section 2/Article I, Section 8, Clause 3; and Article II, Section 1. These distinctions matter for defining jurisdiction and understanding the scope of the authorities—and constitutional protections—that apply. The failure of scholars to take into account the panoply contributes to inaccurate analyses and cabins debates. This Article takes a significant step forward, providing a conceptual framework for each type of court and delineating, based on their legal and historical underpinning, which entities constitute each category. It details the courts’ constitutive elements and their jurisdiction as supported by doctrine, statutory law, and scholarly literature, providing the first, comprehensive taxonomy of federal courts in the United States.
Recommended Citation
Laura K. Donohue & Jeremy McCabe, Federal Courts: Article I, II, III, and IV Adjudication, 71 Cath. U. L. Rev. 543 (2022).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.edu/lawreview/vol71/iss3/9
On Friday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the case(s) of Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc., holding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize the president to impose the tariffs. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the 6-3 decision, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh dissenting (though there are some concurrences, as well). //
Mike Ford
3 hours ago
Roberts speaks out of both sides of his mouth...Under ObamaCare, his "reasoning" was that the mandate was a "tax" although not specifically stated so in the legislation.
Yet, here the "reasoning is that Trump cannot act because "tariffs" are not specifically mentioned in the appropriate legislation.
And people wonder why we door kickers hate lawyers (my good buddy Susie Moore being one of the few exceptions). //
Scholar
3 hours ago edited
The court erred on this as it lacks the competency to determine emergency, upon determining which the president has broad authorities under IEEPA to:
investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest[.].
Roberts and Barrett took a totally subjective view on the the lack of explicity in mentioning tariffs in the text of the law. Since when Common Law has become a totally explicit system?
DeMercurio and Wynn sued Dallas County and Leonard for false arrest, abuse of process, defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and malicious prosecution. The case dragged on for years. Last Thursday, five days before a trial was scheduled to begin in the case, Dallas County officials agreed to pay $600,000 to settle the case.
It’s hard to overstate the financial, emotional, and professional stresses that result when someone is locked up and repeatedly accused of criminal activity for performing authorized work that’s clearly in the public interest. DeMercurio has now started his own firm, Kaiju Security.
“The settlement confirms what we have said from the beginning: our work was authorized, professional, and done in the public interest,” DeMercurio said. “What happened to us never should have happened. Being arrested for doing the job we were hired to do turned our lives upside down and damaged reputations we spent years building.” //
Martin Blank
Reading more about it, it seems a bit more complicated. While I don't think the pentesters should have been arrested (much less defamed), it does seem like the people who authorized them might not have actually had that authority.
I was a pentester for about a decade (though I didn't do physical testing), including at the time of this incident. There is a certain amount of trust that goes into contracting. We don't go out just based on an email approval. We get signed authorizations that are presumably vetted by knowledgeable people, and frequently lawyers, on both sides. I wouldn't have thought twice about accepting a contract signed by a representative for the court system itself.
But even more important, the people who hired them should have done their due dilligence. Had they followed the standard protocol and brought legal in, these issues of authority would likely have been pointed out.
There is a high likelihood that legal was brought in. This circumstance was weird, and the only reason that it got out of control was the sheriff. In most places, an improperly authorized test would have resulted in no charges or charges rapidly dismissed after showing that there was no intent to break the law.
You want to be especially in the clear on this, given cops inherent tendencies to be dicks about anything.
Yeah, this whole incident caused some significant changes in how physical pentesting was done.
January 29, 2026 at 7:08 pm
Political-Paige
2 hours ago
I'll jump in as the non-Christian in the room, having been raised Buddhist. Let's divorce (no pun intended) the theology from the legality here.
Frankly? It's none of the business of any government to define marriage. Marriage licenses were once handled by the churches marrying the couples, but they were usurped by state governments for the nefarious purpose of preventing miscegenation... interracial marriages. There were other excuses like blood tests for syphilis. Both rationales are long since abandoned.
There's nothing in the Constitution that lets governments decide whether you can marry, or whom. That's a religious and personal choice. We don't have to like it, but then again, we also don't have to like our in laws. It's not our choice, not our lives, not our circus and not our monkeys.
The only interest government could possibly have in that decision -- which should be between individuals and their church -- is in passing regulations that define tax and divorce rules in marriage and its dissolution. Protect those who lack the ability to consent, as we do in any situation. Then get out of it.
We have laws based on Judeo-Christian ethics, but there's a line between that moral base and codifying this or that rule from the Old Testament.
Patrick Political-Paige
33 minutes ago
It is understandable to want the state as far away as possible from intimate choices, but there are clear, non‑theological reasons why modern states both define and encourage marriage as a civil institution. That concern is not (at its best) about policing virtue; it is about managing predictable problems in property, care, and vulnerability that arise when adults form long‑term unions and have children.
First, children create obligations that someone must legally carry, and the state cannot ignore that. A liberal state does not care whether two people are in love or blessed by a church; it does care that any child has financially responsible adults, clear decision‑makers for medical and educational choices, and a default framework if those adults separate or die. Marriage as a legal status is basically a pre‑packaged set of rules: if you two take on a shared life, then you are presumptively each responsible for the children you bring into it, for their support, and for each other’s basic support. Without such a default scheme, every breakup or death becomes a bespoke legal nightmare, which is precisely when children are least able to protect themselves.
Second, long‑term coupledom generates property, debts, and dependencies that private agreements cannot reliably handle on their own. Most couples do not and cannot afford to draft detailed contracts about every asset, liability, medical contingency, and inheritance scenario. A civil marriage statute gives third parties—hospitals, courts, insurers, employers, pension administrators—a simple, publicly knowable answer to questions like: who can consent to surgery; who gets survivor benefits; who inherits without a will; who is liable for household debts. Without a state‑defined status, those questions would have to be litigated or contracted every time, which would be vastly more intrusive and expensive than a standardized legal framework.
Third, the state has an interest in reducing free‑riding and externalized costs. If two adults share a household and one becomes disabled, society prefers that the other adult has a clear, enforceable duty of support before the costs are shifted to public welfare. If someone dies, it is better that there is a predictable heir to manage assets and obligations than that the estate sits in limbo or the state must step in as guardian of last resort. Marriage law assigns these duties by default, thereby lowering the administrative and financial burden on everyone else.
Fourth, state involvement in defining civil marriage is precisely what makes equal treatment enforceable. If marriage were purely private or ecclesiastical, then access to the associated protections—hospital visitation, inheritance, tax treatment, immigration sponsorship—would depend entirely on private gatekeepers who are not bound by constitutional norms of equality. By defining a civil status that is independent of any church and open (in principle) on neutral terms, the state both creates and can police a sphere where citizens must be treated alike, regardless of religion or lack of it.
Finally, recognizing a legitimate civil interest in marriage does not mean sacralizing any particular religious ethic or banning all alternative arrangements. Adults remain free to structure their intimate lives as they see fit; the question is which arrangements the state will treat as the default template for allocating rights and duties when things go wrong. There, it is neither arbitrary nor theocratic to say: stable, two‑adult unions that take on mutual responsibility and child‑rearing are given a special legal form, because they reliably solve problems the state would otherwise have to solve awkwardly and expensively. In that sense, defining and encouraging civil marriage is less about virtue policing than about risk management and the orderly protection of children, dependents, and property across generations.
In a separate opinion, justice Kenneth Lee accused California of misleading residents in smaller counties — where the open-carry ban does not apply — about how they can lawfully carry firearms. “Our constitutional rights,” Lee wrote, “should not hinge on a Where’s Waldo quiz,” The Hill reported.
thatanonymouscoward Ars Scholae Palatinae
13y
901
I'm gonna have to prepare more crow for people to eat.
I saw a shark once upon a time long ago... of course I'm an untrusted source by design.
As I often pointed out, courts don't let you create events to profit from.
See they could have owned the films, even openly filed cases on behalf of themselves but then there would have been questions, depositions, etc. So they invented shells to hide the client from view and convince the world it was some poor copyright holder getting screwed by evil pirates.
If your playing the home game -
They forged a name on a copyright assignment & submitted a knowingly forged document to courts.
They placed the content on TPB, knowing it would be downloaded.
They lied about their involvement/control/ownership of various firms & shells.
They lied under oath... a lot.
They funneled money out of Prenda from the main accounts, not a client account where actual lawyers place client funds to keep everything above board.
They shifted the money around rapidly trying to hide the trail.
They hired the best of the best lawyers off of craingslist.
They used another lawyers ECF login to file court documents in his name.
They ghostwrote & submitted documents to courts the lawyer of record on the case had never seen.
They tried to sue the person whos identity they stole to forge the copyright assignment. (Not to mention a bunch of us nice people who called them extortionists online.)
They lost that case before it even began because they lied to amend the filing, lied about what another Federal Judge said about a concurrent case they had filed, and pretty much pissed all over the bench.
When this all went sideways they applied the same pay us or else strategy filing bogus Americans with Disability Act lawsuits, and managed to force several small businesses to go under.
@StanFL - there might be a chance that Hans thinks his father can work miracles one more time to save him. He's bailed him out several times but I think he's burned most of goodwill.
@yasth - Thats the fun thing about copyright you can demand actual damages OR statutory damages. The statutory damages are $150,000. Its a very scary number to threaten people with and makes a few thousand sound reasonable. Of course settlement amounts don't get subtracted from the $150K so they can keep scaring people with that number.
Former attorney John Steele was sentenced this week to five years in prison for his role in the Prenda Law porn-trolling scheme, putting an end to a years-long legal drama wild and stupid enough to be prime-time TV.
Steele pleaded guilty in 2017 to federal charges of fraud and money laundering and then cooperated with authorities in the investigation into his former legal partner Paul Hansmeier. That cooperation weighed heavily in Steele’s favor at his sentencing, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
US District Judge Joan Ericksen said federal guidelines recommended a sentence of 10 to 12-1/2 years for Steele’s “vile scheme” but agreed that given Steele’s extreme willingness to cooperate, his defense attorney’s recommendation of five years was “eminently fair.”
Ericksen also said Steele and Hansmeier were liable for paying about $1.5 million in restitution, separate from all the fines and sanctions the two already accrued in recent years. //
Hansmeier was sentenced in June to 14 years in prison for his role in the scheme.
The Prenda Law saga kicked off in 2012, when the copyright troll firm sued Comcast and AT&T, claiming they were accessory to their subscribers “stealing” certain pornographic content. A chain of courtroom events unfolded from there, and in 2013 a judge sanctioned the firm and referred Steele and Hansmeier for criminal investigation.
Prenda made its money by suing people who allegedly downloaded pornographic films online. Its targets frequently agreed to settlements worth a few thousand dollars rather than facing a courtroom process. These copyright trolling tactics netted the company more than $6 million between 2010 and 2013.
But eventual criminal investigations revealed that rather than representing real companies who had a real product that was being traded in violation of copyright law, Prenda was filming its own porn, inventing fraudulent shell companies, and uploading those supposed companies’ content to torrent sites itself. Then the settlement money went directly into the Prenda attorneys’ pockets. //