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. //
When an attorney of many years experience gets disbarred by a court, it is not a trivial thing, but a serious, serious punishment, and not something judges take lightly. But, congratulations to Philadelphia’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, for getting one of his minions kicked out of practice for deliberate lying to a a federal district court. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
biffbobfred Ars Scholae Palatinae
11y
1,172
Will they kick off Meta/Facebook for torrenting, or is “pirating is only bad if you’re not rich already” going to be the rule here? //
Messy Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
21y
190
can we just have dumb pipes? i don't want a utility knowing or caring what i do.
imagine getting your electricity cut off because the power company doesn't like what you cook. //
thadco Ars Centurion
9y
380
You child stole a candy bar. No more food for you or your whole family forever! //
TylerH Ars Praefectus
13y
4,472
Subscriptor
I would very much like the justices to ask counsel whether they would kick a customer like Facebook/Meta off for large-scale pirating in abuse of this position, or if they would turn a blind eye if the organization has a large enough contract.
I would also very much like the justices to ask whether Sony has considered just making the pirated content more conveniently available for purchase/access. I wager a large portion of pirated content is not actually readily available in an offline-consumable format.
Glaringly absent from these arguments (at least those covered in the article) is "why should the ISPs act merely on the accusation of piracy? Why not just send a notice after you have sued an individual in court and won/proven that they are the specific person committing the piracy? Wouldn't that preserve liability and due process, albeit at the cost of the copyright holder (where it ought to belong, frankly)?" //
Mad Klingon Ars Tribunus Militum
5y
1,776
Subscriptor++
Is Sony and the other copyright holders willing to assume liability for damages for submitting a list of IP addresses performing infringement and being wrong? Even a 90% correct rate would result in 100 improper cutoffs for every 1000 addresses. I doubt that Sony's lists are that good. A fair number of folks use an ISP connection as a VOIP landline. What damages apply if that is cutoff due to being on a Sony list and someone dies due to 911 not working? Or a house is destroyed due to delays in fire department arriving? Bonus points if that person proves no infringement happened. And before someone says "But cell phones....", not everyone lives in an area where cell services is available or reliable.
With Internet connections becoming increasing required for modern life, cutting a house off from the Internet should be a method of last resort. //
GFKBill Ars Tribunus Militum
21y
2,674
Subscriptor
“The approach of terminating all access to the Internet based on infringement, it seems extremely overbroad given the centrality of the Internet to modern life and given the First Amendment,” he said.
And "based on infringement" isn't even in the picture - the studios haven't taken these infringers to court, Cox et al are supposed to just take their word for it. On that basis alone this should be chucked out.
Sony and their ilk want a cheap shortcut, when they should be filing charges against the infringing user and letting a judge determine penalties, if they prove their case. //
GFKBill Ars Tribunus Militum
21y
2,674
Subscriptor
TylerH said:
Glaringly absent from these arguments (at least those covered in the article) is "why should the ISPs act merely on the accusation of piracy? Why not just send a notice after you have sued an individual in court and won/proven that they are the specific person committing the piracy? Wouldn't that preserve liability and due process, albeit at the cost of the copyright holder (where it ought to belong, frankly)?"
The whole thing is an end-run around due process, because it's easy and saves them the expense and effort of suing.
The courts should be telling them to pound sand. //
42Kodiak42 Ars Scholae Palatinae
13y
1,165
Clement said that hotels limit speeds to restrict peer-to-peer downloading, and suggested that universities do the same. “I don’t think it would be the end of the world if universities provided service at a speed that was sufficient for most other purposes but didn’t allow the students to take full advantage of BitTorrent,” he said. “I could live in that world. But in all events, this isn’t a case that’s just about universities. We’ve never sued the universities.”
Clement is either a ... moron, or is hoping the judges are by telling them this outright lie. This is nothing more than a brash assertion that a network configuration that supports peer-to-peer services has no valid personal use cases.
Stewart gave a hypothetical in which an individual Internet user is sued for infringement in a district court. The district court could award damages and impose an injunction to prevent further infringement, but it probably couldn’t “enjoin the person from ever using the Internet again,” Stewart said.
A court isn't even likely to block the user's internet access while the case is ongoing. The fact of the matter is simple: People's livelihoods can very well depend on continued and reliable internet access. What Sony is asking for is a clear violation of our fifth amendment rights by requiring ISPs to enact an unjustified punishment without due process in a court of law.
A decades old consent decree has been lifted against the Republican National Committee's so-called "ballot security" measures. It's a big victory in the RNC's efforts to monitor polling activity and it's a sobering moment for activists who fear this could accelerate voter suppression — especially among minorities.
An elderly woman just scored a landmark court win against her neighbor that forces him to stop smoking weed in his own home.
Josefa Ippolito–Shepherd, 76, of Washington, DC, said the “feces” or “skunk” smell emanating from 73-year-old next-door resident Thomas Cackett’s doorway made her dread coming home.
At the heart of the issue, at least in the case itself, is that Montana's permitless carry law basically says that everyone who isn't expressly forbidden from carrying a gun is considered licensed, and the federal law says people with licenses can carry in the buffer area around a school. The Biden administration argued that no, the licensing had to be explicit--something the law doesn't seem to actually state, for the record--and so he was in violation of federal law.
Metcalf's defense is that he literally had no reason to believe any such thing, which is fair.
However, a bigger issue is the existence of this area outside of the school grounds themselves.
See, the federal law doesn't account for permitless carry as most states have it, nor does it account for things like reciprocity. You have to be licensed in that state in order to just walk past a school on the sidewalk, which is a problem.
This is something most people are going to be unaware of when traveling, for one thing, just as they're not going to be aware of where all the schools in a given city might be. Just following Google Maps could land you a felony charge, simply because Google didn't know you needed to be so many feet away from a school because you're lawfully carrying a firearm.
It's ridiculous. //
California Curmudgeon
7 hours ago
Wasn’t he also within his own yard when he was arrested? Living within 1000 feet of a school should not override your rights.
Streaming is now the most popular way to watch TV, yet many are unaware of what they’re buying. As Reingold's lawsuit points out, paying for content in the streaming era is different from buying media from physical stores. Physical media nets control over your ability to watch stuff for years. But you also had to have retrieved the media from a store (or website) and to have maintained that physical copy, as well the necessary hardware and/or software for playing it. Streaming services can rip purchased content from customers in bulk, but they also offer access to a much broader library that's instantly watchable with technology that most already have (like a TV and Internet).
We can debate the best approach to distributing media. What's clearer is the failure of digital content providers to ensure that customers fully understand they’re paying for access to content, and that this access could be revoked at any time. //
galvanash Seniorius Lurkius
17y
14
Subscriptor++
Is it really that controversial to expect that the word "buy" should have a legally binding meaning? Seems like a pretty simple and straight forward concept to me.
I give you money, you give me a thing. Maybe there are terms binding me as to what I can do with the thing, but assuming I never violate those terms if you can then take the thing away from me I never bought it.
Can we please get a judge to just settle this after like 50 years of this nonsense??? //
SimonRev Ars Praetorian
10y
434
You know, as long as I "bought" a digital asset, I have no ethical compunctions about creating/obtaining a more convenient copy for personal use. I don't do that with rentals.
If Amazon et al tried to provide a "non-fixed term lease" (and yes, I know that is what they really mean with the "buy button"), I would expect to pay roughly 1/2 to 1/3 vs purchasing the physical media. //
A D.C. grand jury has refused to return an indictment against a man accused of assaulting federal law enforcement during a confrontation in Washington, D.C. //
Compare and contrast this with the alacrity with which D.C. grand juries handed out felony indictments for people merely walking into the Capitol on January 6. Had either Dunn or Reid committed those acts on January 6, 2021, they would have been facing a decade or more in prison. //
The reluctance of DC judges and juries to support President Trump in tamping down violence in D.C. Former RedStater Bill Shipley, who goes by the handle @shipwreckedcrew on X, has a solid idea.
Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew
·
The case is building for eliminating the District Court for DC, and making it part of the District of Maryland.
You cannot have a District Court that has a juror pool so extremely partisan that objective evidence is simply disregarded based on politics.
Ed Whelan @EdWhelanEPPC
·
The old saying is that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. But somehow this one didn’t indict the DOJ lawyer who threw sandwich at federal agent. https://nytimes.com/2025/08/27/us/politics/trump-sandwich-assault-indictment-justice-department.html
10:08 AM · Aug 27, 2025
America’s lower judiciary is out of control — and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is putting it on notice.
In a Thursday order, the nation’s highest court granted (in part) a request by the Trump administration to temporarily pause a lower court blockade on the National Institutes of Health’s bid to terminate DEI-related grants totaling nearly $800 million. The ruling was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s Democrat appointees saying they would have denied the administration’s application in full. //
In addition to signing onto the majority’s Thursday decision, Gorsuch penned a concurring opinion in the case in which he ripped into the lower judiciary’s out-of-control behavior. While noting that “[l]ower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions … they are never free to defy them.”
Citing a related case recently before the Supreme Court (Department of Ed. v. California), the Trump appointee highlighted how the high court “granted a stay [in that case] because it found the government likely to prevail in showing that the district court lacked jurisdiction to order the government to pay grant obligations.” He wrote, “California explained that ‘suits based on “any express or implied contract with the United States”’ do not belong in district court under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), but in the Court of Federal Claims under the Tucker Act.”
“Rather than follow that direction, the district court in this case permitted a suit involving materially identical grants to proceed to final judgment under the APA,” Gorsuch wrote. “As support for its course, the district court invoked the ‘persuasive authority’ of ‘the dissent[s] in California‘ and an earlier court of appeals decision California repudiated … That was error.”
Gorsuch went on to underscore that “the promise of our legal system that like cases are treated alike means that a lower court ought not invoke the ‘persuasive authority’ of a dissent or a repudiated court of appeals decision to reach a different conclusion on an equivalent record.” More to the point, however, he noted that the district court’s apparent rebuke of the precedent very recently established by SCOTUS in the California case is not an isolated incident among the lower courts.
“If the district court’s failure to abide by California were a one-off, perhaps it would not be worth writing to address it. But two months ago another district court tried to ‘compel compliance’ with a different ‘order that this Court ha[d] stayed,'” Gorsuch wrote. “Still another district court recently diverged from one of this Court’s decisions even though the case at hand did not differ ‘in any pertinent respect’ from the one this Court had decided … So this is now the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case ‘squarely controlled’ by one of its precedents.” //
“All these interventions should have been unnecessary, but together they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect ‘the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress,'” Gorsuch wrote.
17 U.S. Code § 107 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use] said:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
Dieter Schultz DaveMac
3 hours ago edited
Yeah, doesn't seem right, does it?
Months ago... before Trump took office, streiff had a great piece on the whole issue of birthright citizenship, it was well worth the read.
Honestly, I don't see how with what's he brought up and referenced in that article that anyone can rule that Trump's order is unconstitutional.
There were examples of the US government having to get positive affirmation via a law to grant citizenship to Indians, the author of the 14th clarifying its intentions, and the need to recognize the limits of the 'seminal' case with extending citizenship to legal permanent foreign residents, explicit denial of citizenship to babies of foreign diplomats... all feeding into the State Department making a unilateral decision to grant 'birthright citizenship' without any grant of legal authority.
The best I can tell is that these judges are ruling on the constitutionality of the issue based on the length of time that the State Department's unilateral decision has remained unchallenged and then finding it unconstitutional. //
Az-Mt
4 hours ago
“And subject to the jurisdiction” must mean someone approved by the govt to be here. Otherwise the words are simply meaningless and being ignored as inconvenient.
mopani Az-Mt
a few minutes ago
If you came here illegally you are excluding yourself from the jurisdiction of this nation. Therefore your children born here cannot be born citizens.
If you came here on a visa you are not subject to United States' jurisdiction either, your country of citizenship still has jurisdiction -- for conscription or draft, for example.
The trial court declined to appoint counsel for Gideon. As a result, he was forced to act as his own counsel and conduct his own defense in court, emphasizing his innocence in the case. At the conclusion of the trial, the jury returned a guilty verdict. The court sentenced Gideon to serve five years in the state prison.
Gideon first filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the Supreme Court of Florida. In his petition, he claimed his Sixth Amendment right had been violated because the judge refused to appoint counsel. The Florida Supreme Court denied Gideon's petition.[3] Later, from his cell at the Florida State Prison in Raiford, making use of the prison library and writing in pencil on prison stationery,[4] Gideon appealed to the United States Supreme Court in a suit against the Secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections, H. G. Cochran. Cochran retired and was replaced by Louie L. Wainwright before the Supreme Court heard the case. Gideon argued in his appeal that he had been denied counsel and therefore that his Sixth Amendment rights, as applied to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment, had been violated.
The Supreme Court assigned Gideon a prominent Washington, D.C. attorney, future Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas of the law firm Arnold, Fortas & Porter. //
As a second point, Fortas presented during oral argument that it was widely accepted in the legal community that the first thing any reputable lawyer does when accused of a crime is hire an attorney. As an example, Fortas noted that when Clarence Darrow, who was widely known as the greatest criminal attorney in the United States, was charged with jury tampering and suborning perjury, the first thing he did was get an attorney to represent him.[7] Since Gideon had only an eighth-grade education, Fortas suggested that if a lawyer as prominent as Darrow needed an attorney to represent him in criminal proceedings, then a man without a legal education, or any education for that matter, needed a lawyer too.[7] Fortas's former Yale Law School professor, longtime friend and future Supreme Court colleague Justice William O. Douglas praised his argument as "probably the best single legal argument" in his 36 years on the court.[8]
It’s been 293 days since appellate judges heard arguments in President Donald Trump’s appeal of a $454 million fraud ruling in a civil case brought by state Attorney General Tish James.
The average time for an appellate decision from such a point is 30 days.
Signed decisions can take longer, but almost never this long. //
Any judge on the panel can delay the release of a decision without having to give a reason. //
Court observers suspect that Presiding Justice Dianne Renwick — appointed by Gov. Hochul and a political ally — may be sitting on the decision.
Why?
Keeping the judgment on hold gives Hochul leverage over Trump on matters from federal aid to congestion-pricing to wind farms.
“Pure extortion,” as one attorney familiar with the case has remarked.
Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not mince words when criticizing the lack of legal rationale behind the Biden appointee’s emotionally-charged dissent. //
While noting how the principal dissent authored by Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor “focuses on conventional legal terrain, like the Judiciary Act of 1789 and our cases on equity,” Barrett highlighted how Jackson’s dissent “chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.” More specifically, she underscored how her Democrat-appointed colleague’s expressed views on the power of courts go beyond those of judicial supremacists — those who believe the judiciary is superior to the other branches of government. //
“Waving away attention to the limits on judicial power as a ‘mind-numbingly technical query,’ post, at 3 (dissenting opinion), [Jackson] offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush. In her telling, the fundamental role of courts is to ‘order everyone (including the Executive) to follow the law—full stop.'” //
“We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.“ //
While agreeing that the executive has an obligation to follow the law, Barrett chastised Jackson for “skip[ping] over” the fact that the judiciary must do so as well, and that separation of powers must be upheld.
“JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: ‘[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.’ … That goes for judges too.”
‘When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.’. //
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court declared rogue lower courts’ universal injunctions against President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship order to be unlawful.
“[F]ederal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote.
Anybody who knows a law book from an LL Bean catalog knows that federal judges just made up this concept of universal injunctions. There's no basis in statute, no basis in Supreme Court precedent. There's no basis in English common law.
They just made it up because they don't agree with what a president or Congress has done. You know, if they disagree, you know, I'm sorry—fill out a hurt feelings support. Buy a comfort rock.
But they can't just say, "I disagree and I'm putting the entire action by another branch of government on hold, because I don't like it," and that's what they've been doing…. //
They're not the superior branch of government. They're an equal branch of government. //
RocketGeezer NorCalGC
a day ago
That’s largely true for SCOTUS too, since Article 3 defines it’s jurisdiction, but doesn’t really define it role. SCOTUS has done a pretty good job of defining its role since the founding.
The lower federal courts, whose establishment, funding, role and jurisdiction were to be done by Congress, have been established and funded by Congress, but have essentially defined their own role and jurisdiction. Naturally, they’ve gone far afield from what the founders likely envisioned, especially in the last 30 or 40 years.
The lower federal judiciary now boils down to small, insecure people in minor roles trying to make themselves way more important than they were intended to be. I’d say that most of the lower federal judiciary has a bad case of SCOTUS envy! //
camd83 Marek76
5 hours ago
Excellent point! The President is the only person elected by the whole country - how can an unelected, single district judge, override action for the USA taken by the country-wide elected official? Wish SCOTUS was more definitive in their decision. Looks like the Left will just switch from injunctions to class-action lawsuits which will be approved by these same judges.