Freedom of the Press Foundation: “The news business isn’t just any business — it serves a vital role in our democracy, recognized by the First Amendment. But media outlets can’t serve that role if they’re bankrupt. And as a result, news readers often find themselves blocked by paywalls from reading important stories about government business. That experience is particularly frustrating for readers who are unable to access the groundbreaking investigative reports outlets like Wired magazine have been publishing, particularly over the first couple months of the Trump administration. Fortunately, Wired has a solution — it’s going to stop paywalling articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. This approach makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of civil duty. They’re called public records for a reason, after all. And access to public documents is more important than ever at…

Wired is dropping paywalls for FOIA-based reporting. Others should follow.Katie Drummond, Freedom of the Press Found., Mar. 18, 2025The news business isn’t just any business — it serves a vital role in our democracy, recognized by the First Amendment. But media outlets can’t serve that role if they’re bankrupt. And as a result, news readers often find themselves blocked by paywalls from reading important stories about government business.That experience is particularly frustrating for readers who are unable to access the groundbreaking investigative reports outlets like Wired magazine have been publishing, particularly over the first couple months of the Trump administration. Fortunately, Wired has a solution — it’s going to stop paywalling articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.This approach makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of civil duty. They’re called public…

Jacob Eisler (Florida State University College of Law) has posted Discrimination, Private Liberty, and Public Accommodations Law (12 Tex. A&M L. Rev. 479 (2025)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, a fiercely divided Supreme Court opined that commercial vendors enjoy First Amendment protections to decline to serve customers, even where such a choice is prohibited by state public accommodations regimes. In identifying a clash between personal liberty and state instruction, the decision could radically reshape the public accommodations statutory regime, which prevents discrimination against customers from minority and vulnerable groups. Standard constitutional interpretation cannot explain 303 Creative, and existing doctrinal and scholarly frameworks will struggle to integrate the decision into the already convoluted narrative of public accommodations law. This Article is the first to identify the unifying theme of public accommodations law,…

[Dean Treanor is right to assert Georgetown's First Amendment right to "teach DEI" in the face of Trump Administration threats.] I'm almost two weeks late to this party, but I wanted to congratulate Dean William Treanor of Georgetown Law for his strong response to the letter sent by Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin insisting that Georgetown Law "eliminate[] all DEI from [the] school and its curriculum", and threatening not to hire any Georgetown graduate if it fails to do so. Dean Treanor writes: The First Amendment . . . guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it. The Supreme Court has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university's First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it. This is a bedrock principle of constitutional law—recognized not only by the courts, but by the…

Following Donald Trump's election in 2024, the owners of the major tech platforms bent the knee to Trump. Not only did they hope that Trump would make them richer at home, they also wanted Trump to use American power to help them combat regulation in the E.U. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the owner of X, poured over 250 million dollars into Trump's 2024 campaign and used his platform to promote MAGA causes. Trump, in turn, let Musk loose to wreak havoc on the federal government. What, if anything, should citizens do about this new form of collusion between some of the most powerful private actors on the planet and the U.S. Government? Voters can vote politicians out of office. But they cannot do the same with today's robber barons of tech. People angry at Musk have sought to boycott Tesla products. But it is harder to boycott YouTube or Meta, and X retains its power over public discourse even if Tesla loses sales. Exit is another strategy. New platforms like Mastodon…

On March 8, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and a prominent leader of pro-Palestinian protests on the university’s campus. They claimed that Khalil’s student visa had both been revoked and when told that he had a green card, said that too had been revoked. While the full facts of the case are yet to emerge, there seems little doubt that Khalil was detained in retaliation for his activism. U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently and explicitly threatened to go after university protestors, including in his Executive Order on “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats,” which I analyzed in an earlier post. Trump celebrated Khalil’s arrest on social media, warning that it was the first “of many to come.” Some of the “many to come” will likely be identified via the State…

ABA Journal, Former George Mason University Law Prof Says He's ‘Fully Vindicated’ After ‘Relatively Modest’ Defamation Suit Settlement: A former professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School has reached a settlement in his defamation lawsuit against two former students who alleged that he abused his power to...

Michael Mann, formerly a climate scientist at Penn State University, is no stranger to controversy.[1] As an outspoken advocate for climate change, he has attracted close scrutiny and harsh criticism. Several right-of-center commentators criticized Mann’s work in potentially defamatory terms of “misconduct,” or “manipulation,” or data torturing. One blogger likened Mann’s conduct to Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse scandal.[2] Mann sought vindication, not by a duel, but by lawsuits for defamation. His cases have bounced up and down the court system for over a decade,[3] but last week, they crashed landed. In the course of yo-yo’ing through the courts, the case resulted in the Supreme Court’s denial of a petition for a writ of certiorari, which was accompanied by a dissent by Associate Justice Alito. The published dissent is interesting for the light it sheds on recent speculation about the fate of New York…

Six4Three developed an app called “Pikinis” (a/k/a “Pikini”), which enabled its users to search Facebook for photos of women in bikinis. The app drew upon Facebook’s Graph API. Facebook later shut down Six4Three’s API access for what seemed to me to be obvious reasons. Nevertheless, Six4Three claimed that Facebook engaged in “bait-and-switch,” i.e., Facebook provided Six4Three access to the API to motivate the app’s production, only to frustrate the app developer’s economic expectations by having the rug pulled out from under it. Six4Three sued Facebook in 2015 (yes, this lawsuit has been ongoing for a decade) and somehow worked its way up to a Fifth Amended Complaint. In its most recent ruling, the trial court granted Facebook’s anti-SLAPP motion and awarded Facebook nearly $700k in attorneys’ fees. (Facebook claimed nearly $3M in attorneys’ fees, so the awarded amount was still a major haircut).…

On Wednesday 5 March 2025, the trial in the case of Clarke v Guardian QB-2022-001397 began before Steyn J. The actor, Noel Clarke is suing The Guardian for libel and data protection in relation to eight articles published between 2021-2022 which accused him of sexual misconduct. The Guardian is arguing that the defences of truth and public interest apply. The actor said that the Guardian had acted as “the judge, jury and executioner” of his reputation, suggesting that the sources relied upon in their reporting were “hostile” and had an “axe to grind”. The defendant newspaper stated that over a dozen women would give evidence in relation to their experience of Mr Clarke’s inappropriate behaviour, explaining that “there is no motive for them to lie” in response to the claimant’s argument that he is the target of an “unlawful conspiracy.” The trial is estimated to last for 6 weeks. 5RB summarised the…

Motekaitis and Kneass worked for USI. There were rumors about the circumstances of their departure. Marsh & McLennan (MMA) was contemplating hiring Motekaitis, but then an email from a USI employee (Kane) about Motekaitis spooked MMA. MMA employees allegedly circulated the Kane email internally and externally. Among other beefs, Motekaitis sued MMA for defamation by forwarding the Kane email. This turns into an easy Section 230 dismissal. The court takes two elements off the table immediately: “Plaintiffs do not contest that MMA was a user of an interactive computer service, nor that MMA received the Kane Email from another information content provider.” A reminder that Section 230 protects Internet providers AND USERS. In other words, Section 230 isn’t only for “big tech.” It benefits EVERYONE ON THE INTERET. Motekaitis argued that MMA added content that also defamed him, but the complaint didn’t actually say this. Thus, Featuring no…

By Andy DelaneyTwo opinions on Friday. Let's get to it.  First up we have a tiff between Travelers and the Department of Financial Regulation (DFR). Travelers wanted records from DFR about Middlesex Assurance Company, a Vermont captive insurer. If you don't know what captive insurance is, it's essentially an insurance company that is wholly owned and controlled by its insureds. In this case, there's ongoing litigation in New Jersey and Middlesex Assurance is Johnson & Johnson's Vermont captive insurer. Why Vermont, you might ask? Well, since 1981, when Vermont was one of the first states to pass captive insurance legislation, Vermont has more or less been the captive insurance capital of the United States.  Now, certain information has to be filed with DFR in order for a captive insurance license to be issued. This info is considered confidential and DFR can only release these confidential records about captive insurers…

[The modern crime victims' rights movement has been remarkably successful in inserting the victim's voice into criminal justice processes.] This post is the second of three posts, serializing my comprehensive law review article on the crime victims' rights movement. In yesterday's post, I described the movement's roots in the history of private prosecution. This post describes the movement's last several decades, during which the movement has successfully created participatory rights for victims throughout America's criminal justice system. The modern victims' rights movement began to stir in the late 1960s, coalesced in the 1970s, and gained momentum in the early 1980s. The movement has continued ever  since "as one of the most significant and successful forces for reshaping the criminal justice process."  The movement's birth can be traced to the confluence of five developments: (1) the creation of an…

Most discovery disputes involve requests for production of documents.  This is because there are specific requirements for a party to properly respond to the request which has been the subject of many of my blogs, including a responding party’s obligation to state whether the documents you are seeking ever existed and where they are now as well as which request the documents being produced are responsive. However, there is nothing more combative in discovery than parties arguing over objections to a document request and the adequacy of the privilege log–assuming one was even provided.  To begin, in responding to the document request, a party is obligated to list the documents in a privilege log that are being withheld on the claim of privilege.  C.C.P. §2031.240.  According to Cal. Prac. Guide: Civil Procedure Before Trial (TRG 2024) §8:1474.5a, citing Hernandez v. Sup. Ct. (2003) 112 CA4th 285, pg.…

 According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, a DAO is a "term used to describe a 'virtual' organization embodied in computer code and executed on a distributed ledger or blockchain".  See Report of Investigation Pursuant to Section 21(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934: The DAO.  That does not answer the question, however, of the legal status of DAOs.  Two years ago, I wrote that U.S. District Court Judge  William H. Orrick  had ruled that  Ooki DAO was an unincorporated association under California law.  CFTC v. Ooki DAO, 2022 WL 17822445. Several months later, U.S. District Court Judge  Larry Alan Burns found that the plaintiffs had sufficiently pled the existence of bXz DAO as a partnership under California law.  Sarcuni v. bZx DAO, 664 F. Supp. 3d 1100 (S.D. Cal. 2023) In the meantime, California Assembly Member Matt Haney introduced legislation, AB 1229, that…

On September 29, 2024, the Governor of California signed into law a new bill that would create a uniform resentencing procedure. In the past decade, the California legislature has passed numerous bills that have provided incarcerated individuals with the opportunity to ask courts to have their sentences recalled and reduced. Some of these ameliorative statutes include AB 2942 – Recall of Sentence and Resentencing, which grants district attorneys the ability to make resentencing referrals; the RISE Act (SB 483); and SB 775/SB 1437, which effectively eliminated the role of the natural and probable consequences doctrine in murder cases and dramatically limited who can be charged under the felony murder doctrine. Those and other legislation have provided an opportunity for countless people to petition the courts to have their sentences reduced. The new laws have given defendants hope that the tough-on-crime policies of the past would not result in them serving unjust…

Whenever an employer investigates employee misconduct, there’s a chance it will find—and may have to disclose—negative facts. This is true when a hospital investigates the medical conduct of a doctor, or an employer investigates an employee for potential harassment. In both instances, and in the absence of malice, those investigations are protected by the litigation and the common interest privileges. Mounting Problems Dignity Health hired orthopedic surgeon Troy I. Mounts to work in a spine surgery practice at the San Luis Obispo French Hospital Center. Concerns regarding his clinical competence arose almost immediately. At the same time, he complained he wasn’t getting staff support or adequate time in the operating room to perform complex surgeries. Dignity put Mount’s complex surgeries “on hold” and required him to complete a previously scheduled surgery with a second surgeon he hadn’t worked with before.…

Yesterday's edition of the Los Angeles Daily Journal included an above the fold headline proclaiming "growing chorus for state constitutions should be taught in law schools".   I don't recall such a course being offered when I was in law school more than four decades ago.  However, according to the article, Stanford (not my alma mater) currently offers a course in state constitutional law, which it describes as a "neglected body of law". My first real exposure to the California Constitution came when I began working as Deputy Secretary and General Counsel for the California Business, Transportation & Housing Agency.  Since then, I have observed that many lawyers in private practice have scant knowledge about California's foundational document. "Quien sabe dos lenguas, vale por dos." California adopted its first constitution during the Gold Rush.  It was handwritten on parchment in both Spanish and…