First, Judge Paul Crotty held that New York’s law prohibiting the unauthorized practice of law could not survive strict scrutiny in an action brought by Upsolve, a company dedicated to providing non-lawyer assistance to consumers sued for debt collection. The argument was that the law violated the First Amendment by prohibiting speech used to assist consumers to challenge debt collection suits. The Second Circuit then reversed, holding that intermediate scrutiny applied, as the law was content neutral.

The case then went back before Judge Lewis Kaplan, who held that New York’s UPL law easily survived intermediate scrutiny, holding that the state’s interest in prohibiting non-lawyers from the practice of law was “important” and “real,” and that the law did not burden speech any more than was necessary to achieve the state’s important interest. Fair enough. Continue reading →

As might be obvious, I like to write. Writing enables me to think things through, to come to grips with the errors of my views and the beliefs that cannot be justified or explained. In other words, I don’t know what I think until I see what I write. (Sorry, Bill.)

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick tells an apocryphal story about his child.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%. Continue reading →

The cost to the United States of the war against Iran is estimated to be $1 billion per day, not including the cost of Pete Hegseth’s hair gel for his daily pressers. Everett Dirksen once had something to say about this. If there was no choice in the matter, that would be one thing. But when it’s a war of choice, paying for it is an issue, especially after the indiscriminate evisceration of federal employees by DOGE, the wildly mounting federal deficit, the monumental increase in ICE funding, the ongoing rise in inflation and the cuts to Obamacare subsidies.

But hey, we’ve got hundreds of billions of free dollars from the tariffs that other countries are paying to the United States, we’ve been told. Except now that the tariffs have been held unconstitutional, as was almost certainly going to be the case (and will similarly be the case with the Section 122 tariffs as well), they’ve been ordered to be returned. Continue reading →

When Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, her string of deflections, non-responses and outright insults demonstrated her utter contempt for Congress. More to the point, it demonstrated Congress’ fecklessness when it came to forcing a cabinet secretary to explain her stunning failure to do her job or comply with the law. So naturally, the House is going for round two by subpoenaing Bondi to appear before the House Oversight Committee for a closed door deposition.

Over the objection of the panel’s Republican chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, five Republicans on the Oversight Committee joined Democrats to force approval of the subpoena, which was introduced by Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina.

Yes, that Nancy Mace. Continue reading →

The Trump administration has abandoned its efforts to use the power of the federal government to force law firms that had the audacity of hiring or representing Trump’s enemies to capitulate to his great and powerful will.

With a brief due this week, Justice Department lawyers told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that they were no longer interested in pursuing the cases and were voluntarily asking the court to dismiss them.

The decision is the White House’s most significant acknowledgment that the executive orders cannot be successfully defended in court. The move is particularly striking given that some firms opted to reach deals in a bid to head off executive orders that President Trump’s Justice Department said it would no longer stand behind.

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Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell called it the “Pottery Barn Rule.” You break it, you own it. President W owned Operation Iraqi Freedom because he broke it, learning too late that beating Saddam Hussein did not mean that democracy would fill the necessarily void. Trump never learned the lesson.

From the outset, Trump has been careful to declare limits around the U.S. attack, saying he wanted to overthrow the current regime, but telling Iranians it was up to them to seize the opportunity to write their country’s next chapter. His communication strategy has reinforced those limits by creating a bit of distance — at least in imagery — between the president and the fighting.

At the same time, however, Trump has adopted expansive rhetoric about the reasoning for his intervention that recalled the justifications used for earlier U.S. forays into the Middle East.

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United States Constitution

Article I, Section 8, Clause 11

The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Over the past few decades, presidents have flexed their military muscle. Some in response to acts against the United States or its allies. Some in discrete, one-shot actions like Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities that obliterated its nuclear weapons capacity or his invasion of Venezuela to seize its president and rendition him back to America. Continue reading →

It seems clear that the op-ed couldn’t be written by Pete Hegseth, as it was coherent and all the words were spelled correctly. But it came as a shock that it was written by Frank Kendall, who served as Secretary of the Air Force under President Biden. Given the current Secretary’s obsession with war and lethality, the effort to hijack a private company upon threat of its destruction by being named as a “supply chain risk,” thus making it unusable either to the government or to any enterprise doing business with the government, one would have expected, hoped?, that the response would have been a robust defense of private enterprise. But that wasn’t where Kendall went.

Anthropic is insisting that the government agree to specific restrictions that would prevent the use of its model to conduct widespread surveillance of Americans or to control autonomous weapons like drones without a human in what is called the “kill chain.” The company reiterated on Thursday that it has no intention to change its position. The government says that the only requirement its contractors can insist on is that their products be used lawfully.

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The glibberish response from the Department of Justice provides no clue as to why the summaries and 302s are nowhere to be found.

The Justice Department said in a statement to The Times on Monday that “the only materials that have been withheld were either privileged or duplicates.” In a new statement on Tuesday, the department also noted that documents could have been withheld because of “an ongoing federal investigation.” Officials did not directly address why the memos related to the woman’s claim were not released.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Justice Department said in a new statement that it was reviewing which documents were released in connection to the index. The department said it would publish any documents “found to have been improperly tagged in the review process” that are legally required to be made public.

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There are nine. There were seven seats. Four showed. Why? Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kagan, Kavanaugh and Barrett were present for the State of the Union address. As tradition dictates, they sat there stoic, hands folded in their laps, faces frozen, showing no reaction to the one hour and 47 minute speech. There was no reason for the four to be there.

Now would be a good time to put an end to the charade that the annual State of the Union address is a solemn occasion of civic ceremony. Although there have been moments in which the speech has seemed to serve such a function, it has always been primarily a vehicle of presidential and partisan boosterism.

Members of Congress and the Supreme Court have long been dragooned into playing along with the ruse. They should not continue to do so. They should stay home and let the president deliver his speech to a half-empty room of his most partisan supporters.

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