It’s not a ruling, as there is no majority of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in its Commonwealth v. Kurtz opinion saying so, but that’s only because the fourth vote held it unnecessary to reach the question. The point, nonetheless, is clear. While the Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States may have carved out a narrow exception to the Third Party Doctrine for cellphones, as a theoretical body part to which people have no real option to possess at all times and thus compelled to provide information to third-party providers, Google search is a voluntary act for which no warrant is needed.

In the case, the police were trying to find out who committed a sexual assault of a person known in the opinion by her initials, “K.M.” Police figured that whoever committed this crime may have googled K.M.’s name or address before committing the crime.  Investigators obtained what is known as a “reverse keyword search warrant,” asking for Google to hand over the I.P. address of whoever may have googled the name or address of the victim shortly before the crime.  Google responded that someone at a particular I.P. address had conducted two searches for K.M.’s address a few hours before the attack.  The I.P. address was in use at the home of the defendant, Kurtz.  The police had not suspected Kurtz in the crime, but they started to watch Kurtz closely, obtained a DNA sample, and found a DNA match from the crime.

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Upon learning that Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, were murdered, President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, immediately reacted by posting on Truth Social.

Needless to say, the Reiner’s murder had nothing to do with Trump. It had nothing to do with TDS. It had nothing to do with driving “people CRAZY” with his “raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump,” curiously written in the third person. But the impetuous Trump couldn’t wait until there was more information and, instead, leapt to the assumption that Reiner’s murder was all about him. Continue reading →

As the levers of government were handed off to the guy who paid for Trump’s campaign and his adorable muskrats, Big Balls and all. the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, did the very best it could to achieve its ambitious goals. Now that it no longer exists and nobody talks about it, except perhaps the former federal employees with glowing performance reviews who were fired by terse emails written by twelve-year-olds who almost made it through their sophomore year of college, how did it do?

As the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transitioned from internet meme to real-life government reform effort, the agency claimed it would achieve many far-reaching, seemingly improbable goals.

It was going to slash $2 trillion in federal spending, eliminate burdensome and unconstitutional regulations, upgrade the federal government’s “tech stack,” evict the woke deep state, and, time permitting, balance the budget. Continue reading →

Some states put limits on the number of times a case may be presented to a grand jury. Some require judicial approval before resubmission. But in the federal system, there are no legal limits, per se, to the number of times a prosecutor can present and represent a case to grand juries until he gets the ham sandwich indicted. The only prerequisite for resubmission is set forth in the Justice Department Manual.

Approval Required Prior to Resubmission of Same Matter to Grand Jury: Once a grand jury returns a no-bill or otherwise acts on the merits in declining to return an indictment, the same matter ( i.e., the same transaction or event and the same putative defendant) should not be presented to another grand jury or resubmitted to the same grand jury without first securing the approval of the responsible United States Attorney.

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Prefatory note: Yep. I think I’ve officially lost it.—CLS

‘Twas the night before Christmas, in Mud Lick so still

Sheriff Roy Templeton locked up every grill

Tyrone’s on vacation, thank God—he’s dim as a drill.

The station was quiet, Just two drunks in a cell Continue reading →

It’s bad enough that FIFA plans to charge up to $700 for the $21 tickets that United States officials said would be offered when they bid for he World Cup. Of course, they didn’t know then that they would have to invent a FIFA Peace Prize for the sad Donald Trump, who already glommed the gold trophy when it was brought to the Oval Office to be shown him. “I’m keeping it,” he muttered, because it was gold.

But another part of the gig was that the World Cup for soccer, a sport for people who find baseball too fast paced, would bring in a bunch of touristas, as would the Los Angeles summer Olympics. That would be atop the normal tourists that come to visit the United States in the usual course. They fill hotel rooms, dine at restaurants and buy tchotchkes. They provide jobs and revenue. Unlike tariffs, tourists are a huge boon for the economy. Continue reading →

Being neither for nor against Charlie Kirk, only because I never followed Kirk and knew nothing about him or his positions, I had nothing to contribute after his assassination beyond the fact that no one should be harmed, no less killed, for their political views. It’s beyond ironic, then, that 20-year combat veteran turned Tennessee public employee was fired hours after making a comment in reply to a friend’s Facebook post.

Was Charlie Kirk a white supremacist? It’s irrelevant. Would you have written this reply? It’s irrelevant. Do you think Monica Meeks’ reply was terrible? It’s irrelevant. Monica Meeks has a right to express her opinion, right or wrong, offensive or not. And yet, she was fired from her job with the State of Tennessee. Continue reading →

For many of us, the reaction to an image of a transgender female (a biological male, as the Fifth Circuit notes, lest anyone be confused) washing her hands at the sink in a woman’s rest room would be a shrug. Regardless of our feelings about the new rules for transgender people, this just isn’t worthy of much outrage. For Travis County District Attorney, José Garza, it’s worthy of an investigation toward a felony prosecution. The Fifth Circuit agrees.

In May 2023, Evans attended a debate in the Texas House of Representatives at the Texas Capitol about gender reassignment treatment for children. When she visited the women’s restroom, Evans encountered a transgender (biologically male) politician whom she later confronted. After returning to her seat in the Capitol gallery, one of Evans’s seatmates showed her that someone from their group had posted a photo of the politician washing their hands in the women’s restroom on Facebook. Evans tweeted the photo with a caption indicating she believed the politician should not have used the women’s restroom. Continue reading →

After oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter, there is essentially no doubt that the Supreme Court will rule in Trump’s favor, that the president has the authority to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission even though the statute creating the positions limits the president’s power to removal for cause. In other words, Humphrey’s Executor, the case upon which Congress relied since 1935 in crafting boards and agencies made up of putative non-partisan subject matter experts whose terms would extend from one regime to another, is history.

The question is no longer will it happen, but what reversal of Humphrey’s Executor will do to the functioning of a nation that has been built to be run, at least to some significant extent, by bureaucracy. Once Congress realized that it could dodge the hard work of legislating by creating a board, commission or agency with a vague mandate that was intended to be controlled by people with the knowledge and experience that Congress lacked, it spent almost a century doing so. For many, government by unaccountable bureaucracy wasn’t the democratic dream, with less expertise than agenda and little motive to limit the reach of its fiefdom, or accept the premise that its work was done. Continue reading →

Back in the early days of SJ, during the throes of #Reinvent Law and A2J, access to justice, two beliefs meshed into the fantastical belief that because lawyers were too expensive and inaccessible to much of the public, putting statutes and caselaw online would enable non-lawyers, regular people if you will, to gain sufficient legal information to knowledgeably conduct their affairs and engage with the law. This belief gave rise to such sites as the Cornell Legal Information Institute as well as a handful of free websites publishing court decisions.

While I was not against the concept of putting law online, I argued that this notion was not merely wrong, but dangerously nuts. The nice folks at Cornell LII were not pleased with me. More than a decade later, there is little doubt that it was just a sweet fantasy, and that people are not only ignorant of law, but proud and certain of their ignorance. I pointed this out with regard to people’s beliefs as to the legality and propriety of the United States murdering people on the high seas and ICE’s flagrant violation of constitutional rights in its zeal to get every “illegal” at all costs.  The reactions were, well, sadly unsurprising. Continue reading →