A federal judge in Alaska has ruled that President Trump does not have the authority to re-open Arctic waters to drilling that the Obama administration closed to drilling in 2016. Judge Sharon L. Gleason explained that while a 1953 law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) permits a president to remove waters from drilling, it does not contain a provision allowing a president to add waters to the list of available drilling sites.

Rookie justice Brett M. Kavanaugh seemed to take the place of Justice Kennedy during the arguments, suggesting that some partisan gerrymandering can be so extreme that it is unconstitutional.

New Jersey has become just the second state in the U.S. to prohibit retail stores and restaurants from refusing to accept cash. The law targets stores that accept payments only by credit cards or through an app.

After years of debate, the European Union (“EU”) has passed the controversial Copyright Directive (the “Directive”), its first update of copyright rules since 2001. By a vote of 348 to 274, the 28 EU member countries are now required to pass or “transpose” these new rules into legislation in their respective countries. The most controversial…

Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court, along with judges in a dozen or so other states, has been considering issues of gerrymandering. The courts have primarily questioned whether mapmakers have gone too far by manipulating legislative district boundaries for the advantage of a preferred political party.

US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is (in)famous for remaining silent during oral arguments, but last week during the oral argument of Flowers v. Mississippi, he broke his silence to ask a question. The case presents a question about whether a Mississippi prosecutor engaged in unlawful exclusion of jurors on the basis of race in the series of trials of Curtis Flowers, who was charged with several murders.

On Thursday, March 21, 2019, Tesla filed a lawsuit against one of its former engineers, alleging that he copied the company’s Autopilot source code before moving to a Chinese self-driving car start-up in January. The lawsuit claims that the engineer, named Guangzhi Cao, copied more than 300,000 files associated with the Autopilot source code before joining his new employer, China’s Xiaopeng Motors Technology Company Ltd.

On Wednesday, March 6, 2019, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit decided Patrick Hately v. Dr. David Watts, ruling that opened and read emails are covered by the federal Stored Communications Act's privacy protections. Watts used a password provided to him by the mother of Hately's children, with whom Watts was having an affair, to browse Hately's emails in an attempt to uncover evidence of a relationship between Hately and Watts's ex-wife. The Fourth Circuit ultimately found that the district court erred in finding Hately did not demonstrate the statutory injury required under state law and in finding that Hately's opened and read emails were not statutorily protected "electronic storage" under federal law.

Congressman Devin Nunes has reportedly filed a defamation lawsuit in Virginia state court against Twitter, Republican political consultant Liz Mair, and two parodical Twitter accounts (@DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow) seeking at least $250 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The lawsuit alleges, among other things, that Twitter is intentionally refusing to enforce its Terms of Service and Twitter Rules against accounts that supposedly attempt to defame conservative individuals such as Nunes.

A class action lawsuit filed on Thursday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California names Stanford, USC, UCLA, the University of San Diego, the University of Texas at Austin, Wake Forest, Yale, and Georgetown.