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.

The lawsuit seeks to prevent the Tesla CEO from using social media to make misleading statements about the company.

On Wednesday, March 13, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued Executive Order N-09-19 (the “Order”) granting a stay of execution to the 700 plus inmates on death row in the state. The Order also closes the state’s death penalty chamber located in San Quentin prison and withdraws California’s legal injection protocol. A long time opponent…

Earlier this month, the United States women’s soccer team filed a lawsuit in a California district court, alleging that U.S. Soccer’s codified policies and its actual practices discriminate against members of the women’s national team based on their gender. The claimed result is that female team members are paid less than similarly situated male soccer players on the U.S. men’s team, according to the complaint.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held on Thursday that the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus precludes US immigration authorities from deporting asylum seekers who had failed an initial screening. This ruling sets up a circuit split (with the Third Circuit, which came to the opposite conclusion in 2016), which makes review by the US Supreme Court likely.