A federal district court judge in the District of Columbia today ruled that the White House must restore the press credentials of Jim Acosta, a CNN journalist. Acosta had reportedly engaged in a heated exchange with the president during a news conference last week over the president's regular disparagement of mainstream news as "fake news." CNN filed the lawsuit on Tuesday, November 13, arguing that the revocation violated Acosta's rights to free speech and due process, and seeking a preliminary injunction to reinstate Acosta's press credentials.

Last week, a New Hampshire judge ordered Amazon to turn over an Echo smart speaker’s recordings that may have captured key evidence in a double homicide that occurred last year in Farmington. Investigators believe that the recordings may provide information that could help convict the murderer. The question arises: how much data can tech companies collect, store, and use, and what does that mean for privacy?

On Wednesday, November 14, 2018, the United States Department of Justice provided a twenty page memo to President Donald J. Trump arguing that President Trump's appointment of Acting Attorney General Matthew G. Whitaker complied with federal statutes and the U.S. Constitution, and that the appointment is "[c]onsistent with our prior opinion and with centuries of historical practice and precedents."

The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has ruled against the Trump administration's attempt to phase out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA permits approximately 600,000 unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the US as children to remain in the country legally by seeking permission from the Department of Homeland Security every two years. Though the Trump administration had asked the US Supreme Court to weigh in on the case pending in the 9th Circuit before the appellate ruling, now that the appellate court has issued its decision, it is even more likely that the Supreme Court will take up the matter in 2019.

In response to the recent worldwide protests, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company would agree to the first demand made by the organizers.

Two Florida district courts have reached clashing conclusions on whether a suspect in a criminal case can invoke the Fifth Amendment to withhold their iPhone passcode from law enforcement. In the older case, State of Florida v. Stahl, the court ruled that a criminal suspect does not have this right under the Constitution. (This case involved…

Listen to the October, 2018 oral arguments presented to the Court and learn more about new cases on the docket.

A landmark bill aimed at protecting the rights of transgender Massachusetts residents in the context of public accommodations was upheld by voters on November 6.

In its first decision from this term, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled earlier today that state and local governments must follow labor laws that ban age discrimination regardless of the number of their employees. Plaintiffs in Mount Lemmon Fire District v. Guido were two former Arizona firefighters who argued that the Mount Lemmon Fire District laid them off in violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). Because the fire department had fewer than 20 employees, the defendant argued that they were too small to qualify as an employer who had to comply with the law.

The US Supreme Court heard arguments this week in its second session of the 2018–2019 term. The cases argued span a wide range of topics, including arbitration, criminal procedure, federal Indian law, sovereign immunity, and class action settlements.