California Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed a lawsuit last week against the federal government, alleging they violated the Clean Water Act by allowing millions of gallons of raw sewage, heavy metals, and other contamination to routinely spill across the border from Tijuana into San Diego. According to the complaint, toxic water pollution from the Tijuana River Valley shut down San Diego beaches on more than 500 days in the past three years.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently decided a case allowing the government to produce evidence from the Internet Archive (often referred to as the “Wayback Machine”). The July 2018 ruling supports a similar holding from the Third Circuit in 2011.

On Friday, September 7, US Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan denied an application to preserve straight-ticket voting on Michigan state ballots. The brief order indicated that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have granted the application. The denial of the application will mean that on the November 6 ballot, voters in Michigan will have to vote individually for numerous partisan offices, in accordance with a law passed by the Republican-majority legislature in 2015. Until today, that law had been stalled in litigation.

In a complaint filed on Tuesday in San Francisco, Facebook claims Blackberry has infringed on multiple patents for its voice-messaging features in its instant messaging app. These patents include analysis of GPS information and voice-messaging technology.

On Thursday, August 30, 2018, arbitrator Stephen B. Burbank ruled that Colin Kaepernick's lawyers presented enough evidence in his collusion case against the National Football League to proceed to a full hearing. Kaepernick's lawyers will be presented with the opportunity to question league officials, owners, and other parties with regard to the collusion case.

Court papers filed late last week show that according to the government's most recent estimates, close to 500 children, including 22 under the age of 5, remain in US custody after being separated from their parents at the border earlier this year pursuant to the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy. The greatest logistical challenge that government officials and immigrants' rights advocates have faced in reuniting many of these children with their families is that their parents were deported without them, and are now proving difficult if not impossible to locate.

The dispute between Catholic Social Services (CSS) and the city of Philadelphia over foster care will not be handled by the Supreme Court.

With the November elections looming, North Carolina may be required to reorganize its congressional districts. Three federal judges in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that the legislature had violated the Constitution by gerrymandering districts to favor Republicans over Democrats, as openly acknowledged by Republican state legislators. The judges…

A bill aimed to help employees who have experienced sexual harassment and discrimination on the job sue their employers in a court of law, rather than private arbitration, has been passed by the California Assembly.

Unions won a major victory against the Trump administration’s attempts to weaken protections that apply to many federal workers when Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columnbia invalidated provisions in three executive orders Trump's administration issued back in May.