#us district court

[alwaysbewoke]

A federal judge on Monday threw out a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s X that had targeted a watchdog group for its critical reports about hate speech on the social media platform. In a blistering 52-page order, the judge blasted X’s case as plainly punitive rather than about protecting the platform’s security and legal rights. “Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation,” wrote District Judge Charles Breyer, of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, in the order’s opening lines. “Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose.” “This case represents the latter circumstance,” Breyer continued. “This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.” X’s lawsuit had accused the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) of violating the company’s terms of service when it studied, and then wrote about, hate speech on the platform following Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October 2022. X has blamed CCDH’s reports, which showcase the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, for amplifying brand safety concerns and driving advertisers away from the site. In the suit, X claimed that it had suffered tens of millions of dollars in damages from CCDH’s publications. CCDH is an international non-profit with offices in the UK and US. Because of its potential to destroy the watchdog group, the case has been widely viewed as a bellwether for research and accountability on X as Musk has welcomed back prominent white supremacists and others to the platform who had previously been suspended when the platform was still a publicly-traded company called Twitter.

[criminaljusticemark]

United States Federal Court Structure

“Life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves.”- Earl Warren, 14th Chief Justice of the United States The United States court system is a dual system (USC, 2023). The dual court system refers to the separate federal judicial and state judicial court systems (USC, 2023). The two court systems…

[hislop3]

Genesis and COVID Litigation - Interesting Update

Genesis is one of the country’s largest SNF and assisted living providers so naturally, it saw its share of COVID cases throughout the pandemic. Like other similar providers across the same industry, cases involving COVID infections are just now hitting the courts.  Back in October, I wrote about the advancement of litigation involving COVID.  There are two relevant…

[vinceeasley]

Perspectives: From the president to the Bundys, the political press is becoming obsolete

…Closer to home, that lack of trust in the self-styled “legitimate” media can be seen in the information divide that has emerged in the trial of Cliven Bundy, his sons and a handful of supporters currently underway in Las Vegas. NPR recently bemoaned that “parallel universes” were emerging in which established news outlets reporting on the case are being upstaged by Bundy family supporters using…

[mapsontheweb]

Every United States Federal District Court

[whenweallvote]

Last week, the U.S. Senate confirmed Judge Melissa DuBose to the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island, making her the first person of color and the first openly LGBTQ judge to serve on this Court.

Judge DuBose is also the 100th Black woman ever confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship in the United States. 

Making history during Women’s History Month? Period! 👩🏾‍⚖️🏛️🤩

[tomorrowusa]

Lock him up!

Bannon is a leading fascist strategist for Trump. It's too bad that their trials are in different jurisdictions. It would be fun to imagine them sharing a jail cell – material for a genuine reality show. 😝

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld former White House adviser Steve Bannon's conviction for criminal contempt of Congress. Bannon was sentenced in October 2022 to four months in prison on charges related to his refusal to testify before and provide documents to the Jan. 6 committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. At the time, the judge also fined Bannon $6,500 but allowed the former Trump adviser to remain free while he appealed his convictions. According to Friday's order, the three-judge panel rejected Bannon's argument that he was not guilty because his "lawyer advised him not to respond to the subpoena" from Congress. Bannon could still appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the justices there previously did not help Peter Navarro, another Trump aide, to stay out of prison on similar charges.

[usauthoritarianism]

This is a Chicago Jump Out Squad

In DC this sort of thing is normal too.

People need to understand. I have spent my adult life in driving distance between the urban centers where this slave catcher ass policing style is the reality, and the prison(s) where massive prisoner populations are rented out to governments and corporations for literal pennies to the inmates.

-and this article is from 2014

[craigsumter-justice]

This will be used to improve the quality of my blog and the discovery process.

[opens-up-4-nobody]

You don't understand how unhinged I feel trying to construct an ending for Bleach that I personally would enjoy while knowing Bleach does not deserve my time and also not remembering enough to actually make anything coherent. And yet here I am.

[beetrans]

This really makes the Studios costing themselves even more money (and getting more unions involved) by prolonging the strike for the promise of free ai labor even more fucking funny. you dumb fucking bastards lol

[nationallawreview]

Department of Labor’s New Overtime Rule Overturned by Federal Court in Texas

On November 15, 2024, in State of Texas v. Dep’t of Labor, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas overturned a Department of Labor rule that would have increased the number of employees subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The rule established by the Department of Labor in April of 2024 increased the minimum salary at which executive, administrative, and professional…

[shamballalin]

How to Fix the Broken Electoral College

For more than 50 years, Common Cause and their members have fought for the democracy we deserve,[1] working to make every vote equal with the National Popular Vote. The National Popular Vote compact is based on a simple principle: the American people should pick who serves as the President of the United States and the candidate with the most votes should win. National Popular Vote would…

[vinceeasley]

Perspectives: From the president to the Bundys, the political press is becoming obsolete

“…Closer to home, that lack of trust in the self-styled “legitimate” media can be seen in the information divide that has emerged in the trial of Cliven Bundy, his sons and a handful of supporters currently underway in Las Vegas. NPR recently bemoaned that “parallel universes” were emerging in which established news outlets reporting on the case are being upstaged by Bundy family supporters…

[mapsontheweb]

A visualization of the 94 Federal District Courts of the United States.

[whitesinhistory]

On August 21, 1959, Jim Johnson, an Arkansas supreme court justice, told a state-wide segregationist rally at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to “do what needs to be done” to fight the proposed integration of schools in the Dollarway School District. “When Dollarway falls,” Johnson exhorted the crowd, “Arkansas falls!” The crowd of over a thousand white Arkansas residents cheered.

On August 4, a federal judge ordered that three Black children be admitted to the Dollarway School District when schools reopened in September. The Dollarway School Board appealed the decision. Meanwhile, white residents in the Dollarway District put together a petition with over 1,200 signatures asking Governor Orval Faubus to preserve segregation in the district “with all the force at your command.”

Though Brown v. Board of Education determined in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, for years white residents across Arkansas relied on intimidation and organized political resistance to maintain segregation in the public schools. White residents fought court rulings and held intimidation rallies to terrorize Black families and their children while politicians closed schools to avoid integration. By 1960, only 98 of Arkansas’s 104,000 Black students attended integrated schools.

Justice Jim Johnson was an outspoken segregationist who served as an Arkansas state senator and associate justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960s. After the Brown decision, Justice Johnson launched a campaign to ensure that defense of segregation remained a central political platform in Arkansas. Justice Johnson formed the White Citizens’ Council of Arkansas, which protested plans to integrate schools in the town of Hoxie, and proposed an amendment to the Arkansas Constitution that would authorize state officials to ignore federal law, which Arkansas voters passed. In 1956, Justice Johnson challenged incumbent Orval Faubus and ran for governor on a segregationist platform with the endorsement of the KKK. Although Justice Johnson lost the election, he leveraged his supporters to pressure Governor Faubus to embrace the segregationist cause. He was instrumental in persuading Governor Faubus to defy federal orders to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

The massive resistance to integration by the white community was largely successful in preventing integration of schools, especially in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown v. Board of Education, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.” Learn more about this history by reading EJI’s report, Segregation in America. You can also learn more about segregationist leaders like Justice Johnson, including his wife Virginia Johnson, here.