Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Corporate law firms don’t just present logic and evidence before a judge and jury; they also do lots of underhanded bullshit.
https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/how-big-law-firms-shape-capitalism-with-david-enrich
Women don’t formally have equal rights before the law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtHqsaWz4Ww
“The law, Assembly Bill 2839 makes it illegal for an individual to produce “knowingly distributing an advertisement or other election communication, as defined, that contains certain materially deceptive content,” within 120 days of an election and up to 60 days after. Affected candidates can file for a civil action enjoining distribution of the media, and seek damages from its creator.”
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“content creator Christopher Kohls filed a lawsuit arguing the law was overbroad, violating his First Amendment rights to make parody content. Kohls has a YouTube channel with more than 300,000 subscribers, and his videos often consist of political parodies featuring political candidates seemingly mocking themselves.”
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“Judge John A. Mendes, a judge on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, sided with Kohls, ruling that the law doesn’t pass constitutional muster because it does not use “the least restrictive means available for advancing the State’s interest.”
“Counter speech is a less restrictive alternative to prohibiting videos such as those posted by Plaintiff, no matter how offensive or inappropriate someone may find them,” Mendez’s opinion reads. “AB 2839 is unconstitutional because it lacks the narrow tailoring and least restrictive alternative that a content based law requires under strict scrutiny.”
Mendez’s ruling argues that the law, which is aimed at cracking down on “deepfakes” and other forms of false speech intended at misrepresenting an opponent’s views and actions, ends up making illegal a much wider range of speech than these specific statements.
“While Defendants attempt to analogize AB 2839 to a restriction on defamatory statements, the statute itself does not use the word ‘defamation’ and by its own definition, extends beyond the legal standard for defamation to include any false or materially deceptive content that is ‘reasonably likely’ to harm the ‘reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate.'”
While the law did contain a provision exempting parody content that contains a disclosure, the requirement was onerous, mandating that it be “no smaller than the largest font size of other text appearing in the visual media.”
Just one part of the law was found to pass constitutional muster—a requirement audio-only media be disclosed at the beginning at the message, and every two minutes during the duration of the content.
“While the Court gives substantial weight to the fact that the California Legislature has a ‘compelling interest in protecting free and fair elections,’ this interest must be served by narrowly tailored ends.” Mendez writes. “Supreme Court precedent illuminates that while a wellfounded fear of a digitally manipulated media landscape may be justified, this fear does not give legislators unbridled license to bulldoze over the longstanding tradition of critique, parody, and satire protected by the First Amendment.””
https://reason.com/2024/10/03/judge-stops-california-law-targeting-election-misinformation/
“You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. I’m sure you’ve heard somebody say that before when discussing free speech and limitations on free speech and the First Amendment. Well, it’s actually one of the most widely misunderstood quotes in American law. It’s routinely parroted as the status of why there can be or are limitations on free speech, but it is a big fat myth. I will explain here in just a moment, so stick around.”
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“the interesting about it is the Schenck case wasn’t about fires, it wasn’t about theaters, it kind of wasn’t even about free speech. It was in a way, but it was really about a guy that was being charged with violations of the Espionage Act because he was a member of the socialist party and he was speaking out against the draft. And the other bizarre thing about why this quote gets attributed to why it’s okay to limit free speech is, the Schenck case, which has now actually been overturned and has been for like 60 years, actually stood for the exact opposite. The Schenck case was applying a pretty large degree of censorship on free speech. That’s why it was overturned is because it was actually found to be completely contrary toward what the First Amendment stood for.
So, the idea that you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, Justice Holmes was using that as an analogy to simply say that free speech can’t go completely unchecked. And that idea has maintained it’s truth throughout the years. That’s still true. There are limitations on what is considered protected speech and what is not considered protected speech, and that’s a topic for a different video. But it’s just always been interesting to me that this quote, which is just dicta, it’s not the holding of the case, it’s not really the law of the land, and it’s not Justice Holmes saying that’s what the law of the land should be, has somehow withstood the test of time and is still, to this day”
https://www.whalenlawoffice.com/blog/legal-mythbusting-series-yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-theater/
What’s wrong with Greg Abbott?
“the Texas Supreme Court handed down an extraordinary order saving Robert Roberson from execution — but potentially not for very long.
Roberson was convicted in 2003 of murdering his daughter on the theory that she died of “shaken baby syndrome.” However, in an extraordinary turn of events, it now appears likely that Roberson is innocent. Not only that, but it is far from clear that his daughter was even a victim of murder in the first place.
One reason to doubt the conviction is that modern science looks at shaken baby syndrome with increasing skepticism. More importantly, however, the evidence in Roberson’s case suggests that his poor girl actually died from a combination of pneumonia and medications that should never have been prescribed to such a young patient, and that the injuries that a 2003 jury attributed to child abuse may have resulted from a surgery.
Another reason why the order in In re Texas House of Representatives is so extraordinary is that it involves what may be an unprecedented conflict between the state’s legislature and its governor. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has the power to issue a 30-day pause on Roberson’s execution (although not to grant him permanent clemency) but has thus far refused to do so”
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“a bipartisan group of state lawmakers issued a subpoena seeking Roberson’s testimony before a committee of the state’s House of Representatives. This hearing isn’t scheduled until Monday, and Roberson obviously could not comply with this subpoena if he had been killed Thursday night.
So Roberson’s case raises what may be a unique separation of powers issue under the Texas Constitution: Can Texas’s executive branch of government carry out an otherwise lawful execution if doing so would prevent its legislative branch from hearing testimony from a witness it has already subpoenaed?”
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“The striking thing about this case, however, is that virtually everyone who has touched it wants Roberson to live except for the few people in Texas’s government (the Court of Criminal Appeals, the pardon board, and Abbott) who actually have the power to save him.”
https://www.vox.com/criminal-justice/378717/robert-roberson-execution-death-penalty-texas-supreme-court
“The program works like this: Registered voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, or Wisconsin — all swing states that could go for either Vice President Kamala Harris or Trump come Election Day — can sign the petition, which claims to be a “Petition in Favor of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms” until Monday, October 21, which happens to be the voter registration deadline in Pennsylvania.
The petition is being circulated by Musk’s America PAC, which has taken over much of Trump’s ground operation in key swing states. Musk has made Pennsylvania a particular focus of his personal outreach, hosting events there, including one on Sunday where he handed a woman in a Trump-Vance shirt a giant $1 million check.
Though the petition does not require signers to be registered Republicans, the focus on the First and Second Amendments does seem to appeal to potential Trump voters who fear Democrats will take away their gun rights and who subscribe to Musk’s idea of “free speech.” The net effect, then, is that Musk is promising $1 million a day to a program aimed at getting pro-Trump voters registered in swing states.
Because his contest is only open to registered voters, there may be a case for it to be understood as an illegal financial incentive to get people to register to vote, as Public Citizen’s complaint alleges. One issue Musk faces, said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, is that what constitutes payment for voting-related activity has been broadly interpreted in the past.
“This could involve anything of value,” Becker said. The law “has been applied to things like Ben & Jerry’s offering everyone who has an ‘I Voted’ sticker an ice cream cone on Election Day. They received a cease-and-desist letter and changed [the promotion to give] everyone a free ice cream cone on Election Day.”
There is some ambiguity in Musk’s promotion, compared to what Ben & Jerry’s offered, however. The uncertainty arises from the fact that Musk’s PAC is asking people to sign a petition for the chance to win $1 million, not explicitly rewarding them for registering to vote.
Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government Program, told Vox that the issue at hand really comes down to whether entering a specific group of people in a lottery if they sign a petition counts as paying people to register to vote.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/378912/musk-trump-voting-contest-million-dollars-swing-state-lottery-pennsylvania
Trump played a key role in destroying the USFL in the 1980s?
“The NFL would later introduce extensive evidence designed to prove that the USFL followed Trump’s merger strategy, and that this strategy ultimately caused the USFL’s downfall. The merger strategy, the NFL argued, involved escalating financial competition for players as a means of putting pressure on NFL expenses, playing in the fall to impair NFL television revenues, shifting USFL franchises out of cities where NFL teams played into cities thought to be logical expansion (through merger) cities for the NFL, and, finally, bringing an upcoming antitrust litigation..”
https://www.law.berkeley.edu/sugarman/Sports_Stories_USFL_v_NFL__-_Boris_Kogan.pdf
“Amid mounting pressure for Supreme Court reform, Congress has before it one relatively straightforward option: enshrine Scalia’s “standing test” and legislate the basic requirements for who can sue over major issues of national importance.
Currently, the law concerning standing is governed by a series of Supreme Court cases that sort out which plaintiffs can bring cases in federal court in the first place. If it’s the wrong plaintiff, the case is thrown out. It also keeps federal judges out of the business of legislating under the pretense of legitimate litigation.
But so far, there is no general “standing” statute. The court has set its own standards for which cases it and lower courts can hear, pursuant to its reading of the Constitution. Congress should change that and set down its own marker. Although the current right-wing justices could decide to strike down standing legislation as impinging on their constitutional prerogatives, codification of standing law would send an important message that Congress is willing to impose reasonable checks and balances on the justices.
Standing comes from Article III of the Constitution, which gives federal judges the job description of deciding “cases.” The case law around standing amounts to the court’s working definition of the word “case”: At its core, it requires that plaintiffs have an injury that’s unique to them and not shared by the general population. Standing is central to the separation of powers because judges are supposed to only consider disputes between discrete parties that occurred in the past.
To grasp the distinction, imagine a case in which a city miscalculates the property tax liability owed by a homeowner for a single residence. She sues the government to get that particular financial injury redressed. Resolving that dispute is a job for the courts because it’s between two discrete parties and involves retroactive relief.
Legislatures, by contrast, make rules that are future-oriented and apply to the general population. If the homeowner wants the general property tax rate lowered, she must push legislators for action, not the courts. Standing holds judges within their constitutional lane by keeping sweeping policy disputes impacting the broader public out of courtrooms.
The Constitution does not define the word “case,” however, so the Supreme Court has had to fill in the blanks over the years by requiring, first and foremost, a concrete “injury” to make something a case. In cases between private parties, the injury is usually obvious — the defendant broke a contract or committed a tort that left the plaintiff worse off than they were before. In cases against the government, if the plaintiff is a corporation, it’s easy to show that a regulation or legislation causes harm to their business. But if a regular citizen wants the government to take action that affects the public — such as enforcing clean air standards or making mifepristone unavailable across the country — it’s harder to show an injury that’s particularized, or special, to the actual plaintiff bringing the suit.
For those cases, the court has long made clear that taxpayers cannot sue merely to vindicate their alleged “injury” in having their tax dollars misused by the government. That would allow angry taxpayers to turn the judiciary into the ultimate boss of the other two branches of government. Beyond that, what suffices as an injury can be hard to pin down, with the court adding a slew of adjectives to the test, requiring that an injury be imminent and not speculative or hypothetical, for example.
The governing standard, created by the Supreme Court over decades and refined at Scalia’s hand, requires three things: 1) that the plaintiff has an injury that is unique to them, 2) that the defendant caused it and 3) that if the court rules in their favor, that injury will be fixed. The aim is to find the equivalent of a “broken arm” — versus a generic policy gripe — that courts can remedy with an order.”
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“The fact that the court can pick and choose which cases in which to recognize standing law, and which they prefer to overlook it, cries out for congressional intervention.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/25/supreme-court-reform-congress-00164740
Shapiro Doesn’t Realize This Big Mistake & Gets It All WRONG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1yaePHlgsA
“On the one hand, Trump frequently claims credit for the Supreme Court’s decision eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion — and well he should, since the three Republicans he appointed to the Supreme Court all joined the Court’s 2022 decision permitting abortion bans. As Trump told Fox News last summer, “I did something that no one thought was possible. I got rid of Roe v. Wade.”
At the same time, Trump at least claims that he has no interest in signing new federal legislation banning abortion. When a reporter asked Trump if he would sign such a ban last month, Trump’s answer was an explicit “no.”
Behind the scenes, however, many of Trump’s closest allies tout a plan to ban abortion in all 50 states that doesn’t require any new federal legislation whatsoever.”
https://www.vox.com/abortion/351678/the-comstock-act-the-long-dead-law-trump-could-use-to-ban-abortion-explained