Law

Came across an interview with Cass Sunstein by Tyler Cowen, which covered many things, but where this idea of a right to be free of manipulation came up. I found this article Sunstein wrote about the topic a few months ago. Apparently part of a promotion tour for his book https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/manipulation/right-not-to-be-manipulated/FBB35C24137F78950566867F1D348AB0

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino gave nearly seven hours of clipped, defensive, and evasive answers about his unit’s chaotic Chicago mission, according to newly released court documents.

U.S. District Judge Sara L. Ellis, 56, last week torched Bovino’s credibility in a 233-page opinion on the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation in Chicago, writing that he “appeared evasive… either providing ‘cute’ responses… or outright lying.” Her order—now stayed by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals—details a video that, she said, flatly contradicts agency narratives about violent mobs justifying force.

https://archive.ph/ANKSp

A federal judge dismissed the indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James on Monday.

The judge found that Donald Trump’s appointment of interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan in Alexandria, Virginia, was invalid.

Trump handpicked Halligan for the role amid increasing pressure to bring criminal cases against his political enemies, including Comey and James.

“The Attorney General’s attempt to install Ms. Halligan as Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was invalid,” Judge Cameron McGowan Currie wrote in her Monday order.

The move will, for now, allow Texas to use the new district lines that a federal court blocked earlier this week as the Supreme Court reviews the case.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday temporarily permitted Texas to use Republicans' redrawn congressional map that a federal court blocked earlier this week.

Alito's order comes after Texas asked the high court to intervene following a ruling from a panel of federal judges on Tuesday that barred the state from using new district lines designed to help Republicans pick up an additional five House seats in next year's midterm elections.

The lower court's ruling, signed by Judge Jeffrey Brown — a nominee of Donald Trump — had ordered Texas to use a previous map that was drawn in 2021 instead, after finding that "substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map."

AI’s growing abilities to create realistic videos, images, documents and audio have judges worried about the trustworthiness of evidence in their courtrooms.

Judge Victoria Kolakowski sensed something was wrong with Exhibit 6C.

Submitted by the plaintiffs in a California housing dispute, the videoshowed a witness whose voice was disjointed and monotone, her face fuzzy and lacking emotion. Every few seconds, the witness would twitch and repeat her expressions.

Kolakowski, who serves on California’s Alameda County Superior Court, soon realized why: The video had been produced using generative artificial intelligence. Though the video claimed to feature a real witness — who had appeared in another, authentic piece of evidence — Exhibit 6C was an AI “deepfake,” Kolakowski said.

The case, Mendones v. Cushman & Wakefield, Inc., appears to be one of the first instances in which a suspected deepfake was submitted as purportedly authentic evidence in court and detected — a sign, judges and legal experts said, of a much larger threat.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/54993036

Alexander Smirnov, the ex–FBI informant who admitted to lying about the Biden-Burisma connection, has been released from prison just months into his six-year prison sentence.

In a plea deal in December 2024, Smirnov admitted to completely fabricating the conspiracy that became central to a Republican effort to impeach then-President Joe Biden. Days later, the Russian asset pleaded guilty to four felony charges, including one count of obstruction, and was sentenced to six years in prison.

The Justice Department revealed in February 2024 that Smirnov admitted to prosecutors that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in developing the Hunter Biden narrative.

three state Supreme Court justices, NBC News projects, preserving Democrats’ 5-2 majority on the battleground state’s high court.

Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty and David Wecht all survived an up-or-down vote to keep their seats on the bench. Dougherty and Wecht each won another 10-year term, while Donohue will serve until 2027, when she’ll reach the mandatory retirement age of 75 for justices.

The [Supreme] Court easily could have let the lower court ruling against Trump [having presidential immunity] stand, but Roberts orchestrated a ruling that effectively pardoned Trump retrospectively and prospectively. That unprecedented and partisan edict paved the way for Trump’s return to power.

The Constitution provides zero immunity for presidents from criminal prosecution. But John Roberts chose to be the kingmaker, giving Trump king-like powers last year, and then this year mowing down well-founded and well-grounded temporary restraining orders [that allowed] an array of unilateral and extreme dictates to proceed — even though doing so will cause irreparable harm [by letting Trump] transgress constitutional provisions, laws passed by Congress and long-standing legal precedents.

“What if a large group of people, angry at Congress, gathered on the Washington Mall, some of whom have firearms, and are known to have firearms, and a leader stood in front of them, here, right in front of them, not in another country, and said, ‘Go down the street and fight like hell. I’ll be there with you,’” said Judge Stephanie Thacker, an Obama appointee on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Thacker raised Trump’s speech as federal prosecutor Gordon Kromberg tried to defend the 2005 convictions of Muslim scholar and cancer researcher Ali Al-Timimi for encouraging more than a dozen young men to travel to Pakistan for military training to prepare to defend the Taliban in Afghanistan against an expected U.S. attack after Sept. 11, 2001. A judge last fall overturned some of Al-Timimi’s convictions.

Archived at https://archive.is/2sn9T

The Trump administration on Monday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to fire the director of the U.S. Copyright Office.

The administration’s newest emergency appeal to the high court was filed a month and a half after a federal appeals court in Washington held that the official, Shira Perlmutter, could not be unilaterally fired.

The case is the latest that relates to Trump’s authority to install his own people at the head of federal agencies. The Supreme Court has largely allowed Trump to fire officials, even as court challenges proceed.

But this case concerns an office that is within the Library of Congress. Perlmutter is the register of copyrights and also advises Congress on copyright issues.

As previously reported, the bank giant was accused in a lawsuit of conducting interviews with “diverse” candidates without the intention of hiring for the role. Former executive Joe Bruno addressed this concern, saying the “fake interviews” were “inappropriate, morally wrong, ethically wrong,” according to the New York Times.

A federal judge in California will haul the Trump administration into court for an emergency hearing on Friday afternoon amid concerns that several thousand federal workers may be laid off in the coming days — in direct violation of a temporary restraining order.

The nature of the hearing reflects a series of quick moves and countermoves by the parties in the already-dramatic litigation.

On Wednesday, in a bench ruling, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Bill Clinton appointee, blocked the government from issuing so-called reductions in force (RIFs) aimed at cutting the number of federal employees. Later, the court issued a seven-page order outlining the terms of the relief and elaborating on the judge's rationale for barring the mass layoffs.

"If what plaintiffs allege is true, then the agencies' actions in laying off thousands of public employees during a government shutdown — and in targeting for RIFs those programs that are perceived as favored by a particular political party — is the epitome of hasty, arbitrary and capricious decision making," Illston's order reads.

A judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from laying off thousands of federal workers during the government shutdown.

It comes less than a week after the administration confirmed several agencies had begun laying off about 4,000 workers.

US District Judge Susan Illston granted a request by two unions to block layoffs at more than 30 agencies.

During the hearing, Illston said she agreed with the unions that the administration was unlawfully using the lapse in funding, which began on 1 October, to carry out its plans to downsize the federal government.

The Supreme Court seemed ready on Tuesday to side with an Evangelical Christian therapist who objects to a Colorado law that she maintains violates her free speech rights.

After reading excerpts of the law out loud, conservative Justice Samuel Alito chimed in that the Colorado law "looks like blatant viewpoint discrimination."

"Let's just assume that we're in normal free-speech land rather than in this kind of doctor land. And if a doctor says I know you identify as gay, and I'm going to help you accept that, and another doctor says I know you identify as gay, and I'm going to help you change that, and one of those is permissible and the other is not, that seems like viewpoint discrimination."

In the short time since Kavanaugh wrote that opinion, his assertions have been proved demonstrably, almost laughably false too many times to count. As Sherrilyn Ifill notes, the justice’s claims were already belied by the factual record in that case, which showed ICE agents violently harassing and detaining American citizens for extended periods simply because they are Latino. Now the agency, freed from constitutional restraints by SCOTUS, has stopped pretending to be engaged in anything other than racial profiling. Bovino’s admission only confirms what we already knew: These detentions, far from the “brief” inconvenience Kavanaugh described, are often lengthy, violent, and dangerous. Ifill and Anil Kalhan, a professor of law at Drexel University, have proposed calling these detainments “Kavanaugh stops,” a label that’s quickly catching on.

Perhaps the most comprehensive account of Kavanaugh stops so far arrived last Thursday, in the form of a new lawsuit against the Trump administration brought by victims of racial profiling in the District of Columbia. The plaintiffs, a group of citizens and legal residents, describe ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents detaining them for hours—or even overnight—because they happen to be Latino. These accounts make a mockery of Kavanaugh’s insistence that these stops are brief and painless for those who have a right to live in this country.