Courtside

Recent legal news from around the U.S.: Satanists seeking abortion rights, a restaurant that went "private" to avoid mask mandates, and a bunch of new restrictive laws in Texas.

Last year's killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and subsequent protests also brought renewed attention to other high-profile killings of Black people and how police and prosecutors often avoided accountability. And now, recent indictments in the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Elijah McClain indicate that momentum could be building.

Late last week, a California judge threw out the state's controversial "gig workers law." The ruling casts massive uncertainty on the state's large gig economy and the status of workers for companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Instacart.

The dairy industry has long held legal sway, which they've needed to wield in recent years as demand for products made with cow's milk has been challenged by a growing interest in plant-based milk and dairy alternatives. The dairy industry has waged a legal fight to ban milk alternatives from labeling their products with terms like "milk" or "dairy."

Consumers read news stories all the time about various product recalls, often issued voluntarily by manufacturers in concert with government agencies. But when a company fights a recall, the situation ends with the rare step of the federal government issuing a mandatory recall. That happened last week when the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) ordered Zen Magnets and Neoballs off of shelves nationwide.

Though half of the country is now fully vaccinated, the United States continues to struggle against an anti-COVID-19 vaccination movement. As more employers, universities, businesses, and localities are requiring proof of vaccination before community interaction, legal challenges to vaccine mandates have arisen, dragging one Supreme Court case from over a century ago back into the spotlight.