Federal Courts

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has bucked 88 years of precedent in holding that the Securities and Exchange Commission cannot use administrative law judges in securities fraud cases because it violates the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.

The unprecedented leak of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's first draft in the monumental abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health would explicitly overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion. Here is a quick summary of that opinion, which can (and likely will) change from its current version. However, the first draft does strongly suggest that the court is likely to overturn Roe in about a month.

Johannsongs-Publishing Ltd. sued songwriter Rolf Lovland and several record companies over the song "You Raise Me Up" written by Lovland in 2001 and popularized by Josh Groban in 2003. It argues that the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' test for substantial similarity failed to find enough commonalities between "You Raise Me Up" and a 1977 song entitled "Söknuður," while the Second Circuit's "ordinary observer" test would have found infringement.

The use of nationwide preliminary injunctions has been on the rise in recent decades. A preliminary injunction is a court order that prohibits one party in a lawsuit from taking a certain action or the government from enforcing a particular rule or law. Unlike, say, a temporary restraining order, a preliminary injunction can last for the entirety of the litigation. In the case of lawsuits against the federal government, a nationwide injunction applies to all states, regardless of whether a state is party to the lawsuit. This makes it an incredibly powerful tool. The most recent prominent example occurred when a federal district court in Florida ended the public transportation mask mandate.

In most cases, the Sherman Antitrust Act prohibits competitors from engaging in a group boycott. This law prevents companies from banding together to fix prices or push another competitor out of the market. However, if the "price" a group is looking to influence is worker's wages, that's a horse of a different color.

The coronavirus pandemic may be winding down, but there are still pending cases dealing with the legality of executive mandates requiring vaccination for different types of employees. One of them, Georgia v. Biden, is currently before the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, and its resolution will determine the fate of President Joe Biden's executive order mandating vaccination for federal contractors.