U.S. Ninth Circuit

If I was trying to go incognito, my first thought probably wouldn't be to rent an electric scooter and zoom around downtown Los Angeles with it. They are not particularly inconspicuous. Yet a recent Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion dealt with the "reasonable expectation of privacy" LA residents and visitors might have when renting e-scooters, which are more popular than ever due to their mobility, ease of use, and low cost.

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.

Self-described "activist law professor" John Eastman filed a complaint seeking declaratory judgment after being subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the capitol. Eastman, who represented President Trump in litigation following the 2020 election, argued the Committee was acting in a law enforcement capacity - rather than a legislative one. He also claimed that attorney-client privilege protected the documents at issue, a favorite argument among those connected to Trump.

Several federal laws criminalize behavior that aids the migration of undocumented immigrants into the U.S. For example, it is a crime to smuggle immigrants across the border or to conceal an undocumented immigrant. One such law, 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv), has been challenged as unconstitutional.

The popular Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit" depicts the life of a trailblazing chess prodigy named Beth Harmon. While the character and story are fiction, the struggles and prejudice the female protagonist in the series faced would have been very real. In the world of chess in the 1950s and 60s, it was widely assumed that to be among the best chess players in the world, you had to be a man. Nona Gaprindashvili, a Georgian woman who grew up in the USSR, disagreed.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently held in Maner v. Dignity Health that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act does not prevent employers from exercising a preference for a female employee over a male employee because of workplace romance—a matter of first impression for the court. With this holding, it joins a majority of Circuit Courts which have rejected the "paramour preference" theory as a basis for sex-discrimination claims.