Supreme Court
The Supreme Court on Wednesday said it will hear arguments next month over the constitutionality of the federal law that could ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese parent company doesn’t sell it.
The justices will hear arguments Jan. 10 about whether the law impermissibly restricts speech in violation of the First Amendment.
The law, enacted in April, set a Jan. 19 deadline for TikTok to be sold or else face a ban in the United States. The popular social media platform has more than 170 million users in the U.S.
It’s unclear how quickly a decision might come. But the high court still could act after the arguments to keep the law from taking effect pending a final ruling, if at least five of the nine justices think it’s unconstitutional.
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Lawyers for the company and China-based ByteDance had urged the justices to step in before Jan. 19. The high court also will hear arguments from content creators who rely on the platform for income and some TikTok users.
The timing of the arguments means that the outgoing Biden administration’s Justice Department will make the case in defense of the law that passed Congress with bipartisan support and was signed by Democratic President Joe Biden in April.
The incoming Republican administration might not have the same view of the law.
President-elect Donald Trump, who once supported a ban but then pledged during the campaign to “save TikTok,” has said his administration would take a look at the situation. Trump met with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida on Monday.
The companies have said that a shutdown lasting just a month would cause TikTok to lose about one-third of its daily users in the U.S. and significant advertising revenue.
The case pits free speech rights against the government’s stated aims of protecting national security, while raising novel issues about social media platforms.
A panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously upheld the law on Dec. 6, then denied an emergency plea to delay the law’s implementation.
Without court action, the law would take effect Jan. 19 and expose app stores that offer TikTok and internet hosting services that support it to potential fines.
It would be up to the Justice Department to enforce the law, investigating possible violations and seeking sanctions. But lawyers for TikTok and ByteDance have argued that Trump’s Justice Department might pause enforcement or otherwise seek to mitigate the law’s most severe consequences. Trump takes office a day after the law is supposed to go into effect.
This story was originally published by The Associated Press.
TikTok on Monday asked the Supreme Court to step in on an emergency basis to block the federal law that would ban the popular platform in the United States unless its China-based parent company agreed to sell it.
Lawyers for the company and China-based ByteDance urged the justices to step in before the law’s Jan. 19 deadline. A similar plea was expected from content creators who rely on the platform for income and some of TikTok’s more than 170 million users in the U.S.
The companies have said that a shutdown lasting just a month would cause TikTok to lose about a third of its daily users in the U.S. and significant advertising revenue.
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The case could attract the court’s interest because it pits free speech rights against the government’s stated aims of protecting national security, while raising novel issues about social media platforms.
The request first goes to Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees emergency appeals from courts in the nation’s capital. He almost certainly will seek input from all nine justices.
On Friday, a panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied an emergency plea to block the law, a procedural ruling that allowed the case to move to the Supreme Court.
The same panel had earlier unanimously upheld the law over a First Amendment challenge claiming that it violated free speech rights.
Without a court-ordered freeze, the law would take effect Jan. 19 and expose app stores that offer TikTok and internet hosting services that support it to potential fines.
It would be up to the Justice Department to enforce the law, investigating possible violations and seeking sanctions. But lawyers for TikTok and ByteDance have argued that the Justice Department might pause enforcement or otherwise seek to mitigate the law’s most severe consequences because President-elect Donald Trump pledged during the campaign that he would “save TikTok.”
Trump takes office a day after the law goes into effect.
The Supreme Court could temporarily put the law on hold so that they can give fuller consideration to First Amendment and other issues.
On the other hand, the justices could reject the emergency appeal, which would allow the law to take effect as scheduled.
The case has made a relatively quick trip through the courts once bipartisan majorities in Congress approved the law and President Joe Biden signed it in April.
This story was originally published by The Associated Press.
Nearly five years after the major labels won a $1 billion music piracy verdict against Cox Communications, the U.S. Supreme Court is signaling that it might jump into the long-running copyright case.
In an order issued Monday (Nov. 25), the justices asked the Justice Department to weigh in on whether the high court should tackle the huge penalty, which Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment (SME) and Warner Music Group (WMG) won back in 2019 over allegations of widespread piracy by Cox’s users.
After an appeals court ordered the award recalculated earlier this year, both sides have asked the Supreme Court to take the case. The labels want the justices to reinstate the original verdict; Cox wants the high court to overturn it entirely.
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Such petitions are always a long shot, as the Supreme Court takes less than 2% of the more than 7,000 cases it receives each year. But Monday’s order — a “call for the view of the Solicitor General,” or CVSG, in SCOTUS parlance — is a relatively rare step that indicates that the justices think the issues in the case might be significant enough for the court to tackle.
UMG, SME and WMG all sued Cox in 2018, seeking to hold the internet giant itself liable for alleged wrongdoing committed by its users. The labels said Cox had ignored hundreds of thousands of infringement notices and had never permanently terminated a single subscriber accused of stealing music.
ISPs like Cox are often shielded from lawsuits over illegal downloading by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. But a judge ruled that Cox had forfeited that protection by failing to terminate people who were repeatedly accused of violating copyright law. Stripped of that immunity, jurors held Cox liable in December 2019 for the infringement of 10,017 separate songs and awarded the labels more than $99,000 for each song, adding up to $1 billion.
Earlier this year, a federal appeals court overturned that award, ruling that aspects of the verdict weren’t supported by the law. But the appeals court also upheld other parts, and Cox is still facing the potential of a very large penalty when damages are recalculated.
In taking the case to the Supreme Court, Cox has urged the justices to undo the entire verdict. The company has issued dire warnings, arguing that the “draconian” approach applied in the case “threatens mass disruption” by potentially forcing ISPs to terminate internet service to thousands of Americans.
“The stakes are immense,” Cox’s attorneys wrote. “This court should grant certiorari to prevent these cases from creating confusion, disruption, and chaos on the internet. Innovation, privacy, and competition depend on it.”
Firing back, the labels have called those arguments “disingenuous” and instead urged the court to take up their own separate petition seeking to reinstate the entire verdict.
“This court should take Cox’s concerns about terminating internet access with a healthy serving of salt,” attorneys for UMG, SME and WMG wrote. “During the time period at issue here, Cox terminated over 600,000 subscribers for not paying their bills. When Cox’s money is on the line, Cox clearly has no problem ‘irreparably cutting’ its customers ‘off from society.’”
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from R. Kelly over his 2022 convictions on child pornography and enticement charges, leaving him with no further direct appeals from a verdict that saw him sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Kelly’s attorneys had urged the high court to take up the case, in which a federal jury in Chicago convicted him in September 2022, by arguing that the case should have been barred by the statute of limitations.
But in an order Monday, the justices declined to tackle the case. As is typical, the court did not explain its decision to reject Kelly’s case along with dozens of others. The Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions per year and only decides to hear a tiny fraction them.
Monday’s order dealt only one of Kelly’s two sets of sex abuse convictions. The other — a September 2021 guilty verdict on racketeering charges brought by prosecutors in New York that resulted in a 30-year prison sentence — is still pending on appeal before a lower appellate court.
In the current case, a different team of federal prosecutors from Chicago accused Kelly of violating child pornography laws, enticing minors for sex and obstructing justice by upending a 2008 criminal trial.
Though he was acquitted on certain counts, Kelly was convicted in September 2022 and later sentenced to 20 years in prison; the vast majority of that sentence will be served concurrently with the New York sentence. The conviction was affirmed by a lower appeals court earlier this year.
In asking the justices to consider overturning that ruling, Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean cited the statute of limitations. She said that an updated federal law extending the time limit, passed in 2003, could not be applied retroactively to Kelly’s alleged crimes, which occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“Retroactive application of the 2003 amendment not only fly in the face of congressional intent,” Bonjean writes. “It violates notions of fundamental fairness.”
Barring an unusual outcome at some point in the future, Monday’s decision effectively finalized Kelly’s convictions and sentencing in the Chicago case. The separate convictions in the New York case could still be overturned, however, either by the lower appeals court or by the Supreme Court.
Kelly’s attorney did not immediately return a request for comment.
R. Kelly is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn his convictions on child pornography and enticement charges, arguing the case should have been barred by the statute of limitations.
In a petition filed with the high court on Monday (July 29), attorneys for the disgraced R&B singer asked the justices to take up his case and toss out an April ruling by a lower appeals court, which said that “no statute of limitations saves him” from his 2022 convictions.
Kelly’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, argued that an updated federal law extending the statute of limitations, passed in 2003, could not be applied retroactively to Kelly’s alleged crimes, which occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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“Retroactive application of the 2003 amendment not only fly in the face of congressional intent,” Bonjean writes. “It violates notions of fundamental fairness.”
Like all appeals to the Supreme Court, Kelly’s case faces long odds. The high court receives thousands of petitions per year and only decides to hear a tiny fraction them.
This week’s petition deals with only one of Kelly’s two sets of felony sex abuse convictions. The other one — a September 2021 guilty verdict on racketeering charges brought by prosecutors in New York that resulted in a 30-year prison sentence — is currently pending on appeal before a lower appellate court.
In the current case, a different team of federal prosecutors from Chicago accused Kelly of violating child pornography laws, enticing minors for sex and obstructing justice by upending a 2008 criminal trial. Though he was acquitted on certain counts, Kelly was convicted in September 2022 and later sentenced to 20 years in prison; the vast majority of that sentence will be served concurrently with the New York sentence.
Bonjean, who famously won a 2021 ruling at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturning Bill Cosby‘s 2018 sex assault conviction, has repeatedly argued that Kelly is innocent and that she will take his cases all the way to the Supreme Court.
In doing so on Monday, she focused on the PROTECT Act — a 2003 federal statute aimed at preventing child abuse. Among other changes, the 2003 law eliminated the statutes of limitations for child sex abuse victims, extending the right to sue through the entire life of the victim.
But Bonjean said the PROTECT Act was not written to apply retroactively to crimes allegedly committed before it was passed. Without a clear intention from Congress to apply it to past crimes, she wrote, a law must be considered to only apply to future wrongdoing.
“This court has explained that the aversion to retroactive rulemaking is deeply rooted in our jurisprudence and embodies a legal doctrine centuries older than our Republic,” she wrote. “Elementary considerations of fairness dictate that individuals should have an opportunity to know what the law is and to conform their conduct.”
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Source: Cook County Department of Corrections / Cook County Department of Corrections
R. Kelly is exploring yet another route in order to get his freedom back. He is asking the Supreme Court to review his federal sex crimes case.
As spotted on TMZ, the disgraced entertainer might have a legal ace up his sleeve. This week, his lawyer Jennifer Bonjean confirmed she formally submitted a petition asking for his case to be reevaluated. According to the US Courts, a writ of certiorari is a “a request that the Supreme Court order a lower court to send up the record of the case for review.” In essence, she is making a statute of limitations argument where the actions he was accused of occurred in the 1990s/early 2000s and he was charged with a law that did not exist yet.
Jennifer Bonjean appeared on TMZ and explained this is not the first time this technicality was brought to the court. “Yes, we raised this issue pre-trial and it was denied” she said. “The government’s position is that they admit they applied a statute of limitations that did not exist at the time the conduct was allegedly committed. But they are saying that ‘we were permitted to extend it’ nor did it ‘harm’ him or ‘violate’ him.
R. Kelly was convicted on three counts of child pornography and three counts of inducement back in 2020. He was sentenced to 20 years and is slated to be released in 2045.
Bette Midler is going down the yellow brick road to justice. The Grammy and Tony Award winner took to social media on Tuesday (July 2) to share a Wizard of Oz parody song that calls out several Supreme Court Justices, including Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. “Neil and Brett, […]
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The Supreme Court’s ruling on the claim of immunity by former President Donald Trump was condemned in a dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and President Joe Biden afterward.
The nation was rocked on Monday (July 1), as the Supreme Court issued its ruling on former President Donald Trump’s claims of absolute immunity for his actions in office. The vote was 6 – 3, as all of the conservative justices including Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that Trump was entitled to absolute immunity for acts carried out in his official capacity as president, but also ruled that not all of those acts were official. The ruling was seen as a major win for Trump as his trial to determine his role in the events leading up to the January 6 insurrection will now not take place until after the November presidential elections.
The three liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented, with Sotomayor delivering a blistering opinion underscoring the severity of what took place. “Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency,” Sotomayor wrote, pointedly criticizing their conservative colleagues and Roberts, who authored the ruling. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.” She would end the dissent with “The indictment paints a stark portrait of a President desperate to stay in power. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.”
Sotomayor’s opinion also called out how the majority – including Trump-appointed Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Comey Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh – didn’t offer clear guidelines as to what is deemed official. President Joe Biden issued a nationwide address on Monday evening noting that “America will have to render a judgment about Donald Trump’s behavior” and said the ruling “almost certainly means that there are almost no limits to what the president can do. “This is a fundamentally new principle,” Biden said. “It’s a dangerous precedent, because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law.” Biden also highlighted the danger apparent if Trump returns to office in November urging people to vote for democracy, stating that he “will be even more emboldened to do whatever he pleases whenever he wants to do it.”
When the U.S. Supreme Court’s nine justices released their annual financial disclosures on Friday (June 7), Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reported a cooler-than-usual line item: that Beyoncé had personally gifted her four concert tickets.
In a yearly report required by federal ethics laws, Justice Jackson listed her various investments, as well as a nearly $1 million book advance she received from Penguin Random House for her Lovely One memoir set to hit bookshelves this fall.
But the most notable item was under gifts, where the justice listed “Concert Tickets (4),” valued at $3,711. The source of those tickets? “Beyonce Knowles-Carter.”
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The filing, obtained by Billboard, did not include any more information, like what particular shows Justice Jackson had attended or how KBJ and Queen Bey had connected. A spokesperson for Beyoncé did not immediately return a request for comment.
This year’s SCOTUS disclosures have drawn far greater attention than usual, following revelations last year that Justice Clarence Thomas had received undisclosed expensive gifts, including trips aboard a private plane, from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. In his own report on Friday, Justice Thomas formally amended the disputed trips to his earlier filings but did not list any new travel reimbursements for 2023.
Members of the federal judiciary are not barred from owning investments, earning outside income or even accepting gifts like expensive concert tickets. But they must disclose such income to avoid any potential conflicts of interest involving cases that they’re tasked with deciding.
When faced with a financial conflict of interest — or even the appearance of such bias — lower federal judges are required to recuse themselves from cases. In a new code of conduct issued last year after the Thomas-Crow uproar, the high court agreed to follow essentially those same rules. But those new regulations noted that recusals are harder at the Supreme Court, where a justice cannot simply be replaced by another judge.
In the case of Justice Jackson, such questions would only arise if Beyoncé had business before the high court — an outcome that’s not impossible, given the rash of copyright litigation in the music industry, but seems unlikely any time soon.
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The whitest section of Baton Rouge, the Black-majority Louisiana state capital, is now the newly-incorporated city of St. George. The state Supreme Court overturned the rulings of lower courts in what advocates for the change are excited about while others, including the Baton Rouge’s NAACP chapter, are calling it a modern-day secession.
According to WGXA, Norman Browning, the St. George Transition District Chairman, called last Friday’s Supreme Court ruling “a historical and exciting day for the City of St George citizens” and vowed to “build an efficient, productive, and vibrant city while contributing to a thriving East Baton Rouge Parish.”
Well, here’s what the NAACP had to say about all of that:
“The St. George plan poses significant risks to our education system, threatens the continuity of critical programs, and challenges community representation. The creation of a new municipality introduces considerable uncertainty around funding allocation for our schools, jeopardizing the cornerstone of our community’s future: education.”
For the record, this decision was the culmination of a yearslong battle between proponents of the new city and opponents, many of whom view the move as a microcosm of recourse-siphoning colonization. Up until now, the latter group was winning that battle in the courts.
Here’s a little history on the matter reported by the Advocate:
Baton Rouge leaders took St. George organizers to court in 2019 over the proposed city, just two weeks after 54% of voters living within the proposed city’s limits voted “yes” on the incorporation in a November election.
Baton Rouge leaders argued in their petition — and had argued for years leading up to the election — that the new city would financially cripple Baton Rouge’s city-parish services and force layoffs by taking away an estimated $48.3 million in annual tax revenue. They also argued that St. George’s proposed budget was inaccurate and that it’d actually operate with a deficit.
Twice the courts have sided with Baton Rouge and shot down the proposed city, once in 2022 when a district judge ruled that St. George couldn’t operate with a balanced budget and was “unreasonable,” and again last year when the First Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that St. George organizers hadn’t followed state law for getting on the election ballot.
The fight for St. George preceded the 2019 election by a decade — it originally started out as a movement to create a separate, independent school district before evolving over the course of several years into a full campaign to create a new city.
Organizers for St. George, who reside in the predominantly White and affluent Southeast corner of the parish, said for years that the city-parish government and school system were poorly run and that they wanted more localized control of tax dollars.
St. George is comprised of 68,000 residents, only about 12% of whom are Black, which is why opponents have argued that the incorporation proposal was essentially segregation by another name and inherently racist. The Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t really address whether or not the move is racist, the justices simply argued that the St. George organizers followed the proper steps for incorporation and that it would provide its residents with proper public services.
But the question remains: At what cost to other Baton Rouge residents?