The Latest Breaking News from Second Circuit

[This month, I'm serializing my 2003 Harvard Law Review article, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope.] Multi-peaked slippery slopes can happen when a significant group of people prefers both extremes to the compromise position. One such situation is when A without B seems unfairly discriminatory. Consider the following example: Position…

Interstate wine shipping, illegal traffic fines, and internet-ordained preachers.

From Vengalattore v. Cornell Univ., decided yesterday by the Second Circuit (Judge Amalya Kearse, joined by Judges José Cabranes and Rosemary Pooler): Vengalattore is a male of Indian descent. He became a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Physics … in 2009…. One [of his laboratory assistants], a graduate student—called "Jane Roe"…

Citizenship, machine guns, and bigamy

From Hermes Int'l v. Rothschild, an opinion issued today by Judge Jed Rakoff (S.D.N.Y.): Around December 2021, defendant Mason Rothschild created digital images of faux-fur-covered versions of the luxury Birkin handbags of plaintiffs Hermes International and Hermes of Paris, Inc. (collectively, "Hermes"). Rothschild titled these images "MetaBirkins" and sold them…

Plasma, prisons, and political parties

Prosecutor-induced perjury, a satirical arrest (and prosecution), and an unraised winning argument.

though laws generally banning mislabeling food as “halal” (or “kosher”) violate the Establishment Clause.

Flea collars, bachelors, and data scraping.

More from today's Eleventh Circuit decision in Speech First, Inc. v. Cartwright (written by Judge Kevin Newsom and joined by Judge Stanley Marcus and District Judge Richard Story); seems quite right to me: The bias-related-incidents policy creates a mechanism by which a UCF student can be anonymously accused of an…

The Supreme Court declined to review a New York-led constitutional challenge to the $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions imposed by Congress in the 2017 tax law.