Alex Kozinski, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump and several of his co-defendants, faced tough questioning in oral argument Wednesday from 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee about the breadth of evidence on which they’re basing their challenge of the district court’s dismissal of their complaint against Twitter on First Amendment grounds.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a newly revised opinion Tuesday (docket 23-30445), granted on rehearing the requests to add the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to the list of federal agencies enjoined in the injunction against Biden administration officials from "coercing or significantly encouraging" social media platforms to moderate their content. The Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri and five individual social media plaintiffs requested the addition.
Plaintiffs Feliks Roitman and Yekaterina Shkolnik “strenuously object” to defendant T-Mobile’s assertion that their claims should be in arbitration rather than in U.S. District Court for Eastern New York in Brooklyn, their counsel wrote U.S. District Judge Eric Vitaliano in a letter opposition Friday (docket 1:23-cv-06159) to T-Mobile’s anticipated motion to compel arbitration.
A federal court may provide injunctive relief only to a named plaintiff, “unless a class has been certified or broader relief is necessary to redress that plaintiff ’s injury,” said Apple’s cert petition against Epic Games, dated Sept. 28 and docketed Monday at the U.S. Supreme Court (docket 23-344).
Charter Communications’ lawsuit to prevent Bridger Mahlum, its former director-state government affairs, from going to work for BroadbandMT and spilling Charter’s broadband state funding trade secrets “is baseless and demonstrably false,” said Mahlum’s motion to dismiss Friday (docket 3:23-cv-01106) in U.S. District Court for Connecticut in New Haven.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the motion of Pasadena, Texas, to stay the issuance of the mandate in its case against Crown Castle, pending its filing of a cert petition at the U.S. Supreme Court, said an order Friday (docket 22-20454) signed by U.S. Circuit Judge Jerry Smith. The mandate is scheduled for issuance Tuesday.
The Republican National Committee’s Aug. 24 motion to dismiss plaintiff Jacob Howard’s Telephone Consumer Protection Act class action (see 2308250005) “addresses an imaginary complaint” and should be denied, said Howard’s opposition Thursday (docket 2:23-cv-00993) in U.S. District Court for Arizona in Phoenix.
In a nation “where the first cries for liberty and independence came from colonial pamphlets and newspapers,” New York now restricts the printed word “in the name of policing conduct,” said the New Civil Liberties Alliance in an amicus brief Tuesday (docket 23-0356) that urges the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to affirm the district court’s preliminary injunction to block New York Attorney General Letitia James from enforcing Section 394-ccc, the state’s hateful conduct law.
The office of Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) moved to dismiss or alternatively to strike defendant Smartbiz Telecom’s Sept. 7 robocalling counterclaim against the state on multiple grounds, including that it's "redundant" to Smartbiz's previous arguments and adds "nothing new to the case," said its motion Thursday (docket 1:22-cv-23945) in U.S. District Court for Southern Florida in Miami. Smartbiz filed its counterclaim after U.S. District Judge Jose Martinez denied its Jan. 20 motion to dismiss Moody’s complaint, saying the Florida AG’s office clearly has Article III standing to bring its robocalling suit on behalf of its citizens (see 2308240041).
The U.S. Supreme Court granted the cert petitions of NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association challenging on First Amendment grounds the constitutionality of the Florida (docket 22-227) and Texas (docket 22-555) social media laws, said the court’s order list Friday.