Judge Williams backed again...

 ... this time by SCOTUS.  The blog has been covering the State AG case before Judge Williams where she has blocked enforcement of a state immigration law and also held the State AG in contempt.  The 11th Circuit refused to dissolve the injunction, and today the Supreme Court did the same thing.  From the NY Times:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to revive an aggressive Florida immigration law that had been blocked by lower courts. The law would let state officials prosecute unauthorized migrants who enter the state.

The court’s one-sentence order gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. There were no noted dissents.

The court’s ruling is not the last word in the case, which is pending in an appeals court and may return to the justices. The litigation to date has been contentious, with a trial judge holding the state’s attorney general in contempt for what she said was defiance of her ruling.

The Supreme Court has given the Trump administration great leeway in pursuing its immigration agenda.

In a series of orders ruling on emergency application from the administration, the justices have allowed it to lift protections for hundreds of thousands of people who had been granted temporary protected status or humanitarian parole, allowing them to be deported.

The court also allowed the administration to pursue so-called third-country deportations, sending migrants to places other than their home nations without an opportunity to argue that they would face the risk of torture.

Wednesday’s order suggested that the court may take a different view of states’ power over immigration.

 

AI is also coming for oral argument

 You gotta read this post by Adam Unikowsky, a top Supreme Court advocate, who discusses whether AI can perform well at a Supreme Court oral argument.  His conclusions:

• Yes, a robot lawyer would be an above-average Supreme Court advocate.
• The DoNotPay people weren’t ambitious enough. You don’t need to have a human read back what the robot lawyer says. You can have an actual robot lawyer.
• Courts should permit robot lawyers at oral arguments and shouldn’t discourage this practice.
• If there’s any aspect of a lawyer’s job where AI is likely to shine relative to humans, it’s oral argument. Oral argument should be the first, not the last, frontier of AI-assisted legal practice.

You can also listen to Adam's oral argument versus Claude's argument in the post itself.  Incredible.

DOJ is coming after naturalized U.S. citizens

 That's the reporting from Jay Weaver in this Herald article:

In his all-out war on illegal immigration, President Donald Trump has branded immigrants as “criminals,” “invaders” and “predators,” as his administration targets millions of Haitians, Latin Americans, gang members and foreign college students for deportation. Now, the president has directed the Justice Department to bolster its resources in a major crackdown on naturalized citizens suspected of unlawfully obtaining their U.S. citizenship. According to a recent memo, the department plans to focus not only on individuals who may have lied about a crime or having done something illegal during the naturalization process. But authorities also plan to focus on others who may have committed a crime after becoming citizens — a generally untested legal frontier.

I wonder how Miamians feel about this new frontier.

HAPPY 20th BIRTHDAY TO THE BLOG

Thank you all for supporting the Southern District of Florida Blog for the past 20 years.  I started this thing on July 4, 2005.  Crazy to think we are still going.  

There have been 4818 posts (or about 240 a year).

You have commented on these posts over 19,000 times.

Some of the most read posts have sadly been about our colleagues passing away -- Steve Chaykin, Chris Morvillo, and Ervin Gonzalez. 

Other really popular posts have been fun -- like an AUSA appearing on the Bachelorette or Judge Rosenbaum presiding over a trial in which a defense lawyer put on a dress during cross or a WPB jury asking for a bottle of wine:

 

We all feel like that during trial!

I want to thank you to John Byrne for his contributions to the blog as well as all of the judges who send me important decisions and updates from their courtrooms.  Most importantly, thank you for reading and commenting and sending me tips.  I appreciate all of you.

I'm not sure how much longer I am going to do this, but it's been an amazing 20 year run. 

Thank you,

 David 

Eleventh Circuit Rules for Florida on Personal Pronoun Statute

By John R. Byrne

Big ruling yesterday from the Eleventh Circuit in another case dealing with transgender rights. A Florida statute forbids public school teachers from asking their students to call them by a name/title that doesn’t correspond to his or her sex (so, if the teacher is a man, the teacher can’t ask students to use “Ms.,” “Mrs.,” “she,” “her,” etc. when addressing him). 

A teacher, Katie Wood, challenged the statute, arguing it violated her First Amendment rights. The trial court issued a preliminary injunction in her favor.

The Eleventh Circuit saw things differently and reversed. The court’s ruling hinged on a threshold question courts ask when a government employee’s freedom of speech is at issue: is the employee speaking as a “citizen" or as a "government employee"? If the answer is government employee, the First Amendment claim is dead. If the answer is citizen, more analysis is necessary. In the specific case of Wood, the court ruled that she had spoken as an employee. Critical to the court’s ruling was the location and timing of the speech at issue—Wood wanted students to use her preferred pronouns in the classroom during instruction hours. That, according to the court, meant she was speaking as a government employee, not a citizen. 

Judge Newsom wrote the opinion and was joined by Judge Brasher. Judge Jordan dissented. He first said that the majority applied the wrong standard of review (he thinks it should have been abuse of discretion, not de novo). But he also wrote that the majority got the citizen/government employee ruling wrong, noting that “not every word uttered by a teacher in the classroom is the speech of the government.” 

That’s a high-level overview, but there’s much more here than just that. If you want to have a read, the opinion is below.

Wood Case by John Byrne on Scribd

Huge win for Diddy

 Now the judge has the tough part on sentencing.  What do you get if the jury acquits you of all the major counts and convicts on the one minor count.  It should be credit time served... we shall see.  In the meantime, who is buying this shirt?