Free Republic

At an undetermined date, in an undisclosed location, the Biden administration began operating a secretive new court to protect Europeans’ privacy rights under U.S. law. Officially known as the Data Protection Review Court, it was authorized in an October 2022 executive order to fix a collision of European and American law that had been blocking the lucrative flow of consumer data between American and European companies for three years. The court’s eight judges were named last November, including former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Its existence has allowed companies to resume the lucrative transatlantic data trade with the blessing of...

PHOENIX (AP) — A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Arizona doesn’t have to give voters who forget to sign their mail ballot time after the election to resolve the issue, rejecting a lawsuit filed by Democrats. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, overturned a lower-court ruling that found it’s unconstitutional for Arizona to give voters time after an election to resolve mismatched signatures but not missing signatures. The appellate judges said Arizona’s interest in reducing the burden on busy poll workers justifies the disparity. The overwhelming majority of Arizona voters cast mail ballots, which...

The U.S. government can’t be held liable for the death of Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier based on a federal ranger’s negligent storage of a gun that was stolen and used to shoot her, a Ninth Circuit panel ruled Tuesday.Steinle was killed by a bullet that ricocheted off a concrete walkway and struck her in the back on Pier 14 in San Francisco on July 1, 2015. . . . In arguments before a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel last month, a lawyer for Steinle’s parents argued U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) ranger John Woychowski had a duty...

The Constitution grants Congress plenary authority over immigration policy, but liberal judges have increasingly usurped the law. On Monday the Supreme Court will consider if immigrants whom Congress has deemed deportable can seek sanctuary in the courts. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) establishes rules and procedures by which immigrants may be removed from the country. To prevent federal courts from getting clogged, Congress created special immigration courts with multiple levels of administrative appeal and limited federal judicial review of cases. In Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, a Sri Lankan man caught after crossing the Mexican border illegally is...

A 1986 federal law makes it a crime to “encourage” unauthorized immigrants to come to or stay in the United States. “The statute potentially criminalizes the simple words — spoken to a son, a wife, a parent, a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker, a student, a client — ‘I encourage you to stay here,’” Judge A. Wallace Tashima wrote last year for a unanimous panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, in striking down the law. The law applies to a grandmother urging a grandchild to overstay a visa or a lawyer...

The merchant shipping industry has failed a second time to short-circuit California's effort to combat the toll on the health of its population from air pollution caused by oceangoing vessels. The industry is contesting California's authority to regulate fuel used by seagoing vessels up to 24 miles off its coast. The Air Resources Board estimates the vessels' emissions of particulate matter cause 300 premature deaths across the state every year. California mandates that ships "use cleaner marine fuels in diesel and diesel-electric engines, main propulsion engines, and auxiliary boilers" while operating far beyond the traditional three-mile jurisdictional limit. The Pacific...