John:

On Wednesday, we secured our 12th courtroom win of the year! This time, we won on behalf of Jay Fink, an anti-spam crusader from California.   

Jay runs a small business where he sorts through individual client’s email inboxes looking for emails that might violate the state’s anti-spam law, which allows people to sue spammers. His model is simple: He reads emails, sorts them, and sends PDF copies to clients, who may or may not decide to hire a lawyer and go after the spammer. 

But according to California, Jay was working as an unlicensed private investigator—a real-life Sherlock Holmes. (You are also a private investigator in the eyes of California if you’ve ever “investigated” the “acts” of “any person.”) So, the state demanded he shut his business until he takes 6,000 hours—literally three full-time years—of irrelevant training about things like insurance adjusting and how to investigate arson.  

The government can’t restrict your speech without a compelling reason, and it can’t require that you take incredibly burdensome and irrelevant training just to look through an email inbox. So, Jay teamed up with IJ to fight back.