March 14, 2025

The Courts

New York Times: Khalil Sues Columbia and Lawmakers to Keep Activists’ Names Secret

By Benjamin Weiser

.....Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate detained by the Trump administration last weekend, and seven current students asked a federal court on Thursday to block the school from producing student disciplinary records to a House committee that demanded them last month.

The committee’s request and the school’s compliance with it would violate the First Amendment rights of Mr. Khalil and the students and the university’s obligation to protect student privacy, the lawsuit said.

The seven current students also asked the court to allow them to proceed anonymously and are referred to in the lawsuit with pseudonyms like Sally Roe and Ned Noe.

Ed. note: Legal documents in Khalil v. Trump are available here.

Bloomberg Law: NetChoice Wins Order Blocking California Website Safety Law

By Isaiah Poritz

.....Tech industry lobbying firm NetChoice LLC won a court order Thursday prohibiting California’s attorney general from enforcing the state’s first-in-the-nation law regulating how social media platforms collect and use data from minors.

Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that NetChoice, which represents tech giants including Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Google LLC, is likely to show that the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act violates the US Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of free speech .

Fox News: Maine judges refuse to take Rep Laurel Libby's court case on censure for trans athlete post

By Jackson Thompson

.....After Maine State Rep. Laurel Libby filed a lawsuit over her recent censure for a social media post pointing out a trans athlete in a girls' competition, all of Maine's federal judges have recused themselves from the case. 

Congress

House Judiciary Committee: Chairman Jordan Seeks Documents About Biden-Harris Censorship Pressure on Artificial Intelligence Companies

.....Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic PBC, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp., Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Open AI, Palantir Technologies, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI seeking all documents and communications with the Biden-Harris Administration related to content moderation and suppression as the Committee conducts oversight of how and to what extent the executive branch coerced or colluded with artificial intelligence (AI) companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech.

Politico: Dems ask Trump admin to explain Khalil’s arrest, calling it ‘playbook of authoritarians’

By Myah Ward

.....More than 100 House Democrats on Friday sent a letter to top Trump officials, decrying the arrest of a former Columbia graduate student as an attack on the First Amendment and questioning the murky legal authority invoked by the administration.

The lawmakers, including authors Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, addressed the letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The letter, first obtained by POLITICO, slams the use of a Cold War-era section of the Immigration and Nationality Act to deport Mahmoud Khalil as the “playbook of authoritarians.” The law was aimed at protecting national interests against potential foreign intervention.

Trump Administration

New York Times: Justice Dept. Moving to Downsize Units Investigating Fraud and Corruption

By Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer

.....Justice Department officials are drafting plans to broadly restructure — and significantly downsize — several key units in Washington responsible for investigating cases of fraud and public corruption, according to three people briefed on the changes.

The plans, which have not been finalized, could be announced within the next few days. If enacted, they would be the latest initiative by the Trump administration aimed at limiting the ability of prosecutors in Washington to bring sensitive and politically fraught cases against business figures and elected officials.

It remains unclear if the department plans to farm out cases to U.S. attorney’s offices around the country, as has been discussed internally; use the shift to drastically cut the number of investigations; or both.

The move, like the forced transfers or firings of career nonpolitical prosecutors in recent weeks, is part of an effort to reduce the power of divisions that Trump appointees claim were politically “weaponized” or otherwise overused under the Biden administration.

The Hill: Are Trump’s campus funding cuts an attack or a defense of free speech?

By Alan Dershowitz

.....The Trump administration’s decision to cut $400 million of federal grants to Columbia University is intended to influence the actions of university administrators. Its goal is to incentivize them to do more to protect Jewish and pro-Israel students from antisemitic harassment.

Will this curtail peaceful and thus legitimate free speech on affected university campuses? The ACLU says it will deter legitimate protests against Israel. Anti-Israel activists go even further — Peter Beinart warns that “We are witnessing the greatest assault on campus free speech in decades.”

What these critics fail to acknowledge is that there are dangers to free speech on both sides — in inaction as well as overreaction.

City Journal: Deporting Hamas Supporters Like Mahmoud Khalil Is Perfectly Legal

By Erielle Azerrad

.....Despite his defenders’ claims, Khalil’s alleged activities make his deportation perfectly legal—and reasonable—under federal law. Doing so is consistent with what the Supreme Court has called the government’s “power of self-preservation” against those who seek its destruction, as Khalil’s organization has so readily advocated.

Free Expression

The Hill: Misguided anti-racism campaign cancels college Sondheim production

By Andrew Koppelman

.....John Wilkes Booth was a racist murderer, but that apparently wasn’t the worst thing about him. The worst thing was that he used “the N-word.”

Isn’t that a bizarre thing to say? Not too bizarre, evidently, for the social media campaign that pressured a Northwestern University theater group into cancelling its production of Stephen Sondheim’s classic musical “Assassins.”

The cancellation was part of a misguided effort to fight racism, and it is a window into how counterproductive such efforts have sometimes become.

The States

Reason: No Other Land Won an Oscar. Miami Beach's Mayor Is Trying To Evict a Movie Theater for Screening It

By C.J. Ciaramella

.....The mayor of Miami Beach, Florida, is trying to terminate the lease of a movie theater for screening No Other Land, an Oscar-winning documentary about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Miami Herald reported that Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner introduced a resolution to terminate the lease of O Cinema, an independent film theater that rents space from the city, and discontinue more than $60,000 in promised grant funding. The legislation comes after Meiner tried to pressure the theater to cancel the screening.

Florida civil rights groups and First Amendment experts say such government retaliation against the theater for the content of the films it chooses to screen would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

"Simply put, the First Amendment does not allow the government to discriminate based on viewpoint or to retaliate against anyone for their speech," says Daniel Tilley, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida. "Pulling funding from an independent, community-based cinema under these circumstances is patently unconstitutional. The government does not get to pick and choose which viewpoints the public is allowed to hear, however controversial some might find them."

Fox News: Trump Organization, Eric Trump sue Capital One for 'unjustifiable' 2021 debanking based on 'woke' beliefs

By Brooke Singman 

.....The Trump Organization is suing Capital One after the bank "unjustifiably" terminated more than 300 of the company’s bank accounts and accounts belonging to numerous Trump family members in 2021. 

Eric Trump told Fox News Digital he will hold major corporations accountable for the "egregious nature of canceling based on political bias." 

The Trump Organization filed the lawsuit [embedded] against Capital One in the Circuit Court of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit for Miami-Dade County, Florida, Friday. The plaintiffs in the case are Eric Trump, the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, DJT Holdings, DJT Holdings Managing Member and DTTM Operations. 

Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): Pennsylvania School District Must Disclose DEI Training Materials, Though It Claimed They Were a "Trade Secret"

By Eugene Volokh

.....In Trethewey v. Downingtown Area School Dist., a Feb. 26 Pennsylvania appellate court decision by Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt (joined by Judges Renée Cohn Jubelirer and Christine Fizzano Cannon), Trethewey sought these records under the Pennsylvania Right-to-Know Law (RTKL):