Law
fromAbove the Law
2 hours agoMorning Docket: 04.07.26 - Above the Law
The new US News law school rankings have been released and are notably controversial.
House Bill 1001's final version broadens by-right approval for certain housing types and reduces some local zoning, design and fee authority. However, it permits communities to opt out of key provisions and introduces new rules for impact fees, residential tax-increment financing and state housing infrastructure financing.
Starting this summer, most college programs will have to show that their students earn more than someone with only a high school diploma to avoid being cut off from federal funding, as part of a new accountability measure. Congress created the earnings test known as Do No Harm when it passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer. The Education Department is still working to finalize the regulations that outline how it will work.
"What's most problematic is that the extraordinary has become ordinary. It's just a matter of course now that when you issue an opinion that some people don't like, you're going to get threats, you're going to get death threats, and that is obviously problematic on many levels."
On Friday a federal judge dropped two of the four charges against Luigi Mangione the man accused of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson making his case no longer eligible for the death penalty. Mangione is accused of killing Thompson on Dec. 4, 2024 on a street in midtown Manhattan as he was walking to his hotel for UnitedHealth Group's annual investor conference.
If you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA, and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda, DM me. We need good prosecutors. And DOJ is hiring across the country. Now is your chance to join the mission and do good for our country.- Chad Mizelle (@chad_mizelle) January 31, 2026
Artificial intelligence, meet the U.S. Supreme Court. It's an institution steeped in tradition and resistant to any quick changes in the way it does things. But like it or not, the justices are about to see artificially created versions of themselves, essentially avatars, speaking words that they actually did speak in court but that were not heard contemporaneously by anyone except the people in the courtroom.
The scheme Congress enacted governing immigration proceedings provides Khalil a meaningful forum in which to raise his claims later on-in a petition for review of a final order of removal,
The unexpected gravitas occurred in one of the thousands of habeas cases currently swamping trial courts. The Department of Homeland Security recently discovered that 8 USC § 1225(b)(1)(B)(iii)(IV) requires mandatory detention of asylum seekers, including those who were released in the country decades ago and given work permits. Hundreds of judges across the country - but not the Fifth Circuit! - have scoffed at this discovery and ordered DHS to either grant immigrants a bond hearing or release them.
In 1996, the Supreme Court decided Whren v. United States, which came about when plainclothes vice officers patrolling in the District of Columbia passed a truck in a "high drug" area and "their suspicions were aroused." They had a hunch that the truck was involved in a drug operation. They chose to wait until it had violated a traffic ordinance (turning without a signal) and then used that violation as an excuse to stop the truck. In the course of searching the truck, they found crack cocaine.