Purcell v. Gonzalez is the source of the "Purcell principle" — the idea that courts should be cautious about changing election rules in the period close to an election, because late changes risk voter confusion and administrative disruption. It is most often invoked to counsel against judicial intervention shortly before an election. Here, the court cites it for a related point in the opposite direction: the imminence of the upcoming midterm cycle weighs against staying the case, because leaving the rules unsettled would itself create the confusion Purcell warns about. The court pairs it with Justice Kavanaugh's observation that running a statewide election is a "massive coordinated effort" requiring clear and settled rules.

This phrase invokes the most influential framework in separation-of-powers law: Justice Robert Jackson's concurrence in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952) — the "Steel Seizure" case. Jackson described three tiers of presidential power. Presidential authority is at its maximum when the President acts with congressional authorization; in a "zone of twilight" when Congress is silent; and "at its lowest ebb" when the President acts against the expressed or implied will of Congress. In that third category, the President may rely only on his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter. By placing § 2(a) at the "lowest ebb," the court signals that the EO conflicts with Congress's will (as expressed in the NVRA) and can survive only if grounded in some exclusive presidential power — which the court finds absent.

"Nonstatutory review" refers to a federal court's inherent equitable power to review and enjoin unlawful government action even when no statute expressly provides a cause of action. Its roots trace to Ex parte Young (1908) and the line of cases recognizing implied equitable actions "directly under the Constitution." The jurisdictional anchor is the general federal-question statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1331. As the court explains, equitable ultra vires claims based purely on statutory violations "rarely succeed," but courts afford broader latitude where, as here, the plaintiff alleges a constitutional violation. This distinction — statutory versus constitutional — is why the court spends several pages characterizing the States' claims as constitutional separation-of-powers challenges rather than mere statutory disputes.

"Ultra vires" is Latin for "beyond the powers." In administrative and constitutional law, an ultra vires claim asserts that a government official acted outside the bounds of any authority granted to them — either by the Constitution or by statute. The doctrine matters here because the States are not suing under the Administrative Procedure Act (the usual vehicle for challenging agency action). The APA does not reach the President directly, because the President is not an "agency" and an executive order is not "final agency action." The States therefore rely on a "nonstatutory" equitable cause of action — a residual judicial power to enjoin unlawful executive conduct — which the court holds is available because their claims are constitutional in nature rather than merely statutory.

The "shall accept and use" command (52 U.S.C. § 20505(a)(1)) is the statutory hook for much of this case. In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (ITCA), 570 U.S. 1 (2013), the Supreme Court explained that while states may design their own registration forms, the Federal Form serves as a "backstop": no matter what hurdles a state's own form imposes, the Federal Form guarantees a simple national means of registering for federal elections. Because the form is mandatory and national, the court later reasons, an unlawful change to it cannot be cured by a partial, state-by-state injunction — every covered state is bound to use whatever the single form says.

The Help America Vote Act was enacted in 2002 in the wake of the disputed 2000 presidential election. It created the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) — a four-member, bipartisan independent agency — and transferred to it the responsibility for maintaining the Federal Form (previously held by the Federal Election Commission). HAVA also established the federal funding program for election administration that the EAC distributes to the states. The EAC's bipartisan, independent structure is central to the court's reasoning: the opinion treats a presidential command dictating the outcome of EAC rulemaking as an intrusion on an entity Congress deliberately insulated from direct executive control. The current commissioners named as defendants are Donald Palmer, Thomas Hicks, Christy McCormick, and Benjamin Hovland.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (52 U.S.C. §§ 20501 et seq.), often called the "Motor Voter" law, established baseline voter-registration procedures every covered state must offer — registration by mail, alongside driver's-license applications, and at designated agencies such as public-assistance offices. It also created the national mail voter registration form (the "Federal Form"), which states subject to the NVRA must "accept and use." Critically, the statute provides that the Federal Form "may require only such identifying information . . . as is necessary" to assess eligibility, and sets a specific procedure — consultation with state election officials plus notice-and-comment rulemaking — for changing its contents. Sections 2(a) and 4(a) of the Executive Order are evaluated against these requirements.

The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (52 U.S.C. §§ 20301 et seq.) governs absentee voting for military service members, their families, and U.S. citizens living abroad. It created the Federal Post Card Application (FPCA) — the single national form used to both register and request an absentee ballot — and requires states to accept it. UOCAVA verifies citizenship through attestation rather than documentary proof. By statute, the Secretary of Defense (here, defendant Pete Hegseth) is the "presidential designee" responsible for promulgating the FPCA. Section 3(d) of the challenged Executive Order, which would require documentary proof of citizenship on the FPCA, is measured against this statute.

This quotation comes from Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024) — the Supreme Court's presidential-immunity decision. The cited language appears in the portion of that opinion describing the limits of presidential authority over elections: the Constitution vests "executive Power" in the President and directs him to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," but it grants him no specific powers over the administration of elections. The court here invokes this passage to establish a baseline — that whatever authority the Executive Order claims, it cannot derive from any direct constitutional role of the President in election administration.

The Elections Clause (U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1) is the provision at the center of this entire dispute. It assigns the states the power to set the "Times, Places and Manner" of congressional elections, while giving Congress the power to "make or alter" those state rules. The Supreme Court has described the Clause as functioning like a "default provision": states run the mechanics of federal elections unless and until Congress steps in to preempt them. Notably, the President appears nowhere in the Clause — a structural omission the court returns to throughout this opinion. For presidential elections, a parallel provision, the Electors Clause (art. II, § 1, cl. 2), gives states the primary authority to decide how electors are chosen.

The brief quotes this D.C. Circuit decision for the proposition that the power over the purse was among the most important authorities the Constitution assigned to Congress. The opinion was authored by then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the Supreme Court in 2018; the case held that, under federal appropriations law, a Navy facility generally could not spend appropriated funds on bottled water when safe tap water was available. The brief’s parenthetical “(Kavanaugh, J.)” signals the authorship deliberately — citing a now-sitting Justice’s appropriations-law reasoning lends weight to the amici’s Spending Clause argument. The quoted language itself derives from Federalist No. 51 (James Madison).

The “power of the purse” refers to Congress’s control over federal spending, grounded in Article I — the Vesting Clause (§ 1), the Spending and related powers (§ 8), and the Appropriations Clause (§ 9, cl. 7: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law”). The settled principle is that money cannot leave the Treasury unless Congress has appropriated it. The brief’s separation-of-powers argument is that using a litigation settlement to move funds from the Treasury, without a congressional appropriation, encroaches on this legislative power. The opposing position is that the Judgment Fund is itself a standing appropriation Congress enacted for exactly such payments. The reach of the appropriations power over settlement payments is a contested constitutional question.

“Fraud on the court” is a narrow and demanding legal standard, distinct from ordinary fraud between parties. It refers to misconduct that corrupts the judicial process itself — classic examples include bribery of a judge or fabrication of evidence by officers of the court — and it must typically be shown by clear and convincing evidence. Rozier v. Ford Motor Co. is a Fifth Circuit decision the brief cites for the proposition that egregious misconduct can justify relief from a judgment. (Fifth Circuit decisions issued before October 1, 1981 are binding precedent in the Eleventh Circuit, where this case sits, under Bonner v. City of Prichard.) The brief argues the parties’ conduct meets this high bar; that is the precise question the court would have to decide, and it is contested.

The underlying lawsuit arose from the unauthorized disclosure of tax returns. 26 U.S.C. § 7431 creates a civil damages action against the United States for unlawful disclosure of tax return information, and § 7431(c) caps recovery at actual or specified statutory damages plus, in some cases, costs and attorney’s fees. The Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552a, separately governs federal handling of personal records, with its own civil-remedy and damages provisions in § 552a(g). The factual backdrop (per court records and reporting) is the 2019–2020 leak of many taxpayers’ returns by an IRS contractor, Charles Littlejohn, who was criminally convicted. The brief’s point here is that these statutes cap relief at money damages to the plaintiffs — so, the amici argue, a billion-dollar fund for third parties and a grant of immunity are not remedies these statutes authorize. The brief also asserts the government declined to raise several available defenses (including a statute-of-limitations defense and arguments that the leaker was a contractor, not an employee); whether those defenses would have succeeded is not adjudicated.

“Consideration” is the bargained-for exchange that makes a promise enforceable as a contract — each side must give something of legal value. A long-standing wrinkle, reflected in the Restatement provision the brief cites, is that giving up a legal claim counts as consideration only if the claim is at least doubtful or honestly believed valid; surrendering a worthless claim gives up nothing. The brief’s argument proceeds in the alternative: first, that the released claims were meritless and so supplied no consideration; and second, that even if they had value, the benefits conferred (the Fund and the immunity addendum) were disproportionate to that value. The brief notes the Settlement Agreement itself stated the Fund’s capitalization “does not represent the value of any current claim by Plaintiffs.” Whether the released claims had value, and whether the exchange was adequate, are disputed.

28 U.S.C. § 2414 authorizes the Attorney General to settle claims against the United States and provides for their payment. The brief reads § 2414 — together with Government Accountability Office guidance and a line of Attorney General opinions dating to 1900 — to require a “bona fide dispute” over liability or amount before the government may compromise a claim, and to limit settlements to relief of the kind a court could award on the underlying claim. The brief pairs this with a contract-law principle (Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 74) that surrendering a claim is valid “consideration” only if the claim is doubtful or believed to be valid. The amici argue these limits were exceeded here; the opposing parties contend the settlement was a lawful exercise of § 2414 authority. The scope of § 2414 settlement authority is the central legal question the court must resolve.

The Judgment Fund (31 U.S.C. § 1304) is a permanent, indefinite appropriation Congress created so the government can pay final judgments and certain settlements against the United States without a case-by-case appropriation. Because it is “permanent and indefinite,” it does not require Congress to vote new money for each payment. Its use is statutorily limited — for settlements, payment generally must be authorized by the Attorney General or made under an agency’s own authority, and the underlying claim must be one the government is actually liable for. According to the Justice Department’s announcement and contemporaneous reporting, the $1.776 billion for the Anti-Weaponization Fund was to be drawn from the Judgment Fund. The brief’s argument is that routing money this way, for these purposes, exceeds those statutory limits and bypasses Congress’s appropriations role — a contention the opposing parties dispute.

Article III of the Constitution limits federal courts to deciding actual “Cases” and “Controversies.” A foundational requirement is genuine adversity — the parties must have truly opposing interests. Courts have long refused to decide “collusive” or “feigned” suits in which the nominal opponents actually share the same goal, because such cases lack a real dispute for the court to resolve. The brief notes that the district court itself raised this concern and ordered the parties to brief whether a case or controversy existed, given that the plaintiffs (the President and his family/company) had sued executive-branch agencies whose leadership the President oversees. According to news reporting, the presiding judge, Kathleen Williams, had questioned whether the parties were “sufficiently adverse.”

Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure lets a plaintiff dismiss its own case unilaterally — by filing a notice, without a court order and without the defendant’s consent — but only before the opposing party serves an answer or a summary-judgment motion. Because the dismissal takes effect on filing, it does not require the judge’s approval. The brief’s significance point is one of timing: it contends the plaintiffs used this self-executing mechanism to end the case two days before the court’s deadline for briefing whether a genuine “case or controversy” existed. “With prejudice” means the dismissed claims cannot be refiled.

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b) lets a court relieve a party from a final judgment or order in defined circumstances, including fraud and “any other reason that justifies relief.” Separately, courts have long recognized an inherent power to set aside a judgment for “fraud on the court,” which Rule 60(d)(3) expressly preserves and which is not subject to the one-year time limit that applies to some Rule 60(b) motions. The motion this brief supports asks the court to reopen the case after its dismissal. Because the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed the case (rather than the court entering a contested judgment), the movants invoke the court’s authority to set aside the dismissal on fraud-on-the-court and related grounds.

An amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) is a non-party that files a brief to offer the court information or perspective bearing on a pending matter. Amici do not control the litigation and are not bound by its outcome; their briefs are permitted at the court’s discretion. Here, the 23 state attorneys general are not parties to Trump v. IRS — they filed this brief in support of a separate motion (by other movants) asking the court to reopen the dismissed case. The brief identifies the amici’s stated “interest” as their experience defending sovereign entities and settling claims on behalf of their states. The signatories are listed in the appendix; the brief is led by the California Attorney General’s office.

A dismissal “with prejudice” is a final adjudication on the merits: the United States cannot cure the defect by amending its complaint and refiling the same claim in this court. The court chose this disposition because its ruling is a legal interpretation of the statute — an SVRL simply is not a record the CRA reaches — so no additional facts could rescue the claim. This is distinct from a dismissal “without prejudice,” which would have allowed refiling. A with-prejudice dismissal is an appealable final judgment, which is the ordinary route by which the government would seek review in the Fourth Circuit.

This case is one of roughly 30 suits the Department of Justice filed across the country beginning in fall 2025, seeking states’ full statewide voter registration lists — including sensitive fields such as dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers. The filings were announced in batches by the Civil Rights Division through late 2025 and early 2026. At the time of this opinion, every court to rule had ruled against the United States; the eight dismissals the court cites (in Wisconsin, Maine, Arizona, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, and California) were decided between February and May 2026. According to public trackers, the DOJ appealed several of these dismissals. A number of other states separately agreed to provide their full lists voluntarily.

The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) is the component of the Department of Justice that issues authoritative legal opinions binding within the executive branch. The United States cited a May 2026 OLC opinion concluding that the CRA authorizes the federal government to compel production of SVRLs. The court gives it no weight, observing that it “will not interpret the CRA contrary to its text simply because an office of the party advancing that interpretation has adopted it” — that is, an OLC opinion is the litigant’s own internal legal position, not independent or binding authority on a court. OLC opinions carry significant weight inside the executive branch but do not bind courts, which owe them no deference in litigation.

This is the court’s second, independent textual reason. Section 20702 makes it a federal crime to alter, deface, or destroy any record § 20701 requires to be retained. An SVRL, by design, is continuously updated — voters are added and removed, addresses change — and the NVRA and HAVA affirmatively require that ongoing maintenance. So if an SVRL were a § 20701 record, the routine list maintenance that federal law demands would simultaneously be a federal crime under § 20702. The court invokes the canon against absurdity — courts avoid readings of a statute that produce absurd or self-contradictory results — to reject that interpretation, reading § 20701 in harmony with the rest of the scheme.

This is the interpretive heart of the decision, quoted from the Michigan case United States v. Benson. The reasoning rests on a familiar tool of statutory construction — the rule against surplusage, which presumes every word in a statute does work and none is redundant. If § 20701 covered all records in an official’s possession, the qualifying phrase “come into his possession” would add nothing, since the state possesses its own SVRL. To give the phrase meaning, the court reads it to reach only records an official receives from an outside source (the voter), not records the state creates. The court reinforces this with dictionary definitions of “obtain,” “receive,” and “acquire,” and with a string of federal statutes that use “come into possession” to describe things a person gets rather than makes.

Kennedy v. Lynd (5th Cir. 1962) is the principal authority the United States relied on for its procedural argument. There, the Fifth Circuit described a CRA enforcement action as “a special statutory proceeding” conducted apart from the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The court gives two reasons for not following it: first, that the Supreme Court’s Powell decision two years later points the opposite way on materially identical statutory language; and second (in a footnote), that even Lynd itself acknowledged a court may decide whether a particular record falls within the CRA’s scope — which is exactly the dispositive question here. Lynd is a Fifth Circuit decision and is not binding on a district court in Maryland, which sits in the Fourth Circuit.

United States v. Powell (1964) is the Supreme Court decision the court finds controlling on the procedural question. Powell involved IRS administrative summonses under statutes (26 U.S.C. §§ 7402(b), 7604(a)) that, like the CRA’s § 20705, grant district courts jurisdiction to compel production “by appropriate process” but specify no particular procedure. The Court held that because those statutes contained no procedural specification, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure apply, and enforcement proceeds by complaint, answer, and hearing. Judge Gallagher reasons that the CRA uses the identical “appropriate process” language and likewise specifies no procedure, so Powell dictates that the Federal Rules apply here too.

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 81 lists specialized proceedings and the extent to which the ordinary civil rules apply to them. Subdivision (a)(5) provides that the Federal Rules govern proceedings to compel production of documents under a federal-agency subpoena “except as otherwise provided by statute, by local rule, or by court order.” The United States argued that a CRA enforcement action is a special summary proceeding to which the ordinary rules — including the right to file a motion to dismiss — do not apply. The court rejects that argument, finding nothing in the CRA or the local rules displacing the Federal Rules. The practical stakes were high: if the government were right, defendants could not have moved to dismiss, and the court would have proceeded directly toward compelling production.

This describes the “list maintenance” obligation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), 52 U.S.C. § 20507(a)(4) — the “Motor Voter” law. Together with the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), 52 U.S.C. § 21083, which requires each state to keep a single, uniform, centralized, computerized statewide voter registration list, these statutes are what actually create and govern the SVRL. The court’s point is structural: the SVRL is a creature of the NVRA and HAVA, statutes enacted decades after the 1960 CRA, and the CRA’s retention provision was not written with such a database in mind. The United States notably chose not to sue under these statutes.

Section 20703 is the mechanism the United States invoked: it lets the Attorney General demand, in writing, that a record custodian make covered records available for inspection and copying. The final sentence — requiring the demand to state its “basis and purpose” — has been a second front in this nationwide litigation. In the parallel Oregon case, the court dismissed partly because it found the DOJ’s demand letter failed to adequately state a basis and purpose tied to the statute’s anti-discrimination function. Judge Gallagher does not reach that question here, resolving the case instead on the threshold issue of whether an SVRL is a covered record at all.

This is the operative language of 52 U.S.C. § 20701, and the phrase “come into his possession” is the hinge of the entire decision. The court reads it to cover only records an election official receives from an outside source — chiefly, materials voters themselves submit (registration forms, applications) — not records the state itself generates. The reference to “payment of poll tax” reflects the statute’s 1960 vintage: poll taxes were still in use at the time and were not abolished in federal elections until the Twenty-Fourth Amendment (1964) and in state elections until Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966).

Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (now codified at 52 U.S.C. §§ 20701–20706) was enacted to combat the systematic destruction and concealment of voter records by Southern officials, which had frustrated federal efforts to document racial discrimination in voter registration. It requires election officers to retain voting records for 22 months and authorizes the Attorney General to demand access to those records. Notably, this is the only claim the United States brought in this case — it did not sue under the NVRA or HAVA, the two modern statutes that more directly govern voter-list maintenance. That choice matters because, as the court explains, the CRA’s retention provision contains limiting language (“come into [their] possession”) that the NVRA’s broader disclosure provision does not.

A writ of mandamus is an extraordinary remedy by which a higher court orders a lower court (or a government official) to perform a duty correctly or to undo a clear abuse of discretion. In the litigation context here, it is the mechanism an appellate court uses to quash an improper discovery or testimony order before it takes effect, rather than waiting for a final judgment to appeal. Mandamus is granted sparingly; the petitioner must generally show a clear and indisputable right to relief and no other adequate means to obtain it (Cheney v. U.S. District Court, 2004). The government cites these mandamus rulings to argue that orders compelling testimony from senior officials are the kind of error appellate courts step in to correct — implying the district court's declaration demand would be vulnerable to the same challenge.

The string of cases cited here (In re Cheney, In re Musk, In re Paxton, In re U.S. Dep't of Education, and In re United States (Jackson)) all apply what is known as the "apex doctrine." Under this doctrine, courts generally protect high-ranking government and corporate officials from being compelled to testify or sit for depositions unless the party seeking the testimony shows the official has unique, first-hand knowledge that cannot be obtained from other sources. The Supreme Court's decision in Cheney v. U.S. District Court (2004) established that discovery directed at senior Executive Branch officials raises separation-of-powers concerns and should be narrowly limited. Each of the cited "In re" cases involved an appellate court using a writ of mandamus to block a lower court's order compelling such testimony. The government invokes this line of authority to argue the court cannot condition mootness on sworn statements from three senior officials.

Section 1001 is the federal false-statements statute, which criminalizes knowingly making materially false statements to the federal government, with a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment. The government cites it here to argue that its representations — the Acting Attorney General's congressional testimony and counsel's court filings — were already made under threat of criminal penalty, so separate sworn declarations would add nothing to the mootness analysis. One distinction the filing does not draw: a § 1001 violation for false congressional testimony would, as a practical matter, be prosecuted by the Department of Justice itself, and the other authority cited (Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11) governs attorney conduct and carries primarily monetary sanctions rather than criminal liability. A sworn declaration under penalty of perjury (28 U.S.C. § 1746) is the specific form of commitment the court requested.

A case is "moot" when there is no longer a live controversy for a court to decide — for example, when the challenged conduct has stopped and cannot reasonably be expected to recur. Federal courts lack jurisdiction over moot cases under Article III. The government argues the Fund's cancellation moots this lawsuit. The complication is a doctrine called "voluntary cessation": when a defendant voluntarily stops the challenged conduct, the case is not automatically moot, because the defendant could resume the conduct after the suit is dismissed. The party claiming mootness bears a "heavy burden" of showing the conduct cannot reasonably be expected to recur (Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw, 2000). This is why the court sought sworn declarations rather than accepting the government's litigation statements — and why the President's post-testimony comments that he still wanted the Fund were significant to the court's analysis.

The Anti-Weaponization Fund was a $1.776 billion fund the Justice Department announced on May 18, 2026, to compensate individuals who claimed they were targeted or harmed by federal "weaponization" or "lawfare." It was created as part of the settlement of President Trump's lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns; under the settlement, the Trump plaintiffs dropped their claims in exchange for the Fund's creation. The money was to come from the Judgment Fund, a permanent Treasury appropriation (31 U.S.C. § 1304) used to pay settlements and judgments against the federal government. The Fund drew bipartisan criticism — including concern that it could pay January 6 defendants — and several lawsuits, of which this case (Floyd v. DOJ) is one. Critics, including some members of Congress, argued the spending was not authorized by Congress, raising separation-of-powers and appropriations questions.

This is the Court's own characterization of what it has done: it declines to add the petitioner's finality requirement but insists it is not enlarging the doctrine either, leaving Rooker-Feldman confined to the Exxon formulation — suits by state-court losers, complaining of injuries from a state-court judgment rendered before the federal suit, that ask the federal court to review and reject that judgment. The practical holding is that the doctrine applies regardless of whether the state judgment is still subject to further appeal. The dissent reads the result differently, arguing the Court has in fact expanded the doctrine past Exxon's line — while noting, with some relief, that the majority repeatedly calls the doctrine "narrow," language lower courts should heed.

Supreme Court Rule 14.1(a) provides that only the questions "set out in the petition, or fairly included therein," will be considered by the Court. The majority invokes it to explain a deliberate limit on the decision: although it reads much of the petitioner's (and the dissent's) argument as ultimately resting on the view that Rooker and Feldman were wrongly decided and should be cut back or overruled, that broader question was not presented in the petition for certiorari, so the Court does not address it. The decision therefore takes the doctrine's validity as a given and resolves only the narrower finality question.

Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn (1975) is the leading case on what counts as a "final judgment" for Supreme Court review under § 1257. It recognizes that finality is not purely mechanical: the Court described a "pragmatic" approach identifying four sets of circumstances in which a state-court judgment may be treated as final for review even though further state proceedings technically remain. The majority cites it to make a practical point against the petitioner's rule — determining § 1257 finality is itself complicated, so building Rooker-Feldman around that requirement would add confusion rather than reduce it.

This citation marks the circuit split the Court took the case to resolve. After Exxon, most courts of appeals read its "after the state proceedings ended" language to mean Rooker-Feldman applies only once the state litigation has functionally "ended" — and the First Circuit in Federación de Maestros built a three-part test to decide when that has happened. By the dissent's count, seven circuits adopted some version of an "ended" requirement; only the Sixth Circuit (and now the Fourth, in this case) held that an unfinished, still-appealable state judgment can trigger the doctrine. Notably, the majority observes that these "ended"-test circuits did not adopt the stricter § 1257-finality rule the petitioner urged — the "ended" approach and the petitioner's rule are not the same thing.

"Comity" refers to the mutual respect courts of different systems extend to one another's proceedings — here, the deference federal courts owe to ongoing state-court litigation. The Court invokes Ruhrgas AG v. Marathon Oil Co. (1999) for the principle that cooperation and comity underpin the federal system, and ties that to § 1257: Congress let the Supreme Court intervene in state litigation only after a State's highest court has rendered a final judgment, which the Court reads as a deliberate limit on federal intrusion into state affairs. The dissent sharply disputes that federalism does any work here, noting that neither Rooker nor Feldman used the word "federalism."

These are two of the federal abstention doctrines — judge-made rules under which a federal court with jurisdiction nonetheless declines to exercise it out of deference to state proceedings. Younger v. Harris (1971) bars federal courts from enjoining ongoing state criminal prosecutions and certain civil enforcement proceedings. Colorado River (1976) permits a federal court to stay or dismiss a case in favor of parallel state litigation, but only in "exceptional circumstances," given courts' "virtually unflagging obligation" to hear cases within their jurisdiction. The petitioner and the dissent argue these doctrines (plus preclusion) already do Rooker-Feldman's work; the majority responds that they may not even apply where a plaintiff attacks a judgment rather than relitigating claims — and the district court here found none of them applicable.

"Void ab initio" is a Latin phrase meaning "void from the beginning" — a request to treat the consent order as if it had never had any legal effect, rather than merely setting it aside going forward. The Court treats the nature of this requested relief as decisive: asking a federal district court to declare a state-court judgment void from inception, and to enjoin its enforcement, is in substance a request for appellate review of that judgment. Because that is what triggers Rooker-Feldman, the specific words of T. M.'s prayer for relief — not the § 1983 label on her complaint — are what place her suit inside the doctrine.

Lance v. Dennis (2006) is a per curiam decision — an unsigned opinion of the Court — issued the year after Exxon. It reinforced Exxon's narrowing message, stressing that Rooker-Feldman "applies only in limited circumstances" where a party "in effect seeks to take an appeal of an unfavorable state-court decision to a lower federal court," and reiterating that the doctrine does not bar suits by those who were not parties to the state-court judgment. Both the majority and the dissent cite Lance — the majority for its "in effect . . . an appeal" framing, the dissent for the proposition that post-Exxon cases describe the doctrine without relying on § 1331.

Johnson v. De Grandy (1994) is cited for two propositions that recur in Rooker-Feldman law. First, the doctrine bars federal suits that seek "what in substance would be appellate review of [a] state judgment" — the inquiry looks to the substance of the relief sought, not the statute invoked. Second, De Grandy is the source of the rule (developed in later cases) that Rooker-Feldman does not bar a federal plaintiff who was not a party to the state-court judgment, because such a person could never have sought review of it in the Supreme Court. The majority leans on the first point; the "substance over form" framing is what lets it treat this suit as an attempted appeal.

Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (2005) is the pivotal modern case, and the parties read it in opposite ways. By 2005 the lower courts had expanded Rooker-Feldman well beyond its origins, using it to dismiss many suits that merely overlapped with state litigation. Exxon reined this in, holding the doctrine is "confined to cases of the kind from which the doctrine acquired its name" — suits by state-court losers, complaining of injuries from a state-court judgment, filed after that judgment, and asking the federal court to review and reject it. The dispute in this case is whether Exxon's reference to suits filed "after the state proceedings ended" is itself a requirement (the dissent's view) or merely a description of the facts in Rooker and Feldman (the majority's view).

Feldman (1983) is the doctrine's second namesake. Applicants who had been denied admission to the D.C. bar (in part because they had not graduated from an accredited law school) sued in federal district court. The Supreme Court drew a line that still governs: a district court has no jurisdiction to review the D.C. high court's specific decision denying these applicants a waiver — that is appellate review reserved to the Supreme Court — but it does have jurisdiction to hear a general constitutional challenge to the bar-admission rule itself, because reviewing a rule is not reviewing a judicial decision. That distinction (challenging a judgment versus challenging a rule) remains central to applying Rooker-Feldman.

Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co. (1923) is the first of the doctrine's two namesake cases. After William and Dora Rooker lost in the Indiana courts — a judgment affirmed by the Indiana Supreme Court — they filed a new suit in federal district court asking it to declare the state judgment unconstitutional and void. In a brief unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court held the district court had no jurisdiction: setting aside a state-court judgment for legal error is an exercise of appellate jurisdiction, and the district courts' jurisdiction is "strictly original." The proper path, the Court said, was appeal through the state system and ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Section 1331 is the general federal-question statute: it gives district courts "original jurisdiction" over civil cases arising under federal law. "Original" jurisdiction means the power to hear a case in the first instance, as opposed to "appellate" jurisdiction, the power to review another court's decision. The two are treated as mutually exclusive. The Court's reasoning is that because § 1331 confers only original jurisdiction, a district court asked to undo a state-court judgment would be exercising appellate jurisdiction it does not possess. The dissent counters that a collateral attack on a judgment is not the functional equivalent of an appeal, so § 1331's original-jurisdiction grant should be enough.

Section 1257(a) of Title 28 is the statute that gives the U.S. Supreme Court jurisdiction to review state-court decisions, and it does so only for "final judgments or decrees rendered by the highest court of a State in which a decision could be had." Two features of that text drive this case: review is limited to final judgments, and only from a State's highest available court. The petitioner's proposed rule would have imported both limits into Rooker-Feldman — barring federal district court suits only where § 1257 would actually let the Supreme Court step in. The majority rejects that link; the dissent would embrace it, treating Rooker-Feldman as essentially a mirror of § 1257 (what it calls "the § 1257 Rule").

The Rooker-Feldman doctrine holds that the lower federal courts (district courts and courts of appeals) have no power to sit in review of state-court judgments — a losing party in state court cannot file a new suit in federal district court asking it to declare the state judgment wrong or void. The only federal court that may review a state-court judgment is the U.S. Supreme Court, and only by writ of certiorari. The doctrine takes its name from the two cases in which the Supreme Court applied it: Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co. (1923) and District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman (1983). The precise formulation the Court quotes here comes from Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Industries Corp. (2005), the modern decision that sharply narrowed the doctrine.

"Draw" is a term of art in vicarious copyright liability, the Fourth Cause of Action. Vicarious infringement has two elements: (1) the defendant had the right and ability to supervise or control the infringing activity, and (2) the defendant derived a direct financial benefit from it. The "draw" concept addresses the second element: under cases like Fonovisa, Inc. v. Cherry Auction (9th Cir. 1996), a financial benefit is "direct" when the availability of the infringing material acts as a draw that attracts customers, even if it is not the primary draw. The complaint alleges the availability of Eminem's music drew users to Meta's platforms and thereby increased advertising and subscription revenue — the factual basis for the direct-financial-benefit element.

This is the standard for contributory copyright infringement, the Third Cause of Action. Contributory liability has two elements: (1) knowledge of the direct infringement, and (2) a material contribution to it (inducing, causing, or materially contributing to the infringing conduct). The doctrine traces to Gershwin Publishing Corp. v. Columbia Artists Management (2d Cir. 1971) and was applied by the Supreme Court in Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984), the "Betamax" case, which held that a product capable of substantial non-infringing uses does not by itself create contributory liability. Contributory infringement differs from inducement (Count II) in that it does not require proof of intent to promote infringement, and from vicarious liability (Count IV) in that it turns on knowledge and contribution rather than financial benefit and control.

The Second Cause of Action is for inducement of copyright infringement. The governing standard comes from the Supreme Court's decision in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. (2005), which held that one who distributes a product or service "with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement," is liable for the resulting infringement by third parties. Inducement requires more than merely knowing a product can be used to infringe; it requires affirmative acts encouraging infringement. The complaint's allegations that Meta promoted music features, declined to implement filtering, and advertised the tools are the factual hooks for the Grokster elements — though whether they meet the "affirmative steps to foster infringement" bar is a question for the court.

These are two specific Meta platform features the complaint singles out. "Original Audio" lets a user extract the audio track from an existing post or Reel (or upload their own) and label it as their own original sound, which other users can then reuse. "Reels Remix" lets a user take a portion of another user's Reel — keeping its audio — and build new content around it. The complaint's theory is that these features cause "exponential" infringement: one unlicensed composition, once stripped and relabeled as "original," propagates across many additional videos by many additional users, each constituting a further alleged reproduction and synchronization. This mechanism underlies the inducement and contributory-infringement counts.

Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm that, in a scandal that became public in March 2018, obtained the Facebook profile data of tens of millions of users — harvested via a third-party personality-quiz app — without their consent, and used it for political advertising and voter-targeting work. The fallout led to a $5 billion FTC penalty against Facebook in 2019, a $725 million class-action settlement, and Cambridge Analytica's own bankruptcy. The complaint cites the Michigan-specific data-sharing figure to support its argument that Meta has extensive contacts with Michigan for purposes of personal jurisdiction; the reference is offered as evidence of Meta's reach into the state, not as a copyright allegation.

In 2013, the same plaintiffs sued Facebook in this District over the song "Under the Influence," which they alleged was used without authorization in a promotional video ("Airplane") for the "Facebook Home" software launch. The ad agency Wieden+Kennedy had reportedly taken the position that no copyright could be asserted because the underlying music resembled an earlier Michael Jackson recording. Facebook pulled the video and the case was ultimately resolved by a stipulated dismissal. The complaint invokes this prior case for a specific purpose: to argue that Meta already submitted to personal jurisdiction in the Eastern District of Michigan once before, and to show Meta was on notice of the plaintiffs' selectivity about licensing Eminem's music.

Under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c), a copyright owner may elect statutory damages instead of proving actual damages. The range is $750 to $30,000 per work infringed, rising to a maximum of $150,000 per work where the infringement is willful — the figure the complaint uses. The plaintiffs' arithmetic ($150,000 × 243 works × 3 platforms) yields roughly $109.3 million, the headline exposure figure widely reported in connection with the case. Two caveats a reader should know: statutory damages are awarded per work infringed, and whether the same composition made available on three platforms supports three separate awards (rather than one) is a contested legal question, not a settled multiplier; and courts have discretion to set any amount within the statutory range, so the maximum is a ceiling, not an entitlement.

Audiam is a music-rights administration company founded in 2013 by Jeff Price (a co-founder of TuneCore) that locates and collects digital mechanical royalties, with an early emphasis on YouTube. Its ownership has changed hands several times: SOCAN (a Canadian collecting society) acquired it in 2016, and SESAC acquired a controlling stake in August 2021. The Harry Fox Agency (HFA), the largest U.S. mechanical-rights licensing agent, is also owned by SESAC, which acquired HFA in 2015 — so Audiam and HFA are corporate siblings under common SESAC ownership rather than HFA being Audiam's direct parent. SESAC has been majority-owned by the investment firm Blackstone since 2017. The complaint's relevance for Audiam is narrower: it alleges Meta licensed certain catalogs through Audiam but that Audiam never represented, and had no authority to license, the Eight Mile Style catalog.

The DMCA's safe harbor (17 U.S.C. § 512) shields online service providers from monetary liability for copyright infringement committed by their users, provided the provider meets certain conditions — most importantly that the infringing material is stored "at the direction of a user," that the provider lacks actual knowledge of specific infringement, and that it removes infringing material upon proper notice (the "notice-and-takedown" system). The complaint's recurring argument is that the safe harbor does not apply here because Meta itself — not its users — allegedly copied and stored the compositions in its Music Libraries, making Meta a direct infringer rather than a passive host. Whether storage was "at the direction of a user" is typically a central fought-over question in these cases.

The "synchronization" or "sync" right is the right to reproduce a musical composition in timed relation with visual images — for example, pairing a song with a video. It is part of the bundle of exclusive reproduction rights a composition's copyright owner holds under 17 U.S.C. § 106. Sync licenses are negotiated individually between the user and the rights-holder (there is no compulsory or statutory sync license, unlike the compulsory mechanical license that exists for making audio-only recordings). This is central to the complaint's theory: when a Meta user pairs an Eight Mile composition with a video in a Reel or Story, that is a synchronization, and the complaint alleges no sync license was ever granted.

The full list appears in Schedule A (Exhibit A) at the end of the filing. Each entry shows a song title and an "EMS / MA Controlled Share" percentage — the fraction of the composition's copyright that Eight Mile Style or Martin Affiliated controls, which ranges from a fraction of a percent to 100%. This matters because music compositions are frequently co-owned by multiple songwriters and publishers; a 100% share means the plaintiffs control the entire composition, while smaller shares reflect partial ownership alongside other rights-holders. The catalog includes many of Eminem's best-known works (for example, "Lose Yourself," "The Real Slim Shady," "Cleaning Out My Closet," and "Mockingbird" are all listed at 100%).

This is a copyright infringement suit filed May 30, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The plaintiffs, Eight Mile Style and Martin Affiliated, are the music publishing entities that co-own and administer a catalog of compositions recorded by Marshall Mathers (Eminem). They allege that Meta — through Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — reproduced, stored, and distributed 243 Eminem compositions in its in-app "Music Libraries" without a license, and built tools (Original Audio, Reels Remix) that let users incorporate the music into their own videos. The complaint pleads four counts: direct copyright infringement, inducement, contributory infringement, and vicarious infringement. The same plaintiffs previously sued Facebook in this District in 2013 over an Eminem composition used in a "Facebook Home" advertisement, and separately litigated against Spotify over streaming of the same catalog.

The decision was 8–1. Justice Kagan wrote for the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Jackson. There were three concurrences and one dissent. Justice Gorsuch (joined by Sotomayor and Jackson) concurred to argue the decision should go further and to question whether prospective appeal waivers are valid at all. Justice Kavanaugh (joined by Alito and Barrett) concurred to emphasize that the miscarriage-of-justice exception sets a high bar, expressly disagreeing with what he read as Gorsuch’s lower threshold. Justice Barrett concurred separately to address the Court’s “supervisory power” over lower courts, which she — like the dissent — doubts exists, locating the decision instead in the common law of waiver. Justice Thomas dissented alone, arguing the Court identified no source of law for its new exception and that Hunter’s knowing, voluntary waiver should simply be enforced.

This phrase, quoted from Cutter v. Wilkinson (2005), expresses a routine principle of appellate practice: the Supreme Court generally decides only questions that lower courts have already passed on, rather than resolving issues “in the first instance.” Here it explains why the Court announced the miscarriage-of-justice standard but declined to apply it to Hunter’s medication challenge — the Fifth Circuit had never reached that question because its own precedent foreclosed it. The practical effect is that Hunter has won the legal rule but not yet his case: the dispute returns to the Fifth Circuit to decide, under the new standard, whether enforcing his waiver would be a miscarriage of justice.

Supervised release is a period of court-monitored conditional liberty that a federal defendant serves after completing a prison term — it replaced traditional parole in the federal system under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. During supervised release, the defendant must comply with conditions set by the court (here including the disputed medication requirement); violating those conditions can result in revocation and a return to prison after a separate hearing. As the dissent notes, a defendant may move to modify supervised-release conditions “at any time” under 18 U. S. C. §3583(e)(2), and a court must hold separate revocation proceedings under §3583(e)(3) before imprisoning someone for a violation — points the dissent raises to argue Hunter’s challenge is premature.

Aiding and abetting is not a separate crime but a theory of liability, codified at 18 U. S. C. §2, under which a person who helps commit a federal offense is punishable as a principal — that is, as if he had committed the offense himself. Wire fraud itself (18 U. S. C. §1343) criminalizes the use of interstate wire communications to carry out a scheme to defraud, and carries a statutory maximum of 20 years (30 years where a financial institution is affected, as charged here). Because aiding and abetting carries the same penalty as the underlying offense, Hunter’s guilty plea to one count of aiding and abetting wire fraud exposed him to the same statutory maximum as a principal wire-fraud count.

An appeal waiver is a provision in a plea agreement by which the defendant gives up, in advance, the statutory right to appeal his conviction, his sentence, or both. The right to appeal a federal sentence is not constitutional — it was created by statute (18 U. S. C. §3742) and is of relatively modern origin. Appeal waivers are now standard in federal plea agreements: studies cited in the opinions indicate that as of 2003, roughly two-thirds of federal plea agreements contained them, and they have become more common since. A defendant typically signs the waiver before the sentence is known, which is the feature the concurrences and dissent debate most pointedly — the defendant is waiving the right to challenge a sentence that has not yet been imposed.

These are the statutory provisions the parties dispute over the medication condition. Section 3583(d) governs the discretionary conditions a court may impose on supervised release; subsection (d)(2) requires that any such condition involve “no greater deprivation of liberty than is reasonably necessary” to serve the statutory sentencing purposes. Hunter cites this provision to argue the forced-medication condition is excessive. The Government counters with 18 U. S. C. §3563(b)(9), which expressly lists, as an available condition, that a defendant “undergo available medical, psychiatric, or psychological treatment.” The interplay is central to the remand: §3563(b)(9) authorizes treatment conditions in general terms, while §3583(d)(2) and the constitutional liberty interest in refusing medication (see Sell v. United States, 539 U. S. 166 (2003)) supply the limits.

Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11 governs guilty pleas in federal court. Rule 11(c)(1) confirms that plea agreements are negotiated between the prosecutor and the defendant, with the court forbidden from participating in those discussions. Rule 11(c)(3)(A), which the opinion also cites, gives the district court three options when presented with a plea agreement: accept it, reject it, or defer a decision. Separately, Rule 11(b)(1)(N) — discussed elsewhere in the opinion and the concurrences — requires the judge to confirm that the defendant understands the terms of any appeal waiver before accepting the plea. This rule, adopted in 1996, figures in the dissent’s argument: Justice Thomas notes that the rulemaking committee has repeatedly considered and declined to adopt limits on appeal waivers beyond this disclosure requirement.

United States v. Olano (1993) is the case that fixed the now-standard distinction between “waiver” and “forfeiture” in federal criminal procedure. Waiver is the “intentional relinquishment or abandonment of a known right”; forfeiture is “the failure to make the timely assertion of a right.” The distinction matters because a forfeited error can still be reviewed on appeal for “plain error,” while a waived right generally cannot be raised at all. The majority uses this distinction to explain why the Government’s silence at sentencing was neither: it was not an affirmative abandonment (waiver), and because the proper time to enforce an appeal waiver is after a notice of appeal is filed — not at sentencing — the silence was also not a failure to timely assert the right (forfeiture).

This memorable hypothetical comes from United States v. Mezzanatto (1995), where the Supreme Court held that a defendant may waive the protections of the plea-statement evidentiary rules. In the passage the Court quotes, it borrowed an illustration from an opinion by Judge Richard Posner (United States v. Josefik, 7th Cir. 1985): even if a defendant consented to be tried by twelve orangutans, the conviction would be invalid, because “some minimum of civilized procedure is required by community feeling regardless of what the defendant wants.” The orangutan recurs throughout the Hunter opinion — and at oral argument, counsel debated whether a sentence chosen by an orangutan could be insulated from appeal by a waiver. It serves as the Court’s shorthand for the principle that some procedural defects are so fundamental that no agreement by the parties can require a court to honor them.

Santobello v. New York (1971) is the foundational modern case on the enforceability of plea agreements. There, the prosecution promised as part of a plea deal to make no sentencing recommendation, but a different prosecutor later recommended the maximum sentence, which the court imposed. The Supreme Court held that when the government breaks a promise that induced a guilty plea, the defendant is entitled to a remedy — either withdrawal of the plea or specific performance of the agreement. Santobello is also the case in which the Court declared plea bargaining “an essential component of the administration of justice” and “highly desirable” — language Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence revisits critically as the turning point when the Court embraced plea bargaining. The majority cites it here for the narrower proposition that a district court’s decision whether to accept a plea agreement is committed to “sound judicial discretion.”

In Class v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court held 6–3 (Breyer, J.) that a defendant who pleads guilty does not automatically give up the right to argue on appeal that the statute he was convicted under is unconstitutional. As relevant here, the plea agreement contained no appeal waiver, but during the plea colloquy the district judge mistakenly told the defendant he was “giving up [his] right to appeal.” The Court held that the defendant’s agreement to that misstatement “neither expressly nor implicitly waived his right to appeal.” The majority treats this case as the mirror image of Hunter’s: in Class a court’s misstatement did not create an appeal waiver, and here a court’s misstatement (plus the prosecutor’s silence) did not undo one. The operative principle in both is that a judge’s offhand remark during a hearing cannot, by itself, alter the parties’ agreement about appeal rights.

The Court is explicit about the limits of its holding, expressly reserving several questions: (1) disarming those "addicted to" a controlled substance (the separate clause of § 922(g)(3), not at issue because the government never alleged Hemani was an addict); (2) those presently intoxicated; (3) future laws targeting users of a particular drug Congress finds especially risky; (4) § 922(g)(1)'s felon ban; and (5) a § 922(g)(3) prosecution supported by individualized proof of dangerousness, or proof that a specific drug always renders users dangerous. The decision is as-applied to Hemani on these facts — regular marijuana use, nothing more.

The Court quotes the dissent of then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett in Kanter v. Barr (7th Cir. 2019), a case decided before her elevation to the Supreme Court. The Kanter majority upheld the felon-in-possession ban (§ 922(g)(1)) as applied to a man convicted of a nonviolent fraud offense; Barrett dissented, arguing through extensive historical analysis that legislatures may disarm people who are dangerous, but not categories of people based on status alone absent dangerousness. That "dangerousness, not status" principle — and her warning that a broad power to designate groups as dangerous could "quickly swallow" the right — is what the majority borrows here.

This citation is to a DOJ/DEA final order published April 28, 2026 (91 Fed. Reg. 22714), issued after oral argument in this case. The order moved a narrow set of marijuana products — those in FDA-approved drug products, and marijuana handled under a state medical-marijuana license — from Schedule I to Schedule III. It did not reschedule marijuana generally; recreational and other marijuana remained on Schedule I, and a separate DEA administrative hearing on broader rescheduling was set to begin June 29, 2026. The Court uses the order as evidence that the federal government's own regulatory posture toward marijuana is inconsistent with treating every marijuana user as categorically dangerous.

This describes § 922(g)(8), the statute upheld in Rahimi. The Court draws a deliberate contrast between two kinds of historical surety law. Surety-of-the-peace laws — the ones Rahimi relied on — required an individualized showing that a person posed a threat of violence before a bond could be demanded. The government here instead invokes surety-of-good-behavior laws, which targeted "scandals against good morals" (drunkenness, eavesdropping, frequenting bawdy houses) and did not require any showing of violence. The opinion notes the government does not rely on the surety-of-the-peace tradition — and explains why that tradition would not fit a defendant whose only conduct is regular drug use.

This passage supports the Court's historical claim with figures on early-American alcohol consumption. By most accounts per-capita consumption of distilled spirits in the early nineteenth century was far higher than today; the era is sometimes called "the Alcoholic Republic" after W.J. Rorabaugh's 1979 study of the same name, which the opinion cites. The Court's point is comparative: if merely regular heavy drinking had triggered disarmament-style restrictions, a large share of the founding generation — by its examples, including several Presidents — would have qualified, which it did not.

Benjamin Rush (1746–1813) was a Philadelphia physician, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and an early figure in American medicine. The treatise the Court cites, his Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812), is often described as the first American textbook of psychiatry. Rush was also an early proponent of the view that habitual drunkenness was a disease rather than merely a moral failing — context that reinforces the Court's point that the historical category described a condition of incapacity.

In re Tracy (N.Y. Ch. 1829) is an early American case the Court uses to fix the historical meaning of "habitual drunkard." The quoted standard — intoxicated for a considerable part of one's time, to a degree that deprives one of ordinary reasoning faculties — illustrates the opinion's central historical finding: founding-era law reserved the label for those rendered functionally incapacitated, not for ordinary or even frequent drinkers. "Paige Ch." refers to Paige's Chancery Reports, which compiled decisions of the New York Court of Chancery, an equity court that existed before New York merged law and equity in 1847.

"Why" and "how" are the two metrics Bruen identified as playing a central role in deciding whether a modern law is "relevantly similar" to a historical one: the why is the purpose or justification behind the law (what problem it addresses), and the how is its operation or mechanism (the manner and degree of burden it imposes on the right). The structure of the majority opinion tracks these two axes — Parts A, B, and D test the government's "why" comparisons, and Part C tests the "how."

United States v. Rahimi (2024) was the Court's first major application of Bruen. It upheld § 922(g)(8), which disarms persons subject to domestic-violence restraining orders, by analogy to historical surety and "going armed" laws. Rahimi clarified that the government need not produce a "historical twin" or a precise founding-era precursor; it is enough that a modern law is "relevantly similar" to historical regulation in why it burdens the right and how it does so. The Court here applies that more forgiving standard and still finds the government's analogy wanting.

This is the test from New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen (2022). Step one: if the Second Amendment's plain text covers the conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects it. Step two: the burden shifts to the government to show the regulation is consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. Bruen displaced the "two-step" means-end balancing (involving tiers of scrutiny) that most circuit courts had used after Heller — the very framework Justice Jackson's concurrence here urges the Court to reconsider. Throughout this case the government concedes step one, so the entire dispute is litigated at step two.

For scale: § 922(g) as a whole produces thousands of federal convictions per year, the large majority under § 922(g)(1) (felon-in-possession). The unlawful-user provision at issue here, § 922(g)(3), accounts for only about 5% of that total. The Court attributes the figure to a Congressional Research Service report, Guns and Drugs: A Brief History of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) (2026).

The CSA sorts controlled substances into five schedules. Schedule I is the most restrictive — substances with a high potential for abuse and (in the statute's terms) no currently accepted medical use, such as heroin and LSD. The schedules descend to Schedule V, the least restrictive. Placement is made by the DEA in consultation with HHS and turns on statutory factors in 21 U.S.C. § 811(c), including current scientific knowledge, history of abuse, and risk to public health — factors that need not relate to whether a drug makes its users violent. That is the structural point the Court develops later: the gun ban's reach is defined by a list assembled for public-health reasons, not dangerousness.

This is the penalty provision the opinion repeatedly references. 18 U.S.C. § 924(a)(8) sets the maximum prison term for a § 922(g) violation at 15 years. That ceiling was raised from 10 years to 15 years by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022. The "disarmament for life" the Court mentions follows because a § 922(g)(3) conviction is itself a felony, which then triggers § 922(g)(1)'s separate, permanent ban on firearm possession by convicted felons.

Section 922(g)(3) is one of nine prohibited-possessor categories in the federal Gun Control Act of 1968. It bars firearm possession by anyone who is an "unlawful user of" or "addicted to" a controlled substance. Critically, the provision does not define "controlled substance" itself — it borrows the definition from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), so the scope of the gun ban automatically tracks whatever Congress and the DEA place on the CSA's five schedules. This incorporation is central to the Court's reasoning: because a substance can be scheduled for reasons unrelated to violence, the firearm ban sweeps in users of any scheduled drug regardless of dangerousness.

District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the Supreme Court's landmark decision recognizing that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, unconnected to militia service. The same opinion expressly cautioned that the right is "not unlimited" and listed examples of "presumptively lawful" regulations — including bans on possession by felons and the mentally ill, and prohibitions on carrying in sensitive places. The Court here draws on that limits language; the page it cites (554 U.S. at 626) is the well-known passage cataloguing those presumptively lawful measures.

This footnote invokes one of the foundational principles of American antitrust law: the statutes protect competition as a process, not individual competitors from the effects of competition. Brunswick (1977) involved bowling alley operators who argued they were harmed when Brunswick acquired failing competing alleys and kept them open, preventing the plaintiffs from gaining market share. The Supreme Court held that this was not the kind of harm the antitrust laws were designed to prevent — the plaintiffs were harmed by more competition, not less. The underlying principle comes from Brown Shoe Co. v. United States (1962), which is quoted in the footnote. The DOJ deploys this distinction to address complainants who argued the merger would harm them — implying that their objections reflect competitive self-interest rather than genuine harm to competition or consumers.

General Dynamics (1974) is a landmark Supreme Court antitrust case that established that historical market share data, standing alone, is not sufficient to sustain a presumption that a merger will harm competition. The case involved the merger of two coal producers. Although the combined company held a significant market share, the Court found that one company's coal reserves were largely committed under long-term contracts, meaning its future competitive significance was far less than its current market share suggested. The DOJ cites General Dynamics here to signal that even if the combined Paramount/WBD entity would hold a significant share of theatrical film production, the "highly dynamic" nature of the industry — with new entrants like A24 and shifting distribution models — means historical shares are an unreliable predictor of future competitive harm.

In March 2019, The Walt Disney Company completed its $71.3 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox's entertainment assets, including the 20th Century Fox film studio, FX Networks, National Geographic, and Fox's stake in Hulu. The deal reduced the number of major film studios from six to five. Critics of the Paramount/WBD merger argued that the Disney/Fox deal provided an "event study" — a before-and-after comparison — showing that studio consolidation leads to reduced theatrical output. The DOJ rejects this analogy on two grounds: first, the Disney/Fox deal closed in early 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally disrupted the film industry, making any output comparison unreliable; and second, Disney's business model (built around franchise IP that it monetizes across theme parks, merchandise, and streaming) gives it different output incentives than a "pure-play media business like Paramount."

These three companies represent a new generation of studios that have disrupted the traditional Hollywood model. A24, founded in 2012, has become a cultural force with critically acclaimed films including Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022, which won seven Academy Awards) and Moonlight (2016, Best Picture). NEON, founded in 2017, similarly built a reputation for prestige content, distributing the Best Picture winner Parasite (2019). Blumhouse Productions, founded in 2000 by Jason Blum, pioneered a low-budget, high-return model for horror films (Get Out, The Purge franchise) and has since expanded into larger productions. The DOJ's point is that these companies — none of which existed in the era of the traditional "Big Six" studios — demonstrate that the theatrical film market is more competitive and accessible than historical market share data would suggest.

In antitrust merger investigations, documents and information that companies produce to the DOJ under a Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) filing or a civil investigative demand are subject to statutory confidentiality protections. The DOJ generally cannot share this material with state attorneys general without the merging parties' consent. A "voluntary waiver" is the mechanism by which the parties agree to let the DOJ and state AGs share investigative materials. While technically optional, refusing to grant a waiver can signal a lack of cooperation and may draw additional scrutiny. Here, the waivers allowed state AGs to attend and participate in the DOJ's depositions of company executives — a meaningful level of state involvement in a federal merger review.

Each of these prior deals shaped the entity that Paramount is now acquiring. AOL's merger with Time Warner in 2001 was valued at $164 billion and is widely regarded as one of the worst corporate mergers in history — AOL's dial-up internet business declined rapidly, and the combined company wrote down nearly $100 billion in value. AT&T's $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner in 2018 was the subject of a landmark antitrust challenge by this same Division, which sued to block the deal as an anticompetitive vertical merger. The DOJ lost at trial before Judge Richard Leon in the D.C. District Court, and the D.C. Circuit unanimously affirmed. It was the first vertical merger case the Division had tried in forty years. AT&T subsequently reversed course and spun off WarnerMedia, which merged with Discovery Inc. in 2022 to form Warner Bros. Discovery. The Division's reference to "challenges that arise when the commercial rationale for a deal lacks clear alignment" is a pointed allusion to these failed combinations.

In December 2025, Netflix agreed to acquire WBD's studio and streaming divisions (including Warner Bros. Studios, HBO, and Max) in a deal initially structured as cash and stock, later revised to all cash, valued at approximately $72 billion ($82.7 billion including WBD debt). The agreement would have spun off WBD's linear television networks as a separate entity. The Netflix deal drew significant concern within the entertainment industry about further streaming consolidation. In December 2025, Paramount launched a rival all-cash tender offer for the entirety of WBD — not just its studio and streaming assets. After a contractual waiver allowed WBD to negotiate with Paramount, the WBD board determined on February 26, 2026, that Paramount's revised offer of $31 per share (approximately $110.9 billion total enterprise value) was a "Company Superior Proposal." Netflix declined to match and withdrew. The DOJ's statement notes that it reviewed both proposals, benefiting from the "comparative perspectives" each bidder presented on the media landscape.

Paramount Skydance Corporation (NASDAQ: PSKY) was formed in August 2025 when Skydance Media completed its merger with Paramount Global. Skydance was founded in 2006 by David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. The Ellison family and RedBird Capital Partners backed the transaction, with David Ellison becoming chairman and CEO of the combined company. The Skydance-Paramount deal was itself a major media consolidation event, combining Skydance's production capabilities (Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible) with Paramount's studio, broadcast network (CBS), cable channels, and streaming service (Paramount+). Just six months after completing that merger, the new entity pivoted to acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery — the transaction at issue here.

Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act is the federal government's primary mechanism for considering the effects of its projects on historic properties before spending federal money. Under the process, a federal agency must identify historic properties that might be affected by a proposed project, assess potential adverse effects, and consult with the State Historic Preservation Officer, tribal officials, and other interested parties before proceeding. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) oversees the process and may comment on the adequacy of the agency's review. Importantly, Section 106 does not give the ACHP or any other body a veto over federal projects — it requires only that the agency "take into account" the effects on historic properties. However, the consultation process frequently leads to project modifications that mitigate damage to historic resources. The legal question here is whether the Kennedy Center — which is not technically a "Federal agency" under the APA — is nonetheless required to follow Section 106 by virtue of a 2003 statute that brought the Smithsonian within the process for certain types of projects.

The East Wing of the White House — which housed the offices of the First Lady and the White House social secretary, among other functions — was demolished in early 2026 as part of President Trump's renovation plans for the executive residence. The demolition was particularly controversial because President Trump had previously promised that construction would "pay total respect to the existing building." The East Wing demolition prompted its own federal lawsuit — National Trust for Historic Preservation v. National Park Service (D.D.C., Judge Lamberth) — which is cited elsewhere in this opinion. Judge Cooper references the East Wing episode here to explain why there were legitimate fears that the Kennedy Center might face a similarly drastic fate despite assurances from its leadership.

Judge Cooper is extending his "Hail Mary pass" metaphor with a reference to one of the most famous plays in NFL history. On December 28, 1975, in an NFC divisional playoff game, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach threw a desperate 50-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Drew Pearson with 24 seconds remaining, defeating the Minnesota Vikings 17–14. After the game, Staubach told reporters he closed his eyes and said a "Hail Mary" — popularizing the now-universal term for any last-second, low-probability deep pass. Judge Cooper's point: just as Staubach's improbable pass found its receiver in the end zone, Beatty's long-shot ultra vires claim connects.

Ultra vires is a Latin phrase meaning "beyond the powers." In administrative law, an ultra vires claim argues that a government entity or official has acted entirely outside the authority Congress granted — not merely that the action was unwise or even illegal, but that it was fundamentally unauthorized. The doctrine provides a narrow but important avenue for judicial review when no other mechanism (such as the Administrative Procedure Act) is available. As the court notes, ultra vires claims are deliberately hard to win: the Supreme Court has "strictly limited" their scope, requiring the plaintiff to show that the challenged action plainly disregards a specific, unambiguous statutory command. The standard is so demanding that courts sometimes call it a "Hail Mary pass" — a metaphor Judge Cooper extends with evident relish in the next paragraph.

In Dong (1997), the D.C. Circuit held that the Smithsonian Institution is not a federal "agency" as defined by the Administrative Procedure Act, because it was established as an independent trust instrumentality rather than an executive department or government corporation. This ruling has cascading consequences throughout this case. Because the Kennedy Center is a bureau within the Smithsonian, it too falls outside APA coverage — which is why the court grants summary judgment to the Defendants on Beatty's APA claim (Count Six). The ruling also means the Kennedy Center may not qualify as a "Federal agency" under the National Historic Preservation Act, potentially exempting its renovation from the Section 106 historic preservation review process — a gap that Congress only partially addressed through the Smithsonian Facilities Authorization Act of 2003.

Thole (2020) was a 5–4 Supreme Court decision holding that beneficiaries of a defined-benefit pension plan lacked Article III standing to sue under ERISA for alleged mismanagement of plan assets. Because the plaintiffs were guaranteed the same monthly payments regardless of how the plan's investments performed, the Court found they had no concrete stake in the lawsuit. Critically, however, the majority distinguished trustees and other fiduciaries from mere beneficiaries, noting that fiduciaries have independent legal obligations that give them standing to sue to protect trust assets. Judge Cooper relies on this distinction to support Representative Beatty's standing: as a trustee rather than a beneficiary, she has fiduciary duties that give her a personal stake the Thole plaintiffs lacked.

Loper Bright (2024) is one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in recent decades. In a 6–3 ruling authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court overruled Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), eliminating the 40-year-old doctrine under which courts deferred to federal agencies' reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes they administered. The Court held that the Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise independent judgment in interpreting federal statutes. Judge Cooper cites Loper Bright here for the specific point that the Kennedy Center's officers' internal interpretation of "trust funds" receives no judicial deference — but the citation signals the broader post-Chevron principle that courts, not administrators, are the final arbiters of statutory meaning.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a comprehensive budget reconciliation bill passed by the 119th Congress and signed by President Trump in July 2025. The legislation — which exceeded 1,000 pages — addressed tax policy, immigration enforcement, energy production, defense spending, and numerous other subjects. The $257 million Kennedy Center appropriation was one of many discrete spending provisions within the broader bill. Budget reconciliation is a special legislative procedure that allows certain spending, revenue, and debt-limit legislation to pass the Senate by simple majority, bypassing the 60-vote threshold typically required to overcome a filibuster. The Kennedy Center appropriation is authorized through September 30, 2029 — a deadline that becomes significant later in the opinion when the Defendants argue that a preliminary injunction could jeopardize the project timeline.

Richard Grenell is a Republican political figure who served as U.S. Ambassador to Germany (2018–2020) and Acting Director of National Intelligence (February–May 2020) during President Trump's first term. His professional background was in public diplomacy, communications, and national security rather than arts administration or nonprofit management. As the opinion notes, Grenell was subsequently replaced as the Center's senior executive by Matthew Floca, whose background is in facilities and project management — meaning that neither of the two individuals who have led the Kennedy Center since the Board's reconstitution had prior experience in performing arts administration.

The REACH (an acronym for Renew, Experience, Art, Community, and Humanity) is a 72,000-square-foot expansion of the Kennedy Center campus that opened in September 2019 — the first major addition to the site since the original building opened in 1971. Designed by Steven Holl Architects, the REACH consists of three interconnected pavilion buildings set into the landscape south of the main building, connected by gardens and outdoor performance spaces. It houses rehearsal studios, classrooms, a video wall, and flexible event spaces. Because the REACH is a separate structure from the main building, it figures prominently in the Defendants' argument that some programming, educational, and memorial functions could continue there during the main building's closure.

Edward Durell Stone (1902–1978) was an American architect known for monumental public buildings in an ornate modernist style. His other major works include the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi (1954), the Museum of Modern Art's original building in New York (1939, with Philip Goodwin), and the General Motors Building in Manhattan (1968). The Kennedy Center, completed in 1971, is characteristic of Stone's later career — the grand marble façade and columned Hall of States and Hall of Nations are his design. The building was recognized for its architectural significance when it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a designation that is relevant to the historic preservation questions discussed later in this opinion.

A "trust instrumentality" is a category of federal entity that holds property in trust for the benefit of the American public. Unlike a typical federal agency, a trust instrumentality is not subject to the Administrative Procedure Act and operates with a degree of institutional independence. The Kennedy Center shares this classification with only a handful of other institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution (of which it is technically a bureau) and the National Gallery of Art. The classification is central to this opinion because it means the Center's Board members owe fiduciary duties — including duties of prudence, loyalty, and care — derived from the common law of trusts. These are the same duties that govern private trustees, and they provide the legal framework for every claim in this case.

This sentence marks the boundary between the public and confidential phases of the process. From here, the chief judge reviews the identified complaint under JC&D Rule 11 and may dismiss it, conclude it on the basis of voluntary corrective action, or appoint a special committee of judges to investigate. A special committee reports its findings to the circuit's Judicial Council, which can impose remedies including private or public reprimand, temporary suspension of new case assignments, or a request that the judge voluntarily retire. What no actor in this process can do is remove an Article III judge from office — removal requires impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate. The proceedings themselves are confidential by statute, though final orders may be made public, just as this initiating order was disclosed under the Rule 23(b)(1) exception for maintaining public confidence in the judiciary.

Ryan D. Nelson has served on the Ninth Circuit since October 2018, nominated by President Trump. He is a native of Idaho Falls, Idaho — where he maintains his chambers, and where the incident described in the cited news reports allegedly occurred. Before taking the bench, Nelson spent nearly a decade as general counsel of Melaleuca, Inc., the Idaho Falls-based wellness products company, and earlier served in the George W. Bush administration as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department's environment division and as deputy general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget. According to the court records described in the news reports underlying this order, the Idaho Falls city prosecutor charged Nelson in April 2026 with misdemeanor battery and malicious injury to property arising from an April 2 parking-lot dispute; he pleaded not guilty in May. That criminal case, State of Idaho v. Nelson, proceeds in Idaho state court separately from this federal judicial misconduct inquiry.

Most federal judicial misconduct complaints are filed by litigants or members of the public under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980 (28 U.S.C. §§ 351–364). This order uses a different mechanism: an "identified complaint." Under 28 U.S.C. § 351(b) and Rule 5 of the Judicial-Conduct and Judicial-Disability Rules, the chief judge of a circuit may initiate a complaint on the court's own motion when there are reasonable grounds for an inquiry, without waiting for anyone to file one. As the order notes, the Ninth Circuit has previously used this mechanism when alleged misconduct surfaces through credible media reporting. Chief Judge Mary H. Murguia, who issued this order, has led the Ninth Circuit — the largest of the thirteen federal appellate courts — since December 2021.

Jonathan Mitchell served as Solicitor General of Texas — the state's chief appellate lawyer — from 2010 to 2015, and has taught at several law schools, including Stanford and the University of Texas. Now in solo practice at Mitchell Law PLLC in Austin, he is best known as the legal architect of the Texas Heartbeat Act (S.B. 8), the 2021 abortion law enforced exclusively through private civil suits rather than by state officials — a structure designed to complicate pre-enforcement constitutional challenges, which the U.S. Supreme Court largely allowed to stand in Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson (2021). Mitchell has argued multiple cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and frequently represents conservative and religious-liberty litigants in high-profile constitutional cases. He has represented Hensley since the suit was filed in 2019.

The Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, enacted in 1999, is Texas's analogue to the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. After the U.S. Supreme Court held in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997) that the federal RFRA could not constitutionally be applied to state and local governments, many states enacted their own versions; Texas's appears in Chapter 110 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code. It forbids a government agency from substantially burdening a person's free exercise of religion unless the agency demonstrates the burden furthers a compelling governmental interest by the least restrictive means. Its remedies provision explains the numbers in this judgment: Section 110.005 caps compensatory damages at $10,000 — so the damages figure here is the statutory maximum, not a negotiated valuation of the harm — while separately authorizing reasonable attorney's fees, court costs, and expenses with no cap. That structure is how a case with $10,000 in damages produces a $630,000 fee award sixty-three times its size.

This agreed judgment ends more than six years of litigation. Dianne Hensley is a justice of the peace in McLennan County (Waco), first elected in 2014. Texas justices of the peace are authorized — but not required — to officiate weddings for a fee. After the Supreme Court's 2015 same-sex marriage decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, Hensley continued officiating opposite-sex weddings while declining, on religious grounds, to perform same-sex ceremonies; her office referred those couples to other local officiants. In 2019, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct — the state agency that disciplines Texas judges — issued her a public warning under Canon 4A(1) of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct, concluding her practice cast doubt on her capacity to act impartially toward people based on sexual orientation. Rather than appeal the warning to a Special Court of Review, Hensley sued the Commission in December 2019 under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The trial court and the Third Court of Appeals dismissed her claims on jurisdictional grounds, but in June 2024 the Supreme Court of Texas held that neither her decision not to appeal the warning nor sovereign immunity barred her TRFRA claim, and remanded (Hensley v. State Commission on Judicial Conduct, 692 S.W.3d 184). This filing is the result of the remand: a joint motion by both sides with a proposed judgment attached — the judge's signature line is blank as filed — meaning the terms were negotiated between the parties rather than adjudicated after trial.

Three points about what this disposition does and does not do. First, it reaches only the §1519 falsification count; Abouammo's five other counts of conviction — foreign-agent, conspiracy, wire-fraud, honest-services, and money-laundering charges — were not before the Court, and his 42-month sentence (imposed in December 2022) rested on all six counts together. Second, reversal for improper venue does not mean acquittal. In Smith v. United States (2023) — the same case this opinion cites for its venue history — the Court unanimously held that a trial in the wrong venue does not trigger the Double Jeopardy Clause, so the government remains free to re-prosecute the charge in a proper district. The Constitution's remedy for wrong-place trials is a new trial in the right place, not freedom from trial. Third, the right place is now fixed: if the government wants to pursue the §1519 charge again, it must do so in the Western District of Washington, where Abouammo created the invoice in his Seattle home.

This footnote reserves a question with real consequences for other obstruction prosecutions. Congress sometimes writes venue rules directly into criminal statutes: 18 U.S.C. § 1512(i), cited here, provides that obstruction offenses under §§ 1503 and 1512 may be tried either where the offense occurred or in the district of the official proceeding the defendant intended to affect — exactly the kind of investigation-location venue the Court rejects for §1519, which has no such provision. The footnote contains a notable tension: the Court observes that the venue rule is constitutional and "Congress lacks the power to finally decide what it means," while also acknowledging prior suggestions that Congress's view "may make a difference." Whether § 1512(i)'s proceeding-district option can survive the conduct-focused constitutional analysis applied today is therefore expressly an open question — one likely to be litigated by defendants charged under those statutes.

This statute, 18 U.S.C. § 3237(a), is why multi-district venue is routine in federal prosecutions even though this case narrows it for §1519. Crimes that unfold across space — kidnappings, drug conspiracies, frauds executed through interstate wires or mails — can be tried anywhere along their path. A wire-fraud charge, for instance, can often be brought where the scheme was devised, where the wire was sent, or where it was received. That background explains the practical stakes here: prosecutors are accustomed to venue flexibility, and the Government's reading of §1519 would have extended that flexibility to document-falsification charges by locating the crime wherever the targeted investigation sat — frequently the government's own home district. The Court's holding makes §1519 a point-in-time, single-place offense: it is "begun, continued, and completed" wherever the document is falsified, and nowhere else.

An "inchoate" (incomplete or anticipatory) offense criminalizes steps toward a crime that never has to happen. The classic three are attempt (trying and failing, or being stopped), conspiracy (agreeing with another to commit a crime), and solicitation (asking someone else to commit one). Each is defined by reference to a target offense — a conspiracy must be a conspiracy to commit some other crime. The Government's theory was that §1519 works the same way, anticipating some "ultimate" obstruction offense, so venue could borrow from that ultimate offense's location. The Court's answer: §1519 names no target crime and is complete in itself. Black's Law Dictionary, which both sides invoked, has been the standard American legal dictionary since 1891; its current editions are edited by legal-writing scholar Bryan A. Garner, and courts at every level cite it as evidence of how the profession ordinarily understands legal terms.

Johnson, authored by Justice Felix Frankfurter, arose under one of the more obscure federal criminal statutes ever enacted. The Federal Denture Act of 1942 — passed at the urging of organized dentistry — made it a crime to mail dentures across state lines if they were made from impressions taken by anyone other than a licensed dentist, a strike at the mail-order denture industry. Beyond its venue holding (trial only where the dentures were mailed, not where they arrived), Johnson is remembered for Frankfurter's broader statement of principle: questions of venue "raise deep issues of public policy" and "are not merely matters of formal legal procedure," so doubtful venue statutes should be construed against requiring defendants to stand trial far from home. The treatise cited alongside it — Wayne LaFave's Criminal Procedure — is the standard multi-volume reference in the field, and its description of Johnson as "seminal" reflects the case's status as the foundation of modern venue doctrine.

"Mens rea" (Latin, "guilty mind") is the mental-state component of a crime — the knowledge, intent, recklessness, or purpose the prosecution must prove. Its counterpart is "actus reus," the physical act. Nearly every crime requires both: the act alone is not criminal without the mental state, and the mental state alone is never criminal without the act. Section 1519 actually stacks two mens rea requirements — the falsification must be done "knowingly" AND "with the intent to impede [or] obstruct" an investigation. The Court's logic in this passage is geographic: a mental state exists in the defendant's head and travels with him; it has no independent location on a map. So intent can never add a venue that the physical act does not supply. The Ninth Circuit's error, in the Court's telling, was converting the second mental state (intent to obstruct an investigation in San Francisco) into a piece of conduct (obstruction in San Francisco) that the statute does not actually require to occur.

United States v. Rodriguez-Moreno (1999) is the source of the framework this opinion applies. There, associates of a drug distributor kidnapped a middleman in Texas and moved him through New Jersey and New York to Maryland, where Rodriguez-Moreno put a gun to his head. He was tried in New Jersey for using a firearm during a crime of violence (18 U.S.C. § 924(c)) even though the gun appeared only in Maryland. The Court upheld venue: the predicate kidnapping was a continuing crime committed in every district through which the victim was moved, so the offense's essential conduct occurred partly in New Jersey. The decision rejected a mechanical "verb test" (looking only at the statute's action verbs) in favor of identifying all conduct the statute proscribes. The Latin phrase "locus delicti," quoted from the 1946 Anderson decision, simply means "the place of the crime." The irony this opinion exploits: the same framework that expanded venue in Rodriguez-Moreno contracts it here, because §1519's only proscribed conduct happens in one place.

The two safeguards do slightly different work. Article III, Section 2 fixes the place of trial: the state where the crime was committed. The Sixth Amendment adds precision through the related concept of "vicinage" — the place from which jurors are drawn — guaranteeing a jury of the state and district of the crime. "District" refers to the 94 federal judicial districts into which the country is divided; Washington State, for example, is split into Eastern and Western Districts, and California into four. Cabrales, the case quoted here, is a close cousin of this one: a defendant laundered Missouri drug-trafficking proceeds at Florida banks and was charged with money laundering in Missouri. The Court unanimously held venue improper — the laundering happened entirely in Florida, and the Missouri drug activity, while connected, was not conduct constituting the money-laundering offense. The parallel to trying a Seattle falsification in San Francisco is direct.

This grievance — the twenty-first in the Declaration of Independence's list of charges against George III — referred to concrete British policy. In 1769, after unrest in Massachusetts, Parliament resolved that colonists accused of treason could be carried to England for trial under a statute of Henry VIII dating to 1543, which permitted treason committed outside the realm to be tried within it. Virginia's House of Burgesses denounced the plan in resolves that spread through the colonies. After the 1772 burning of the British revenue schooner Gaspee off Rhode Island, the Crown empaneled a commission of inquiry with authority to send suspects to England — though none ultimately were. The threat of facing a distant tribunal, away from local juries and witnesses, is the historical root of both the Article III venue requirement and the Sixth Amendment's district requirement that decide this case.

The opinion compresses a widely reported espionage case. Abouammo was Twitter's Media Partnerships Manager for the Middle East and North Africa from 2013 to 2015. According to trial evidence and Justice Department statements, the "high-level Saudi official" was Bader Al-Asaker, a close aide to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who gave Abouammo a Hublot watch (which Abouammo later listed for sale at $42,000) and routed $300,000 through a Lebanese bank account opened in Abouammo's father's name. In August 2022, a San Francisco jury convicted Abouammo on six of eleven counts — acting as an agent of a foreign government without notice to the Attorney General, conspiracy, wire fraud, honest-services fraud, international money laundering, and the §1519 falsification count at issue here — and acquitted him on five others. He was sentenced to 42 months in December 2022. Two alleged co-conspirators, Twitter engineer Ali Alzabarah and social-media strategist Ahmed Almutairi, left for Saudi Arabia before they could be arrested and remain charged; the United States has no extradition treaty with Saudi Arabia. Only the §1519 count was before the Supreme Court.

Section 1519 was enacted in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Congress's response to the Enron collapse — and specifically to the accounting firm Arthur Andersen's mass shredding of Enron audit documents. It is often called the "anti-shredding provision." Its 20-year maximum sentence is unusually high for a documents offense, and its language is deliberately broad: it covers any record, document, or tangible object, and any matter within the jurisdiction of any federal department or agency, including investigations that are merely "contemplated" and not yet underway. The statute has reached the Supreme Court before: in Yates v. United States (2015), the Court held 5–4 that an undersized red grouper a fisherman threw overboard was not a "tangible object" under §1519, reasoning that the provision targets record-keeping and information, not fish. This case is its second trip to the Court.

Robert H. Jackson served on the Supreme Court from 1941 to 1954 and is no relation to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the author of the principal dissent in this case. Robert Jackson — also famous as the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials — was a frequent skeptic of legislative history despite serving in the heyday of its use. The "psychoanalysis of Congress" line comes from his 1953 concurrence in United States v. Public Utilities Commission of California. The dissent responds in kind, quoting Robert Jackson's Schwegmann Brothers concurrence, in which he allowed that committee reports may be consulted when a statute is "inescapably ambiguous" — making the two Justices Jackson, separated by seven decades, participants on both sides of the same debate.

This is one of the most famous quips in the statutory interpretation literature. It originated with Judge Harold Leventhal of the D.C. Circuit, who reportedly described the use of legislative history as "looking over a crowd and picking out your friends" — the idea being that legislative records are voluminous and internally contradictory enough that a judge can usually find a passage supporting any predetermined conclusion. Justice Scalia popularized the line in his concurrence in Conroy v. Aniskoff (1993), the opinion the Court cites just above this passage, and it has been a standard weapon in the textualist critique of legislative history ever since.

Oxford University Bank was the Second Circuit's 2019 decision — addressing the question as a matter of first impression — that Section 47(b) implies a private right of action for rescission. It made the Second Circuit the lone outlier: the Third Circuit (Santomenno, 2012), Fourth Circuit (Steinberg, 2011, unpublished), and Ninth Circuit (UFCW Local 1500, 2018) had all rejected the argument. The practical consequence was forum concentration: because the Second Circuit covers New York, activist plaintiffs could file ICA rescission suits in the Southern District of New York — as Saba did here — and proceed under precedent unavailable anywhere else in the country. Today's decision abrogates Oxford University Bank and eliminates that forum.

The 1980 amendment was part of the Small Business Investment Incentive Act of 1980 (Pub. L. 96–477, 94 Stat. 2275), signed by President Carter on October 21, 1980. The Act's headline purpose was deregulatory: it created the "business development company" (BDC), a new category of investment vehicle designed to channel capital to small and developing businesses with lighter regulation than ordinary investment companies. The Section 47(b) revision was a small piece of this much larger package — which is part of why the parties and the Justices dispute its significance. The House Report the opinions debate (H.R. Rep. No. 96–1341) and Senate Report (S. Rep. No. 96–958) are the committee reports accompanying this Act.

In TAMA, clients of an investment adviser sued under the Investment Advisers Act — the ICA's sibling statute, enacted the same day in 1940. The Court split the difference: all nine Justices agreed that Section 215's declaration that violative contracts "shall be void" implied a limited private right to sue for rescission, but a 5–4 majority refused to imply a damages remedy under the Act's antifraud provision. TAMA matters here because Section 47(b) of the ICA was textually identical to Section 215 when TAMA was decided — meaning, as the majority concedes, that Section 47(b) indisputably carried an implied rescission right as of 1979. The whole case therefore turns on what Congress did to that right when it rewrote Section 47(b) the following year: the majority reads the 1980 rewrite as eliminating it; the dissent reads the rewrite as codifying it.

Rescission is the unwinding of a contract: the agreement is treated as if it never existed, and each side returns what it received (called restitution), restoring the parties to their pre-contract positions. It is an alternative to damages, which leave the contract in place and compensate for losses. The remedy/cause-of-action distinction the Court draws is the analytical hinge of the case: a cause of action is the legal right to bring a suit at all, while a remedy is what a court can award once a suit is properly before it. The Court's position is that Section 47(b) speaks only to the second question — telling courts when they may or may not deny rescission — and is silent on the first. Justice Jackson's dissent contests this, arguing rescission has historically been understood as an affirmative right a party may sue to obtain.

Egbert v. Boule arose in a different doctrinal lane — implied damages remedies for constitutional violations under Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents (1971), not statutory interpretation. The plaintiff, owner of a bed-and-breakfast straddling the U.S.–Canada border (the "Smuggler's Inn"), sued a Border Patrol agent for excessive force and retaliation. The Court refused to extend Bivens, holding that creating damages remedies is a legislative function in all but the narrowest circumstances. Its appearance here shows the Court treating the two doctrines as expressions of a single separation-of-powers principle: courts do not create causes of action, whether the underlying right comes from a statute or the Constitution.

Sandoval is the foundational modern case on implied rights of action, cited throughout this opinion. In a 5–4 decision by Justice Scalia, the Court held that private parties could not sue to enforce disparate-impact regulations issued under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, because nothing in the statute's text displayed congressional intent to create a private remedy. Sandoval established the framework the Court applies here: a statute must contain "rights-creating language" focused on the persons protected (not the persons regulated), and an express enforcement scheme elsewhere in the statute counts against implying private remedies. The "one last drink" line the Court quotes — refusing the invitation to return to the old habit of implying rights of action — comes directly from Sandoval.

Borak is the high-water mark of the era the Court describes. A unanimous Court held that a shareholder could sue under Section 14(a) of the Securities Exchange Act for misleading proxy statements, even though the statute nowhere authorized private suits, reasoning that private enforcement was a "necessary supplement" to SEC action. For the next decade, federal courts routinely inferred private rights of action under this purposive approach. The retrenchment began with Cort v. Ash (1975), which imposed a four-factor test, and accelerated through the late 1970s. Borak has never been formally overruled — its specific holding about proxy suits survives — but the Court has repeatedly described its method as abandoned.

A "private right of action" is the legal authorization for a private person or company — as opposed to a government agency — to file a lawsuit to enforce a statute. Some statutes grant this expressly ("any person aggrieved may bring a civil action"). An implied private right of action is one a court finds in a statute that never says so directly, inferred from the statute's text and structure. Whether and when courts should infer such rights is one of the longest-running methodological debates in federal courts law: from the 1960s through the mid-1970s the Supreme Court inferred them freely; since then it has grown steadily more restrictive, treating the creation of causes of action as a job for Congress alone. This case applies that modern, restrictive framework.

Control share acquisition statutes exist in roughly half the states and are a standard anti-takeover device for ordinary corporations: they strip or suspend the voting rights of shares acquired above specified ownership thresholds (in Maryland, starting at one-tenth of voting power) unless the other shareholders vote to restore them. The Supreme Court upheld this category of statute for ordinary corporations in CTS Corp. v. Dynamics Corp. of America (1987). For closed-end funds, however, their use was long considered off-limits: a 2010 SEC staff no-action letter (the "Boulder letter") concluded that a fund opting into the MCSAA would violate Section 18(i)'s equal-voting-rights requirement. The SEC staff withdrew the Boulder letter in May 2020, stating it would not recommend enforcement against funds that opt in with reasonable care. That reversal is what opened the door for funds like petitioners to adopt the resolutions Saba challenged here. Maryland is also the dominant state of incorporation for closed-end funds, in part because of defenses like the MCSAA.

Saba Capital is a roughly $6 billion New York hedge fund founded in 2009 by Boaz Weinstein, a former Deutsche Bank credit trader. It is the most prolific closed-end fund activist in the market, with campaigns against fund families including Nuveen, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and — in the United Kingdom, where closed-end funds are called investment trusts — Edinburgh Worldwide and Herald Investment Trust, among others. Saba's litigation under the Investment Company Act has been a recurring feature of these campaigns: the Second Circuit case the Court cites here, Saba Capital CEF Opportunities 1 v. Nuveen Floating Rate Income Fund, was a prior Saba win against a fund's control share defenses. Saba even operates an exchange-traded fund (ticker: CEFS) dedicated to the discounted closed-end fund strategy.

The Court's description omits the market dynamic that drives this entire dispute: because a closed-end fund's share price is set by trading rather than by the value of its holdings, shares frequently trade at a "discount" to net asset value (NAV) — often 10–15% below what the fund's underlying portfolio is worth per share. This gap is the economic engine of closed-end fund activism, sometimes called "closed-end fund arbitrage": an activist buys shares at the discounted market price, then pressures the fund to take actions that let shareholders cash out at full NAV — tender offers, share buybacks, liquidation, or conversion to an open-end fund. The activist pockets the difference between the discounted purchase price and NAV.

"Vacate and remand" wipes out the lower court's judgment and sends the case back, but it does not decide who wins. Keathley has not won his personal-injury suit — he has won the right to have the judicial-estoppel question reconsidered under the correct standard. On remand, the Fifth Circuit (or the district court, if the Fifth Circuit passes the case down) must now weigh the totality of the circumstances, which would include the evidence the old rule excluded: Keathley's affidavit that he believed telling his bankruptcy lawyer was sufficient, his counsel's affidavit that he received no benefit from the nondisclosure, his prompt amendment of the schedules once the issue surfaced, and the Chapter 13 trustee's staff attorney's statement that the timing was consistent with common local practice. If judicial estoppel is again applied even under that standard, the negligence claims remain dismissed; if not, the case proceeds toward trial on the merits of the 2021 accident.

"Assuming without deciding" is a technique by which a court accepts a proposition for the sake of argument so it can resolve a case on narrower grounds, while leaving the assumed question open for a future case. The list of what this opinion does not decide is striking: whether judicial estoppel applies in bankruptcy at all; whether "inadvertence or mistake" actually operates as an exception; whether bad faith is required (footnote 5 expressly declines to resolve that dispute, which the parties briefed at length); and whether a continuing duty to disclose even exists (footnote 1). The holding is confined to one point — if there is an inadvertence inquiry, it must consider the totality of the circumstances. Both concurrences signal appetite for the bigger questions: Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, questions whether federal courts have authority to apply judicial estoppel at all, and Justice Sotomayor doubts the doctrine ever makes sense while a bankruptcy remains open.

"Equity" refers to a body of law that developed in England's Court of Chancery as a flexible, fairness-based alternative to the rigid common-law courts. American federal courts merged law and equity in 1938, but doctrines classified as "equitable" — injunctions, estoppel, tolling — still carry equity's case-by-case character. The two cases quoted here both involved equitable tolling of deadlines: Holmberg v. Armbrecht (1946) held that federal equitable claims are not mechanically bound by state limitations periods, and Holland v. Florida (2010) held that a death-row prisoner's missed habeas deadline could be excused based on all the circumstances, rejecting a lower court's rigid attorney-negligence rule. The analytical move in this opinion — equitable doctrine, therefore no mechanical two-factor test — is the same one Holland made, and it is the entire engine of the Court's reasoning.

This is the only case in which the Supreme Court has ever applied judicial estoppel, and its facts were far afield from bankruptcy. It was a border dispute filed directly in the Supreme Court under its original jurisdiction over suits between states: New Hampshire claimed its boundary with Maine ran along the Maine shore of the Piscataqua River, which would have placed the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in New Hampshire. The Court held New Hampshire was judicially estopped because, in 1970s litigation against Maine before the same Court, it had agreed the boundary ran down the middle of the river — and had benefited from that position. The 2001 opinion listed three non-exclusive factors for the doctrine and, in a passing sentence, suggested it might not apply where the earlier position resulted from "inadvertence or mistake." That single sentence is the textual hook for the entire body of lower-court law this case reviews.

A "circuit split" — disagreement among the regional federal courts of appeals on the same legal question — is the single most common reason the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case (see Supreme Court Rule 10(a)). Here the split was 5–2 among the circuits to have addressed it: the Fifth and Tenth Circuits used the narrow two-factor test (knowledge of the claim plus any potential motive to conceal), while the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits examined all the circumstances, including evidence of the debtor's actual intent. The Eleventh Circuit is notable in that group: it originally followed an approach like the Fifth Circuit's, then repudiated it in a 2017 en banc decision, Slater v. United States Steel Corp. — a reversal the Court cites favorably throughout this opinion. The practical effect of the split was that identical debtor conduct preserved a lawsuit in Atlanta but ended it in New Orleans.

Two pieces of citation shorthand here. "Per curiam" ("by the court") means the opinion was issued in the court's name without a signed author — typically used for decisions a panel considers routine applications of settled precedent. The "WL" citation means the Fifth Circuit's decision was unpublished: it appears only in the Westlaw database, not the official Federal Reporter, and under Fifth Circuit rules is non-precedential. The combination is telling — the panel treated the outcome as compelled by existing circuit law, while Judge Catharina Haynes wrote separately to say that precedent produced the wrong result on these facts. A concurrence of that kind, agreeing the panel's hands are tied while flagging the rule as flawed, is a classic signal to the full circuit or the Supreme Court that review is warranted. Certiorari followed seven months later.

Summary judgment (Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56) allows a court to decide a case without trial when there is "no genuine dispute as to any material fact" and one side is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. Here it meant Keathley's negligence claims were never tried: no jury ever heard evidence about the car accident or the construction company's driver. The case was dismissed entirely on the threshold question of whether Keathley's bankruptcy omission barred him from suing at all. Notably, Keathley submitted sworn affidavits — his own and his bankruptcy counsel's — saying the omission was an honest mistake, but under the Fifth Circuit's two-factor rule the district court was not permitted to weigh that evidence, which is the rigidity the Supreme Court found erroneous.

Collier on Bankruptcy, first published in 1898 — the same year as the modern Bankruptcy Act's predecessor — is the preeminent treatise on American bankruptcy law and among the most frequently cited secondary sources in federal courts. A "treatise" is a comprehensive scholarly commentary on an area of law; courts cite treatises not as binding authority but as distilled expert consensus. The Court relies on a second major treatise later in the opinion: Wright & Miller's Federal Practice and Procedure, the standard multi-volume reference on federal courts and civil procedure. When the Supreme Court grounds a proposition in Collier or Wright & Miller, it is signaling that the point reflects settled professional understanding rather than a contested position.

This footnote quietly reserves a significant threshold question. The Bankruptcy Code expressly requires disclosure of assets at the time of filing, but courts disagree about whether a Chapter 13 debtor has an ongoing statutory duty to amend his schedules when new assets — like a personal-injury claim — arise mid-case. The amicus brief cited here, from the National Consumer Bankruptcy Rights Center, documented a split among lower courts on the question. Both parties litigated this case on the shared assumption that a continuing duty exists, so the Court accepted that premise without endorsing it. If no continuing duty exists, there arguably was no "omission" to estop in the first place — meaning a future case could unwind this entire line of doctrine at an even more fundamental level.

The "estate" is the legal entity created the moment a bankruptcy petition is filed — a pool comprising essentially everything the debtor owns, which becomes the source of creditor recovery. A lawsuit (or the right to bring one) counts as property of the estate just like a house or bank account. The Chapter 13 wrinkle cited here, 11 U.S.C. § 1306(a)(1), is what makes this case possible: in Chapter 13, unlike Chapter 7, the estate continues to absorb property the debtor acquires after filing, for as long as the case stays open. Keathley's car accident happened in August 2021 — twenty months after he filed for bankruptcy — but because his five-year plan was still running, the personal-injury claim arising from that accident belonged to the bankruptcy estate the moment it arose.

The Bankruptcy Code offers individuals two main routes. Chapter 7 ("liquidation") sells the debtor's non-exempt assets to pay creditors, after which most remaining debts are discharged — the process typically takes a few months. Chapter 13 (sometimes called the "wage earner's plan") lets the debtor keep all property in exchange for committing future income to a court-approved repayment plan lasting three to five years. The Keathleys' plan was notable: it provided for repayment of 100% of creditors' claims, interest-free. Many Chapter 13 plans pay unsecured creditors only a fraction of what they are owed, so the creditors here were positioned to recover everything except interest — a fact that becomes relevant to the "motive to conceal" analysis, since the only hypothetical benefit the courts below identified was avoiding interest or an accelerated timeline.

Judicial estoppel is one of several distinct "estoppel" doctrines, and the differences matter in this case. Equitable estoppel protects a party who relied on another's representation and was prejudiced when that party changed positions — it requires reliance and prejudice by the party invoking it. Collateral estoppel (issue preclusion) and res judicata (claim preclusion) prevent re-litigating issues or claims already decided. Judicial estoppel is different from all of these: it protects the courts rather than any party, and the party invoking it need not show it relied on or was harmed by the earlier position. That is why Buddy Ayers Construction — a stranger to the bankruptcy — could invoke it at all. The doctrine traces to an 1857 Tennessee Supreme Court decision, Hamilton v. Zimmerman, and remained a minority rule for over a century before spreading through the federal courts in recent decades.

In legal proceedings, a "colloquy" is a formal dialogue — typically between the court and the parties, or between attorneys and jurors — that is placed on the record. This transcript is labeled a colloquy because it records only the prosecutors' legal instructions, video presentations, and interactions with grand jurors. Agent A's sworn testimony is transcribed separately (beginning at PDF page 39 with a new title page). The distinction matters because it is the colloquy — not the testimony — that contains the exchanges later identified as problematic: the vouching statement, the juror dismissals, and the prosecutor's expressions of disappointment.

Agent A's testimony was cut off mid-examination during a question about his vehicle's law enforcement lights. The transcript does not explain why. News reports indicate the session ended because the audio recording equipment's batteries died and could not be replaced, though the full circumstances remain unclear. Because Agent A's testimony was incomplete, prosecutors returned for a third session on October 23, 2025 — the session documented in Part 1 of these transcripts — where Agent A testified again from the beginning. That third session resulted in the grand jury voting to indict. The abrupt ending meant this grand jury never deliberated on or voted on the charges after this presentation.

The lead prosecutor's expression of disappointment that grand jurors chose to leave — rather than stay to hear the government's witness — was later cited as part of a pattern of conduct that pressured jurors. Grand jurors who recuse themselves from a particular case are exercising a right recognized by the court: they may step aside if they feel unable to deliberate fairly. A prosecutor characterizing that decision as "disappointing" — particularly in front of the remaining jurors — risks signaling that recusal is disfavored, which could discourage others from exercising the same right.

This is a second juror excusing herself during this session, separate from the juror who called the case "a crock of shit." Federal grand juries require a minimum of 16 members present to conduct business, and at least 12 votes to return an indictment. By this point in the October 16 session, multiple jurors had departed — some after the prosecutor's direct questioning about whether they could "be fair." The cumulative effect of these departures was to alter the composition of the deliberating body. When prosecutors returned for a third session on October 23, they presented to a panel that no longer included the most vocal skeptics.

The foreperson's distinction is a correct statement of law: the grand jury decides only whether there is probable cause to charge, not whether the defendant is guilty. That determination happens at trial, where the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt" and the defendant has counsel, can cross-examine witnesses, and can present a defense. The foreperson attributes this framing to U.S. Attorney Boutros from the prior session. While legally accurate, the statement was being used in context to encourage remaining jurors to vote for indictment — effectively arguing that their reservations were more appropriate for a trial jury than a grand jury.

The foreperson is referencing U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros's personal appearance before the grand jury during the October 9 session — the first presentation, which ended without an indictment. It is highly unusual for a U.S. Attorney (the chief federal prosecutor for a district) to personally address a sitting grand jury. Grand jury presentations are almost always handled by line prosecutors (Assistant U.S. Attorneys). Boutros later acknowledged the appearance in a five-page "special report," explaining he spoke to three grand juries that day "given prior grand jury disturbances and potential tension." Defense attorneys argued the appearance was designed to lend the personal authority of the U.S. Attorney's office to pressure jurors toward indictment.

The question of who may excuse a grand juror — and under what circumstances — became a central issue in the case's collapse. Prosecutors do not have the authority to dismiss grand jurors; that power belongs to the supervising court. A juror who voluntarily recuses from a particular case is different from a juror being told to leave. Judge Perry later found that the manner in which jurors were excused during these proceedings constituted an "improper juror dismissal" — meaning the distinction between a juror choosing to leave and being instructed to leave was blurred. The exchange that follows this moment — including the juror's outburst — resulted in at least two jurors departing before deliberations.

Grand jury independence — the power to refuse to indict even when prosecutors urge charges — is a constitutional safeguard rooted in the Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court has described the grand jury as belonging to "no branch of the institutional Government" and serving as "a kind of buffer or referee between the Government and the people" (United States v. Williams, 1992). This juror's blunt rejection of the case, while colorful, represents exactly the kind of independent judgment the grand jury system is designed to permit. Federal grand juries indict in approximately 99.97% of cases, making outright refusals extraordinarily rare. This exchange became a focal point in news coverage when the transcripts were unsealed.

There is no formal legal limit on how many times a prosecutor may present a case to a grand jury after a refusal to indict. However, the practice of re-presenting is unusual and raises due process concerns. Courts have recognized that repeated presentations — particularly when accompanied by changes to the jury's composition — can constitute prosecutorial abuse. The Second Circuit has held that a prosecutor may not "circumvent a previous grand jury's refusal to indict by simply presenting the case again to a more amenable panel" (United States v. Thompson, 2001). The juror's question suggests an awareness that something procedurally unusual was happening. The prosecutor's non-answer — "I don't think we have to worry about that" — and Skiba's quip that "the second time is the charm" were later scrutinized as reflecting a casual attitude toward the grand jury's prior refusal.

This statement was later identified by U.S. District Judge April Perry as improper "prosecutorial vouching." Vouching occurs when a prosecutor puts her personal credibility or prestige behind the government's case. By framing the grand jury's refusal to indict as her own failure — rather than a legitimate exercise of the jury's independent judgment — the prosecutor implicitly told jurors that the "correct" outcome was an indictment. Federal courts have held that vouching undermines the grand jury's constitutional role as an independent check on prosecutorial power. The Department of Justice's internal manual warns prosecutors against statements that could be perceived as pressuring grand jurors toward a particular outcome.

A prosecutor's contact with grand jurors outside the grand jury room — known as "ex parte" contact — is generally prohibited. Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(d) limits who may be present during grand jury sessions, and the Department of Justice's internal guidelines (Justice Manual § 9-11.010 et seq.) instruct prosecutors to avoid substantive communications with grand jurors outside the formal proceedings. The concern is that private conversations can exert undue influence on jurors without creating a record for judicial review. Here, the lead prosecutor places the conversations on the record voluntarily. This disclosure was later cited by the court as one of several procedural irregularities in the grand jury proceedings.

Agent A is referring to a September 24, 2025, shooting at an ICE field office in Dallas, Texas — two days before the Broadview incident. A gunman opened fire on the facility, killing two ICE employees and one contractor and injuring several others before being killed by responding officers. The attack was one of several incidents of violence targeting federal immigration personnel in 2025. Agent A's reference to this event is part of his testimony about his state of mind during the Broadview confrontation — specifically, his fear that the crowd's aggression could escalate to physical violence.

The Broadview Processing Center, located at 1930 Beach Street in Broadview, Illinois (a near-west suburb of Chicago), is a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility used for processing and staging immigration enforcement operations. In the fall of 2025, Broadview became a focal point for protests against the Trump administration's "Operation Midway Blitz," a large-scale immigration enforcement campaign focused on the Chicago area. Daily demonstrations drew hundreds of protesters, extensive media coverage, and a significant law enforcement response. The September 26, 2025, incident described in this transcript occurred during that broader protest movement.

The six defendants became publicly known as the "Broadview Six." They were: Michael Rabbitt, a 45th Ward Democratic committeeman; Katherine "Kat" Abughazaleh, a social media creator and candidate for Congress in Illinois's 9th District; Andre Martin, a campaign staffer for Abughazaleh; Catherine "Cat" Sharp, a candidate for the Cook County Board; Brian Straw, a Village of Oak Park trustee; and Joselyn Walsh, a musician. All were participants in ongoing protests at the Broadview ICE facility in the fall of 2025. Charges against Sharp and Walsh were dropped in March 2026; charges against the remaining four were ultimately dismissed with prejudice in May 2026 after the court identified prosecutorial errors in these grand jury proceedings.

A "true bill" is the formal term for a grand jury's decision to indict. When a grand jury votes to approve charges, it endorses the proposed indictment as a "true bill," and the case proceeds to arraignment and trial. A refusal to indict is called a "no true bill" or "no bill." In federal practice, at least 12 of the grand jury's 16 to 23 members must vote to indict. The term dates to English common law. Here, the prosecutors are asking the grand jury to return a true bill on both the felony conspiracy count and the individual misdemeanor counts for each defendant.

Probable cause — the standard the grand jury applies — is a significantly lower threshold than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard required for conviction at trial. Probable cause requires only that there is a reasonable basis to believe a crime was committed and the defendant committed it. The grand jury does not determine guilt; it determines only whether the case should proceed to trial. This lower standard, combined with the fact that only the prosecution presents evidence (no defense, no cross-examination, no judge), is why grand juries indict in the vast majority of cases — leading to the well-known legal aphorism that a grand jury would "indict a ham sandwich."

This October 23, 2025, session was the government's third attempt to secure an indictment. The first presentation, on October 9, ended without a vote after the lead prosecutor told jurors that if they didn't indict, she hadn't done her job explaining the law — a statement later identified by Judge Perry as improper "prosecutorial vouching." The second presentation, on October 16, ended mid-testimony when an earlier grand jury declined to indict and the government started over with different jurors. The "start over" referenced here means re-presenting the legal instructions and witness testimony from scratch to a reconstituted panel. In ordinary federal practice, a single grand jury presentation almost always results in an indictment; multiple presentations to secure one are highly unusual.

Federal grand jury proceedings are conducted in secret under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), which prohibits prosecutors, jurors, and court personnel from disclosing what occurs inside the grand jury room. No judge presides; no defense attorney is present; witnesses may not have counsel in the room. Grand jury secrecy serves several purposes identified by the Supreme Court: protecting witnesses from retaliation, preventing flight by targets, and encouraging full candor. The release of this transcript is extraordinary — courts almost never unseal grand jury materials. Here, U.S. District Judge April Perry ordered disclosure after finding that prosecutorial conduct during the proceedings warranted public scrutiny, a rare exception to the secrecy rule.

Section 111 is the primary federal statute for crimes against federal officers. In its basic form — charged here as a misdemeanor under § 111(a)(1) — it carries a maximum of one year imprisonment and covers forcibly assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating, or interfering with a federal officer. The statute escalates to a felony (up to 8 years) if the assault involves a deadly weapon or results in bodily injury under § 111(a)(2), and to up to 20 years under § 111(b). The misdemeanor version charged here is the lowest tier. Each defendant was charged with a separate § 111 count for their individual conduct, distinct from the single group conspiracy charge under § 372.

Section 372 is a Reconstruction-era statute originally enacted in 1861 to protect federal officials from organized resistance in the South. It is rarely charged in modern federal practice. The statute carries a maximum penalty of six years' imprisonment — making it a felony — and requires proof that two or more people conspired to impede a federal officer by force, intimidation, or threat. Federal prosecutors more commonly charge obstruction or assault statutes; the use of § 372 here was noted by legal commentators as unusual. A felony charge was significant because it required grand jury approval under the Fifth Amendment, whereas the companion misdemeanor charges under § 111 could have been brought by information (without a grand jury).

This is one of the traditional "maxims of equity" — principles courts apply when a party asks for discretionary, non-monetary relief such as an injunction or, as here, emergency treatment. The clean hands doctrine holds that a party who has itself acted improperly in the matter at hand cannot ask a court to exercise its equitable discretion in that party's favor. The brief deploys it as the legal hook for its timeline argument: a party that (as the brief alleges) filed in the wrong district, ignored state officials' communications for months, and asked to postpone a hearing cannot then claim entitlement to emergency speed. The doctrine doesn't bar a party's claims outright — it goes to whether the court should grant discretionary favors like expedited rulings.

SAVE — Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — is a database system run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services within the Department of Homeland Security. It was built in the late 1980s to let government agencies verify the immigration status of people applying for public benefits. Its records cover noncitizens and people who naturalized or otherwise acquired citizenship through the immigration system; it generally contains no records for U.S.-born citizens, who make up the large majority of registered voters. That structural gap is why using SAVE to check voter rolls is contested: a voter's absence from SAVE does not indicate the voter is a noncitizen. In 2025, DHS expanded SAVE to support bulk voter-list checks, including searches by Social Security number, and several states began running their rolls through it. (Note: this SAVE is unrelated to the "SAVE plan" student loan program or the proposed SAVE Act voting legislation.)

Powell is the Supreme Court's foundational decision on judicial enforcement of administrative records demands. (The citation as printed appears to contain a typographical error — the 1964 decision is reported at 379 U.S. 48.) In Powell, the Court held that before a court will enforce an IRS summons, the government must show that the investigation has a legitimate purpose, that the material sought is relevant to that purpose, that the government doesn't already have it, and that proper procedures were followed — and courts may refuse enforcement that would abuse judicial process. Powell's framework has been extended to administrative demands generally. The intervenors' argument, developed in their earlier briefing, is that Powell-style judicial scrutiny "supersedes" the more deferential, expedited approach of the 1962 Lynd decision — meaning DOJ must justify its demand for Georgia's voter file rather than receive automatic enforcement.

Two pieces of context. First, the case itself: "Kennedy" is Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and Theron Lynd was the voter registrar of Forrest County, Mississippi, who had registered virtually no Black voters and refused to let the Justice Department inspect his registration records under the Civil Rights Act of 1960 — the same Title III records statute at issue in this case. The Fifth Circuit ordered the records produced and emphasized the need for prompt enforcement; Lynd later became the first Southern registrar held in contempt for defying a federal voting-rights order. The brief's point is that DOJ is invoking a case about dismantling Jim Crow disenfranchisement in a very different posture. Second, why a 1962 Fifth Circuit case binds a Georgia federal court: when the Eleventh Circuit was carved out of the Fifth in 1981, it adopted all prior Fifth Circuit decisions as binding precedent (Bonner v. City of Prichard, 661 F.2d 1206 (11th Cir. 1981) (en banc)).

Arcia arose from Florida's 2012 effort to identify and remove suspected noncitizens from its voter rolls in the months before the presidential election, using database matching against driver's license and federal immigration records. The Eleventh Circuit held that this violated the NVRA's "90-day provision," which prohibits states from conducting programs that "systematically remove" ineligible voters within 90 days of a federal election. The pin-cited passage rejected Florida's argument that its program wasn't "systematic" because each flagged voter received individualized process: the court held that a removal program based on database matching is systematic regardless, because it relies on mass comparison rather than individualized information about specific voters. That holding — binding precedent in this district — is why the brief argues DOJ's planned comparison of Georgia's voter file against a federal database would be "systematic" no matter who performs it.

This Georgia suit is one of dozens of parallel cases. Beginning in the summer of 2025, DOJ sent demands to more than 30 states for their full voter registration files, including sensitive data such as driver's license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, and full dates of birth, then sued states that refused. Bellows is the Maine case: DOJ sued Secretary of State Shenna Bellows in September 2025, and on May 21, 2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Lance Walker — a 2018 Trump appointee — dismissed the suit, writing that under the Constitution, states are the primary regulators and administrators of federal elections. By the time of that ruling, federal courts had dismissed DOJ voter-file suits against several other states as well, including the Rhode Island (Amore) and Massachusetts (Galvin) decisions cited on pages 5–6 of this brief, and a Wisconsin suit dismissed the same day as Maine's. The ACLU — counsel for the intervenors here — reports involvement in more than 20 of these cases nationwide.

"Title III" refers to Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the third federal statute underlying DOJ's suit (alongside the NVRA and HAVA). Enacted to combat the systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters in the Jim Crow South, it requires election officials to retain all records relating to federal elections for 22 months (52 U.S.C. § 20701) and authorizes the Attorney General to demand inspection and copies of those records (52 U.S.C. § 20703). DOJ's complaint in this case alleges that Raffensperger violated the Act by refusing to turn over Georgia's unredacted statewide voter file; the Secretary of State provided the publicly available portion of the rolls but withheld confidential voter data protected under Georgia law. The quoted footnote from the Maine decision holds that whatever Title III's investigatory purposes, conducting voter list maintenance is not among them.

These are the two principal federal statutes governing voter registration. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), often called the "Motor Voter" law, requires states to offer voter registration at DMVs and other agencies, and its Section 8 requires states to conduct a general program making a "reasonable effort" to remove voters who have died or moved — while also restricting how and when removals can happen. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), passed after the disputed 2000 election, required every state to build a single computerized statewide voter registration database and to perform regular list maintenance on it (52 U.S.C. § 21083). Critically for this case, HAVA expressly leaves "the specific choices on the methods of complying" to "the discretion of the State" (52 U.S.C. § 21085) — the provision this brief quotes on page 4.

This brief never describes what the recusal motion actually alleges, so for context: on May 29, 2026, DOJ moved to disqualify U.S. District Judge Eleanor L. Ross under the federal recusal statute, 28 U.S.C. § 455(a), which requires a judge to step aside whenever her "impartiality might reasonably be questioned." DOJ's theory is that Judge Ross attended a primary-election celebration for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis — who prosecuted Donald Trump in Georgia's 2020 election-interference case before it was dismissed — and that a judge who attended such an event cannot impartially preside over a Trump administration election suit. DOJ's identification of Ross rests on inference: it matched press reports about an unnamed Eleventh Circuit judicial-misconduct review to Ross, who has not publicly confirmed she is the judge in question. Judge Ross was appointed by President Obama in 2014 and previously worked in the Fulton County District Attorney's office. The footnote on page 3 of this brief responds to the motion's merits: even if true, attendance at an event honoring someone who is neither a party nor a witness would not require recusal.

An intervenor is a nonparty that a court permits to join an existing lawsuit because it has an interest the original parties may not adequately protect (Fed. R. Civ. P. 24). Intervenor-defendants align with the defendant — here, Georgia's Secretary of State — but file their own briefs and make their own arguments. Common Cause is a nonpartisan government-accountability organization founded in 1970 by John W. Gardner, a former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare; it is a frequent litigant in voting and redistricting cases. Rosario Palacios is an individual Georgia voter whose registration data is contained in the voter file DOJ seeks. The intervenors are represented by the ACLU, the ACLU of Georgia, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Court sanctions and bar discipline are separate tracks. Everything else in this order — the fines, the pro hac vice revocations, the two-year bar from the Northern District of Mississippi — affects only the attorneys' ability to practice before this particular court. Only the state licensing authorities (here, the Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas bars, to which the Clerk is directed to send this order) can suspend or revoke a law license itself. Bar disciplinary bodies conduct their own independent investigations and evaluate the conduct under the rules of professional conduct — typically the duties of competence, candor toward the tribunal, and (for supervising attorneys) responsibility for others' work. A referral does not guarantee discipline; it starts a separate process with its own findings and outcomes. Two of the attorneys here, Ridgeway and McClinton, had already self-reported to the Mississippi Bar before the referral.

Local counsel requirements like this exist in nearly every federal district. The structure is deliberate: because the court has no licensing authority over an out-of-state attorney beyond the single case, the locally licensed "resident attorney" serves as the court's point of accountability — someone whose ongoing ability to practice in the district depends on the proceeding being conducted properly. The rule's language makes that responsibility substantive, not ceremonial: the resident attorney is "responsible for the conduct of the proceeding," which is why Ridgeway and McClinton were sanctioned despite neither drafting the tainted filings nor knowing AI had been used. Separately, Rule 11's certification duty attaches to every signatory of a filing, regardless of who drafted it.

Johnson v. Dunn is one of the most prominent AI-sanctions cases to date because it involved a major firm. Attorneys from Butler Snow LLP — a 350-plus-lawyer firm — were defending the former Alabama Department of Corrections commissioner in prison-conditions litigation when a partner used ChatGPT to generate supporting citations for two motions and filed them without verification, despite the firm having warned its attorneys about AI citation risks since 2023. In July 2025, Judge Anna Manasco publicly reprimanded three attorneys, disqualified them from the case, and referred them to the Alabama State Bar — while declining monetary fines on the reasoning that fines had proven an insufficient deterrent. The passage quoted in this order rejects the argument that fake citations are excusable when the legal propositions they support happen to be correct, calling that "a stroke of pure luck."

Fletcher, decided February 18, 2026 — less than four months before this order — is the Fifth Circuit's first published precedent sanctioning an attorney for AI-hallucinated filings, which is why this order leans on it so heavily. The underlying case was a Fair Credit Reporting Act suit alleging identity theft. On appeal, the plaintiff's appellate counsel filed a reply brief containing numerous fabricated quotations and citations that appeared to be AI-generated; the Fifth Circuit issued its own show-cause order, found that counsel had used AI to draft substantial portions of the brief without verification and was not forthcoming in her response, and fined her $2,500 under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 46(c) and the court's inherent authority. Fletcher made it binding circuit law that ignorance of generative AI's risks is no longer an excuse — the holding this court invokes in rejecting Wilson's claimed unawareness.

Chambers v. NASCO (1991) is the Supreme Court's leading decision on the inherent power of federal courts to sanction bad-faith conduct. The case arose from a Louisiana television station sale gone wrong: after agreeing to sell his station to NASCO, Chambers engaged in a sustained campaign of bad-faith litigation tactics to frustrate the deal, and the district court ordered him to pay nearly $1 million in the opposing side's attorney's fees under its inherent authority. The Supreme Court affirmed, 5–4, holding that the inherent power to sanction survives even where rules and statutes (like Rule 11) cover the same conduct. This is the authority that lets the court here go beyond Rule 11 in sanctioning Wilson and Williams based on findings of bad faith.

The "snapshot rule" means Rule 11 compliance is measured at the instant the attorney signs the document — like a photograph taken at that moment. What the attorney knew or did afterward is irrelevant to whether a violation occurred: later corrections cannot cure a violation, and later-discovered problems cannot retroactively create one. The rule traces to Thomas v. Capital Security Services, Inc., 836 F.2d 866 (5th Cir. 1988), an en banc decision that remains the Fifth Circuit's foundational Rule 11 case and is cited repeatedly in this order — including for the principle, applied in the sanctions section, that courts must impose the least severe sanction adequate to achieve deterrence.

Cooter & Gell is a 1990 Supreme Court decision and one of the foundational Rule 11 cases. It arose from an antitrust complaint that a law firm filed and then voluntarily dismissed; the Supreme Court held that a voluntary dismissal does not strip the district court of jurisdiction to impose Rule 11 sanctions for the filing, and that appellate courts review Rule 11 determinations only for abuse of discretion. Its statement that Rule 11's central purpose is "to deter baseless filings in district court" — the language quoted in this order — is among the most frequently cited formulations of the rule's purpose in federal case law.

"Hallucination" is the term of art for generative AI producing plausible-sounding but fabricated output. Large language models generate statistically likely text rather than retrieving verified facts, so a hallucinated case citation typically arrives complete with a realistic case name, reporter citation, court, year, and pinpoint page — making it indistinguishable from a real citation without checking the source. The first widely publicized court sanction for this conduct was Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (S.D.N.Y. June 2023), in which Judge P. Kevin Castel fined two New York attorneys and their firm $5,000 after they submitted ChatGPT-fabricated cases in a personal injury suit and initially stood by the citations when questioned. Researchers have since catalogued hundreds of similar incidents in courts worldwide.

Pro hac vice (Latin: "for this occasion") is the mechanism by which an attorney who is not licensed in a jurisdiction may be specially admitted to handle a single case there. Admission is discretionary, governed by each court's local rules, and typically conditioned on the out-of-state attorney associating with a locally licensed attorney who remains answerable to the court. Both out-of-state attorneys in this case — Wilson (Louisiana) and Williams (Texas) — appeared pro hac vice, which is why the court's sanctions include revoking those admissions. As the order later notes, pro hac vice status is a privilege, not a right, and is subject to revocation at the court's discretion.

Most Rule 11 sanctions proceedings begin with a motion from the opposing party, which triggers a 21-day "safe harbor" under Rule 11(c)(2): the motion must be served on the offending party first, giving them 21 days to withdraw or correct the challenged filing before the motion can be filed with the court. When the court initiates sanctions itself — as here — Rule 11(c)(3) instead authorizes an order to show cause, and the safe harbor does not apply. There is no opportunity to cure by withdrawing the filing. In this case, neither party moved for sanctions; the court discovered the fabricated citations during its own review of the summary judgment and attorney-fee briefing.

Chaffin (1973) addressed whether the so-called "trial penalty" — the practice of receiving a harsher sentence after exercising the right to trial rather than pleading guilty — violates a criminal defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. The defendant had been convicted and sentenced to 15 years, won a new trial on appeal, and then received a life sentence from the second jury. The Supreme Court held 6-3 that this did not unconstitutionally burden the right to trial. The Court's use of Chaffin here is a powerful a fortiori argument: if the near-certainty of a longer prison sentence does not impermissibly burden a criminal defendant's jury right under the Sixth Amendment, the uncertain prospect of reputational harm from an outstanding FCC forfeiture order surely cannot burden the civil jury right under the Seventh Amendment.

Jarkesy was a landmark 2024 Supreme Court decision — also authored by Chief Justice Roberts — that significantly curtailed the enforcement powers of federal agencies. The Court held 6-3 that the Securities and Exchange Commission violated the Seventh Amendment by adjudicating securities fraud claims and imposing civil penalties through its in-house administrative courts with agency-appointed administrative law judges. The critical distinction from this case: the SEC's penalties were immediately enforceable (the SEC could garnish wages and seize tax refunds), and no jury trial was available at any point in the process. The FCC's enforcement scheme, by contrast, requires the government to prove its case to a jury before collecting any penalty. The Court uses Jarkesy to illustrate the constitutional line: what matters is not whether an agency imposes a penalty label, but whether a jury ultimately decides the facts before anyone has to pay.

The opinion parenthetically identifies the trial judge as "Augustus Hand, J." Augustus Noble Hand (1869–1954) was a federal district judge for the Southern District of New York and one of the most respected trial court judges of the 20th century. He served alongside his more famous cousin, Judge Learned Hand, on the federal bench in New York — both were considered among the finest judges never to serve on the Supreme Court. In this 1920 case, Judge Hand appointed an auditor to investigate disputed facts about coal deliveries. The auditor's report served as prima facie evidence before the jury, which retained the "ultimate determination of issues of fact." The Court treats Peterson and Meeker as a pair: both establish that preliminary fact-finding by a non-jury body is constitutional so long as the jury gets the last word.

Meeker involved the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the first major federal regulatory agency, created by Congress in 1887 to regulate the railroad industry. The Hepburn Act of 1906 authorized the ICC to determine damages owed to shippers who had been charged unreasonable freight rates and to issue orders directing railroads to pay. But the ICC's determination was not self-executing: the shipper could enforce the order only by filing suit and succeeding in a subsequent jury trial, where the ICC's findings served as prima facie evidence — meaning the jury could accept or reject them. The Court's reliance on this 111-year-old precedent underscores a recurring pattern in administrative law: agencies have long been permitted to make initial findings so long as a jury retains the final word.

The unconstitutional conditions doctrine holds that the government may not condition a benefit — or structure an avoidance of a burden — on the relinquishment of a constitutional right. Classic examples include: the government cannot condition a building permit on a property owner surrendering unrelated land (Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, 1987), or condition public employment on the employee waiving free speech rights (Perry v. Sindermann, 1972). The carriers' argument was a variation on this theme: by structuring the forfeiture scheme so that paying "voluntarily" and accepting deferential appellate review is far easier than insisting on a jury trial and risking years of uncertainty, the Commission effectively coerced them into waiving their Seventh Amendment right. The Court rejects this framing because, if the government never sues to collect, the jury right never attaches in the first place — so there is no right to be "coerced" out of.

The term literally means "trial anew" and denotes a completely fresh proceeding from scratch. In the administrative law context, this is an unusually robust form of judicial review. Most challenges to federal agency action are reviewed under the deferential "arbitrary and capricious" standard of the Administrative Procedure Act, where courts give substantial weight to the agency's factual findings and rarely hear live witnesses. A trial de novo, by contrast, starts as if the agency proceeding never happened — the court makes its own independent findings of fact, hears its own evidence, and owes no deference to the agency's prior conclusions. This distinction is the linchpin of the opinion: because § 504 guarantees a full trial de novo with a jury before any penalty can be collected, the FCC's initial administrative proceedings are merely preliminary, not a final deprivation of property.

These penalties — totaling roughly $104 million — are among the largest forfeitures in FCC history. For context, the FCC's statutory forfeiture authority for each violation is capped at specific amounts (currently $585,339 per violation for common carriers). The large totals here reflect the Commission's calculation that the carriers committed thousands of individual violations affecting millions of customers' location data. Both AT&T and Verizon paid the full amounts under protest before seeking judicial review — a decision that becomes legally significant in this opinion. The Court holds the orders were not binding and the carriers could have simply refused to pay. Justice Thomas's dissent argues that penalizing the carriers for complying in good faith with what appeared to be a mandatory order is unjust.