The Kern County Sheriff’s Office requested the public’s help Friday in locating a juvenile who went missing March 16.Read more

The Kern County Sheriff’s Office is requesting the public’s help in finding a 47-year-old man who went missing Jan. 3.Read more

For all the disruption Kern’s oil industry has endured in recent years, a new study shows it has continued to contribute strongly to the local economy while providing exceptionally good pay relative to the amount of education it requires.Read more

The Bakersfield Police Department asked for the public’s help Friday in identifying three people who it said are related to credit card fraud at local businesses between March 6 and March 10.Read more

Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA v Amarin Pharma presents a complex dispute between Amarin, the manufacturer of Vascepa, a prescription medication to reduce heart disease, and Hikma, which markets a generic substitute for Vascepa. With a great deal of simplification, the general topic is how hard it should be to hold Hikma responsible when pharmacists dispense Hikma’s substitute to patients who have been prescribed Vascepa for a use that infringes Amarin’s patents. The lower courts held that the evidence was enough for Amarin to proceed on that infringement claim and Hikma is asking the justices to overturn that ruling.The problem arises because Vascepa, like many pharmaceuticals, has some uses that are patented and some that are not. The FDA has approved multiple uses of Vascepa. For the on-patent uses, it would infringe patents held by Amarin for doctors in those situations to prescribe, pharmacies to dispense, or patients to use the generic version. But the FDA also has approved Vascepa for some uses that are off-patent, which is to say that no patent protects Amarin from the competition of generics for patients that have those conditions.The statutory framework for generics, the Hatch-Waxman Act, addresses the situation, offering the generic manufacturer seeking approval of its pharmaceutical the option to submit a certification asking approval of its drug on the premise that it will market the pharmaceutical only for the off-patent use. If the FDA approves that, as it did here, the generic manufacturer uses a so-called “skinny label,” which describes use of the generic only for the off-patent uses.In reality, whatever those labels might say, it is quite common for pharmacies to dispense the generic for the on-patent use. That is true in part because of the reality of prescription writing – prescriptions typically identify the pharmaceutical but not the reason for the prescription, so it is impossible for the pharmacy to know whether dispensing the generic would infringe the branded manufacturer’s patents. It also reflects state generic substitution laws, which allow (if not command) pharmacists to substitute generics whenever they are less expensive for the customer than the branded pharmaceutical.Against that backdrop, the branded manufacturer here (Amarin) is suing Hikma (the generics manufacturer) contending that Hikma is responsible for the dispensing and use of its generic product in settings protected by Amarin’s patents. Because even Amarin acknowledges that Hikma itself has not infringed Amarin’s patents, the suit arises under a provision of the Patent Act imposing secondary liability on Hikma for infringement by others. Crucially, that statute permits liability only if Hikma “actively induces” the infringement by the pharmacies and customers. So the key question for the justices is whether the activities of Hikma are enough to justify liability under that standard.Amarin characterizes Hikma’s activities as “active encouragement” through the medium of advertising. It points first to the generic manufacturer’s website, which has referred at times to the on-patent use of Vascepa as a potential use of its generic. It also points to press releases about the generic substitute, which describe the total size of the potential market for Vascepa, even though a strong majority of Vascepa’s revenues comes from the on-patent rather than off-patent uses. Finally, related to those, Amarin contends that the “skinny” label that the generic manufacturer uses includes information that was relevant only to the on-patent use of the pharmaceutical.Hikma makes two points in response. The first is to emphasize the high standard of the statute, which applies only if the generic manufacturer “actively induces infringement” of the branded manufacturer’s patents. Whatever one can say about Hikma’s conduct, it contends it does not amount to “actively inducing” pharmacists to dispense its product. Among other things, it argues that the materials on which the branded manufacturer relies were unlikely to come to the attention of pharmacists and that the reason pharmacists dispense the generic is much more a function of state law than anything the generic manufacturer has said.Hikma gets strong support on that point from an amicus brief of a large and impressive group of academics – including several of the nation’s leading patent law scholars, as well as noted IP economists and business scholars. They argue that the relevant statute requires affirmative proof of some direct and positive step before holding the generic manufacturer responsible for “actively” inducing the infringement of another. In their view, none of the activities alleged here approach that standard of proof.The second point that Hikma makes is that upholding liability here essentially would force generic manufacturers to withdraw from the market whenever a pharmaceutical still has important on-patent uses. That outcome, Hikma argues, undermines the provisions of the Hatch-Waxman Act designed to facilitate generic entry. An amicus brief from the government buttresses that argument, suggesting that Amarin’s position is little more than an end-run around the design of the Hatch-Waxman Act.This is a complex dispute, and the stakes are high – as it well might affect the availability of generics currently routinely dispensed for major conditions. My sense is that the justices will situate this case with their recent cases on secondary liability in the intellectual property context. And those decisions – such as Cox Communications from just a few weeks ago – have tended to be quite forceful in setting a high bar for the imposition of secondary liability. So I would expect a bench that starts off receptive to Hikma’s position.Read more

On Monday, April 27, the Supreme Court will hear Chatrie v. United States, a case about police access to geofence data, a digital record of a person’s location. This case could serve as a landmark intervention in Fourth Amendment doctrine in the digital age – or a more limited adjustment of those rules. The court could also greenlight or restrain “reverse” searches, a key investigative tactic of the digital age. Either way, this is the most important case on digital privacy the court has heard in years.BackgroundThe Supreme Court last weighed in on the digital Fourth Amendment in 2017. In Carpenter v. United States, the court addressed whether the police had to get a warrant before accessing a certain kind of digital location data, cell-site location information. Cell phones generate CSLI anytime they are on by scanning for the nearest cell tower with strong service. When a cell phone connects to a tower, that tower then records that connection in CSLI logs. A phone’s location can be tracked across time and space by reviewing those logs.Writing for a 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts’ Carpenter opinion held that the police must get a warrant before reviewing seven or more days of CSLI for a person’s phone. According to the court, reviewing that amount of location data without a warrant violates a person’s “reasonable expectation of privacy,” which is the legal threshold the court uses to determine whether constitutional protections kick in. The court also enumerated several factors that can be used to measure one’s reasonable expectations of privacy, such as how much the data reveals about a person, the amount of data gathered, and whether the user voluntarily generated the data.Although Carpenter expanded Fourth Amendment protections for digital location, lower courts have spent the last decade contending with its boundaries.Enter: geofence dataAmong these unsettled questions is whether police need a warrant to access geofence data, another kind of digital location data. Geofence data generally refers to location information collected by cellphone apps. If you have encountered a prompt on your phone that asks you whether you’d like to allow an app to use your location, you’re likely generating the kind of data at issue in Chatrie. Chatrie specifically involved data generated by a Google service called Location History. In Google’s case, this location information was created by combining information from cell towers but also on GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth signals.In Carpenter, police sought location information about a particular suspect. But the geofence data in Chatrie is useful in a different situation – when the police have no suspect identified. Police can request information from a private company holding app location data for a list of users at a certain location during a certain timeframe to generate leads.Specifically, in Chatrie, the police asked Google for a list of all users who had been recorded near a bank for an hour during which the bank was robbed. The police’s interaction with Google involved three key steps. First, they served Google with a warrant for an anonymized list of all phones in a 17.5-acre area around the bank. The remaining two steps took place without any further legal process. The police next asked for location information of a subset of those phones within a two-hour period before and after the original timeframe. Finally, the police asked Google to deanonymize three devices whose movements after the robbery matched other details of the investigation. This deanonymization revealed Chatrie was associated with one of those phones.This investigative tactic can be extremely useful for the police. It can help them narrow down or identify suspects when they otherwise have none. But it also raises constitutional questions. The central question is whether accessing this kind of digital location record violates the Fourth Amendment. The petitioner raises a number of arguments as to why. Below I explore two of the most central: that accessing this data invades one’s reasonable expectation of privacy and that the police procedure is an unconstitutional general warrant. An opportunity to clarify CarpenterInitially, this case might seem quite similar to Carpenter – both involve digital location information. But Chatrie involves a few critical differences.First, the Carpenter factors don’t neatly come out the same way. Most prominent is the issue of voluntariness, which matters to Fourth Amendment inquiries because of what is known as the third-party doctrine. As the court has held, when a person voluntarily shares information with a third party, she loses a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information. In Carpenter, the court found that because cell phones automatically connect to towers without any voluntary action on the part of the user, the resulting CLSI falls outside the bounds of the third-party doctrine. But in Chatrie, the situation looks different. The user arguably “opts-in” to app-based location services by clicking yes when prompted and agreeing to the terms of service. Mr. Chatrie disagrees. He counters that this interaction with Google is essentially “consent by adhesion” – that his consent should not practically count given the unequal bargaining power and knowledge between him and Google. As such, he argues that he did not meaningfully voluntarily surrender his location information.But behind this voluntariness debate is a bigger question: is there something fundamentally private about location data? Let us take the example of tower dumps. Tower dumps work much the same as geofence data, except that the location data is CSLI (which the court has held one does not expressly opt into), not the hybrid location data stored by apps (which one arguably does). Carpenter established that CSLI data is not voluntarily generated. If the court finds in Chatrie that the geofence data was voluntarily generated, geofence data would not require a warrant. But tower dumps would likely require a warrant because of Carpenter, even though tower dumps produce essentially the same information as geofence data. The court’s treatment of voluntariness, then, could determine the constitutional fate of two investigative tactics that, from a privacy standpoint, are difficult to distinguish.The general warrant questionAt issue in Chatrie is another novel constitutional question. Carpenter involved a request for information about one suspect. Chatrie involved, at least initially, no suspect, and a request for information about a location. Chatrie contends that this kind of dragnet request runs afoul of the constitutional prohibition on general warrants, which requires a warrant to “specifically describ[e] the place” to be searched. According to him, without a suspect, the warrant issued to Google was effectively a general warrant, requiring the company to rifle through all of its records and thus failing to describe specifically where the search should be directed. In the alternative, Chatrie argues that even if the warrant is not technically a general warrant, it still had what is called a “particularity” problem, because it did not describe any specific account to be searched.At first glance, it might seem that Chatrie’s argument is in tension with existing allowable police practices. After all, police can search an area for clues without yet having a suspect. Here, the police request for a list of all phones in an area may seem similar. Chatrie contends, however, that the difference lies in the way Google assembles this data. Google does not look up a location and see which phones were present. Instead, Google searches each user to see which, if any, were present at the location. That is, Google’s “search” is not of a location as much as it is of many individual people.At stake in this argument is the continued viability of this kind of law enforcement tactic. Law enforcement has increasingly turned to this kind of “reverse” search: specifying a place, a search term, or Chat GPT prompt and requesting a list of implicated users that they can then use as leads. Because these requests do not involve a specific person and typically require companies to search through all records in order to respond, these requests share the same structure as geofence requests. If geofence requests are or are not general warrants, so too might these other requests. Thus, if the court weighs in on this general warrant question, it could implicate a lot more than just location information.The digital road aheadGoogle announced in 2023 that it would no longer store Location History data anywhere but on the user’s phone, meaning the company no longer has access to the data required to respond to police geofence data requests. But where the court lands on voluntariness and general warrants will shape the landscape of the digital Fourth Amendment. The examples discussed above only scratch the surface of unsettled issues – automated license plate readers, pole cameras, government purchases of digital records, and more – which stand to be shaped by this decision. More fundamentally, so too does our notion of constitutional privacy.Read more

On the last regularly scheduled day of arguments for the 2025-26 term, the Supreme Court will consider a dispute in Mullin v. Doe over the Trump administration’s efforts to significantly scale back a program that allows foreign citizens to stay in the United States when the U.S. government believes that it is not safe for them to go home. Since returning to office last year, the Trump administration has sought to end the designation of several countries under the program, which is known as the Temporary Protected Status program. In two orders on its interim docket in May and October, the Supreme Court cleared the way for DHS to strip Venezuelan citizens of their protected status, but on Wednesday, April 29, the justices will hear oral argument on whether DHS can do the same for two other countries: Haiti and Syria.What is the Temporary Protected Status program?The Temporary Protected Status program was enacted by Congress in 1990. Under the program, the Department of Homeland Security can designate a country’s citizens as eligible to remain in this country and work if they cannot return safely to their own country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions there.TPS designations are made for specific periods of time but can be extended when the designation is about to run out. If a decision to extend or terminate TPS status is not published at least 60 days before the designation is set to expire, the designation is supposed to automatically extend for six months.What is the history behind TPS for Haiti and Syria?In March 2012, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano designated Syria for Temporary Protected Status. She cited “deteriorating conditions” in the country – specifically, a “brutal crackdown” by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against anti-government dissenters, which led to the deaths of thousands of Syrians. In the 13 years that followed, DHS repeatedly renewed Syria’s TPS designation. A relatively small number of people – estimated at several thousand – are currently protected by the program.Nine days after a massive earthquake in 2010 that struck just outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, killing more than 300,000 people and causing catastrophic damage, DHS designated Haiti under the TPS program for 18 months – a designation that, as with Syria, was repeatedly extended.How did the case now before the court start?Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced last year that the Trump administration planned to end the TPS designations for both Syria and Haiti. In Syria, she indicated, the new government was attempting to “move the country to a stable institutional governance.” Moreover, she said, it would be “contrary to the national interest” for Syria’s TPS designation to remain in place. And with Haiti, Noem said she had determined that “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian nationals … from returning in safety.” Here too, she indicated, “it is contrary to the national interest of the United States to permit Haitian nationals … to remain temporarily in the United States.”Several Haitian nationals with TPS went to federal court in Washington, D.C., challenging Noem’s efforts to end the program; a group of Syrians who had benefited from the TPS program did the same in New York.How did the lower courts rule on the challenges?In both the Haiti and Syria cases, federal judges blocked the government from ending the TPS program. In Washington, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes issued an order that prohibited the government from ending the TPS program for Haitians. In her view, it was “substantially likely” that Noem had ended the Haitian TPS designation “because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” The termination also violated the federal law governing administrative agencies, Reyes concluded, because Noem had failed both to consult with other federal agencies before ending Haiti’s TPS designation and to consider “the billions Haitian TPS holders contribute to the economy.”The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit turned down the government’s request to put Reyes’ ruling on hold while it appealed. The majority acknowledged the Supreme Court’s orders freezing similar rulings involving TPS designations for Venezuela, but it characterized those cases as “meaningfully distinct” because – unlike Haiti – “the government had invoked ‘complex and ongoing negotiations with Venezuela’” as part of its argument for temporary relief.In New York City, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla similarly barred the government from ending the program for Syria. She concluded that the challengers were likely to succeed on their claim that the decision to end the TPS designation for Syria violates the federal law governing administrative agencies. She noted that Noem had tried to end TPS not only for Syrians, but also “for virtually every country that has come up for consideration” – which, she wrote, in light of the different conditions and factors leading to the initial designations, suggested that the decisions to terminate TPS were not appropriate.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit declined to block Failla’s order while the government appealed. It concluded that the government was unlikely to be able to show that Noem had engaged in the kind of inter-agency consultations required before ending the TPS designation.How has the Supreme Court ruled on other efforts to end TPS?In May 2025, the Supreme Court blocked a ruling by Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen that had temporarily prohibited the government from ending Venezuela’s TPS designation (as well as an extension of that designation). Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s brief, unsigned order.The dispute over Venezuela’s TPS designation then returned to the lower court, where on Sept. 5 Chen issued a final decision holding that Noem had acted unlawfully in ending the 2023 designation and its extension. Chen acknowledged that the court had paused his earlier order, but he emphasized in a footnote that the first “order only concerns the preliminary relief ordered by this Court in postponing agency action.” That order did not, he contended, stop him “from adjudicating the case on the merits and entering a final judgment issuing relief.”The Trump administration returned to the Supreme Court in September after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit turned down the government’s request to block Chen’s order. Telling the justices that the case involved “the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this Court’s orders on the emergency docket,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the court to put Chen’s final order on hold.In a three-paragraph, unsigned order, the Supreme Court once again paused Chen’s order. “Although the posture of the case has changed,” the majority wrote, “the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms have not. The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan indicated that they would have denied the government’s request. Jackson dissented, describing the court’s ruling as “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.”How did the Haiti and Syria cases get to the Supreme Court?The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court in late February, asking it to pause Failla’s order in the Syrian TPS case. Sauer urged the justices to go ahead and hear oral arguments in the case now, without waiting for the 2nd Circuit to weigh in.The government returned on March 11, seeking the same relief in the Haiti case. “The issues that” the government’s application in the Haiti case “presents are … common among the numerous challenges to” efforts to terminate the program for a variety of countries, “have been ventilated in litigation across the country, and cry out for immediate resolution,” Sauer contended.Five days later, the court gave the Trump administration part of what it wanted: the justices agreed to hear oral arguments on whether DHS can end the TPS programs for Haiti and Syria. However, it left Reyes’ and Failla’s orders barring the government from doing so in place until the justices issue a final ruling. What are the Trump administration’s arguments?The Trump administration argues first that courts cannot review DHS’ decision to end the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria. It points to a provision in the law establishing the TPS program indicating that “[t]here is no judicial review of any determination” of the DHS secretary “with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.” This means, the government emphasizes, that if a lawsuit – like these – “is directed at a specific TPS designation, termination, or extension,” it “is unreviewable.” Even if courts could review claims that DHS violated the federal law governing administrative agencies when it ended the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria, Sauer continues, there is no violation here. Among other things, he writes, Noem did seek and consider advice from the State Department before ending those TPS designations, which is all that the TPS law requires. Moreover, he adds, her decisions in these cases are not undermined by similar conclusions for other countries. To the contrary, he contends, they reflect Noem’s “consistent view that the designations cannot satisfy statutory requirements—not presumptive malfeasance.”Finally, Sauer argues that Noem’s decision to end TPS for Haiti does not violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. In Trump v. Hawaii, the 2018 decision in which the justices upheld President Donald Trump’s restrictions on immigration from eight countries, several of which were predominantly Muslim, the court made clear that such restrictions could pass muster as long as the government’s actions “plausibly relate to the Government’s stated objective.” Here, Sauer said, Noem’s decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation is “plausibly related to the national-interest and foreign-relations justifications” on which Noem relied.What are the challengers’ arguments?The challengers maintain that courts have the power to weigh in on these disputes. Federal law, they stress, only bars review of a “determination” with respect to a TPS designation, extension, or termination – that is, the DHS secretary’s conclusion on the merits about whether the criteria for those actions have been met. By contrast, they say, they are challenging the procedures that Noem used to make her decisions. Even if they prevail, they note, the new DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, could still end the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria as long as he complies with the requirements outlined in the TPS statute. If the government’s interpretation were true, they emphasize, it “would insulate flagrantly unlawful executive action from judicial review.”The decision to end the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria, the challengers continue, violates the federal law governing administrative agencies. As an initial matter, they contend, Noem failed to adequately consult with other agencies before the terminations. In the case of Haiti, the challengers say, “the government has admitted that the only supposed consultation was a three-sentence email exchange between a DHS staffer and a State Department staffer” that was “devoid of substantive analysis.” For Syria, they argue, “it is undisputed that she did not consult with State (or any other agency) about conditions in Syria.” Moreover, they continue, although Noem contended that the “national interest” was at the heart of her decision to end the TPS designations, federal law only allows the DHS secretary to end the designations based on “conditions in the foreign state.”The Haitian challengers also argue that the decision to end Haiti’s TPS designation violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection because it was “driven by racially animated discriminatory intent. Just months before” Noem ended the TPS designation, they write, “President Trump slandered Haitian TPS holders, accusing them of eating the pets of American citizens, and vowed to end Haiti’s TPS designation.”The Syrian challengers emphasize that the dispute is still in the preliminary stage, and that allowing the government to end the TPS designations while the litigation continues will result in the “immediate loss of work authorization, and potential detention, family separation, and removal to Syria—a country which remains extremely unsafe.” Such “catastrophic harm … cannot be undone” even if the challengers ultimately prevail, they say.Who will argue the cases at the court?Sauer will represent the Trump administration. He will go first and will have 40 minutes to argue. UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham will argue for 20 minutes on behalf of the Syrian nationals, while Geoffrey Pipoly of the law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner will do the same for the Haitian challengers.When will the court issue its decision?Because the case will be one of the last regularly scheduled arguments for the 2025-26 term, we almost certainly will not get a decision in the case until shortly before the justices leave for their summer recess – in all likelihood, late June or early July.Read more