Tehachapi school officials face legal accusations they failed to properly screen or duly report the misdeeds of a physical education teacher who has been criminally charged with sexually inappropriate activity with several of his students.Read more

County estimates suggest up to 50,000 Kern County residents could lose their health-care coverage under the provisions enacted by H.R. 1, the massive federal spending bill passed last year, but the county will still be required to cover the cost…Read more

VISALIA — A powerful show of unity and respect filled the sanctuary of First Assembly of God as hundreds gathered to honor Tulare County Sheriff’s Deputy Randy Hopper, who lost his life in the line of duty on April 9…Read more

A Bakersfield man was sentenced to five years in prison Monday for wire fraud, possessing stolen mail and aggravated identity theft, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced.Read more

The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared poised to further narrow the extent to which U.S. courts can be used as a forum to consider alleged violations of international law. After roughly two hours of oral argument in Cisco Systems v. Doe, a majority of the justices seemed to side with the California-based technology company, Cisco Systems, and two of its top executives, who argued that they could not be sued for their role in allegedly aiding and abetting the creation by the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party of a powerful surveillance system used to target, detain, and torture the plaintiffs, who are practitioners of the Falun Gong religion. What was less clear, however, was precisely how narrow the court’s rule might be.The Falun Gong religion began in China in the 1990s. By the time the Chinese government designated groups associated with Falun Gong as illegal in 1999, the religion had as many as 100 million practitioners in China. In an effort to find Falun Gong practitioners, the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese security officials sought to develop a massive online surveillance system, known as the “Golden Shield.”The lawsuit before the court on Tuesday began when a group of Chinese nationals and one U.S. citizen, Charles Lee, went to federal court in California and contended that the Chinese government used the Golden Shield technology to identify them or their family members as Falun Gong practitioners, leading to their arrest and serious human rights abuses such as torture, forced labor, beatings, and forced conversions. The defendants in their lawsuit were Cisco and two of its top officials: John Chambers, the company’s CEO, and Fredy Cheung, the vice-president of Cisco’s China subsidiary. In particular, the plaintiffs said, Cisco, Chambers, and Cheung aided and abetted those abuses – specifically, they “designed, implemented and helped to maintain a surveillance and internal security network” that made it easier for Chinese officials to identify Falun Gong practitioners.The plaintiffs relied on two federal laws: the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that allows foreigners to bring lawsuits in U.S. courts for serious violations of international law, and the Torture Victim Protection Act, a 1992 law that allows suits against individuals who subject others to torture while acting on behalf of a foreign government.In 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the plaintiffs’ aiding-and-abetting claims could go forward. Over a dissent by seven judges, the en banc 9th Circuit – which, because that court is so large, consists of only a subset of all of the judges on the court – declined to rehear the case. Cisco then came to the Supreme Court, which agreed in January to weigh in.Representing Cisco and its executives, lawyer Kannon Shanmugam emphasized that Cisco “vigorously” denied the plaintiffs’ allegations. And in any event, he continued, Congress, rather than the Supreme Court, should provide for aiding-and-abetting liability. Shanmugam urged the justices to limit the ATS to the three original causes of action that the court recognized in its 2004 decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain.In Sosa, the majority held that in 1789, the ATS would have allowed lawsuits alleging a “narrow set of violations of the law of nations” – specifically, for safe-passage guarantees, violations of an ambassador’s rights, and piracy – that could have had serious effects on the United States’ relations with other countries. The court in Sosa left open the possibility that other claims brought under the ATS could go forward if they are widely accepted as a violation of international norms and can be defined as specifically as those three 18th-century wrongs. But the Supreme Court, Shanmugam suggested, should “draw a line around” the three offenses singled out in Sosa and hold that claims for aiding-and-abetting liability can never be brought under the ATS.Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared to agree. He wondered whether, by leaving open the possibility that the Supreme Court could recognize additional causes of action under the ATS but not actually doing so, the court had “misled Congress into thinking” it doesn’t need to act. Kavanaugh seemed to indicate that if the court closed the door to additional claims under Sosa, it might spur Congress to expand what could be brought via the ATS.Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Curtis Gannon, who argued on behalf of the Trump administration in support of Cisco, responded (agreeing with Shanmugam) that whether additional causes of action are available under the ATS “is a legislative decision that [Congress] should make.”Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed a similar sentiment in questioning Paul Hoffman, who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in the case. Gorsuch described the court as having created a “mousetrap” with its treatment of ATS claims – theoretically they are available, but the plaintiffs always lose. Wouldn’t the efforts that go into the plaintiffs’ lawsuits, Gorsuch suggested, be better directed at getting relief from Congress?Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether the court should draw a categorical line that either always barred or always permitted aiding-and-abetting claims under the ATS. For example, concerning the three core offenses identified in Sosa, she observed that there is more evidence to support the idea that, when the ATS was enacted, someone could be held liable for aiding and abetting piracy than there was for the other two offenses.Justice Amy Coney Barrett also expressed reservations about limiting the ATS to the three offenses identified in Sosa. There has been research, she told Shanmugam, indicating that when the ATS was enacted, international law allowed claims by foreign nationals for violence committed by U.S. citizens. Could the Supreme Court hold instead, she asked Shanmugam, that the ATS is not limited to those three offenses, and leave open the possibility that aiding-and-abetting claims could be (but are not always) available, but at the same time say that such claims cannot go forward against Cisco?Chief Justice John Roberts had similar concerns. He described a “serious conceptual challenge” created by the position adopted by Cisco and the government in this case. The court had held in Sosa, he emphasized, that “the First Congress wanted courts to” find causes of action under the ATS. If the court were to close the door on new causes of action, Roberts said, it would therefore not be “faithful to the First Congress’s intent.”Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson approached the question from a slightly different angle. In her view, whether an aiding-and-abetting claim should be available under the ATS would hinge on whether a claim could be brought under the ATS for the underlying conduct itself.Shanmugam emphasized that even under this approach, courts would still have to consider the foreign policy and separation-of-powers concerns that might be implicated by allowing such a claim to go forward.Gannon echoed Shanmugam’s caution about foreign policy concerns. He told the justices that the “mine-run” of cases brought under the ATS and TVPA had been “cases like this,” which depended on “having to prove that foreign government officials engaged in serious human rights violations in their own countries.”Perhaps to illustrate the perils of a less-than-categorical rule, Justice Samuel Alito asked Hoffman about the potential impact of a statement of interest from the federal government, in which the federal government indicated that a particular lawsuit was “not in the best interests of the United States’ foreign policy.” Should the court hearing the lawsuit then dismiss the case, Alito inquired? Hoffman acknowledged that courts should give “great weight” to such statements, but added that courts also have “discretion” in their treatment of the statements. In response, Alito asked if Hoffman was saying that a federal judge should effectively second-guess the government’s conclusions about foreign policy and whether allowing the case to go forward would be in the U.S.’s best interests.Jackson was more sympathetic to the plaintiffs. Is it the “position” of the United States, she asked Gannon, “that this particular claim” will cause “a foreign policy problem?” Gannon stressed that the federal government had not taken a position on the case but ultimately answered, “potentially, yes.” But Jackson seemed unpersuaded. Why, she queried, should Cisco be “absolved,” and the plaintiffs in this case “not get a remedy,” based on “speculation” by the United States about possible foreign policy concerns?Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared to side with Jackson. She pressed Shanmugam on Cisco’s assertions that allowing the plaintiffs’ claims to go forward would lead to a flood of lawsuits and have a harmful effect on U.S. businesses. She noted that only about 300 cases had been filed under the ATS, and that the number of cases had dropped “precipitously” in the wake of the court’s 2013 decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., holding that claims under the ATS must be based on conduct that occurs in the United States. There has been no “rush” of new cases in the courts of appeals that allow aiding-and-abetting liability claims under the ATS, Sotomayor observed. Moreover, she added, the United States is a party to the Convention Against Torture, which requires it to hold people complicit in torture responsible.Shanmugam countered that despite the many lawsuits brought under the ATS, he was only aware of six cases in which the plaintiffs had actually “prevailed with a monetary recovery” – suggesting that such lawsuits have little utility for victims while consuming large amounts of resources.The case should be decided by late June or early July.Read more

The Supreme Court on Monday heard oral argument in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, a case on whether a company can be held liable under state law for failing to include a cancer warning on its product labels when the Environmental Protection Agency did not require such a warning and has concluded that the products in question are not carcinogenic.The dispute centers on Monsanto’s popular line of Roundup herbicide products, whose main active ingredient is glyphosate. The Environmental Protection Agency first reviewed the safety of glyphosate-based pesticides in 1974 and has repeatedly concluded since then that glyphosate does not pose a public health risk. However, the EPA’s research has not dispelled claims that glyphosate exposure heightens cancer risk.In 2015, a working group of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, broke with the EPA and top agencies in other countries by classifying glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Its report paved the way toward more than 100,000 lawsuits against Monsanto in the U.S. as Americans who had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after using Roundup worked to hold the company liable for failing to warn them about the alleged cancer risk.The case that’s now before the Supreme Court was brought by John Durnell in Missouri in 2019. Durnell contended that Monsanto was liable for damages under state law because it had not included a cancer warning on its Roundup product labels. Monsanto asserted, as it had in other cases across the country, that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, a federal law that regulates the use, sale, and labeling of pesticides, preempted Durnell’s lawsuit, both because FIFRA explicitly bars states from imposing additional or different labeling requirements on top of what’s required by federal law and because Monsanto could not have added a cancer warning without the EPA’s approval – approval that the company argued it would not have received because the agency has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate does not cause cancer.The trial court in Missouri disagreed with Monsanto on preemption, and the jury went on to award Durnell $1.25 million in compensatory damages. In February 2025, the Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed this judgment, holding that Monsanto had failed to show both that Missouri’s requirements for product labels were at odds with federal law and that it had actually asked the EPA about adding a cancer warning to Roundup products. In January, the Supreme Court agreed to review this decision, which had deepened a split between lower courts over whether FIFRA allows state lawsuits like Durnell’s.During approximately 75 minutes of oral argument on Monday, the justices wrestled with the structure and text of FIFRA, the EPA’s authority over Roundup product labels, and both express and implied preemption. Specifically, they considered whether FIFRA explicitly preempts lawsuits like Durnell’s through the statute’s uniformity provision, which says that states “shall not impose or continue in effect any requirements for labeling or packaging in addition to or different from those required” by the EPA. And they also considered whether it implicitly preempts them because companies cannot change the safety warnings on their products in response to state requirements without the EPA’s permission.Paul Clement, who argued on behalf of Monsanto, emphasized that “Congress plainly wanted uniformity when it came to the safety warnings on a pesticide label” and contended that allowing suits like Durnell’s undermines that goal. Clement highlighted the EPA’s in-depth assessment of products like Roundup and careful balancing of public safety, farmers’ needs, and economic interests, asserting that juries in states across the country cannot disregard or ignore the EPA’s guidance.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pressed Clement on the pace of the EPA’s research, noting that 15 years typically passes between when a pesticide product – including its label – is first assessed and registered and when it is reassessed and reregistered. If new research about the safety of a product is released during that 15-year period, she asked, why can’t states play a role in ensuring that pesticide companies update their labels accordingly?Similarly, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that states might be able to move faster than the EPA’s review process. In that situation, Roberts said, “it’s not necessarily the case that they’re doing something inconsistent with what EPA would do.” It could be that they’re responding to new safety information “more quickly than the federal government is.”In his responses to both Jackson and Roberts, Clement urged the justices to see the pace of the EPA’s work as a feature, not a bug. “If the agency takes its time” reviewing new research, he said, it’s because “it’s charged with the responsibility of looking not just at sort of how the new information affects hazards and the like” but also whether the research is reliable. Indeed, Clement later noted, when the IARC released its glyphosate study in 2015, it was not as if the EPA “said we don’t want to hear about it.” The agency “exhaustively studied it and they actually did peer review that IARC doesn’t do. They looked at more sources than IARC did. And then they came to a conclusion that’s shared by regulators around the globe that glyphosate doesn’t have a cancer risk,” Clement said.Clement further argued that a lawsuit over a pesticide product’s label is not the right way for states to support the EPA’s effort to keep product users safe. Instead, anyone concerned about the safety of a product on the market can “initiate a cancellation proceeding,” which prompts the EPA to reassess safety warnings.Like Clement, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris, who argued on behalf of the federal government in support of Monsanto, emphasized that the EPA is not “just sort of sitting on its hands” and is, in fact, “monitor[ing] new information” that might reveal previously unknown safety risks. And when such information comes to light, Harris continued, the EPA’s response is “completely different from a state just saying slap a cancer warning on the product,” because the EPA is considering not just whether to add a warning, but whether a company should recommend different “protective gear” or whether the company should only be allowed to sell the product to “professional applicators” moving forward. The EPA, Harris explained, “is looking holistically not only at someone who might read the label and be exposed but also at other people in the process and endangered species,” and, under FIFRA, states can’t “try to sort of second-guess or undermine this process.”As he did with Clement, Roberts asked Harris why states should not be able “to do something to call [newly identified] danger to the attention of the people while the federal government” goes through its review of the research. Harris responded that they can take action. Specifically, they “can petition for cancellation” to “spur EPA to action” or decide to “restrict the use” of a particular pesticide within state borders. What they can’t do, Harris said, is require new safety warnings on product labels.Justice Neil Gorsuch questioned why states have the “greater power” to “stop the product from being sold at all” within their borders but not the “lesser power” of forcing changes to a pesticide’s label. Harris contended that Congress chose not to give them that power.Ashley Keller, who argued on behalf of Durnell, contended that Monsanto is blurring an important distinction between the EPA’s registration authority under FIFRA and its authority to approve product labels. While the law makes clear that the agency will review proposed product labels in determining whether to approve a pesticide for sale and distribution in the U.S., FIFRA does not say, according to Keller, that a company can cite the EPA’s review of a label to fend off state-level misbranding lawsuits. “After two briefs and a lot of podium time, Monsanto still hasn’t pointed to one word in FIFRA’s text that” gives such weight to the EPA’s label assessment, he said.Justice Elena Kagan asked Keller how allowing state-level challenges of product labels squares with FIFRA’s uniformity provision, which is “clearly designed to achieve uniformity in labeling.” Keller responded that, while it may be designed to achieve that, “that’s not the law Congress wrote,” and, as written, FIFRA does not prevent juries from determining that a pesticide product needed a different safety warning.Justice Brett Kavanaugh pushed back against Keller’s answer, questioning how “uniformity” is satisfied by a situation in which “each state can require different things.” Keller again asserted that expressing a desire to have uniform labels is different than actually writing a law that requires that level of uniformity.Keller faced notably fewer questions than Clement or Harris, which made it difficult to predict how the justices were leaning in the case.The court’s decision is expected by early July.Read more

Empirical SCOTUS is a recurring series by Adam Feldman that looks at Supreme Court data, primarily in the form of opinions and oral arguments, to provide insights into the justices’ decision making and what we can expect from the court in the future.During oral argument in A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, which involved disabled students’ rights against school districts, Williams & Connolly’s Lisa Blatt – one of the most experienced advocates to appear before the court in the modern era – accused opposing counsel of mischaracterizing her position. Justice Neil Gorsuch admonished her to choose her words more carefully, raising his voice. Blatt was unapologetic. She told him that experienced advocates should have their positions represented accurately. She later withdrew the specific remark.The exchange was unusual by the standards of the Supreme Court bar, where decorum is so prized that Chief Justice John Roberts routinely instructs advocates to refer to opposing counsel as “my friend on the other side.” But it was also, in its way, revealing. Blatt has argued more than 57 cases at the court, has won over 85% of them, and is considered a SCOTUS legend by those on both sides of the political spectrum. She does not need to perform deference. She has already done the work.So what does that work look like? And, relatedly, who are the lawyers that reach the top of the Supreme Court bar, and how did they get there? Using data on top ranked attorneys from Chambers & Partners in its appellate practices, along with argument counts compiled from Oyez.org, it is possible to sketch a fairly detailed picture of that pipeline, and to understand where, exactly, these folks are coming from.What the justices say they wantBefore turning to the data, it is worth spending a moment on what the justices themselves have said about what separates good appellate advocates from great ones. Their advice is remarkably consistent.Roberts (who argued 39 cases before the court in his prior life as an advocate) has said that counsel should be able to tell the court “in simple English … exactly what it’s about and why you should win.” He has also emphasized that a skilled advocate should actually want the hostile questions – the ones from the justices predisposed to rule against you – because those are the questions that define the argument. Justice Antonin Scalia put it bluntly: “good counsel welcomes, welcomes questions.” He was equally direct about preparation: “point number one is to be very clear about what the issue that you’re urging upon the court is.”Justice Anthony Kennedy focused on credibility: “the most important thing in a brief when you state the facts is you must be fair.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said simply: “First, be scrupulously honest.” Justice Clarence Thomas, who famously went years without asking questions from the bench, offered pragmatic advice about answering them: “Just say ‘yes,’ or say ‘no, but I’d like to qualify that,’ or ‘I’d like to explain.’”The advice converges on a few core principles: clarity, honesty, and a genuine willingness to engage with the hardest version of the opposing argument. It also converges, implicitly, on the importance of credibility – the kind that can only be built over years of repeat appearances. Which is why the pipeline to becoming such an advocate matters so much.The pipelineThe picture revealed by the data is one of substantial concentration – in institutions, in geography, and in a handful of career pathways.First, there are only a relatively small number of firms with Supreme Court advocates. Gibson Dunn leads significantly, followed by Munger Tolles; Orrick; Latham; King & Spalding; Kellogg Hansen; and Arnold & Porter. The long tail of firms with only one advocate illustrates that elite Supreme Court practice is both institutionally clustered but individualized enough for standout lawyers to emerge.Second, the vast majority of such lawyers can be found (unsurprisingly) in Washington, D.C., which accounts for 61 of the 75 office locations (several attorneys list multiple offices) represented – a commanding share. New York and Los Angeles each have three. Every other city has two or fewer. The Supreme Court bar is, with rare exceptions, a Washington-centered professional world.Third is how many advocates in the dataset previously clerked for each Supreme Court justice. Scalia leads with seven former clerks among the ranked advocates, followed by Roberts and Kennedy at six each, and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen Breyer at five. The pattern reflects not just ideological preferences but the emergence of certain chambers as especially reliable feeders into elite appellate practice. Fourth is law school. Harvard leads with 19 Supreme Court advocates, Yale follows with 13, and the University of Chicago forms a distinct third cluster at seven. Virginia, Michigan, and Columbia each have four. Every other school has three or fewer. Indeed, the top two schools alone account for more than 45% of the dataset.Undergraduate institutions are not particularly diverse either. Yale (at nine), Harvard (at eight), and Princeton (at six) lead, followed by Georgetown, Duke, and Dartmouth at four each. Elite formation thus begins well before law school for many of these advocates.The argument distributionIf the biographical data tells us how advocates entered the pipeline, the argument data tells us what the pipeline actually produces – and how steep this internal hierarchy really is.Most Chambers-ranked advocates – themselves already an elite group by any reasonable measure – cluster in the range of 5 to 20 arguments. A smaller number have argued 20 to 40 cases. And then there is a thin tail extending all the way out to 124.As for those with the most Supreme Court arguments (per Oyez’s data), there is (as of last week) Paul Clement (at 124), Seth Waxman (at 90), Carter Phillips (at 90), David Frederick (at 63), Lisa Blatt (at 57), Neal Katyal (at 54), Donald Verrilli (at 53), Gregory Garre (at 51), and Jeffrey Fisher (at 50). Four paths to the top: a closer lookPerhaps most instructive comparisons involve advocates who arrived at the top by somewhat different routes.Let’s take Paul Clement, Seth Waxman, Carter Phillips, and Lisa Blatt – four of the highest-argument advocates in the Chambers dataset who are currently in private practice. They are, by any quantitative measure, some of the most experienced Supreme Court advocates at the private bar. But their biographical profiles contain some telling similarities and differences.Clement and Waxman perhaps represent the most conventional version of the pipeline: both clerked at the Supreme Court, both served as solicitor general of the United States, and both attended elite law schools (Harvard and Yale, respectively). Clement graduated from Harvard Law after completing a degree at Cambridge, clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and then for Scalia before joining what would become a storied career at the Office of the Solicitor General and eventually in private practice. His 124 Supreme Court arguments are the most in the dataset by a substantial margin.Waxman, a Yale Law graduate who clerked at the district court level but not at the Supreme Court, nonetheless also served as solicitor general and has argued 90 cases. Both men are institutional exemplars – products of every major box in the conventional pipeline.Phillips represents a geographic and institutional variation on that model. He attended Ohio State as an undergraduate, went to Northwestern Law, and clerked for Judge Robert Sprecher on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit before clerking for Chief Justice Warren Burger. He served as an assistant to the solicitor general and has also argued 90 Supreme Court cases while managing the Washington office of Sidley Austin. He is, by the numbers, as accomplished as anyone in the field, but he arrived without an Ivy League credential at either the undergraduate or law school level.Blatt is the most interesting case study – not only because she is the only female on the list of top 10 advocates by Supreme Court argument. She attended the University of Texas as an undergraduate (summa cum laude) and went to Texas Law (also summa cum laude) – making her the only one of the four whose educational formation was entirely outside of the Northeast. She did not clerk at the Supreme Court, but did clerk for Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, then spent 13 years at the Office of the Solicitor General before returning to Williams & Connolly, where she chairs the Supreme Court and Appellate practice.What the Blatt profile illustrates – and what the aggregate data confirms – is that serving in the Office of the Solicitor General is, in many ways, a more powerful credential than a Supreme Court clerkship. Nearly 70% of the advocates in the Chambers dataset with government backgrounds served in the OSG or as solicitor general. A Supreme Court clerkship matters, and the data shows that former clerks of Scalia, Roberts, and Kennedy are especially well-represented. But OSG service is the more universal common denominator. It is where elite advocates learn to argue on the court’s docket, often many times per year. It is hard to think of better training.What the data tells us — and what it doesn’tThis all captures a particular slice of the Supreme Court bar. It does not capture every important Supreme Court advocate, and it does not capture the bar as it existed decades ago. The geographic concentration in Washington, the dominance of OSG alumni, and the law-school distribution all reflect conditions that have developed over the past several decades and may continue to evolve.What the data does tell us, with considerable clarity, is that the modern Supreme Court bar is structured – not random. There are pipelines, and the pipelines run through a small number of institutions: Harvard and Yale at the law school level, a handful of appellate chambers at the clerkship stage, and the Office of the Solicitor General as the dominant pre-private-practice training ground. For the lawyer who genuinely aspires to practice at this level, the data offers a sobering portrait. The gates are narrow, and they are narrow at multiple points. The few who make it typically have several qualities: an education at some of the country’s most elite schools; credibility built over time, typically in government; and the kind of training that makes hostile questions feel like opportunities rather than threats.Read more