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Supreme Court allows small business registration rule to take effect
Headline Topics |
2025/01/23 08:52
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by lawfirm-network.com
The Supreme Court Revives Corporate Transparency Act, Mandating Small Business Registration The Supreme Court has reinstated a key provision of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), requiring owners of over 32.6 million small businesses to register personal information with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). This act, designed to combat money laundering and the misuse of anonymous shell companies, was previously blocked by a federal judge in Texas and held by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. [Image credit: Pexel]Key Details of the Ruling:- What is Required: Small business owners must provide personal information, including photo IDs and home addresses, to FinCEN.
- Purpose: To deter financial crimes and increase transparency in corporate ownership.
- Legal Challenges: Opposed by Republican-led states, conservative groups, and business associations, the law was initially struck down on grounds that Congress overstepped its authority.
Reactions:- Supporters: Labor, environmental, and progressive groups applaud the decision as a win for transparency.
- Opponents: Business organizations express concerns about compliance challenges and legal uncertainty. The National Small Business Association and Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council have called for clarity and leniency for late filers.
Next Steps:- The Supreme Court’s decision allows enforcement to proceed while the Texas case continues.
- Advocates for repeal, including business leaders, urge Congress to reassess the mandate.
This decision marks a significant step in the federal government’s efforts to curb illicit financial activities, though its future enforcement and impact remain subjects of heated debate. by breakinglegalnews.com |
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Trump asks the Supreme Court to block sentencing in his hush money case
Headline Topics |
2025/01/09 07:59
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President-elect Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to call off Friday’s sentencing in his hush money case in New York.
Trump’s lawyers turned to the nation’s highest court on Wednesday after New York courts refused to postpone the sentencing by Judge Juan M. Merchan, who presided over Trump’s trial and conviction last May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Trump has denied wrongdoing.
The justices asked for a response from prosecutors by Thursday morning. Trump’s team sought an immediate stay of the scheduled sentencing, saying it would wrongly restrict him as he prepares to take office. While Merchan has indicated he will not impose jail time, fines or probation, Trump’s lawyers argued a felony conviction would still have intolerable side effects.
The sentencing should be delayed as he appeals the conviction to “prevent grave injustice and harm to the institution of the Presidency and the operations of the federal government,” they argued.
The emergency motion is from lawyers John Sauer, Trump’s pick for solicitor general, who represents the government before the high court, and Todd Blanche, in line to be the second-ranking official at the Justice Department.
They also pointed to the Supreme Court ruling giving Trump and other presidents broad immunity from prosecutions over their actions in office, saying it supports their argument that his New York conviction should be overturned.
Their filing said the New York trial court “lacks authority to impose sentence and judgment on President Trump — or conduct any further criminal proceedings against him— until the resolution of his underlying appeal raising substantial claims of Presidential immunity, including by review in this Court if necessary.”
The Republican president-elect’s spokesman, Steven Cheung, called for the case to be dismissed in a statement. Trump simultaneously filed an emergency appeal in front of New York’s highest court.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, meanwhile, said it will respond in court papers. Trump’s convictions arose from what prosecutors said was an attempt to cover up a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election.
Daniels claims she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. He denies it.
The Supreme Court’s immunity opinion came in a separate election interference case against him, but Trump’s lawyers say it means some of the evidence used against him in his hush money trial should have been shielded by presidential immunity. That includes testimony from some White House aides and social media posts made while he was in office.
Merchan has disagreed, finding they would qualify as personal business. The Supreme Court’s immunity decision was largely about official acts of presidents while in office.
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Amazon workers strike at multiple facilities as Teamsters seek labor contract
Headline Topics |
2024/12/19 06:51
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Workers at seven Amazon facilities went on strike Thursday, an effort by the Teamsters to pressure the e-commerce company for a labor agreement during a key shopping period.
The Teamsters say the workers, who authorized strikes in the past few days, are joining the picket line after Amazon ignored a Sunday deadline the union set for contract negotiations. Amazon says it doesn’t expect an impact on its operations during what the union calls the largest strike against the company in U.S. history.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters say they represent nearly 10,000 workers at 10 Amazon facilities, a small portion of the 1.5 million people Amazon employs in its warehouses and corporate offices.
At one warehouse, located in New York City’s Staten Island borough, thousands of workers who voted for the Amazon Labor Union in 2022 and have since affiliated with the Teamsters. At the other facilities, employees - including many delivery drivers - have unionized with them by demonstrating majority support but without holding government-administered elections.
The strikes happening Thursday are taking place at one Amazon warehouse in San Francisco, California, and six delivery stations in southern California, New York City; Atlanta, Georgia, and Skokie, Illinois, according to the union’s announcement. Amazon workers at the other facilities are “prepared to join,” the union said.
“Amazon is pushing its workers closer to the picket line by failing to show them the respect they have earned,” Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien said in a statement.
The Seattle-based online retailer has been seeking to re-do the election that led to the union victory at the warehouse on Staten Island, which the Teamsters now represent. In the process, the company has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board. |
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TikTok asks Supreme Court to temporarily block law that could ban site in U.S.
Headline Topics |
2024/12/15 06:52
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TikTok on Monday asked the Supreme Court to step in on an emergency basis to block the federal law that would ban the popular platform in the United States unless its China-based parent company agreed to sell it.
Lawyers for the company and China-based ByteDance urged the justices to step in before the law’s Jan. 19 deadline. A similar plea was filed by content creators who rely on the platform for income and some of TikTok’s more than 170 million users in the U.S.
“A modest delay in enforcing the Act will create breathing room for this Court to conduct an orderly review and the new Administration to evaluate this matter — before this vital channel for Americans to communicate with their fellow citizens and the world is closed,” lawyers for the companies told the Supreme Court.
President-elect Donald Trump, who once supported a ban but then pledged during the campaign to “save TikTok,” said his administration would take a look at the situation.
“As you know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” Trump said during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. His campaign saw the platform as a way to reach younger, less politically engaged voters.
Trump was meeting with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, according to two people familiar with the president-elect’s plans who were not authorized to speak publicly about them and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The companies have said that a shutdown lasting just a month would cause TikTok to lose about a third of its daily users in the U.S. and significant advertising revenue.
The case could attract the court’s interest because it pits free speech rights against the government’s stated aims of protecting national security, while raising novel issues about social media platforms.
The request first goes to Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees emergency appeals from courts in the nation’s capital. He almost certainly will seek input from all nine justices.
On Friday, a panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied an emergency plea to block the law, a procedural ruling that allowed the case to move to the Supreme Court. |
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Court seems reluctant to block state bans on medical treatments for minors
Headline Topics |
2024/12/04 11:57
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Hearing a high-profile culture-war clash, a majority of the Supreme Court seemed reluctant Wednesday to block Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
The justices’ decision, not expected for several months, could affect similar laws enacted by another 25 states and a range of other efforts to regulate the lives of transgender people, including which sports competitions they can join and which bathrooms they can use.
The case is coming before a conservative-dominated court after a presidential election in which Donald Trump and his allies promised to roll back protections for transgender people.
In arguments that passed the two-hour mark Wednesday, five conservative justices voiced varying degrees of skepticism of arguments made by the Biden administration and lawyers for Tennessee families challenging the ban.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted in the majority in a 2020 case in favor of transgender rights, questioned whether judges, rather than lawmakers, should be weighing in on a question of regulating medical procedures, an area usually left to the states.
”The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Roberts said in an exchange with ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio.
The court’s three liberal justices seem firmly on the side of the challengers. But it’s not clear that any of the court’s six conservatives will go along. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion in 2020, has yet to say anything.
Four years ago, the court ruled in favor of Aimee Stephens, who was fired by a Michigan funeral home after she informed its owner that she was a transgender woman. The court held that transgender people, as well as gay and lesbian people, are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace.
The Biden administration and the families and health care providers who challenged the Tennessee law are urging the justices to apply the same sort of analysis that the majority, made up of liberal and conservative justices, embraced in the case four years ago when it found that “sex plays an unmistakable role” in employers’ decisions to punish transgender people for traits and behavior they otherwise tolerate.
The issue in the Tennessee case is whether the law violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which requires the government to treat similarly situated people the same.
Tennessee’s law bans puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors, but not “across the board,” lawyers for the families wrote in their Supreme Court brief. The lead lawyer, Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union, is the first openly transgender person to argue in front of the justices.
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Court backs Texas over razor wire installed on US-Mexico border
Headline Topics |
2024/11/25 11:02
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A federal appeals court Wednesday ruled that Border Patrol agents cannot cut razor wire that Texas installed on the U.S.-Mexico border in the town of Eagle Pass, which has become the center of the state’s aggressive measures to curb migrant crossings.
The decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is a victory for Texas in a long-running rift over immigration policy with the Biden administration, which has also sought to remove floating barriers installed on the Rio Grande.
Texas has continued to install razor wire along its roughly 1,200-mile (1,900 kilometers) border with Mexico over the past year. In a 2-1 ruling, the court issued an injunction blocking Border Patrol agents from damaging the wire in Eagle Pass.
“We continue adding more razor wire border barrier,” Republican Gov. Greg Abbott posted on the social platform X in response to the ruling. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday.
Some migrants have been injured by the sharp wire, and the Justice Department has argued the barrier impedes the U.S. government’s ability to patrol the border, including coming to the aid of migrants in need of help. Texas contended in the lawsuit originally filed last year that federal government was “undermining” the state’s border security efforts by cutting the razor wire.
The ruling comes ahead of President-elect Donald Trump returning to office and pledging a crackdown on immigration. Earlier this month, a Texas official offered a parcel of rural ranchland along the U.S.-Mexico border to use as a staging area for potential mass deportations.
Arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped 40% from an all-time high in December. U.S. officials mostly credit Mexican vigilance around rail yards and highway checkpoint. |
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New Hampshire courts hear 2 cases on transgender girls playing girls sports
Headline Topics |
2024/11/22 06:25
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Two New Hampshire fathers who were barred from school district events for wearing pink wristbands marked “XX” to represent female chromosomes insisted at a federal court hearing Thursday that they didn’t set out to harass or otherwise target a transgender soccer player at the game they attended.
But a judge hearing the case suggested the message the parents sent may matter more than their intentions.
Kyle Fellers and Anthony Foote sued the Bow school district after being banned from school grounds for wearing the wristbands at their daughters’ soccer game in September. The no-trespass orders have since expired, but a judge is deciding whether the plaintiffs should be allowed to wear the wristbands and carry signs at upcoming school events, including basketball games, swim meets and a music concert, while the case proceeds.
Testifying at Thursday’s hearing, both men said that they did not view the wristbands as a protest against Parker Tirrell, a transgender girl on the opposing team, but rather as a show of support for their daughters and their teammates. U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe questioned whether there is a meaningful distinction and whether their intentions matter.
“Sometimes the message you think you’re sending might not be the message that is being sent,” he said.
McAuliffe asked Foote whether it occurred to him that a transgender person might interpret the pink XX wristbands as an attempt to invalidate their existence.
“If he’s a trans female, pink might be a color he likes,” Foote said.
McAuliffe also noted that while both plaintiffs said they had no problem with transgender people outside the issue of sports, they repeatedly referred to the athlete in question as a boy.
“You seem to go out of your way to suggest there’s no such thing as a trans girl,” McAuliffe said. Foote disagreed, saying it was “like learning a new language” to refer to transgender people.
In a separate courtroom earlier Thursday, another judge held a hearing on a lawsuit brought by Parker Tirrell and another student challenging the state law that bans transgender athletes in grades 5 to 12 from teams that align with their gender identity. It requires schools to designate all teams as either girls, boys or coed, with eligibility determined based on students’ birth certificates “or other evidence.”
U.S. District Court Chief Judge Landya McCafferty ruled earlier this year that the teens can try out for and play on girls school sports teams. The order only applies to those two individuals for now as they seek to overturn the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act on behalf of all transgender girl students in New Hampshire.
Lawyers for the teens said in court Thursday they hoped the matter could go to trial and be resolved before the start of the next school year in September. They said the teens’ school districts and others in the state have asked for guidance regarding the statute. Lawyers for the state said they needed more time to prepare.
Judge Talesha Saint-Marc suggested the timing of the trial was ambitious and asked that both sides talk further about scheduling. Gov. Chris Sununu, who signed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act into law in July, has said it “ensures fairness and safety in women’s sports by maintaining integrity and competitive balance in athletic competitions.” About half of states have adopted similar measures.
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