Vacancies Act rulings: Voice of America case

This week Ken and Josh discuss the Customs Service saying its computers won't let it refund IEEPA tariffs, more situations where courts are telling the Trump Administration it can’t just ignore the need to get officials confirmed by the Senate, and another decision about ICE.

That's for all subscribers. Paying subscribers will also hear our conversations about a number of additional lawsuits, including some especially weird ones:

* Voting machine maker Smartmatic’s parent company under indictment over bribes its former executives are alleged to have paid in the Philippines, alleges that it is being selectively and vindictively prosecuted.

* Anthropic suing over the Pentagon’s “supply chain risk” designation that threatens the company’s business. The company makes First Amendment claims, but Ken thinks its less glamorous arguments — like that the designation violated everyone’s favorite law, the Administrative Procedure Act — are more persuasive.

* Nippon Life Insurance Company of America suing OpenAI, the makers of the ChatGPT AI engine. Nippon says it has been dogged by a vexatious litigant — she decided she didn’t like the settlement she’d signed with the company, and when her human lawyer advised her that settlements are a no-backsies kind of situation, she fired him in favor of the AI engine that gave her the advice she wanted to hear: sue, sue, sue. Nippon says this is tortious interference with the valid settlement contract they’d entered with their aggrieved former policyholder. Because tortious interference requires knowledge of the contract you’re interfering with, this lawsuit turns an interesting philosophical question into an interesting legal one — did OpenAI “know” that Nippon had a settlement, simply because their former policyholder told ChatGPT about it?

* And Ed Martin appears to be the Justice Department official with some especially stupid bar trouble.

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