Adam Liptak

In a lively and freewheeling argument on Wednesday, the Supreme Court considered whether it should place limits on class-action settlements in which the plaintiffs’ lawyers receive millions and their clients get nothing. In the process, several justices mused about the nature of privacy in the digital age. The case arose from an $8.5 million settlement between Google and class-action lawyers who said the company had violated its users’ privacy rights. Under the settlement, the lawyers were paid more than $2 million, but members of the class received no money.

Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals, have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples, and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns. “The libertarian position has become dominant on the right on First Amendment issues,” said Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the Cato Institute. “It simply means that we should be skeptical of government attempts to regulate speech. That used to be an uncontroversial and nonideological point.

In a test of antitrust law, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that American Express could use contracts to stop merchants from steering consumers to other cards. The decision has implications not only for what one brief called “an astronomical number of retail transactions” but also for other kinds of markets, notably ones on the internet, in which services link consumers and businesses. Such “two-sided platforms,” the Court said, require special and seemingly more forgiving antitrust scrutiny.

Internet retailers can be required to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision. Brick-and-mortar businesses have long complained that they are disadvantaged by having to charge sales taxes while many of their online competitors do not. States have said that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that helped spur the rise of internet shopping. On June 21, the court overruled that ruling, Quill Corporation v.

A closely divided Supreme Court struggled to decide whether internet retailers should have to collect sales taxes in states where they have no physical presence. Brick-and-mortar businesses have long complained that they are disadvantaged by having to charge sales taxes while many of their online competitors do not. States have said that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that helped spur the rise of internet shopping.

The Supreme Court announced that it would not decide whether federal prosecutors can force Microsoft to turn over digital data stored outside the United States. The move followed arguments in the case in February and the enactment of a new federal law that both sides said made the case moot.

When Donald J. Trump was running for president, he promised to “open up our libel laws.” No one quite knew what he meant. Recently President Trump started to make good on his campaign pledge. But he did so inadvertently — as a libel defendant on the losing side of a decision that will help victims of sexual misconduct sue when they are called liars. These days, a remarkable number of libel suits, including ones against Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly, Roy S.

Can the president change libel laws? No. Libel law is a state-law tort, meaning that state courts and state legislatures have defined its contours. Since the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court has placed constitutional limits on how states can define libel, notably by requiring public officials and, later, public figures to prove actual malice. That protection was needed, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote, to vindicate a “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open.” Such debate, Justice Brennan wrote, “may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” Changing New York Times v. Sullivan would require either the Supreme Court to overrule it or a constitutional amendment. Neither is remotely likely, though President Trump could try to appoint Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn the precedent.

“It has been held impermissible,” Federal Judge J. Paul Oetken wrote, “to exclude a single television news network from live coverage of mayoral candidates’ headquarters and to withhold White House press passes in a content-based or arbitrary fashion.”

Feb 24’s developments at the White House crossed that legal line, said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “That was unconstitutional,” he said. “If you exclude reporters from briefings that they otherwise have a right to attend because you don’t like their reporting, then you have engaged in viewpoint discrimination.” Viewpoint discrimination by the government in a public forum is almost always unconstitutional. Public officials are not required to give reporters perfectly equal access, of course, and exclusive interviews and selective leaks are commonplace and lawful. But First Amendment experts said the allocation of government resources like press passes and access to public forums like news conferences must be based on neutral criteria rather than discrimination based on what the journalists had written.

A ruling issued on Feb 27 by a federal judge in Manhattan, in a case brought by a freelance journalist without a lawyer, may interest the White House. The judge said that the New York Police Department may have violated the First Amendment by revoking the press credentials of the journalist, Jason B. Nicholas. The ruling was preliminary, and the Police Department said it had legitimate reasons for its actions. But Judge J. Paul Oetken’s decision was timely, following as it did the exclusion of several news organizations from a Feb 24 meeting.. “It has been held impermissible,” Judge Oetken wrote, “to exclude a single television news network from live coverage of mayoral candidates’ headquarters and to withhold White House press passes in a content-based or arbitrary fashion.”

Feb 24’s developments at the White House crossed that legal line, said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “That was unconstitutional,” he said. “If you exclude reporters from briefings that they otherwise have a right to attend because you don’t like their reporting, then you have engaged in viewpoint discrimination.” Viewpoint discrimination by the government in a public forum is almost always unconstitutional.