The question is: Why should the court abstain from exercising its “inherent authority for an order holding Defendant Rudolph W. Giuliani in civil contempt and imposing sanctions” for failing to comply with discovery in the collection action filed by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss? And the answer is Hunter Biden. This Court should know that one or more of Plaintiffs’ counsels was partners with Hunter Biden as Boies Schiller Flexner LLC, President Joseph Biden’s son, and had been involved with, upon information and belief, Burisma Holdings and/or Ukrainian issues. These issues became very, very political and charged during the 2020…

Last week, we released our Outside Counsel rankings, an annual look at the Biglaw firms most trusted by corporate legal departments. Today, we highlight the firms rated highest by in-house counsel based on the industries in which they work. Drawing on survey responses from hundreds of GCs and in-house lawyers, we’ve compiled rankings for four industries: Finance/Banking, Healthcare/Life Sciences, Media & Entertainment, and Technology. While several law firms made the list in more than one industry, just one law firm — Latham & Watkins — appears on all four industry lists. Latham also placed in the Top Tier of our…

To call Donald Trump a transactional leader is to damn with faint praise. The man hawks gold sneakers. He took the White House photographers’ work and turned it into a $100 coffee table book. He shreds his clothes and sells them for literal scrap. He got paid billions of dollars to vomit nonsense onto a bespoke social media platform whose only rule was that you couldn’t criticize him (or his business or his family). And so it is perhaps unsurprising that President-elect Got Mine thinks speech is literally merchandise. That is the basis of his trollsuit (h/t Politico) against J.…

Rudy Giuliani is ready to start 2025 off with a bang. America’s mayor is courting contempt in two federal courtrooms, and he’s on the verge of getting himself a default judgment to boot. Squad goals! Rudy’s been at this passion project since November of 2020, when he falsely accused Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Atlanta poll workers, of tabulating thousands of fraudulent ballots. In August of 2023, Judge Beryl Howell ordered a default judgment against him, thanks to his utter refusal to comply with his discovery obligations. And in December a jury awarded the plaintiffs $148 million in damages.…

The never-ending Alex Jones bankruptcy story continued yesterday afternoon in a Texas courtroom. As of this writing, the shitposter’s lawyers are challenging Chapter 7 Trustee Christopher Murray’s selection of Global Tetrahedron, the parent company of “The Onion,” as the winning bidder of the auction for Free Speech Systems. As with most Jones productions, it’s a shitshow. His lawyer spent several minutes objecting to the admission of documents Jones himself signed and submitted to the court in this case. Judge Christopher Lopez, who has sounded exhausted by the Jones cases for more than year (and he’s been at this shit since…

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. Leading the Department of Health and Human Services seems, at first glance, like a dream job for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., quite possibly America’s most infamous anti-vaxxer. If confirmed, Kennedy will oversee the agencies that play a central role in researching, reviewing, and recommending vaccines. But promoting his own vaccination views will likely be a long push for subtle changes—rulings that Americans may get vaccinated, rather than should—and he’s said, at least, that he’s not aiming to “take away anybody’s vaccines.”…

Abortion policy in America is at a stalemate. Republicans will take control of Congress in January, ready to block any national protections—but with a slim majority, making a national ban unlikely. At the state level, pro-choice advocates have focused for the past two years on ballot measures to protect abortion rights. Most of those measures have passed; now there are only two states left that have severe restrictions, allow constitutional amendments, and haven’t already failed to pass constitutional protections. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, U.S. abortion rates have held steady, or even risen. That’s in part because…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest spin on MAGA, “Make frying oil tallow again,” is surprisingly straightforward for a man who has spent decades downplaying his most controversial opinions. Last month, Kennedy argued in an Instagram post that Americans were healthier when restaurants such as McDonald’s cooked fries in beef tallow—that is, cow fat—instead of seed oils, a catchall term for common vegetable-derived oils including corn, canola, and sunflower. Americans, he wrote, are “being unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils; in his view, we’d all be better off cooking with solid fats such as tallow, butter, and lard. In a video that…

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. The recorder used to be an instrument people wanted to hear. As a 1946 article in The Atlantic explained, it gets mentioned lovingly in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Milton’s Paradise Lost. One 17th-century English-navy leader wrote in his diary that it made the best sound he’d ever heard. The recorder was the instrument of kings and queens: Henry VIII had a collection of more than 70. But by 1946, recorders were already commonly associated with terrible screeching noises, most often made by…

Doctors have long taken for granted a devil’s bargain: Relieving intense pain, such as that caused by surgery and traumatic injury, risks inducing the sort of pleasure that could leave patients addicted. Opioids are among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, pain medications ever known, but for many years they have been a source of staggering morbidity and mortality. After the Civil War, thousands of veterans became addicted to morphine and opium, which were used to treat battle injuries and illnesses. In the 1990s, overprescribing by doctors, along with aggressive and deceptive drug marketing by pharmaceutical companies, led…