Editorial desk
Posts under this byline are researched and written by the PacerPlus editorial desk from primary sources — PACER dockets, court opinions, and agency filings — and cite those sources inline so readers can check the record themselves. This byline names a desk, not an individual; posts move to a named author as we credential our writers.
The most closely watched IP dispute of the generative-AI era will decide whether unlicensed model training is fair use. Inside the consolidated In re: OpenAI proceeding and its landmark discovery fights.
Judge Mehta found Google an illegal monopolist but refused to break it up. Now both sides are before the D.C. Circuit, and the fight has shifted from liability to remedy.
The House v. NCAA settlement was supposed to bring order to college sports. Instead it spawned a second generation of antitrust litigation over the machinery built to enforce it.
A single categorical-approach ruling converted a capital prosecution into one bounded by life imprisonment. How doctrine reshaped the federal case against Luigi Mangione.
Nicolás Maduro was seized in Caracas in January 2026 and arraigned in Manhattan on narco-terrorism charges. The defense turns on an immunity doctrine federal courts have applied only a handful of times.
MDL 3047 imports the product-liability playbook into the platform economy, testing whether Section 230 shields design as well as content. A look at the bellwether sequence.
A split verdict left the hardest questions unanswered. With a retrial proposed and an acquittal motion pending, United States v. Storm remains the defining test of whether writing code can be a crime.
Can the President put soldiers on American streets over a governor's objection? The deployment litigation has produced one of the decade's most significant separation-of-powers confrontations.
A landmark constitutional case before the Supreme Court challenges removal protections for FTC commissioners, potentially overturning 90 years of precedent and reshaping dozens of federal agencies.
The Supreme Court unanimously held that ISPs cannot be held contributorily liable for users' copyright infringement merely for knowing about it and continuing to provide service, reversing a $1 billion verdict.
One of the first federal cases to test whether strategic prompting of a generative AI model to extract its system prompt constitutes trade secret misappropriation under federal law.
The FTC's enforcement action against Xponential Fitness resulted in the largest consumer recovery in franchise enforcement history, signaling heightened scrutiny of franchise disclosure practices.
A landmark constitutional case argued before the Supreme Court challenges an executive order ending birthright citizenship, testing the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause.
Federal courts are handling a rapidly expanding category of data privacy litigation involving website tracking technologies, with approximately 30 ECPA decisions issued in March 2026 alone.
The DOJ has significantly escalated enforcement against government contractors for cybersecurity compliance misrepresentations, using the False Claims Act to pursue companies that falsely certify compliance.
Nintendo challenges tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, raising questions about the limits of executive authority to impose tariffs during national emergencies.
A district court and the Ninth Circuit both held that the Homeland Security Secretary lacked statutory authority to vacate Venezuela's TPS designation. The Supreme Court let the terminations proceed anyway while the appeal ran.
A unanimous Supreme Court held on June 18, 2026 that prosecuting Ali Hemani under 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(3) violated the Second Amendment. The opinion is narrow by design, and the limits are the whole story.
The Supreme Court decided Little v. Hecox on June 30, 2026, holding 6-3 that Idaho and West Virginia may limit women's school sports teams to students assigned female at birth. Here is the record and the reasoning.
A Manhattan jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster liable on every claim the plaintiff states brought to trial. Here is the docket history, what the April 2026 verdict decided, and what is still open.
The Justice Department and the Department of Transportation sued CARB in March 2026, arguing the Energy Policy and Conservation Act preempts California's fleet CO2 standards and its zero-emission vehicle sales mandate.
A federal judge in Massachusetts froze the reconstituted ACIP, its votes, and the January 2026 childhood immunization schedule. Here is what the March 16, 2026 order did and what is still unresolved.
A federal judge quashed two grand jury subpoenas served on the Federal Reserve Board in the investigation of Chair Jerome Powell, then refused to reconsider. The opinion is unusually blunt about why.
Published opinions are a small fraction of what federal courts produce. The strategy lives in complaints, motions, and orders, and that material only became searchable at scale once AI could read dockets rather than headnotes.
Federal litigation is driven by dockets, not just published opinions. This guide explains how to use PacerPlus to research litigation dockets directly.
Refreshing PACER is not a monitoring strategy. Docket alerts turn a manual chore into a background process, and they change what you can realistically watch.
Plaintiffs in the social media MDL are not suing over what users posted. They are suing over infinite scroll, variable rewards, and ephemeral stories as design defects, which is the one theory Section 230 may not block.
A jury convicted the Tornado Cash co-founder on one count and deadlocked on the two most serious ones. The case is the closest thing there is to a ruling on whether writing and publishing code can be a crime.
Amazon won an injunction blocking Perplexity's Comet browser from its logged-in pages. Five months later the Ninth Circuit vacated it, holding that when a user directs an AI agent, the user is the one accessing the site under the CFAA.
A unanimous Supreme Court invalidated Amgen's PCSK9 antibody claims in May 2023 for failing to enable their full scope. The decision changed how broadly any biotech patent can be written.
Texas sued TikTok in federal court in Galveston in October 2024 under a state law requiring parental consent for minors' accounts, then followed with a second suit over how the platform markets itself to children.
A class action by visual artists against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway survived two rounds of motions to dismiss and is the furthest-along test of whether training an image model on copyrighted work infringes it.
The Justice Department and eight states sued RealPage in 2024 over software that recommended rents using competitors' nonpublic data. The November 2025 settlement is now the closest thing antitrust law has to a rulebook for pricing algorithms.
Argued and decided alongside Little v. Hecox, West Virginia v. B.P.J. asked whether Title IX permits a state to define girls' school sports teams by sex assigned at birth. On June 30, 2026 the Supreme Court said it does.
Federal court records are the 'secret sauce' behind some of the biggest exposés in history. Here's the 2026 workflow veteran investigative journalists use.
Walking into a courtroom without a federal judge lookup is like playing chess without knowing how your opponent moves. Here's how judicial analytics give litigators the edge.
PACER is the gatekeeper to federal justice—but it's a gatekeeper with a terrible UI and pay-to-play search. Here's how to navigate it, or skip the headache entirely.
PACER's per-page pricing turns curiosity into cost. The real problem isn't $0.10 per page—it's downloading everything just to understand anything.
The federal cases that actually moved in 2026, what each one decided, and where to read the record yourself. Updated with the rulings that landed after the original list was published.
The federal indictment carried four counts. A judge dismissed two of them in January 2026, taking the death penalty off the table and leaving two stalking counts for an October trial.
A jury convicted Elizabeth Holmes on four counts and acquitted her on four others. The split matters, the Ninth Circuit affirmed in 2025, and a commutation request is now pending.
A Manhattan jury acquitted Sean Combs of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking and convicted him on transportation counts. The 50-month sentence is now before the Second Circuit on an acquitted conduct challenge.
The Brooklyn prosecution of Joaquín Guzmán Loera ended in a conviction on all counts, a life sentence, and a $12.6 billion forfeiture order. In 2026 he filed a handwritten letter asking to be sent to Mexico.
Two separate FTC cases against Amazon are routinely confused. The Prime dark patterns case settled for $2.5 billion in September 2025. The antitrust monopolization case is still headed for trial in Seattle.
The Supreme Court took the Nvidia shareholder case, heard argument, then dismissed it in one sentence. The Ninth Circuit's ruling stood, and in March 2026 a district judge certified the class.
George Santos pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, drew an 87-month sentence, served under three months, and walked out after a presidential commutation. The docket tells the whole story.