Free Republic

A Republican candidate for governor has sued Gov. Jay Inslee in federal court, claiming that Inslee's statewide stay-home ban amid the pandemic is a clear violation of First Amendment rights guaranteeing freedom of speech and religion. The candidate, Joshua Freed, filed the suit Tuesday in U.S. District Court. It seeks a restraining order or injunction that would prohibit the enforcement of Inslee's order against religious gatherings. The suit also seeks a judgment from the court declaring that Inslee's order violates the U.S. Constitution's free speech, right to assemble and due process clauses. According to the lawsuit, Inslee's stay-home order carves...

EXCLUSIVE: Missouri became the first state to file a lawsuit against China on Tuesday, accusing the country of being responsible for the severity of the coronavirus pandemic and seeking damages to make up for "the enormous loss of life, human suffering, and economic turmoil" resulting from the disease. The suit in the Eastern District of Missouri follows at least seven federal class-action suits that have been filed by private groups, with one filed in Florida saying that China knew "COVID-19 was dangerous and capable of causing a pandemic, yet slowly acted, proverbially put their head in the sand, and/or covered...

Residents in one New York county have filed a class-action lawsuit on Monday against the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing the agency of covering up the coronavirus pandemic. The three residents in Westchester County -- which was seen as an original hotspot for the virus -- claim the WHO failed to quickly declare a pandemic and monitor China’s response to the original outbreak. It seeks unspecified damages for the alleged harm the organization caused to the county's roughly 756,000 adult residents.

Americans will be able to take the Chinese Communist Party to court for its lies and omissions about the Chinese Wuhan coronavirus from the Middle Kingdom under a new bill proposed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas). The bill would strike down immunity for foreign countries like China in the specific case of the coronavirus, enabling Americans to sue for damages in U.S. courts. "By silencing doctors and journalists who tried to warn the world about the coronavirus, the Chinese Communist Party allowed the virus to spread quickly around the globe," Cotton said in a statement...

A Mississippi church is suing the metropolis of Greenville after law enforcement shut down its generate-in service this week in accordance with a metropolis ban on the observe amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Lawyers with the Alliance Defending Freedom submitted the lawsuit Friday on behalf of the Temple Baptist Church. The submitting problems Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons’ April 7 executive purchase that prohibits drive-in church companies till a statewide shelter-in-location purchase is lifted. The accommodate will come soon after 8 uniformed Greenville police officers reportedly issued $500 tickets to congregants who refused to go away a parking large amount the place...

Lawyers and a Silicon Valley start-up have found ways to flood the system with claims, so companies are looking to thwart a process they created. Teel Lidow couldn’t quite believe the numbers. Over the past few years, the nation’s largest telecom companies, like Comcast and AT&T, have had a combined 330 million customers. Yet annually an average of just 30 people took the companies to arbitration, the forum where millions of Americans are forced to hash out legal disputes with corporations.Mr. Lidow, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a law degree, figured there had to be more people upset with their...

Should the Chinese regime be compelled to pay legal damages for mishandling and deliberately covering up the CCP virus, or coronavirus, outbreak? In practice, how could the Chinese regime actually be held accountable? What precedents are there? What could be used as leverage? In this episode, we sit down with Jeremy Alters, the Chief Strategist and (non-attorney) spokesperson of Berman Law Group, which is filing a class-action lawsuit against the People’s Republic of China, for how it handled the CCP virus, or Covid 19 outbreak. Alters previously launched and won a major class action lawsuit against Chinese manufacturers of...

GOJO, the maker of Purell hand sanitizer, is facing two class-action lawsuits accusing it of "misleading claims" that it can prevent "99.9 percent of illness-causing germs." The most recent lawsuit, filed by four people March 13 in federal court for the Northeastern District of Ohio, comes as retailers scramble to keep hand sanitizer in stock amid a coronavirus outbreak that has infected more than 230,000 people around the world and forced millions of Americans to stay at home indefinitely. Purell's label states the product can kill "99.9 percent of illness-causing germs." The suit claims that it's misleading because it implies...

Portland, OR – Cascade Policy Institute has submitted a letter to the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) requesting that the agency enforce contracts with TriMet for three light rail projects: the Yellow Line, the Green Line, and the Orange Line. Each project received substantial federal funding, which came with contractual obligations to provide minimum levels of service. TriMet has not met those obligations. For both the Yellow and Green Lines, TriMet is supposed to be providing 8 trains per hour during peak periods. Current service on those lines is 4 trains per hour. For the Orange Line, TriMet is supposed to...

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department for all text and other electronic messages of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin after discovering an email that strongly suggests Clinton used text messages for official business ((Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:20-cv-00441)).[snip] Clinton repeatedly stated that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails. In response to a court order in another Judicial Watch...

The Supreme Court issued an Order this morning, at the URL above, staying enforcement of a trial court order that had barred the Trump Administration from enforcing its policy requiring those applying for asylum having come from Mexico to remain in Mexico until the application is ruled on. The policy is being challenged in court,and the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to review the trial court order barring enforcement. The Supreme Court says today that Trump can continue to enforce the policy while the legal challenge continues. One is tempted to read the tea leaves and see this...

Getting ripped off on textbooks has long been part of the standard American college experience, up there with frat parties, cheap pizza, and bad choices. Now, though, one student has taken up the cause in a class-action lawsuit that calls out the three main textbook publishers for alleged antitrust violations. The lawsuit alleges that publishers Pearson, Cengage and McGraw-Hill, along with college bookstores, formed a conspiracy to monopolize the textbook market and inflate the price of course materials. The named plaintiff, Martha Barabas, sued on her own behalf and for the class of “at least hundreds of thousands if not...

President Trump's campaign has filed a multimillion-dollar libel lawsuit against The Washington Post, claiming the newspaper knowingly published false claims that Trump engaged in a conspiracy with Russia concerning U.S. presidential elections.The lawsuit, filed Monday in a Washington, D.C., federal court, comes a week after the Trump campaign filed a similar suit against The New York Times.The lawsuit cites two Washington Post opinion pieces from June 2019, one which said that then-special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that the Trump campaign “tried to conspire with” a “sweeping and systematic” attack by Russia in the 2016 election. A second article stated “who...

There’s finally a chance that The New York Times will be held accountable for lying to the American people. The Trump campaign just filed a lawsuit against the Times for a 2019 article that falsely claimed the campaign had “an overarching deal” with “Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy” to “help the campaign against Hillary Clinton” in exchange for “a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from the Obama administration’s burdensome economic sanctions.” The Times peddled a wild, baseless conspiracy theory, yet the author, who spent nearly a decade as the Times’s executive editor, simply presented his politically-motivated assumptions as unassailable fact....

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday affirmed that YouTube, a Google subsidiary, is a private platform and thus not subject to the First Amendment. In making that determination, the Court also rejected a plea from a conservative content maker that sued YouTube in hopes that the courts would force it to behave like a public utility. Put another way, had the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of Prager University—also known as PragerU—and against YouTube, it would have violated YouTube's First Amendment rights. Headed by conservative radio host Dennis Prager, PragerU alleged in its suit against YouTube that the...

Former President Obama's attorneys say they plan to file a cease-and-desist letter over a pro-Trump group's television ad in South Carolina that attacks former Vice President Joe Biden by using a portion of Obama's book Obama is also demanding that all South Carolina television stations immediately stop running the ad from the Committee to Defend the President, which is aimed at supporting President Trump's reelection bid. The ad uses excerpts from Obama's 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father," in an effort to get the attention of black voters in the state. "Joe Biden promised to help our community. It was...

The Trump campaign’s filing of a libel lawsuit against the so-called "extremely biased" New York Times was a "clever" move but the case will likely be “dismissed,” according to Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano. The lawsuit argued that the newspaper's March 27, 2019 op-ed titled “The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo" amounted to a knowingly false smear intended to "improperly influence the presidential election in November 2020." "They did a bad thing," Trump said at a coronavirus press conference later Wednesday, before hinting at more litigation. "There will be more coming. There will be more coming.”

A nonprofit law firm run by a former member of President Donald Trump's now-disbanded voter fraud commission is suing Allegheny County for its alleged failure to maintain its voter rolls. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which J. Christian Adams is president and general counsel, filed a lawsuit in federal court on Monday accusing the county of violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by not undertaking a "reasonable effort" to remove the names of ineligible voters from its registration lists. Under state and federal law, the county is supposed to remove voters who have moved out of state,...

This week two Democrats in Florida filed a lawsuit aimed at keeping Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., from being listed on the state’s presidential primary ballot. Registered Democrats Frank Bach and George Brown argue in their lawsuit that Sanders cannot be allowed on the ballot because he is a registered independent, not a Democrat, pointing out that he has also raised campaign funding as an independent. Sanders does caucus with Democrats in the Senate, however. Former circuit court judge Karen Givers is representing the two plaintiffs. Speaking with Politico, Givers argued that “Florida is a closed primary state, yet here we...

In a free society, speech at times can be annoying, obnoxious, unsettling or offensive. Panhandlers and political protesters can approach you on the street. Controversial ideas can be expressed on tee shirts, bumper stickers or license plates. And governments cannot block speech merely because it is irritating or bothersome — unless you are talking about commercial speech, in which case government bureaucrats have been given more deference to restrict speech. For example, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission determined that Uber and Lyft drivers could not install tablets that would display advertisements or allow passengers to play games...