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With Paramount Skydance Corp.’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. now complete, litigation seeking damages remains an option for the deal’s many opponents, although pursuing such claims presents significant obstacles.

The acquisition brings together two major film studios under a newly formed company called Skydance, which will house dozens of television networks and two major subscription streaming services, Paramount+ and HBO Max.

The deal has also sparked widespread concern among lawmakers and members of the film industry, who have warned that the merger could lead to lower-quality programming, higher prices, fewer employment opportunities for television workers, and less variety and fewer viewpoints across cable channels.

A private plaintiff could eventually bring a case, given that the merger has affected “so many different constituencies”, said Kathleen Bradish, vice-president and director of legal advocacy at the American Antitrust Institute.

“Everyday people seem to be concerned about this,” Bradish said. “There will certainly be watchful eyes on it.”

Opponents who could become plaintiffs have already made their objections known. Last month, press freedom and film advocacy groups forming the “Block the Merger” coalition challenged a settlement reached with 12 state attorneys-general who had sued to block the transaction after the Department of Justice closed its investigation.

The coalition had previously gathered more than 200,000 signatures from industry professionals and consumers opposed to the merger.

Another group representing writers, performers and production workers also criticised the settlement, arguing that it was unfair and failed to address the harm alleged by the states.

Neither group provided a comment.

Deep Pockets

Bringing a private lawsuit after a merger has been completed is a risky and expensive undertaking, said Josh Davis, an attorney at plaintiffs’ law firm Berger Montague.

However, a wealthy individual motivated by social concerns could potentially finance such litigation, he said. Alternatively, plaintiffs’ lawyers could agree to work on a contingency-fee basis, receiving payment only if the case succeeds or produces a settlement.

“The question is, ‘Is there someone with deep enough pockets who stands enough to gain enough financially, or has enough money that they are okay if it may not be a winning proposition for them?’” Davis said.

The merged company’s conduct will help determine when potential claims might emerge.

Viable cases could take more than a year to develop because damages must accumulate for long enough to demonstrate actionable harm, such as higher prices, suppressed wages or reduced innovation, Bradish said.

“If they go and cut salaries right out of the box, then they are handing a damages case to somebody,” she said.

The merged company could also face claims of monopolisation under Section 2 of the Sherman Act if it achieves sufficient market share in relevant markets, Bradish said. She noted that other mergers, including the combination of Live Nation Entertainment Inc. and Ticketmaster, had not prevented subsequent antitrust challenges.

Last year, a group of consumers secured class certification in a case challenging arbitration agreements used by Live Nation and its Ticketmaster unit.

Live Nation also encountered compliance problems under its 2010 consent decree with the Department of Justice, Bradish said. Private plaintiffs subsequently brought damages claims following the merger.

“That’s one model of a company that did not shake its antitrust problems,” she said.

Nevertheless, private plaintiffs seeking to challenge the Paramount transaction will need to establish legal standing, said Alex Russell, a partner in Goodwin Procter’s antitrust and competition practice.

“The plaintiff will need to show not just some hypothetical injury, but concrete injury in fact that is traceable to the merger,” Russell said.

Bringing a claim immediately after a merger makes it difficult to demonstrate concrete harm. Waiting too long, however, could expose plaintiffs to a “laches” defence, under which Paramount could argue that an unreasonable delay in bringing proceedings has prejudiced its position.

Attempts to reverse a merger and “unscramble the egg” are inherently difficult, Russell warned. She noted that only one private plaintiff had successfully obtained a court-ordered divestiture in a merger-related case.

In that case, door manufacturer Jeld-Wen Inc. was required to sell a plant it had acquired as part of its 2012 takeover of CMI, a manufacturer of the panelled “skins” used as door exteriors.

The fact that there is only one successful example “kind of tells you a lot about the hurdles that private plaintiffs face in the situation”, Russell said.

Potential Plaintiffs

One significant legal question is whether consumers in the 12 states that agreed to the consent decree would be prevented from bringing their own antitrust claims.

Members of the Block the Merger coalition have sought clarification on the issue, warning that due process concerns could arise if people who were not parties to the settlement were nevertheless bound by its terms.

The coalition has also questioned whether the agreement could prevent consumers and workers in those states from pursuing their own potential claims under the Clayton Act, including seeking a future divestiture.

Potential plaintiffs in states that did not join the settlement could also pursue damages claims relating to labour markets.

“You could have actors who are saying they are getting paid less as a result of this,” Davis said. “That would be more novel but it also could be quite credible.”

Moviegoers who purchase tickets from cinema operators rather than directly from studios such as Paramount, as well as cable television subscribers who contract with service providers such as Comcast, could potentially bring claims as indirect purchasers, said Mark S. Hegedus, general counsel at the American Antitrust Institute.

Direct purchasers, including consumers who subscribe to streaming services directly from HBO, could also sue, he said.

Businesses and individuals providing services to film and television productions, including costume professionals and hairdressers, might also join forces to seek damages, Hegedus said.

“There’s a whole set of people who provide services for movie production and television production that may not even be covered by the unions,” he said.

Merger Under Close Scrutiny

With so many opponents, the transaction will remain subject to intense scrutiny, and any alleged breach of its terms could trigger further legal action, said Abiel Garcia, a partner at Kesselman Brantly Stockinger LLP.

Under the settlement, Skydance has agreed to produce 30 films for theatrical release each year, invest $1.5 billion in domestic film production over five years, and establish an independent news oversight board.

“You’re going to have people watching Paramount like a hawk,” Garcia said.

The case is The State of California v. Paramount Skydance Corp., US District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 4:26-cv-07116.

US President Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to revive his dismissed lawsuit against his Democratic rival in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, accusing her, former FBI Director James Comey and others of conspiring to damage his campaign by linking it to Russia.

Trump filed the appeal after a federal judge dismissed the case and ordered him and one of his lawyers to pay nearly $1 million in sanctions for bringing what the judge described as a “frivolous” lawsuit. A US appeals court subsequently upheld both the dismissal and the sanctions.

Trump’s lawyers argued in their appeal that Supreme Court intervention was necessary to protect the presidency. They said the lower courts’ decisions reflected “a deeply troubling trend of federal courts using sanctions and disciplinary threats to punish the president and his lawyers for legitimate legal positions that those courts (erroneously) reject”.

In 2022, after leaving office following his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump sued Clinton, Comey, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, the Democratic National Committee and numerous others in a lengthy complaint filed in federal court in Florida.

Trump, who has a history of bringing lawsuits against political adversaries, alleged that Clinton and her allies had conspired before the 2016 election to discredit him through what he called a false narrative that he and his campaign had colluded with Russia. The complaint included allegations of racketeering and conspiracy to commit injurious falsehood, among other claims.

Trump defeated Clinton in the 2016 election despite losing the national popular vote. He served his first term as president from 2017 to 2021.

US officials have accused Russia of interfering in the 2016 election. An investigation led by former FBI director Robert Mueller documented extensive contacts between members of Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives who sought to influence the election in his favour. Trump has repeatedly dismissed allegations of Russian interference as a “hoax”.

Since losing to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, Trump has continued to make false claims of widespread electoral fraud in that election. He returned to the presidency in 2025 after defeating Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has continued to repeat those claims.

‘Political Manifesto’

US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks dismissed Trump’s lawsuit against Clinton, citing numerous deficiencies, including the excessive delay in bringing some of the claims. The judge compared the complaint to a “two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him”.

Middlebrooks subsequently ordered Trump and his lead lawyer in the case, Alina Habba, to pay nearly $1 million in legal fees and costs. He imposed the sanctions on the grounds that the lawsuit was intended “to dishonestly advance a political narrative” and criticised Trump and his lawyers for what he called a “continuing pattern of misuse of the courts”.

The judge found that the lawsuit employed abusive litigation tactics, contained “knowingly false” factual allegations and advanced “frivolous” legal theories.

The Atlanta-based 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the rulings, including the sanctions, in 2025. “Many of Trump’s and Habba’s legal arguments were indeed frivolous,” the appeals court said.

In Friday’s filing, lawyers representing Trump and Habba argued that the deadline for bringing the lawsuit should have been extended because Trump had deferred legal action during his first presidential term to fulfil his constitutional responsibilities.

“This court’s intervention is necessary to protect the presidency, and to prevent judicial disagreement from becoming a licence to punish its advocates,” the filing stated.

Mueller, who was appointed special counsel by the Justice Department, published a report in 2019 setting out the findings of his investigation. The report concluded that Russia had “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion”. However, it also stated that the investigation had not established that members of Trump’s campaign conspired or co-ordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

Mueller reported finding “numerous links” between Russia and the Trump campaign and said the campaign “expected it would benefit” from Moscow’s efforts to influence the election in Trump’s favour.

Trump’s then attorney general, William Barr, appointed another special counsel, John Durham, in 2019 to investigate possible misconduct by the FBI.

In a report published in 2023, Durham concluded that the FBI lacked “actual evidence” to investigate Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and had relied too heavily on information provided by his political opponents.

Trump’s Justice Department indicted Comey last year, accusing him of making false statements and obstructing Congress following allegations that he had lied about authorising leaks to the news media. Comey was among several of Trump’s adversaries to face criminal charges during his presidency. A federal judge later dismissed the indictment, ruling that the prosecutor personally selected by Trump to bring the case had been unlawfully appointed.

Steele, who worked for an opposition research firm hired by a law firm on behalf of Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, compiled a dossier alleging links between Trump’s campaign and Russia, alongside other controversial claims. Trump denied the allegations.

Lawyers at leading artificial intelligence companies warned on Thursday that malicious actors could exploit the capabilities of open-source AI models, raising concerns about cybersecurity threats and the need for stronger safeguards.

Alex Iftimie, deputy general counsel at OpenAI, said the potential use of open-source models by ransomware groups, hostile nation-state actors and intelligence services was an urgent concern.

“That is a problem that will manifest in serious ways, likely over the next few months,” he said at an American Bar Association conference on national security law in Washington, DC.

Will Hudson, associate general counsel at Anthropic PBC, said the open-source nature of AI models made it significantly easier to remove their safeguards. If models without such protections were available to anyone, cyber-defenders should also have access to the most capable systems, he added.

“Certainly cyber-defenders should have access to the most capable models,” Hudson said.

The discussion comes as AI has assumed a prominent role in Washington, with the US midterm election season under way and government leaders grappling with how best to regulate and manage the technology.

Concerns about the potential threat AI poses to humanity intensified last month after an Anthropic researcher resigned, warning that Anthropic and OpenAI “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”.

Several executives who met US President Donald Trump last week pledged to introduce “robust internal controls” to monitor AI models during training and deployment.

Phil Carter, senior counsel at Alphabet Inc.'s Google, said at Thursday's conference that the government needed to invest in the infrastructure required to identify and address vulnerabilities in open-source systems.

“Without that, I think there’s just enormous latent vulnerability in the global information system,” he said.

Carter also called on Congress to develop a single, large appropriations measure to “supercharge the research enterprise” in the US.

Hudson said the largest AI laboratories should be required to test their systems for “catastrophic risk”. They should publish the results, he said, with an independent evaluator subsequently assessing their findings.

Democratic Party officials have filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent US President Donald Trump’s administration from spending public money on television advertisements that praise him, arguing that the campaign violates restrictions on the use of government funds for political propaganda.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed the case in a federal court in Washington, alleging that the advertisements breach a statutory prohibition on using appropriated funds for “publicity or propaganda purposes”.

The advertisements, which began airing in late September, have triggered criticism from both Democrats and Republicans over the use of taxpayers’ money to promote the president.

A separate lawsuit was filed in New York on Wednesday by watchdog group Common Cause, a public employee union and a candidate for the Alabama state legislature. The plaintiffs are also seeking a court order to stop the advertisements, arguing that they amount to personal publicity and political propaganda rather than public-service announcements.

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday, Trump described the advertisements as “a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.” but said they would no longer be financed by taxpayers. The White House subsequently said his political action committee, MAGA PAC, would fund the campaign.

However, the DNC said the advertisements continued to run after Trump’s announcement, prompting it to pursue legal action.

“With less than 30 days remaining before the midterm election and millions of public dollars apportioned to pay for propaganda ads still unspent, the DNC has no choice but to take action in defence of free and fair elections,” the lawsuit stated.

The advertisements were broadcast during football games as recently as Sunday, as well as during other television programmes. The New York Times reported that Trump had personally instructed the White House budget director to use taxpayer money to pay for the television spots, citing people familiar with the matter.

One advertisement features Trump declaring that “America will never be a communist country”, while a chorus repeats the words “love me”. Another combines images of Mount Rushmore with footage of the president describing the period as a “golden age of America”.

A more recent advertisement also features ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. A source briefed on the matter told Reuters that the government-funded advertisements were expected to end this week.

The White House has said MAGA PAC will not reimburse taxpayers for advertisements that have already aired. The television spots conclude with a disclaimer stating that they were paid for by the US government.

Christa Pike, who was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder, awoke “angry and confused” in hospital this week and faces a long recovery after surviving Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her, her lawyers said on Wednesday.

Pike, 50, was taken from the execution chamber to a Nashville hospital a week ago, unconscious and critically ill, with severe injuries to her arms after two injections of the barbiturate pentobarbital failed to kill her at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.

As recently as Monday, her lawyers believed Pike was brain dead and that life support would be withdrawn the following day. Her failed execution was the second such incident in Tennessee this year, prompting renewed scrutiny of the state’s use of the death penalty.

“But on Tuesday, to the shock of everyone, including me, including her team and including the medical team, Christa woke up and began talking,” Randall Spivey, one of her lawyers, told reporters after a court hearing on Wednesday.

During the hearing, a judge ordered Tennessee officials to preserve syringes and other evidence from the failed execution.

“She is angry and confused about everything right now,” Spivey said. “She is very aware that the state tried to execute her.”

Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions in Tennessee for the remainder of the year while investigators examine the failed executions of Pike and Tony Carruthers in May, when prison officials were unable to establish intravenous lines.

Pike remains seriously ill and shackled to her hospital bed, her lawyers said. She cannot swallow or eat and has pneumonia. Her hands and arms are “tremendously swollen”, leaving her unable to move them, and it remains unclear whether she will regain her mobility.

Although she continues to experience “cognitive confusion”, her lawyers said she has been speaking with people around her.

“She has wanted to know what’s happened, and she’s asked about several people,” Spivey said. “She’s asked about the victim’s family.”

Pike was sentenced to death for her role, as a teenager, in the torture and murder of her 19-year-old schoolmate, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995.

Her lawyers say she is the first person known to have survived a completed execution attempt in the United States. They argue that the attempt amounted to a violation of the US Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

A Unique Case

Pike’s lawyers are continuing their legal action against state officials, seeking greater transparency over execution procedures in Tennessee and challenging the secrecy that typically surrounds them.

Earlier on Wednesday, Davidson County Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles ordered Tennessee officials to preserve all evidence from the failed execution, including syringes, drug packaging and lot numbers, catheters, intravenous lines and gurney restraints.

Pike’s all-female execution team used at least seven needles during an ordeal that lasted more than two hours, her lawyers said. One needle was bent at a 90-degree angle when it was removed.

Myles largely sided with Pike’s lawyers at the end of Wednesday’s hearing, describing the litigation, which began in January as part of efforts to prevent the scheduled execution, as unusual because no one had expected Pike to survive. “This case is unique, to say the least,” Myles said.

She also ordered the state to preserve internal communications relating to the attempted execution, including incident reports, witness accounts and encrypted messages.

Myles has yet to rule on a request by Pike’s lawyers for the Tennessee Department of Correction to allow them to obtain any residual traces of the execution drugs for chemical analysis.

The Tennessee Department of Correction has opposed what it described as a “duplicative and unnecessary” preservation order, arguing that it is already legally required to preserve evidence and had already agreed to share most, if not all, of the material sought by Pike’s lawyers.

Tennessee and other US states have long struggled to obtain drugs used in executions. Major pharmaceutical companies generally do not supply them because of restrictions imposed by European countries on companies whose products are used in torture or executions.

Tennessee, like other states, has therefore turned to small, largely unregulated compounding pharmacies to produce limited batches of execution drugs, while promising to keep their identities confidential.

“Today’s hearing was about transparency, about why Christa, the courts, the media and the public should not simply take the state’s word about what happened last Wednesday,” Luke Ihnen, another lawyer for Pike, told reporters after the judge’s ruling.

He repeated the call for Governor Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence to life imprisonment and never attempt to execute her again. A spokesperson for Lee, who rejected a clemency appeal two days before the failed execution, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pike’s lawyers had previously sought an alternative to lethal injection, arguing that her small veins and related medical conditions made her concerned that the execution could go wrong.

Florida has asked a state judge to order changes to Instagram and Facebook to better protect young users, pressing ahead with a lawsuit accusing Meta Platforms of harming teenagers after most states resolved similar claims through a sweeping settlement.

In a filing in a Pasco County court on Wednesday, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier asked for a temporary injunction requiring Meta to identify and remove users under the age of 14 from the platforms in the state, limit teenagers to two hours a day across its apps and disable features such as autoplay and infinite scrolling for them.

The filing seeks to have the changes implemented immediately and remain in place while the lawsuit proceeds.

A Meta spokesperson said that, following the company’s settlement with nearly every other state, Florida should focus on persuading other platforms to take action.

“The attorney general should be using taxpayer resources to get YouTube and TikTok to empower parents and protect teens in Florida. We regret that he has chosen instead to pursue a meritless preliminary injunction years into the litigation,” the spokesperson said.

Florida’s lawsuit against Meta, which accuses the company of knowingly designing its platforms to be addictive for young users and misleading consumers about their safety, was one of dozens of similar lawsuits filed by states across the country.

In August, Meta reached settlements with 48 other states and Washington, DC, agreeing to pay up to $18 billion and make changes to the way teenagers use its platforms.

Meta has said it works hard to keep teenagers safe on its platforms and denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle. The total payout represents about three to four months of profit and roughly one month of revenue for the company.Uthmeier, a Republican, chose not to join the settlement and instead continued with Florida’s lawsuit.

Florida said in the filing that the settlement amounted to a “mere slap on the wrist” that would be viewed cynically as the cost of doing business and, in any event, would not prevent similar conduct in the future.

The measures sought by Uthmeier are more stringent than those Meta agreed to as part of the settlement. They would cut off teenagers’ access to messaging once their daily time limits are reached and prevent the company from showing them advertisements.

Uthmeier’s office argued that the changes Meta agreed to under the settlement demonstrate that the measures sought by Florida are technically and operationally possible.

A US federal judge has dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Disney and filmmaker James Cameron, rejecting claims that the Avatar sequels copied elements of a science-fiction story created by a 3-D animator.

The case, brought by animator Eric Ryder, alleged that Cameron and Disney copied his original work, known as KRZ, in developing Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash.

The ruling by the US District Court for the Central District of California gives Disney and Cameron a legal victory in the dispute over the blockbuster film franchise.

Ryder had argued that the two sequels contained similarities to his work that amounted to copyright infringement. The court, however, found that the alleged similarities were either based on material that predated Ryder's work, carried forward from the original Avatar film, or involved ideas that were not protected by copyright.

Cameron had developed a detailed treatment for the original Avatar film in 1995, before Ryder presented his KRZ project to Lightstorm Entertainment in 2000.

The court also noted that an earlier case had already found that the original Avatar was not substantially similar to Ryder's work. It therefore excluded elements carried forward from the first film when assessing the allegations concerning the sequels.

Among the similarities highlighted by Ryder was the depiction of underwater harvesting of organic material said to have life-extending properties. The judge found that the alleged similarities, when examined in context, were not sufficient to establish copyright infringement.

The court also rejected the argument that expert testimony or further discovery was required to determine whether the works were substantially similar. It said the remaining issues could be assessed without specialised knowledge because the works were intended for general audiences and dealt with readily understandable subject matter.

Ryder's copyright claim included allegations of direct, contributory and vicarious infringement. The court dismissed those claims, finding that secondary copyright liability could not stand without an underlying finding of direct infringement.

The judge also dismissed Ryder's related state-law claims without prejudice after declining to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over them. The court had previously allowed Ryder an opportunity to amend his complaint, but he chose to stand on his existing filing.

The lawsuit is Ryder v. Cameron, No. 2:25-cv-11854, in the US District Court for the Central District of California. Reuters identified Daniel Saunders of Kasowitz LLP as representing Ryder and Kelly Klaus of Munger Tolles & Olson as representing Disney.

A federal judge on Monday blocked efforts by the Trump administration to impose fines of up to $1.8 million on migrants who fail to leave the US after receiving final deportation orders.

US District Judge George O’Toole in Boston issued the ruling in a class-action lawsuit filed last year by two of the thousands of migrants who have been assessed civil penalties by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

O’Toole said the administration had imposed the fines unlawfully. Halting the policies related to the penalties was necessary, he said, because collecting the fines would likely drive the plaintiffs into insolvency.

“The plaintiffs live in an economically precarious position even without the imposition of the government’s exorbitant fines,” he wrote.

As recently as July, the department said it had issued more than 103,000 fines to migrants, amounting to about $84 billion in total, since President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year.

While Congress authorised civil penalties under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, no administration sought to impose them until Trump’s first term.

Starting last year, Trump’s second administration began levying fines of $998 a day on migrants who failed to leave the US after receiving a deportation order. The fines have been imposed retroactively for up to five years, resulting in a maximum penalty of $1.8 million.

In July 2025, DHS and the US Department of Justice introduced a new process that they said would streamline the assessment of fines by eliminating a 30-day notice period and shortening the process for challenging penalties.

The plaintiffs, who also included the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, challenged that policy, as well as what they described as a practice by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a DHS agency, of issuing fines using boilerplate forms without independently determining whether an individual’s failure to depart was “willful” or “voluntary”.

O’Toole, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, sided with the plaintiffs, ruling that the fines were unlawful and violated the Administrative Procedure Act because the forms lacked specific allegations explaining why an individual’s conduct warranted a penalty.

He also found that the administration had failed to comply with rulemaking procedures when adopting its streamlined fine-imposition process because it had not given the public an opportunity to comment on the policy change beforehand.

A US judge on Thursday dismissed a federal case accusing a Jamaican national of illegally voting, ruling that the law criminalising noncitizen voting was unconstitutional and delivering a setback to the Trump administration’s campaign against alleged election fraud.

The ruling by Miami-based US District Judge David Leibowitz applies only to the case of Florida resident Chelsea Cox, who was charged in October 2025 with illegally voting in the 2020 election. It is not binding on judges in other cases.

The decision marks a setback for President Donald Trump’s administration on noncitizen voting, a cornerstone of its efforts to highlight alleged election fraud ahead of November’s midterm elections. Republicans are fighting to retain majorities in both houses of Congress.

The Justice Department has charged at least 60 people with noncitizen voting since Trump returned to office in January 2025.

Leibowitz, who was nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden, appears to be the first federal judge to find that the 1996 law violates the US Constitution.

Leibowitz wrote that under the Constitution, only states can determine voter qualifications, not Congress. Every state requires US citizenship to vote, and he said it was up to Florida, rather than the Department of Justice, to prosecute Cox for violating that requirement.

“Can the State of Florida prohibit and punish the exact conduct Defendant Cox allegedly engaged in here? This has already been decided elsewhere and is not addressed here: Florida can and does,” Leibowitz wrote.

Trump, who falsely claims that fraud cost him the 2020 election, has said stricter enforcement of citizenship requirements is necessary to protect election integrity. His critics say the administration’s highly publicised crackdown on noncitizen voting exaggerates a rare problem and could undermine confidence in election results.

Neither the White House nor the Justice Department immediately responded to requests for comment.

In a court filing, the Justice Department had argued that Congress, rather than the states, was best equipped to handle immigration and foreign affairs.

“Foreign interference in elections is clearly within the purview of Congress,” federal prosecutors wrote.

Other Defendants Have Challenged Law

Cox’s attorney, Bruce Udolf, welcomed the ruling. “This is a situation that cries out for discretion by government officials and they’d be well-advised to walk away from this without further reprisal against her,” he said.

Cox entered the United States as a tourist in 1999 and remained after her visa expired the following year, according to a government court filing. She used a fraudulent US Virgin Islands birth certificate to obtain a Florida driver’s licence and used those documents to register to vote in 2012.

Records show she voted in federal elections from 2012 to 2020, but only the 2020 election fell within the statute of limitations.

There are about 45 pending noncitizen voting cases around the country, and at least four other defendants have challenged the law on similar grounds. Judges in those cases may find Leibowitz’s reasoning persuasive, but they are not bound by his decision.

Trump has portrayed noncitizen voting as part of a broad Democratic Party conspiracy to dilute Republican power. But Cox was one of just 129 people charged with violating the law known as “voting by an alien”, according to a Reuters investigation published in July.

The investigation, published on July 19, found no defendant accused of conspiring to sway an election, supporting a candidate or taking payment for a vote.

The Reuters investigation also showed that most of those accused of noncitizen voting were lawful permanent residents who either registered by mistake or were encouraged to sign up to vote based on misguided advice from an election worker or government clerk.

Illegal voting is grounds for deportation and, as Reuters has reported, the Trump administration has been investigating noncitizen voting and deporting defendants, sometimes years after their criminal cases were closed.

Cox’s attorney Udolf said he hoped the government would not move to deport her, citing her declining health.

On July 16, Trump said without evidence that 278,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Five days later, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, said about 400 noncitizens in her state had voted after a software error mistakenly registered about 6,600 people in 2023-24. The Justice Department has demanded their names, nationalities and addresses.

A federal judge has warned that law firms’ growing use of artificial intelligence could create risks for clients and hinder the training of junior lawyers, even as he declined to sanction attorneys over AI-generated errors in a court filing.

Manhattan-based US District Judge Arun Subramanian said in an order this week that the episode should serve as a “wake-up call” for lawyers, cautioning that AI-generated legal work must be carefully checked for accuracy.

“While clients may demand the use of AI to save money, there is a risk of adverse consequences when things go wrong,” Subramanian wrote. “For this reason, it might make sense to clients to think hard before requiring counsel to use AI for tasks such as the drafting of briefs.” The judge did not say the client in this case had asked its lawyers to use AI.

State and federal judges are increasingly weighing whether and how to sanction lawyers over misuse of AI as the technology becomes more widespread.

In the New York case, Subramanian questioned in an order last month whether the “unchecked” use of AI had led to citation errors in a copyright infringement case he was overseeing.

The judge this week declined to impose sanctions on the lawyers after Cynthia Arato, an attorney for defendant Foundation Media, apologised and said the errors stemmed from another lawyer at her firm who was responsible for preparing the initial draft and finalising it before it was filed.

Arato said in a declaration this week that the lawyer, who was not named, had acted “contrary to the firm’s policies and training” and that the failure to check AI-generated citations was “an isolated error and not any bad faith or intent to mislead or deceive the court”.

Foundation Media declined to comment. There was no indication in court filings that the company had directed its outside lawyers to use AI.

Arato said her firm, Shapiro Arato Bach, was implementing additional safeguards against AI misuse.

In a filin, Arato disclosed that the firm had used AI tools developed by technology company Harvey to help prepare the filing, which contained the improperly vetted citations.

Subramanian said in his order that the legal profession should “think about ways to ensure that junior lawyers are getting the training they need, even as reliance on these technological tools increases”. He suggested that firms could require initial drafts of briefs to be prepared without AI assistance.

“The use of AI may be unavoidable, but mentoring young lawyers is a joint responsibility that we all share,” Subramanian wrote.