SCOTUSblog

I am not a legal scholar, but from my understanding enough that serious cases were filed and fought and made in all the way to the Supreme Court.

In a https://www.scotusblog.com article, Amy Howe quotes the Chief Justice as saying "Chevron deference, Roberts explained in his opinion for the court on Friday, is inconsistent with the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that sets out the procedures that federal agencies must follow as well as instructions for courts to review actions by those agencies. The APA, Roberts noted, directs courts to “decide legal questions by applying their own judgment” and therefore “makes clear that agency interpretations of statutes — like agency interpretations of the Constitution — are not entitled to deference. Under the APA,” Roberts concluded, “it thus remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says."

I ought to go read the decision for myself, which I have to this point not yet done. I am not an attorney, but do have a general interest in these matters.

But back to the earlier poster's notes, ATF has been a prime example. They have a history of capricious reinterpretation at the whims of whichever administration is in power. They issue letters to people and businesses that say one thing is okay and then outlaw in without any law changes a decade later. I have never owned a pistol brace, but they stated it was an acceptable innovation for certain applications, thousands and thousands of…

> Not at all. I'm simply asking whether you can see how speech restrictions can be abused. Nothing vague here.

Speech restriction being able to be abused doesn't mean that speech restriction is never appropriate. There are countless things that are fundamental to day to day life that can be abused but are vital in their non-abusive form.

> This is an anti-scientific perspective. There is no such thing as "known falsehoods". There is only "current best understanding", which is the thing that most aligns with observations of reality.

If you are making a claim based on information you know to be incorrect, this is a known falsehood. This isn't anti-science, we're not talking about people making arguments against the scientific consensus in good-faith with some framework behind their reasoning.

> Questioning existing axioms or intermediate conclusions is a great technique to advance understanding of reality. If everyone simply referred back to the previous "foregone conclusions", we'd still be trying to discover fire.

Trying to frame this discussion as being a matter of people performing science and not people taking a politically or financially motivated stance (or people that have been conned by people that did that) is also fundamentally dishonest.

> The problem here is the gatekeeping of discussion. Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to escape the power of the societal priest class, and we are in a better place than ever.

Free speech isn't absolute, and…

Yeesh. What a mess.

So first of all, let me recommend SCOTUSBlog and the actual court decision rather than the Atlantic:

http://www.scotusblog.com/?p=143279
http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/kirtsaeng-v-john-wiley-sons-inc/

Now what's going on here: Congress said (1) you have a right to resell copies of copyrighted work "lawfully made under this Title", but (2) you can't import copyrighted work from other countries without the copyright holder's permission. This is intended to make it possible to sell things at different prices in Mexico City and LA, which in turn makes it more viable to sell things in Mexico City at all. You may not love it, but it's at least a rational system.

The Ninth Circuit has interpreted this, using common sense, to mean that if a publisher voluntarily imports stuff and sells it in LA, and then you buy it and resell it, the doctrine of first sale applies. What happened in this case is someone was straight up running a business importing and reselling stuff that wasn't intended for the United States. But instead of focusing on that, the Second Circuit took a closer look and said, waitaminute, these books aren't "lawfully made under this Title" in the first place, because they were made under someone else's statutes instead of ours. So whether or not you had the right to import them, you don't have the right to resell them.

Now, as the defendant and the dissent and the Ninth Circuit have all pointed out, that's nuts. It destroys the…

In a Supreme Court case the burden of proof is on the petitioner, and it's the duty of the Court to critically question that evidence and proof. See, for instance, comparable coverage on the Roe vs Wade case, where you will see similar grilling. [1] Something quite important is how the judges responded to the claims and the follow ups. For instance in the transcript [2] follow the dialogue from the quotes you gave versus the grilling of Prelogar, representing the government.

She was, at times, being overtly mocked with quotes from judges like, "That's your best argument is that the average American won't be able to figure out that the cat feed he's getting on TikTok could be manipulated, even though there's a disclosure saying it could be manipulated?" Prelogar in general found herself struggling to defend the claim that the attempted ban was based on data access and not content (which would be unconstitutional), why there were no alternatives if the claims were based solely on data access, and the implications for any other foreign company that has access to user data (which is basically all of them). TikTok was met with some tough questioning but generally responded competently.

[1] - https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/12/majority-of-court-appears-poised-to-uphold-mississippis-ban-on-most-abortions-after-15-weeks/

[2] - https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-us-supreme-court-oral-argument-on-tiktok/

These were helpful for me and may or may not be helpful for you:

Mix in editorialized content. Read the New York Times or another major, old publication rather than only sites that have user-generated and user-moderated content. There are certain things that will get upvotes all the time on Reddit, etc.

Similarly, read blogs that are outside your normal areas. For example, if you're into tech and work in tech, read the http://www.scotusblog.com/

Read new science fiction from the library, not the same user-generated recommendations from Reddit and HN. Anthologies of short stories are great for rebooting my brain with new ideas. Worms using tunnels in ice to form a sort of neural network over millions of years? Drag racing aliens? Tattoos that administer medicine?

Also with that, just pull random books off your local library's shelf from time to time. A book about the history of Target? A book about socialism and electricity? Why not?

The executive branch has blatantly violated numerous laws but so far they have still obeyed court orders which explicitly required them to follow those laws. The real Constitutional crisis will come if they decide to openly defy a federal court order.

I would also note that while the current Trump administration has broken federal laws at an accelerated rate, the previous Biden administration did much the same thing on a smaller scale. People here on HN frequently make excuses for Biden's illegal student loan forgiveness program because they liked the results but if we want to preserve the rule of law then it needs to apply to every program. In the long run allowing unchecked growth of executive branch power and the administrative state will be bad for everyone.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-strikes-down-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-program/