The appeals court left it to the district court to determine whether Ohana and the Ellison Trust’s employer status may be decided as a matter of law or must be submitted to a jury. Following the bankruptcy filing of Hawaii Island Air, the Ninth Circuit affirmed a district court’s ruling that the owners of two-thirds of the airline’s stock—the Au Defendants—were an “employer” under Hawaii’s Dislocated Workers Act. However, the appeals court reversed the lower court’s rulings as to employer…

The ruling deepens a federal appellate split over whether states can regulate prediction markets trading. The Sixth Circuit resolved appeals arising in Ohio and Tennessee by ruling that sports-related event contracts on the Kalshi predictions market are not “swaps” and do not fall within the CFTC’s exclusive jurisdiction. A three-judge panel decided that even if the contracts are swaps, the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) neither expressly nor impliedly preempts Ohio’s or Tennessee’s gambling…

Several federal agencies refused to provide information to the Government Accountability Office for a probe into whether personnel from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) adhered to privacy and cybersecurity standards in their work at the agencies, GAO said in a report published today. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau went so far as to accuse GAO of “serving at the behest of a few congressional members to harass and impede the CFPB and its efforts to implement the…

The court acknowledged that analyzing Michigan’s challenge to the psychiatric facility exception for disproportionate share hospital payments required “swinging vine to vine through a jungle of statutory and regulatory provisions.” Disproportionate share hospital (DSH) Medicaid payments to two psychiatric hospitals owned and operated by the State of Michigan were subject, without exception, to the institutions for mental diseases (IMD) exclusion from eligibility for Medicaid funding, held the…

The regulations prescribe the certification form and set out a process to facilitate the Committee's approval or denial of the certifications submitted by state payment stablecoin regulators under the GENIUS Act. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has issued an interim final rule, effective Sept. 30, 2026, that sets out the process by which the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee will approve or deny certifications submitted by state payment stablecoin regulators under section 4(c)(4)…

Conflicting accounts of the late artist’s final months leave genuine factual disputes regarding gift, abandonment, and intellectual property ownership. In a dispute over the physical works and intellectual property of late outsider artist Henry Joseph Darger, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois denied cross-motions for summary judgment filed by Darger’s estate and his former landlords. The court held that the evidentiary record yields competing reasonable inferences…

All but one claim of a single franchisee was dismissed. The federal district court in Chicago, Illinois dismissed in large part a suit brought by 31 Black McDonald’s franchisees alleging Black that McDonald’s steered them into underperforming stores in high-crime neighborhoods and then treated them worse than White franchisees in inspections, rent relief, renovations, growth opportunities, rewrites, and store sales, in violation of 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and 1982 and Illinois fraudulent-concealment…

The manufacturer established that the issue was reviewable, but CPSC’s basis for its decision was not clear enough to support a ruling. In a lawsuit filed by a manufacturer of weighted baby blankets and swaddles against the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) for publishing a statement that the products were dangerous, the federal district court for the District of Columbia determined that there was not adequate evidence in the record to support the statement and ordered the matter be…

Among other things, the employee allegedly overheard trainers say that “white people are cannibals,” that “racism is in white people’s DNA,” and that “white people are like the devil.” Reversing in part a district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the City of Seattle against the racial discrimination claims asserted by a former city employee, the Ninth Circuit determined that the evidence presented by the employee, accepted as true, would show that he was subjected to racially…