A criminal referral now sitting on the desk of Wayne County’s district attorney describes conscious beagles screaming and thrashing for ten minutes while untrained workers pumped pentobarbital into their bellies at Marshall BioResources. New York’s aggravated-cruelty statute, its corporate-liability law, and its seizure-warrant authority already reach every act described, and the clock on the last known killings is running. Meanwhile, the only people facing prison over America’s beagle mills are the dog rescuers.
Adrian Rios cannot describe the police encounter that left him in a persistent vegetative state. Years later, his lawyers identified an anonymous eyewitness through the witness’s own excessive-force lawsuit. The Ninth Circuit dismissed the officers’ qualified-immunity appeal because every immunity argument depended on excluding that witness’s declaration.
Ridglan Farms is empty. On Wednesday the last 155 beagles walked out of a Wisconsin building where a judge had already found probable cause to believe felonies were being committed. The state never charged the company. It charged fifty-one people over the rescue. This report explains how that happened—and why opening Ridglan’s door was not a crime.
On October 17, 1830, Simón Bolívar wrote to Joaquín de Mier before spending his last days at de Mier’s estate. Exactly 177 years later, de Mier’s descendant boarded a Venezuelan delegation’s private jet in Orlando with the family’s Bolívar collection. What followed ran through sovereign immunity, an exhumation, a sanctions license that expired before it could be used, CITGO-linked shares, a $17.1 million judgment the Eleventh Circuit erased—and, in January 2026, the elevation of one of the officials who inspected the collection to the acting presidency of the republic still defending the case.
Seven people say brief, unrecorded video arraignments left them jailed because they could not afford bail. The majority said a federal court could hear their claims without supervising state bail hearings. The dissent said enforcement would make that supervision unavoidable.
Alabama stipulated that water carriers were principal competitors to railroads, then denied the point after competition became decisive. The Eleventh Circuit called the reversal a calculated hedge. Judge Gerald Tjoflat said the ruling would teach litigants not to concede anything.
Weems sold chartreuse as “Safety Green,” telling buyers the color made its hoses easier to see and helped prevent tripping. Before the USPTO, it called that visibility “purely incidental.” The Eighth Circuit held the color functional and upheld more than $3 million in fees.
In SS&C Technologies v. D.E. Shaw, the court held that contract-based antitrust counterclaims accrued when the agreements were executed and that a remaining theory challenged protected litigation conduct.
Michael Jensen abused children in West Virginia after his family moved there from Utah. When their civil claims settled, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints asked National Union and ACE to pay. The Tenth Circuit held that the policies reasonably support the Church’s one-occurrence reading, while leaving the insurers’ remaining defenses for remand.
Lieutenant Javan Fowlkes received qualified immunity for spraying Derrick Jones during active resistance. He lost it over a seven-second spray after Jones was cuffed and gasping in a medical room. The district court now faces claims involving missing video, force reviews, water shutoffs, and disability accommodations.
An Italian high-school exchange student accused her host father of rape and sued the sponsor that placed her in his home for negligence. When the sponsor tried to enforce her arbitration agreement, a federal judge held that Congress did not limit the sexual-assault exception to workplace cases or assaults by employees.
RaiLee Mar’s doctors knew that formula was associated with higher rates of NEC, but her hospital had no donor milk. The Seventh Circuit held that Mar could not show a stronger Abbott warning would have changed what the doctors fed her before she became ill.
Before Brianne Dressen received AstraZeneca’s experimental vaccine, the consent form said the company would pay reasonable treatment costs for research injuries. It also warned that federal law might bar a lawsuit. The Tenth Circuit held that PREP Act immunity covered her contract claim and sent the case back to decide whether AstraZeneca gave up that immunity.
Heirs to a Havana factory sued two British parent companies, alleging that their corporate interests and U.S. advertising activity profited from property Cuba confiscated in 1961. The Eleventh Circuit held that those American connections were not enough to make the companies defend the suit here.
A refinery technician entered a burning unit twice, and four clinicians later diagnosed him with work-related PTSD. The Fifth Circuit held that OSHA could not require Exxon to record the condition because Congress’s reference to workplace “illnesses” covered only physical illness.
Loujain al-Hathloul alleges that former U.S. operatives working for DarkMatter used a zero-click exploit to steal data from her iPhone. The Oregon court held that it could hear her civil hacking claims because the defendants extracted data while her phone was in the United States and deliberately used American technology and infrastructure.
EPA left stronger controls out of its decaBDE rule after calling them impracticable. The Ninth Circuit held that the agency had not evaluated the actual testing tools, costs, waste streams, water releases, and disposal gaps needed to justify that decision.
