Appellate

  • October 16, 2026

    Whataburger Can't Arbitrate Ex-Worker's Sex Assault Suit

    A Texas appellate court has declined to send a former Whataburger employee's lawsuit to arbitration, finding that the allegations of unwanted sexual touching trigger a federal law that bars arbitration of sexual assault and sexual harassment claims.

  • October 16, 2026

    8th Circ. Upholds Denial of Gambian Man's Asylum Bid

    The Eighth Circuit denied a Gambian man's bid for asylum, saying there was no evidence in the record showing that the current administration in The Gambia would subject him to persecution for his criticisms of a past government.

  • October 16, 2026

    4th Circ. Says Religious Org. Can't Invoke Bias Law Carveout

    A split Fourth Circuit panel refused Friday to disturb a trial court's ruling that a religious humanitarian nonprofit violated discrimination laws by nixing health insurance coverage for a gay employee's husband, saying the employer was pushing for "nearly unbounded immunity."

  • October 16, 2026

    10th Circ. OKs EPA's Okla. Indian Country Programs Approval

    The Tenth Circuit rejected a Native American tribe's challenge to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's decision to approve Oklahoma's request to extend the state's administration of federal environmental regulatory programs to Indian Country, ruling Friday that a provision of a 2005 transportation bill controls the outcome.

  • October 16, 2026

    9th Circ. Decertifies Tesla 'Full Self-Driving' False Ad Classes

    The Ninth Circuit on Friday decertified a class action alleging Tesla deceived consumers into believing that its cars could fully drive themselves, saying there's no proof that all class members saw the same purportedly false statement on Tesla's website about its cars' hardware.

  • October 16, 2026

    FCC Eyes 'All Options' As 5th Circ. Orders Subsidy Fee Redo

    The Federal Communications Commission said Friday it was exploring all options for managing the $9 billion Universal Service Fund after a Fifth Circuit panel ruled the FCC lacked authority to create the funds' private oversight company.

  • October 16, 2026

    6th Circ. Backs Insurers In $6.3M Crypto Fire Loss Suit

    The Sixth Circuit has affirmed the dismissal of two cryptocurrency mining companies' claims that Travelers Insurance Co. and Northfield Insurance Co. exacerbated their building's fire loss through the claim handling process, finding the mining companies failed to allege the insurance companies owed them a duty of care outside contractual obligations.

  • October 16, 2026

    Texas Justices OK Arbitration In Trampoline Park Injury Suit

    The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that an Urban Air trampoline park and related entities can compel arbitration of a minor's injury claims, saying the language in the arbitration agreement signed by the child's mother expressly covers "protected parties" such as the entities.

  • October 16, 2026

    Balancing The Scales: Criminal Appeals, Sentencing Rules

    The Second Circuit has been ordered to take another look at a murder-for-hire conviction in light of the high court's new miscarriage-of-justice exception for criminal appeal waivers, and the top courts in Pennsylvania and Michigan will look at the retroactivity of new sentencing rules. Here, Law360 highlights access to justice stories arising from litigation, verdicts and judgments you may have missed.

  • October 16, 2026

    Fed. Circ. Stands By Double Denials, SpaceTime3D PTAB Loss

    The Federal Circuit declined Friday to rehear two cases decided in August, one where an e-commerce patent owner was looking for the security to assert its patent in future litigation, and the other where SpaceTime3D was trying to revive patents cut down by Apple and Google.

  • October 16, 2026

    US Inventor Presses Justices To Hear $2.6B Centripetal Case

    US Inventor Inc. has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to revive Centripetal Networks LLC's patent infringement case against Cisco Systems Inc., arguing that a lower court that wiped out a $2.6 billion judgment had wrongly denied Centripetal the chance to respond to new claim construction.

  • October 16, 2026

    Del. High Court Backs Gard In Litigation Funding Fight

    The Delaware Supreme Court has upheld a Chancery Court ruling rejecting claims that hedge fund manager Casey Gard and affiliates improperly shifted a litigation-finance business away from a company he co-owned with attorney Brett K. Findler, ending Findler's challenge to liability findings from a closely watched business breakup.

  • October 16, 2026

    Could A Criminal Sentencing Case Upend Loper Bright?

    U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is concerned that a ruling instructing trial courts to defer to the U.S. Sentencing Commission's interpretation of federal sentencing guidelines could blow a "pretty big hole" in the court's recent rejection of deference doctrines. His colleagues, however, don't appear as perturbed.

  • October 16, 2026

    Mass. Court Adds Knowledge Prong To Gun Charge

    Prosecutors must prove that a defendant found with a licensed firearm while intoxicated knew it was loaded in order to secure a conviction under a state law prohibiting such conduct, Massachusetts' intermediate-level appellate court said Friday in vacating a conviction.

  • October 16, 2026

    9th Circ. Won't Rethink $2B Devas Arbitral Award Confirmation

    The Ninth Circuit said Friday it will not disturb a unanimous three-judge panel's decision to enforce a $2 billion arbitral award issued to a satellite communications company, rejecting the award debtor's petition for a rehearing by the full court.

  • October 16, 2026

    Justices Told Siemens Chip Patent Win Shows Fed. Circ. Split

    The owner of a set of patents covering computer chip design wants the U.S. Supreme Court to look at an alleged internal split within the Federal Circuit of how it looks at whether patents are eligible under the high court's Alice test.

  • October 16, 2026

    US Says 1907 Border Strip Lets Wall Work Continue

    The federal government is asking the D.C. Circuit to deny an Arizona tribe's emergency bid to block border wall construction, saying the Indigenous nation's claim that a 1907 law that established the Roosevelt Reservation as part of its traditional homelands ignores history and precedent.

  • October 16, 2026

    Meet The Candidates Seeking A Texas Supreme Court Seat

    Four justices on the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court will defend their seats from Democratic challengers in November, making for a closely watched contest on a bench that's made controversial moves this year.

  • October 16, 2026

    'Defend To The End': Atty Admits Error In Gucci Glasses Suit

    An attorney blamed a "defend to the end" attitude he'd developed while fighting foreclosures for turning a client's dispute over $399 Gucci glasses into a multiyear legal morass that landed him in front of a Pennsylvania disciplinary panel on Friday.

  • October 16, 2026

    11th Circ. Backs Florida Firm In Lender Note Verdict Appeal

    The Eleventh Circuit in an unpublished opinion backed a law firm accused of botching several financial transactions for a Puerto Rican microcap lender, affirming the findings of a jury and a lower court that it didn't commit malpractice by failing to secure the company's assets during bankruptcy proceedings.

  • October 16, 2026

    Mich. Panel Says PIP Opt-Out Bars State Medical Coverage

    Michigan motorists who opt out of personal injury protection medical benefits cannot obtain such coverage through the state's assigned claims plan if they are injured as a non-occupant of a motor vehicle, a Michigan state appeals court ruled.

  • October 16, 2026

    11th Circ. ERISA Exhaustion Shift Furthers Textualist Trend

    An Eleventh Circuit decision overruling decades-old precedent that took a strict view of when federal benefits law claims could be brought in court continues a trend of courts excising judicially imposed rules not contained in statutory text, attorneys say.

  • October 15, 2026

    Would-Be Kavanaugh Assassin Slams Feds' Skewed Facts

    A woman accused of trying to kill U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh told the Fourth Circuit that federal prosecutors have presented a "wildly inaccurate description" of a Maryland federal judge's sentencing decision, rejecting their argument that she got off too easy because of her gender identity.

  • October 15, 2026

    10th Circ. Shifts Indian Status Burden In Sex Abuse Cases

    Reversing its own long-term precedent, the Tenth Circuit has ruled that defendants seeking to claim Native American status under federal criminal law must prove their status themselves, a decision that rewrites decades of circuit precedent dealing with how crimes on Native lands are prosecuted by the federal government.

  • October 15, 2026

    Anthropic Urges DC Circ. To Revisit Defense Supply Risk Ban

    Anthropic has urged the D.C. Circuit to reconsider a split panel's decision allowing the Pentagon to exclude Claude artificial intelligence models from its supply chain, saying the decision, if left standing, puts U.S. companies at risk of punishment for refusing Pentagon demands.

Expert Analysis

  • Series

    Bass Fishing Makes Me A Better Lawyer

    Author Photo

    Landing a trophy striped bass and closing a big deal both require cultivating the patience to finesse — not force — your way to desired outcomes, changing course when your old approach isn’t working and learning from the ones that got away, says Jon Ruiss at Alston & Bird.

  • Series

    NY Banking Brief: All The Notable Legal Updates In Q2

    Author Photo

    The year's second quarter brought several notable banking law developments to New York, including a proposal to align state stablecoin rules with the federal Genius Act, fresh fair lending and cybersecurity guidance from state regulators, and a significant Second Circuit holding on preemption, say attorneys at Ashurst Perkins Coie.

  • PacifiCorp Ruling Shows Limits Of Aggregate Wildfire Loss Models

    Author Photo

    An Oregon appeals court's recent decision in James v. PacifiCorp illustrates that in litigation involving multiple wildfires, materially different causation theories, and evidence tied to particular fires and locations, a single undifferentiated damages model is vulnerable to attack, say Paige Van Oosten and Jason Kim at Hunton and Kevin Cahill at FTI Consulting.

  • Roundup

    The Most Talked-About Supreme Court Decisions Of 2026

    Author Photo

    This term, 11 U.S. Supreme Court decisions quickly became hot topics among Law360's guest writers.

  • A New Defense For Medicaid Fraud Cases In Texas

    Author Photo

    The Texas Supreme Court decision in LabCorp v. Texas last month, finding that the state's False Claims Act requires proof that an omission is material, is among the first to establish that the government's lack of reaction to the defendant's disclosures rendered alleged omissions immaterial, say attorneys at Sheppard.

  • Fighting The Evidentiary Risks Of Deepfakes In Court

    Author Photo

    Though courts and federal rules are only slowly developing frameworks for assessing digital evidence that could have been created or generated by artificial intelligence, litigators should understand what steps they'll likely need to take to successfully challenge potentially deepfaked exhibits — and fight questions about the authenticity of their own, say attorneys at MoFo.

  • Justices' Cuba Ruling Narrowly Recasts Sovereign Immunity

    Author Photo

    The U.S. Supreme Court recently allowed Exxon Mobil's bid for $1 billion in damages for Cuban-seized property to proceed, but the ruling's doctrinal significance is in treating the Helms-Burton Act as a later, specific and self-contained statutory displacement of the default jurisdictional immunity regime, says Josep Galvez at 4-5 Gray's Inn.

  • 'Tiger King' Funeral Clip Ruling Offers Fair Use Road Map

    Author Photo

    The Tenth Circuit's decision in Whyte Monkee v. Netflix that the streaming service's use of another party's funeral footage in the docuseries "Tiger King" constituted fair use lays out a framework for producers to apply the four statutory fair use factors to their own projects, says Frank D’Angelo at Loeb & Loeb.

  • Justices Stand On Statutory Specifics In Cisco And Landor

    Author Photo

    With its June 23 decisions in Cisco Systems Inc. v. Doe and Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety, the U.S. Supreme Court doubled down on the critical point that the statute invoked in a federal claim must authorize a private lawsuit and the remedy sought, says Patrick Judd at Phelps Dunbar.

  • Justices' Concurrences Foretell Fault Line On Appeal Waivers

    Author Photo

    The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled 8-1 in Hunter v. U.S. that appeal waivers that produce a miscarriage of justice are unenforceable, but the decision's concurrences indicate future divisions over whether this exception will be used as a rare safety valve or to police ordinary but troubling plea errors, say attorneys at RJO.

  • How Montgomery Ruling Will Affect Cos. Across Supply Chain

    Author Photo

    Since the U.S. Supreme Court's May 14 decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, the immediate focus has been on freight brokers and negligent carrier-selection claims, but the ripple effects may extend to shippers, logistics providers, insurers, transportation managers and other participants in the supply chain, say attorneys at Quintairos Prieto.

  • High Court's FCC Fine Ruling Reframes Agency Enforcement

    Author Photo

    The U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T sweeps aside uncertainty about what kinds of regulatory enforcement trigger a Seventh Amendment right, say attorneys at Squire Patton.

  • How 6th Circ. Tightened NLRB Injunction Standard

    Author Photo

    The Sixth Circuit's recent ruling in Kerwin v. Trinity Health Grand Haven Hospital, dissolving a Section 10(j) injunction obtained by the National Labor Relations Board against an employer that refused to bargain, will make it harder for the NLRB to obtain injunctions while prosecuting unfair labor practice proceedings, say attorneys at Bass Berry.

  • After Durnell, Connecting Science And Causation Will Be Key

    Author Photo

    The U.S. Supreme Court's June 25 decision in Monsanto v. Durnell narrowed label-based failure-to-warn claims — meaning that going forward, viable theories will depend even more on whether experts can reliably connect scientific evidence to the causal proposition the law requires, says Alex Smolak at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar.

  • Series

    Choral Singing Makes Me A Better Lawyer

    Author Photo

    Singing in the New York City Bar Chorus — a hobby partly inspired by the late U.S. District Judge Richard Owen, who infused my clerkship year with opera music — has improved my legal career by refining my abilities to listen, exude confidence and develop emotional intelligence, says Bonnie Baker at Friedman Kaplan.

Want to publish in Law360?


Submit an idea

Have a news tip?


Contact us here
Can't find the article you're looking for? Click here to search the Appellate archive.