Summary: Roger Rogoff sued Trump over alleged unlawful removal Rogoff appointed by Western District of Washington judges Justice Department defends president's firing authority The top federal prosecutor in Seattle who was fired by President Donald Trump last week sued the administration on July 21, in a case testing the president's authority to remove U.S. attorneys appointed by judges to fill vacancies. Roger Rogoff’s lawsuit, filed in the federal court in Seattle, said Trump unlawfully removed him as the court-appointed U.S. attorney in the Western District of Washington immediately after he took office on July 15. The lawsuit contends that federal law allows a court-appointed U.S. attorney to serve until the position is filled by a presidential nominee confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Rogoff asked the court to declare his firing invalid and rule that he remains the U.S. attorney for the district until a Senate-confirmed successor takes office. Trump last week removed Rogoff, a former federal prosecutor and state court judge, one hour after the chief judge in the Western District of Washington swore him in as the district's new U.S. attorney. “The President’s actions violate the law, and they ignore the protections of the Constitution of the United States,” Rogoff said in a statement. “His removal of me, like his removal of other court-appointed U.S. Attorneys across the country, is illegal and cannot stand.” The Justice Department in a statement said the district court "did not coordinate with DOJ on this selection. Consistent with other firings of this type, this is wholly within the President’s authority." Rogoff was appointed after the U.S. attorney’s office's top post had remained vacant without a Senate-confirmed nominee. Rogoff is an attorney at the law firm Osborn Machler & Neff. Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a social media post last week that Trump had fired Rogoff. "District court judges can appoint a temporary U.S. Attorney, and POTUS can fire them," Blanche said.

Summary: U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin grants final approval Anthropic settles class action for $1.5 billion Settlement largest known in U.S. copyright case A federal judge in San Francisco on July 20 signed off on artificial intelligence company Anthropic's landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot Claude. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted final approval of the settlement, the largest known settlement of a U.S. copyright case, rejecting arguments that it was too small. The case is one of dozens brought by copyright owners including authors and news outlets against tech companies over the training of their large language models, and the first major U.S. case to settle. Now-retired Judge William Alsup initially approved the deal last September. "We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court's landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair use under copyright law — which remains the law today," Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement. The authors' lead attorney, Justin Nelson, welcomed what he called a "historic settlement." The writers sued Anthropic in 2024, arguing that the company, which is backed by ⁠Amazon and Alphabet , used pirated versions of their books without permission to teach Claude to respond to human prompts. Alsup ruled last June that Anthropic made fair ⁠use of the authors' work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a "central library" that would not necessarily be used for AI training. A trial was scheduled to begin last December ⁠to determine how much Anthropic owed for the alleged piracy, with potential damages running into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The settlement spurred objections from some authors who argued it was not large enough, overcompensated the plaintiffs' attorneys or wrongly excluded some copyright owners. Judge Martinez-Olguin overruled those objections in her ruling on July 20. The judge said that complaints about the settlement's size were "not grounded in a realistic assessment of the overall risks and rewards of a trial," and awarded the attorneys more than $101 million of the $187.5 million they requested in fees. Some authors and publishers opted out of the settlement and have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic that are still ongoing.

Summary: 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules on New Jersey ban Ban covers semi-automatic rifles and large-capacity magazines Judge Arianna Freeman cites Supreme Court precedent Bruen A federal appeals court on July 17 ruled that New Jersey's assault-weapons law barring possession of semiautomatic rifles like AR-15s and large capacity magazines containing more than 10 rounds of ammunition is unconstitutional. The ruling by the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals marked the first time a federal appeals court had ruled that a state's assault weapons ban violated the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. That issue is already in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed last month to review rulings that had upheld similar bans adopted in Cook County, Illinois, and Connecticut against powerful semiautomatic rifles. The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. The ruling on July 17 came in lawsuits filed by gun rights groups that said New Jersey's law could no longer stand after the Supreme Court handed down a landmark Second Amendment ruling in 2022 that expanded gun rights. That decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, held that modern gun restrictions must be "consistent with this nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." Lawyers for Democratic-led New Jersey had argued that the state, like 10 other U.S. states, was justified in banning assault weapons, which they characterized as military-style weapons that can cause "wholesale destruction" and fuel mass shootings. A lower-court judge in 2024 delivered a mixed ruling, holding New Jersey's 1990 ban on AR-15 rifles was unconstitutional but that its prohibition of large-capacity ammunition magazines could stand. The appeals court by a 10-5 vote went even further, declaring the ban on all types of semi-automatic rifles, and not just AR-15s, violates the Second Amendment, as does the large-capacity magazine ban. The court also directed a lower-court judge to assess the constitutionality of the assault weapons ban as applied to other types of firearms, such as semi-automatic pistols and shotguns. U.S. Circuit Judge Arianna Freeman said the Supreme Court's recent Second Amendment rulings "teach that bans or broad prohibitions on possessing or carrying of a class of weapons in common use for lawful purposes fail to find support in our Nation’s tradition of firearm regulation." "That is so even when the regulations are passed with the intention of reducing gun violence," Freeman wrote for the court.