When one judge blocks a president's policies nationwide, alarm bells ring. Should a single judge wield this much power' Can they halt policies across the entire country after just a quick first look at whether they might be illegal' The Supreme Court now faces these critical questions. In a lively session on May 15, 2025, filled with justices' questions that at times interrupted the attorneys appearing before them, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case stemming from President Donald Trump's executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship, the provision in the Constitution's 14th Amendment that says all children born in the United States are granted citizenship. While the underlying lawsuit involves birthright citizenship, the immediate question before the court was about a legal tool called a 'nationwide preliminary injunction.' This allows a single federal judge to temporarily halt presidential policies across the entire country ' even before fully considering whether those policies are constitutional....

A lawyer representing Anthropic admitted to using an erroneous citation created by the company's Claude AI chatbot in its ongoing legal battle with music publishers, according to a filing made in a Northern California court on Thursday. Claude hallucinated the citation with 'an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors,' Anthropic says in the filing, first reported by Bloomberg. Anthropic's lawyers explain that their 'manual citation check' did not catch it, nor several other errors that were caused by Claude's hallucinations. Earlier this week, lawyers representing Universal Music Group and other music publishers accused Anthropic's expert witness ' one of the company's employees, Olivia Chen ' of using Claude to cite fake articles in her testimony. Federal judge, Susan van Keulen, then ordered Anthropic to respond to these allegations. This is the latest instance of lawyers using AI in court and then regretting the decision. Earlier this week, a California judge slammed a pair of law firms for submitting 'bogus AI-generated research' in his court. In January, an Australian lawyer was caught using ChatGPT in the preparation of court documents and the chatbot produced faulty citations....

Fossil claw prints found in Australia were probably made by the earliest known members of the group that includes reptiles, birds and mammals, according to a study published in Nature today1. The findings suggest that this group ' the amniotes ' originated at least 35 million years earlier than previously thought. Early amniotes evolved to lay eggs on land, because they were encased in an amniotic membrane that stopped them drying out. Before this study, the earliest known amniote fossils had been found in Nova Scotia, Canada, and were dated to the mid-Carboniferous period, about 319 million years ago. The latest findings suggest that amniotes also existed in the early Carboniferous period, around 355 million years ago. The discovery also means the last common ancestor between modern amphibians and amniotes such as reptiles and mammals must have existed even further back in time, says co-author, a palaeontologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Dating by the team suggests that the groups diverged in the Devonian period, about 380 million years ago....

The president of the United States appears to have long ago forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War not merely to secure their independence from the British monarchy but to establish a government of laws, not of men, so that they and future generations of Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in 1776, 'For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.' Donald Trump seems also not to understand John Adams's fundamental observation about the new nation that came into the world that same year. Just last month, an interviewer from Time magazine asked the president in the Oval Office, 'Mr. President, you were showing us the new paintings you have behind us. You put all these new portraits. One of them includes John Adams. John Adams said we're a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that'' To which the president replied: 'John Adams said that' Where was the painting''...