Jackson on the Emergency Docket, Riverside Ballot Seizure, ICE Holding Cells & Copilot DMCA: Week of Sep 25

Better Call Claude Briefing — Week of Sep 25, 2026

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson urged restraint on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, California’s high court ordered a sheriff to return 650,000 seized ballots, a Manhattan federal judge locked in permanent limits on ICE holding cells at 26 Federal Plaza, and the Ninth Circuit rejected a DMCA theory against GitHub Copilot and Codex. General news roundup only — not legal advice.

Jackson warns emergency docket is becoming an “end run”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told the University of the District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law on Thursday that the Supreme Court’s modern stay practice is “noticeably less restrained” than earlier courts and risks a “disruptive and potentially corrosive” effect on ordinary litigation. Delivering the Joseph L. Rauh Jr. Lecture, she warned that without care the emergency docket “can and will become an end run around the standard review process, a special avenue that certain privileged litigants can use selectively.” She contrasted Justice Antonin Scalia’s high bar when two lower courts had already denied relief with today’s pace of unsigned, often unexplained orders, and she tied the critique to real-world harms rather than premature merits calls. The speech landed as the Trump administration filed its latest emergency bid — the 40th since January — to revive third-country deportation flights after a First Circuit block, a matter Jackson is handling as circuit Justice for Massachusetts. Jackson has been among the Court’s most consistent public critics of shadow-docket interventions in high-profile executive cases.

Sources: The Hill, Bloomberg Law, Washington Post

California Supreme Court: Riverside sheriff’s ballot seizure was unlawful

The California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco must return roughly 650,000 ballots he seized in February after a November 2025 special election on Proposition 50, calling the seizure “unlawful.” The court held that the Elections Code keeps voted ballots in election officials’ custody even during a criminal investigation, and that a search warrant does not override those rules. Bianco took the ballots after a citizens group claimed a tens-of-thousands vote gap; Registrar Art Tinoco said the real discrepancy was 103 ballots, within the secretary of state’s margin. Attorney General Rob Bonta had ordered the materials returned and sued; a companion UCLA Voting Rights Project case joined the fight. The Court also held that the Attorney General’s directives to county sheriffs are binding, rejecting Bianco’s claim that Bonta’s role is only advisory. Bianco said he will comply while disagreeing with the ruling. Election lawyers are watching the case as a template for November, after similar ballot seizures elsewhere and a new state law signed Saturday to tighten who may seize ballots.

Sources: AP / ABC News, KQED, CalMatters, Democracy Docket (opinion PDF)

Permanent injunction tightens ICE conditions at 26 Federal Plaza

U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan on Thursday entered a permanent injunction requiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement to end overcrowding and improve conditions at Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza temporary holding facility. The order, sought by the ACLU, NYCLU, Make the Road New York, and Wang Hecker LLP in Barco Mercado v. Noem, expands protections to all current and future detainees and requires capacity limits (including roughly 50 square feet per person in holding rooms), clean bedding, dimmed overnight lighting, hygiene supplies, adequate meals and water, on-site medical screening, and free confidential attorney calls within an hour of arrival. A September 2025 preliminary injunction had already barred abusive conditions; evidence at a May 2026 bench trial showed ICE repeatedly exceeded court-imposed capacity and kept people for days or weeks without beds, showers, or confidential legal access. Counsel for the certified class framed the ruling as a floor, not a finish line, given what they called a broader pattern of overcrowding during the administration’s detention surge.

Sources: ACLU, ACLU case page (*Barco Mercado v. Noem*), The City Reporter

Ninth Circuit: Copilot/Codex output is not DMCA “removal” of copyright notices

A Ninth Circuit panel on September 16 affirmed dismissal of programmers’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act §1202(b) claims against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI in Doe v. GitHub, No. 24-7700. Writing for the court, Judge Eric D. Miller held that plaintiffs had standing to plead a substantial risk that Copilot would emit their code without attribution, but that an “output” theory fails on the merits: generating new code that never carried copyright-management information is not “remov[ing] or alter[ing]” CMI from a copy of an existing work. The panel rejected a rigid “identicality” label while insisting plaintiffs must allege affirmative stripping of CMI from existing copies — not merely that a similar work lacks a license notice. It left open traditional copyright-infringement and open-source contract claims still pending below, and it treated plaintiffs’ separate “input” (training-stage) CMI theory as forfeited. The published opinion now binds Northern District of California AI suits and will be closely cited wherever plaintiffs try to convert substantial-similarity theories into DMCA statutory-damages claims.

Sources: Ninth Circuit opinion (PDF), Reuters, Authors Alliance

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This Briefing is general news for Better Call Claude readers. It is not legal advice, and nothing here creates an attorney-client relationship. Check primary sources and talk to a licensed lawyer about your situation.