Judge Refuses DOJ Bid to Hold 20,000 California Ballots; Taxpayer-Funded Trump Ads Barred; Full Fifth Circuit to Rehear SCOPE Act: Oct 29

Better Call Claude Briefing — Oct 29, 2026

A federal judge in Santa Ana refused the Justice Department's last-minute request to make California set aside up to 20,000 mail ballots, and a judge in Washington barred the administration from spending more taxpayer money on campaign-style ads for the president. The full Fifth Circuit agreed to rehear the fight over Texas' SCOPE Act, the child online safety law, wiping out a July panel ruling. In legal tech, Anthropic opened a gallery of ready-made legal tools inside Claude for Legal, and Everlaw rolled out an agentic investigation suite. General news roundup only — not legal advice.

Judge refuses DOJ bid to set aside 20,000 California ballots

On Wednesday, October 28, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California denied the Justice Department's application for a temporary restraining order in United States v. California, which asked the court to make state and Los Angeles County election officials segregate and hold back the ballots of up to 20,000 registered voters the administration says are likely noncitizens. Carter found the government's citizenship list wasn't credible and wrote that granting the request mid-election would "wreak havoc" on voting already underway, chill election workers and voters, and risk discounting the votes of U.S. citizens. He said states, not the executive branch, run their own elections, and that Congress already gave the government a remedy: prosecuting individuals who vote illegally, alongside California's own procedures for cancelling registrations of people proven ineligible. The NAACP, LULAC, and immigrant-rights groups had intervened on the state's side. The Justice Department said it would appeal; a divided Ninth Circuit panel had already dismissed an earlier emergency appeal in the same fight. Why it matters: with Election Day days away, the ruling means those ballots get processed normally, and it signals courts are skeptical of federal efforts to sort ballots on the eve of an election based on contested data.

Sources: AP News, Los Angeles Times, Politico, Washington Post

Judge bars taxpayer-funded "partisan campaign" ads, finds DHS likely broke the law

Also on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan in Washington, D.C., granted preliminary relief to the Democratic National Committee, which sued this month over roughly $20 million in public money used to produce and air ads promoting President Trump. The money had been approved for Customs and Border Protection for "commemorative efforts and events related to border security." In a 35-page order, AliKhan found the DNC likely to succeed on its claim that the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Homeland Security violated the Administrative Procedure Act by breaking the appropriations-law ban on "publicity or propaganda," the Purpose Statute, and the Antideficiency Act. She noted the government "do[es] not even attempt to defend the challenged ads" on the merits, and rejected its main argument that the case was moot because the ads had stopped airing, pointing out that the president's October 5 promise to stop using taxpayer funds went unfulfilled for at least another week. Why it matters: the order is a rare court enforcement of the federal ban on government propaganda spending, and it bars a quick restart of the ads in the final days before the midterms.

Sources: Law&Crime (via Yahoo News)

Full Fifth Circuit will rehear Texas' SCOPE Act child online safety case

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on October 28 granted rehearing en banc in Computer & Communications Industry Association v. Paxton, consolidated with Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton, and vacated the July 24 panel opinion. The cases challenge HB 18, the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, which requires social platforms to register users' ages, limit data collection and targeted ads for known minors, offer parental tools, and build filtering strategies to keep minors from harmful content. The July panel, in an opinion by Judge Dana Douglas, had held the monitoring-and-filtering requirement preempted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, while finding that the student and creator plaintiffs lacked standing on several provisions; Judge James Ho partly dissented. A majority of the court's active judges voted for rehearing, and supplemental briefing and an argument date are still to be set. Why it matters: the panel's Section 230 ruling is no longer law in the circuit, Texas gets another shot at enforcing the law, and the full court may now reach the First Amendment questions the panel avoided. The district court's earlier preliminary injunctions weren't addressed by the order.

Sources: Bloomberg Law, Recording Law, MLex

Legal tech: Claude for Legal adds a gallery of legal artifacts, Everlaw launches Omni

Anthropic on Wednesday launched artifacts in Claude for Legal: reusable, interactive tools that sit beside the chat window and that legal teams can adapt with their own data and connectors and share across a business. Launch partners built several of them. Goodwin contributed an AI Governance Benchmark that asks a short set of questions and flags gaps in a company's AI governance; Harvey built an Intake artifact that lets business users submit legal questions in Claude, answering routine ones from the legal team's own guidance and routing the rest to a lawyer in Harvey through its MCP server; Foley & Lardner built an Obligations Checker for agreements; and PwC built a subpoena-response drafting tool. Law.com reported the launch also includes tools for tabular review, citation checking, and regulatory monitoring. Separately, at its San Francisco summit, Everlaw announced Omni, an agentic investigation suite with an Omni Agent and a "Case Memory" that builds as new evidence arrives, plus Workflows for automating complex document reviews with human controls; Workflows ships in November, and Omni is expected in early 2027. Why it matters: AI vendors and big firms are packaging legal know-how as shareable tools inside general-purpose assistants, which raises fresh questions about supervision, confidentiality, and who's responsible for the advice those tools give.

Sources: Anthropic (Claude), Law.com Legaltech News, Goodwin, Harvey, Everlaw

Not legal advice

This Briefing is a general news summary from Better Call Claude (bettercallclaude.org) and is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. For help with your situation, consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.