Every week, lawyers add sharp, timely commentary to the Library at LexBlog. This week: the first appellate ruling on AI training and fair use in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS, the Video Privacy Protection Act argued at the Supreme Court, a split verdict on 2026 state tax ballot measures, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders’ new union, California holiday pay rules, and more. Here are the ten that stood out and drew readers in.
The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Unionized. Can You? A Guide to Unions in Texas
On October 23 the Cowboys recognized the newly formed Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Association, so for the first time the squad negotiates pay and benefits as a group rather than one contract at a time. Garza quotes a labor sociologist’s point that the squad’s fame gave it leverage most workers never get — and then spends the rest of the post explaining that the rights they used belong to most private-sector employees in Texas anyway.
2026 election results: Voters cap rates and spurn a Billionaires’ Tax, but still open to revenue raisers
Voters were of two minds. They approved income tax rate caps and higher legislative thresholds for raising income taxes, and they turned down California’s one-time 5% billionaires’ wealth tax. They also made California’s top rates permanent, narrowly backed a graduated income tax in Colorado, lifted the TABOR limit and rejected supermajority requirements for citizen-initiated taxes. A measure-by-measure read of a night that resists a tidy summary.
New Scoreboard, Same Rulebook: What the Midterms Mean for Marijuana and Hemp
There is a particular kind of optimism that arrives the morning after an election, when the map looks different and everything Washington couldn’t manage yesterday feels inevitable tomorrow. Steineker and Torbert are happy for cannabis and hemp operators to enjoy that feeling. They would just rather nobody built a compliance program around it.
Texas Business Court Clarifies Output Contract Obligations: Actual Production, Not Capacity
A ten-year supply agreement bound the buyer to take “100% of Seller’s production” from a Greenville plant. After selling the plant, the seller argued the buyer had breached by failing to purchase everything the facility was capable of producing. Judge Andrews read production to mean what actually came out of it, and granted summary judgment for the defendants. One word, ten years, and a lesson for anyone drafting an output contract.
When Use of Artificial Intelligence Conflicts With Employees’ Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs (US)
A new category of accommodation request is turning up: employees asking to be excused from AI tools on sincerely held religious or moral grounds. Lawless maps the ground it stands on — Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical calling AI a tool that requires vigilance, the Future of Life Institute on the agency to opt out, the American Humanist Association telling objecting members to consult a lawyer — and then works through what an employer on the receiving end actually owes.
Supreme Court Considers Scope of the Video Privacy Protection Act
Salazar v. Paramount Global asks who counts as a “consumer” under a 1988 statute Congress passed because someone leaked Robert Bork’s video rental history during his confirmation hearings. The question argued on October 14: must the goods or services you bought from the provider themselves be audiovisual, or does a subscription to anything it sells do? The answer sets the exposure for every business that puts video alongside its other products.
Clio Says AI Is Boosting Billable Hours: Maybe I Was Wrong. Or Maybe Not
Embry expected AI to push billable hours down. Clio’s Legal Trends Report says they are up. He went and asked Clio why at the conference, came away with an explanation for the paradox, and concluded that the same explanation suggests the trend may not hold. Worth reading for the increasingly rare sight of someone revisiting their own prediction in public.
Unwrapping the Rules on California Holiday Pay
California does not require paid holidays, does not require you to close, and does not require a premium rate just because someone works Thanksgiving. What trips employers up is the quieter rule underneath: holiday pay for time not worked doesn’t count toward the overtime threshold, so paying for a closure and then forty worked hours in the same week does not create overtime. Kosche lays out the whole thing before anyone has to find out the hard way.
AI Training and Fair Use After the First Appellate Ruling: Thomson Reuters v. ROSS (3d Cir. 2026)
ROSS set out to build an AI legal research tool to compete with Westlaw, was refused a license, and trained instead on thousands of bulk memos built from Westlaw headnotes. The Third Circuit has now affirmed that this was not fair use — the first appellate ruling on AI training. Burton’s attention is on what the panel deliberately left open for generative models, which is where the next round gets fought.
Is the Requirement that Broadcasters Give Lowest Unit Rates to Political Candidates Unconstitutional?
Lowest unit rate forces stations to sell candidates airtime at the best rate any commercial advertiser gets, volume discounts included, without buying in volume. The RNC, the Texas Republican Party and four candidates have now sued the FCC, arguing the rule unconstitutionally favors one class of political speaker. The request for alternative relief is the striking part: if candidates cannot share the rate, scrap it for everyone — which is precisely what the broadcasters have been asking for.
Recent Comments