SAN FRANCISCO — A Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held in a Sept. 28 opinion that a lawsuit filed by Washington against a gold mine owner and its parent company alleging liability under the Clean Water Act (CWA) for discharging pollutants from the mine into ground and surface waters in violation of permit limits is not barred by claim preclusion, reversing and remanding a federal judge’s grant of judgment on the pleadings after the defendants entered into a consent decree with an environmental group.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A majority of a divided District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel said petitions for review involving artificial intelligence raise “profoundly difficult questions” but ultimately determined that the government had ample reasons to conclude that continued integration of Anthropic PBC’s Claude AI product posed a national security and supply-chain risk.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) on Sept. 28 published a tribunal’s award finding no jurisdiction over two American entities’ claims against the United Mexican States for harming their interest in debt securities worth more than $219 million after finding that they are not protected under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a win for Apple Inc., a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a ruling from the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that six patent claims asserted against Apple involving speech recognition technology were unpatentable as obvious; the panel held that the patent’s term “feature vector” includes the vector-quantized codewords disclosed in an earlier patent.

BOSTON — Overruling objections from each party in a putative class action that is part of a wave of pension risk transfer (PRT) challenges, a Massachusetts federal judge on Sept. 28 adopted a report and recommendation that concluded that the amended complaint “plausibly alleges that a fiduciary breach occurred” but that only a claim against an independent fiduciary and one of the fiduciary’s managing directors survives dismissal.

NEW YORK — In contrast to decisions of two other federal judges who ruled that the United States lacked standing to challenge anticipated state climate change lawsuits, a New York federal judge held that the government has standing to assert core claims that the state’s Climate Change Superfund Act “impinges on its sovereign authority” to create and enforce laws relating to greenhouse gas emissions and “to declare and promote its interests in foreign affairs” in ruling that the act is unconstitutional and preempted by the Clean Air Act (CAA) and the foreign affairs doctrine.

RICHMOND, Va. — Asserting that “no federal court of appeals has squarely addressed whether law enforcement’s use” of cell-site simulators “for real-time tracking of a cellphone constitutes a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment,” the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals held that such tracking does constitute a search — but summary judgment in favor of the appellees was nonetheless proper because “the detectives are entitled to qualified immunity and state law public official immunity” and the police department “cannot be held liable for the violation of [the appellant’s] Fourth Amendment rights.”

WILMINGTON, Del. — A federal bankruptcy court properly enjoined settling insurers’ claims seeking contribution from nonsettling insurers and did not err in permitting holders of temporarily allowed but not-yet-filed talc liability claims to vote on the Chapter 11 plan of liquidation of asbestos talc debtor AIO US Inc. and affiliates, a Delaware federal judge held Sept. 25 in affirming confirmation of the plan over the objections of certain insurers.