Tesla's Race-Discrimination Trial Opens, CNN, MS NOW and Politico Sue Over a White House Press Ban & Law Schools Confront AI

This Day in Legal History: Sandra Day O’Connor Confirmed

On September 21, 1981, the United States Senate voted 99 to 0 to confirm Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court of the United States, making her the first woman ever to sit on the nation’s highest court—191 years after the Court was established. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan, who had pledged during his campaign to name a woman to the Court, O’Connor sailed through confirmation with unanimous support, the lone missing vote belonging to a senator away at a conference.

O’Connor’s path to that seat is a story about the barriers she broke to get there. A graduate near the top of her class at Stanford Law School, she nonetheless found that law firms in the early 1950s would not hire a woman as an attorney—one offered her a job as a legal secretary. She built her career in public service and Arizona state government and judiciary instead, and that pragmatic, real-world background shaped the justice she became: not an ideologue, but a cautious, case-by-case decider who for years held the pivotal swing vote on a closely divided Court, casting the deciding ballot on questions from affirmative action to abortion to the limits of executive power.

The significance of September 21, 1981 is both symbolic and substantive. Symbolically, it shattered a two-century barrier and reshaped who Americans could imagine wielding the judicial power. Substantively, O’Connor’s controlling opinions defined American law for a generation. And it’s a fitting anniversary for today, because our lead story is about a workplace accused of denying opportunity on the basis of who people are—a reminder that the promise of equal treatment that O’Connor’s own career embodied remains, so often, a promise the law is still fighting to keep.

Tesla is heading to trial in California over allegations that it allowed rampant race discrimination against Black workers at its flagship Fremont assembly plant—one of the most significant employment-discrimination cases against a major American company to reach a courtroom in years. The suit was brought by California’s Civil Rights Department, and that’s the first thing worth understanding: this isn’t a private plaintiff, it’s a state civil-rights agency suing on behalf of workers, which brings the enforcement power of the state to bear. The trial opened Monday in Oakland before state Superior Court Judge Peter Borkon, and it’s scheduled to run all the way to October 30—a long trial that signals how much evidence is in play. The allegations, filed back in 2022, are stark. The department claims Black workers at Fremont were subjected to pervasive harassment—racial slurs, racist graffiti, including in bathrooms—and that Tesla failed to prevent or stop it. It further alleges the plant was effectively racially segregated, with Black workers funneled into the lowest-paying, least desirable jobs, paid less, and passed over for promotions. Legally, these are claims under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, the state’s robust anti-discrimination statute, and they sound in two theories we should distinguish: hostile-work-environment harassment, where the question is whether the workplace was permeated with discriminatory intimidation severe enough to alter employment conditions, and disparate treatment in pay and promotion. Tesla denies wrongdoing, says it doesn’t tolerate discrimination, and says it has fired workers who engaged in misconduct—which previews its likely defense: that any harassment was the work of rogue bad actors the company addressed, not a condition it allowed to fester. The significance is considerable. This is one of a whole series of discrimination cases Tesla has faced over Fremont, including a parallel federal EEOC suit, and a state agency taking one to a full jury trial—rather than settling—makes it a landmark test. Thousands of workers are implicated, the company is among the most high-profile in the world, and the outcome will say something about how seriously the law will hold a corporate giant responsible for the culture of its factory floor.

Tesla faces major trial for alleged bias against Black workers, after years of lawsuits | Reuters · US News · Business Standard

Three major news organizations—CNN, MS NOW, and Politico—have sued the Trump administration after being banned from the White House, in a First Amendment fight with real echoes of a case from the last Trump term. Here’s what happened: the President announced he was barring the three outlets from the White House because, in his telling, he didn’t like their “negative stories,” and over the weekend their reporters—including journalists from each outlet—tried to enter the grounds to cover the news and were turned away by the Secret Service, which deactivated and seized their press passes. The outlets are now in court arguing this is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and a violation of press freedom. The legal framework here is well-developed, and it’s why the outlets have a strong hand. The controlling precedent traces to a 1977 D.C. Circuit case, Sherrill v. Knight, which held that once the White House opens press access, it can’t deny a journalist a hardpass without due process and a compelling reason—the government can’t hand out access based on whether it likes the coverage. That principle was reaffirmed in 2018, when a court sided with CNN after the first Trump administration pulled correspondent Jim Acosta’s press pass—and, tellingly, CNN has brought back Ted Boutrous, the First Amendment lawyer who won that Acosta case, to lead this one. The core constitutional problem for the administration is that its stated reason—punishing outlets for critical coverage—is close to a textbook definition of unconstitutional viewpoint-based retaliation against the press. Now, the courts have never said White House access is unlimited or that any journalist can demand entry, so there’s nuance about what process and standards apply. But retaliating against specific outlets for the content of their reporting sits at the very core of what the First Amendment forbids the government from doing. The significance is that this is a direct test of press freedom against executive power—whether a President can use physical access to the White House as a cudgel to reward friendly coverage and punish critical coverage. Given the precedent, the outlets enter court with the wind at their backs.

CNN, MS NOW and Politico file lawsuit against Trump administration over White House access | Reuters · CNN · MS NOW

And finally, a story close to my own world: American law schools are grappling with how to teach law in the age of AI—and some are responding by banning the technology from the classroom entirely. The University of Chicago Law School, notably, has barred phones, tablets, and laptops from its core first-year classrooms this academic year. The rationale is worth taking seriously, because it’s not mere technophobia. The concern is that generative AI, and screens generally, undermine the Socratic method—the centuries-old back-and-forth of cold-calling and live argument that is the signature of legal education. As the chair of Chicago’s AI committee put it, the whole point is to do things “the hard way—because that’s how you learn.” The worry is that if a first-year law student can have ChatGPT instantly summarize a case, spot the issue, and draft the analysis, they never actually build the mental muscles—the close reading, the legal reasoning, the ability to think on their feet under pressure—that the profession requires. And here’s the crucial nuance that makes this more than a simple ban: schools like Chicago aren’t rejecting AI for the whole curriculum. The plan is foundational skills first, AI later—teach students to reason without the tool in year one, then teach them to use it ethically and effectively in advanced research, writing, and clinical work down the line. It mirrors a genuine debate splitting legal education, with many schools racing in the opposite direction, expanding AI instruction from day one. As someone who teaches at the intersection of law and technology, I find this the right instinct: you have to understand what the tool is doing before you can responsibly delegate to it, and every disaster we’ve covered on this show—the hallucinated citations, the sanctioned lawyers, the ChatGPT-fabricated testimony in that New Mexico murder appeal—is ultimately a story about someone who trusted the tool before they’d mastered the underlying judgment. The significance is that the profession’s training pipeline is being redesigned in real time around a single question: how do you produce lawyers who can harness AI without being hollowed out by it?

Laptop bans, new tech courses: US law schools grapple with AI | Reuters · Inside Higher Ed · Forbes