Minimum Competence

This Day in Legal History: Black Monday On October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 508 points, or 22.6 percent, in a single day. It is still the largest one-day percentage drop in the index’s history. Markets around the world fell with it. Trading systems were overwhelmed, order books backed up, and for hours many investors had no way to know what prices they were actually ge...

This Day in Legal History: The Clayton Antitrust Act On October 15, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Clayton Antitrust Act. The Sherman Act of 1890 had banned contracts in restraint of trade and monopolization, but in broad language that left courts to decide case by case what was illegal. Clayton filled in specifics. It prohibited price discrimination that would substantially lessen comp...

This Day in Legal History: The Death of the Great Dissenter On October 14, 1911, Justice John Marshall Harlan died after nearly 34 years on the Supreme Court. Harlan was an unlikely civil rights hero. He was a Kentuckian from a slaveholding family who had opposed the Thirteenth Amendment before the war’s aftermath changed his views. On the Court, he became known as the “Great Dissenter” for standi...

This Day in Legal History: In re Turner On October 13, 1867, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, sitting as a circuit judge in Baltimore, decided In re Turner. Maryland had abolished slavery in its 1864 constitution, but former enslavers quickly found a workaround: a state apprenticeship law that let courts bind Black children to white employers, often their former masters, without their parents’ conse...

This Day in Legal History: The Alex Jones Verdict On October 12, 2022, a jury in Waterbury, Connecticut, ordered Alex Jones and his company to pay about $965 million to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and to an FBI agent who responded that day. For years, Jones had told his audience the massacre, in which 20 children and six educators were killed, was a ho...

This Day in Legal History: Bostock Is Argued On October 8, 2019, the Supreme Court heard argument in Bostock v. Clayton County and two companion cases. Each involved an employee fired after the employer learned the employee was gay or transgender. The question was whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans employment discrimination “because of sex,” protects against discriminati...

This Day in Legal History: The Stamp Act Congress On October 7, 1765, twenty-seven delegates from nine of the thirteen American colonies met in New York City for what became known as the Stamp Act Congress. Parliament had passed the Stamp Act that spring, requiring colonists to buy stamped paper for newspapers, legal documents, licenses, and even playing cards. It was the first direct tax Parliame...

This Day in Legal History: Earl Warren Takes the Center Chair On October 5, 1953, which was the first Monday in October and the opening day of the Supreme Court’s term, Earl Warren was sworn in as the 14th Chief Justice of the United States. Chief Justice Fred Vinson had died of a heart attack less than a month earlier. To make sure the Court opened its term with a full bench, President Eisenhower...

This Day in Legal History: Thurgood Marshall Joins the Court On October 2, 1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren swore in Thurgood Marshall as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, the first Black justice in the Court’s history. President Lyndon Johnson had nominated him to replace Justice Tom Clark, and the Senate confirmed him that August by a vote of 69 to 11. Marshall arrived at the Court havin...

This Day in Legal History: The Nuremberg Verdicts On October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg delivered its sentences on the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany. Of the 22 defendants, 19 were convicted and three were acquitted. Twelve were sentenced to death, three to life imprisonment, and four to prison terms of 10 to 20 years. Hermann Göring killed himself the night befor...

This Day in Legal History: The Integration of Ole Miss On September 30, 1962, James Meredith, a Black Air Force veteran, was escorted onto the campus of the University of Mississippi by federal marshals to enroll under a federal court order. The university had rejected him for no reason other than his race. The Fifth Circuit ordered him admitted, and Justice Hugo Black refused to let that order be...

This Day in Legal History: Congress Creates the U.S. Army On September 29, 1789—the very last day of the First Congress’s inaugural session—the House and Senate passed the act that formally established the United States Army under the new Constitution. President Washington had pressed hard for it, reminding Congress that the militia provisions inherited from the Articles of Confederation were inad...

This Day in Legal History: The Black Sox Indictment On September 28, 1920, a Chicago grand jury indicted eight members of the Chicago White Sox for conspiring to throw the 1919 World Series in exchange for money from a gambling syndicate. That morning, pitcher Eddie Cicotte and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson had reportedly confessed. The scandal—forever after known as the “Black Sox”—remains one of the mo...

This Day in Legal History: Congress Proposes the Bill of Rights On September 25, 1789, the First Congress agreed on twelve proposed amendments to the newly ratified Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. Ten of those twelve would be ratified by the states in December 1791, and we know them today as the Bill of Rights. It was the fulfillment of a promise—many states had ratified...

This Day in Legal History: The Judiciary Act of 1789 On September 24, 1789, President George Washington signed the Judiciary Act of 1789 into law—one of the very first acts of the very first Congress, and a document that turned the skeletal promise of Article III into a functioning national court system. The Constitution had created “one supreme Court” and left everything else to Congress’s imagin...

This Day in Legal History: The Capture of John André On September 23, 1780, three American militiamen stopped a man riding toward British lines near Tarrytown, New York. Hidden in his boot were documents and maps of the fortifications at West Point. The man was Major John André, adjutant general of the British Army—and the papers exposed one of the most infamous plots in American history: General...

This Day in Legal History: The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation On September 22, 1862, following the Union’s costly victory at Antietam, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It gave the Confederate states an ultimatum: return to the Union by January 1, 1863, or the enslaved people in the rebelling states “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”...

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 th...

This Day in Legal History: The First Peacetime Draft On September 16, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act, establishing the first peacetime military draft in American history. With France fallen and Britain under siege, the country was bracing for a war it had not yet entered, and the Act required men in a broad age range to register for potential co...

This Day in Legal History: The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing On September 15, 1963, members of the Ku Klux Klan planted dynamite beneath the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama—a hub of the civil rights movement—and detonated it on a Sunday morning. The blast killed four young Black girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair. It wa...

We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com This D...

We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com This D...

We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com This D...

We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com . This...

We’ve launched Minimum Competence CLE, and our first course is now available completely free. Researching Federal Tax Issues After Loper Bright looks at how the Supreme Court’s decision ending Chevron deference changes the way lawyers should research and evaluate Treasury regulations, IRS guidance, and other federal tax authorities. Take the course and earn CLE credit at cle.minimumcomp.com . This...