Legal News for Thurs 6/18 – Polymarket is Gambling in Michigan, Temu Wiretap Suit Survives and a …
This Day in Legal History: Susan B. Anthony Fined for Voting
On this day in 1873, in a federal courtroom in Canandaigua, New York, Judge Ward Hunt fined Susan B. Anthony one hundred dollars for the crime of voting. Anthony had walked into a polling place in Rochester on November 5, 1872, and cast a ballot for Ulysses S. Grant. She was arrested two weeks later under a federal statute, the Enforcement Act of 1870, that made it a crime to “knowingly” vote without being legally entitled to. Her defense was straightforward: the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified four years earlier, said that all persons born in the United States were citizens, and citizenship carried with it the right to vote. Judge Hunt did not let the jury decide. He directed a verdict of guilty without even letting them deliberate — something that would be plainly unconstitutional today — and then asked Anthony if she had anything to say before sentence was passed.
She did.
She told the court that it had trampled on her natural rights, her civil rights, her political rights, and her judicial rights, and that under such circumstances she would never pay a dollar of the unjust penalty.
She never did.
Hunt declined to jail her for nonpayment, which would have given her the path to appeal she wanted, and the case died without ever reaching the Supreme Court. The Nineteenth Amendment, which finally guaranteed women the right to vote, was ratified forty-seven years later, in 1920 — fourteen years after Anthony’s death. The lesson lawyers usually take from the case is procedural — about directed verdicts, about appellate review, about the ways a determined trial judge can keep a constitutional question off the docket. The lesson worth keeping today is broader. The legal system that one generation treats as obvious common sense is the one a later generation looks back on and cannot understand how anyone thought was just. Anthony lost in court and won in history. That happens more often than the daily case law makes it look.
A federal judge in Michigan ruled Wednesday against Polymarket, a platform that lets people place bets on the outcomes of sports games. Here’s what happened: Polymarket had tried to convince Michigan’s regulators that what it does is not really gambling — it’s a sophisticated financial product called a “swap,” something only the federal government regulates. Polymarket’s argument was: we’re not a sportsbook, we’re a financial market, just like commodity futures markets. A wheat farmer, for example, might use that kind of contract to lock in a price for next year’s harvest. Michigan’s gaming regulators weren’t buying it. They said Polymarket looked and acted like an illegal sportsbook — people betting on sports without a license — and shut it down. Polymarket went to federal court asking the judge to block Michigan from enforcing the law while the lawsuit continues. The judge said no.
He found that Polymarket’s argument didn’t make sense; if something is a bet on a football game, calling it something else doesn’t change what it is. The judge also said that even if Polymarket lost the Michigan market, that’s a business loss that money can compensate — not the kind of serious, immediate harm that would justify stopping Michigan from enforcing its own gambling laws. This case matters because it will help determine how the federal government and individual states regulate online prediction markets going forward. Right now, companies like Polymarket are in legal limbo, unable to operate in states that say they’re gambling, while arguing they should operate under federal financial rules. The courts need to settle which it is.
Mich. Judge Opens Door For Prediction Market Enforcement (https://www.law360.com/compliance/articles/2490783)
An Illinois federal judge ruled Wednesday that a class action lawsuit can proceed against an advertising-technology company that allegedly snuck Americans’ personal information to PDD Holdings, the Chinese parent company of the discount-shopping app Temu. Think of it this way: when you visit websites or use apps, tracking code collects information about you — what you click on, what you buy, where you’re located. That’s normal ad-tech business. But this company allegedly took that data and secretly sent it to China for the Chinese parent company’s benefit. The lawsuit uses two legal theories. First: the federal wiretap law makes it illegal to secretly intercept someone’s communications or data without permission — and the plaintiffs argue this is exactly what happened.
The company embedded invisible code on websites that grabbed user data without asking. Second: there’s a new government regulation that forbids sending Americans’ sensitive personal data to countries the U.S. government considers hostile. China is on that list. The company argued the lawsuit should be dismissed, claiming what it does is standard advertising practice and not really interception. The judge disagreed. He said …