Category: News Feeds

In the very first paragraph of the Justice Department’s late night application for an emergency TRO blocking publication of John Bolton’s book (affiliate link), the government compares Bolton to a traitor selling government secrets to an enemy state.

“A National Security Advisor to a sitting President possesses national security information like few others,” it intones solemnly. “Were such a person to offer such information for sale to foreign governments, all would readily acknowledge the wrongdoing involved.”

Oh, yes they did.

And then it got even batshittier, with the government insisting that an injunction on Bolton’s White House tell-all isn’t a prior restraint on speech, it’s simply an extension of Bolton’s employment contract.

“Nothing in the First Amendment prevents the United States from securing an injunction requiring a former high-ranking official with unique access to sensitive information, such as Defendant, to abide by the agreements he signed,” the government argues, ignoring that inconvenient Pentagon Papers precedent. “It is settled law that restrictions on the publication of classified information are judicially enforceable.”

The DOJ goes on to cite a whole series of cases in which the validity of government NDAs was upheld and the government was able to seize the proceeds post-publication, but none in which a court ordered a defendant not to publish beforehand. The closest it gets is in a footnote, where it mentions language from a precedential case in the D.C. Circuit, but says that actually the court was wrong, so Judge Royce Lamberth should ignore it, okay?

In dicta, the court noted that the CIA had “not sought an injunction against publication of the censored items” and stated that if the CIA had sought “judicial action to restrain publication, it would [have borne] a much heavier burden.” McGehee, 718 F.2d at 1147 n. 22 (citing, e.g., Snepp, 444 U.S. at 513 n. 8, and N.Y. Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713, 714 (1971) (per curiam)). But the cited language in Snepp does not support this assertion. Indeed, the cited portion of Snepp cited to two cases, which include language that, if anything, undermines the notion that the government would bear a heavier burden where it—rather than the author—sought relief.

The government goes on to posit that Bolton’s book isn’t even really speech at all, it’s, uhhhh, contraband. Ipso facto propter hoc, the government doesn’t even have to add publisher Simon & Schuster as a defendant to force it to pulp the book.

Under these principles, when the producer of a product is enjoined from distributing it, courts have subjected the product’s distributors to the same injunction. For example, in Aevoe Corp. v. AE Tech Co., 727 F.3d 1375 (Fed. Cir. 2013), the Federal Circuit explained that the distributor of an infringing product—which obtained the product from the infringing producer and sold it in the marketplace—was “‘acting in concert’ with [the producer] in connection with the resale of” the product and thus was bound by an injunction against the sale of the product.

According to Bill Barr’s DOJ, under Federal Rule 65(d), Simon & Schuster count as “officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys; and other persons who are in active concert or participation” with Bolton, and are thus bound by the requested injunction. Ditto for any book sellers who might have pallets of Bolton’s manuscript sitting in the stockroom ready for the shelves on Tuesday. This embarrassingly weak argument was also buried in a footnote, natch.

But if the government’s case is shaky on the law, it’s even more laughable on the facts. Every reporter in DC appears to have an advance copy of Bolton’s manuscript, details of which appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post last night. And yet the government insists that “unauthorized disclosure of this information could reasonably be expected to enable foreign threat actors to cause serious, and sometimes grave, damage to our national and economic security.” Which is rather like demanding that the barn door be locked up tight when the horse galloped across the county line an hour ago.

If everybody from Stephen Colbert to Ben Wittes already has a copy and thousands of units have already shipped out to retailers, then Kim Jong Un doesn’t have to wait by the door for the Amazon delivery guy to find out whatever classified secrets Bolton spilled. They’re already out there in the world, and an injunction might prevent further embarrassment for the president, but it won’t harm national security. Because the damage has already been done.

In fact, the weakest part of the the government’s argument is its insistence that Bolton is in breach of his contract because he shared the manuscript with his publishers and simultaneously about to breach the contract by selling the book to the general public. He’s like the Schrödinger’s Mustache of national security — his exact location is impossible to pin down!

And according to the Commander in Chief who is definitely not losing his shit right now, the book is both entirely classified and also full of lies. (Although he’s not suing for libel, because … reasons.)

Truly, the former National Security Advisor contains multitudes!

But even if Bolton hadn’t already breached the contract by sharing classified information, the remedy isn’t specific performance by prior restraint. It’s damages, as in Snepp and the case of Matt Bissonnette, the Navy SEAL who was forced in 2016 to disgorge $6.8 million in profits from an unreviewed book on the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. The government couldn’t stop the publication, but they could take the money afterwards.

Which is probably not what Bolton’s lawyer Chuck Cooper will argue at tomorrow’s hearing on the TRO, since his client would doubtless prefer to keep that $2 million advance and all the royalties from the members of the general public who actually pay for their books. Thanks to the president’s manic hate-tweeting, Bolton’s book is now #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list. And thanks to the miracles of technology, we can all listen in at 1pm tomorrow to find out how the hearing goes.

And what a fine case for Jody Hunt, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Division, to end his government career on. Mazal tov, sir, on going out with a bang!

EMERGENCY APPLICATION FOR TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER AND MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION [U.S. v. Bolton, No. 120-CV-01581-RCL (D.D.C. June 17, 2020)]

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Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

From day one, I wanted to create a safe space where I could integrate my passion for social justice with the job. The balancing act for me has come in the last 36 hours or so. I obviously have billable work I need to get to, calls today that I need to plan for. The difference right now is that we are under work-from-home and stay-at-home orders. With that comes more autonomy over your schedule and the ability to shift your responsibilities around. Working from home, I can multitask in a way that I could not in the office.

I want to be as optimistic as possible and am heartened by what has been demonstrated in the last few days. [But] my concern is that once the city starts to open up, when bars and restaurants are open, people will find other ways to spend their time when they have to start doing the 9-5 again.

— Justin Maffett, a first-year associate at Debevoise & Plimpton, commenting on how he’s found the time to fight for social change during the pandemic while working in Biglaw. Maffett was arrested earlier this month following a protest and charged with a misdemeanor for breaking New York City’s 8 p.m. curfew. Debevoise has supported him, and will be representing him in court on those charges.

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

It’s been a good week for the New York Stock Exchange. It moved on to the second phase of its reopening, with a handful of market makers rejoining the handful of floor traders who’ve been pacing the iconic space at a safe distance from one another for three weeks now. Those market makers will be allowed to take the subway to work, as well. And even the bad news comes with a silver lining: Sure, the Nasdaq has been crowned the coronavirus IPO king, but the Big Board is confident that once all this settles down, people will come back to daddy.

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted virtually every facet of life. The times we live in are now uncertain, and nothing will ever be the same as it was before. Lawyers and legal professionals have been cloistered inside their homes for months, and states across the country are now slowly but surely reopening their economies and lifting their shelter-in-place guidance.

With all this taking place, major law firms — many fresh off managing their expenses by using cost-cutting maneuvers like salary cuts, benefits reductions, furloughs, and layoffs — have been weighing their plans to get their employees back into the office.

Just as we’ve done in the past when it comes to raises, bonuses, and austerity measures, we are compiling a table of all the firms that have announced reopening guidelines in these strange times. We want you to see exactly how the legal profession is dealing with this new phase of the coronavirus crisis.

Help us help you. Let us know what your firm is doing to protect employees and adjust to the new normal during this unprecedented moment in time.

As a little reminder, we love covering law firm news, but we need your help. As soon as you find out about reopening plans at your firm, please email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] COVID Reopening”). We always keep our sources on stories anonymous. There’s no need to send a memo (if one exists) using your firm email account; your personal email account is fine. If a memo has been circulated, please be sure to include it as proof; we like to post complete memos as a service to our readers. You can take a photo of the memo and attach as a picture if you are worried about metadata in a PDF or Word file.

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” barked Oz the Great and Powerful. It’s an admonishment that Chief Justice John Roberts might as well have footnoted in today’s DHS v. Regents opinion. A 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court held that the lawsuits challenging the White House decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy could go forward, plaintiffs having successfully pleaded that the administration’s reversal could amount to a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act.

But the Court also released an 8-1 opinion today, with all but Justice Sotomayor glibly dismissing the Equal Protection claims brought by the plaintiffs in these cases. Given the posture of these cases, the simple question was “is there a possibility that DACA was killed based on Trump’s animus toward the Latinx community?” To this question, the majority responded: “New phone, who Trump?”

Much like the Bostock opinion earlier this week, the positive result obscures the problematic path taken by the majority. This opinion provides concrete relief to the hundreds of thousands of people impacted by the government’s policy deferring deportations of folks who came here as children. But, as Mark Joseph Stern pointed out two years ago, this is a policy reversal that could have easily been approved if the government had handled the process correctly.

To revoke DACA, Sessions need only put forth a clear statement explaining the constitutional, statutory, and policy justifications for discontinuing the program.

Instead, the attorney general issued a garbled one-page memo with minimal analysis. First, he suggested that DACA lacked “proper statutory authority.” Yet in 2014, the Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion finding that DACA did have this statutory authority. Trump’s OLC could have reversed this finding, but it did not, and Sessions failed to explain why he’d ignore an opinion that remains on the books. This inconsistency undercut his claim, unsupported by any meaningful reasoning, that DACA had no statutory authorization.

Today’s majority opinion is limited to chiding the administration for not dotting its “i”s. It affirms that Jeff Sessions could declare DACA illegal but held that Homeland Security officials acted arbitrarily and capriciously in then pulling the plug:

The dissent is correct that DACA was rescinded because of the Attorney General’s illegality determination. See ante, at 20. But nothing about that determination fore- closed or even addressed the options of retaining forbearance or accommodating particular reliance interests. Acting Secretary Duke should have considered those matters but did not. That failure was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the APA.

But the door remains wide open for this or a future administration to try again from scratch. Which, on the one hand, makes sense. Future administrations shouldn’t necessarily be bound by old Executive Orders. On the other hand, that’s why it would’ve been a better decision to take an extra 10 seconds to allow the current plaintiffs to pursue their discrimination claims to short-circuit another round of pretextual tripe spewing from DHS and landing us right back where we started.

Instead, we got this:

Finally, the cited statements are unilluminating. The relevant actors were most directly Acting Secretary Duke and the Attorney General. As the Batalla Vidal court acknowledged, respondents did not “identif[y] statements by [either] that would give rise to an inference of discriminatory motive.” Instead, respondents contend that President Trump made critical statements about Latinos that evince discriminatory intent. But, even as interpreted by respondents, these statements—remote in time and made in unrelated contexts—do not qualify as “contemporary statements” probative of the decision at issue.

In other words, the majority opinion boils down to “Trump may have said he wanted to do this for discriminatory reasons but plaintiffs can’t say that the cabinet officials were actually listening to Trump when they did the thing Trump told them to do.”

Justice Sotomayor was completely alone in embracing reality.

But “nothing in our precedent supports [the] blinkered approach” of disregarding any of the campaign statements as remote in time from later-enacted policies. Nor did any of the statements arise in unrelated contexts. They bear on unlawful migration from Mexico—a keystone of President Trump’s campaign and a policy priority of his administration—and, according to respondents, were an animating force behind the rescission of DACA. Taken together, “the words of the President” help to “create the strong perception” that the rescission decision was “contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus.” This perception provides respondents with grounds to litigate their equal protection claims further.

Translated into image form, here’s Justice Sotomayor responding to the majority’s claim that they don’t understand why any statements from the President indicating a racialized motive for ending DACA would matter.

Unfortunately, this is a position that Justice Sotomayor is getting accustomed to occupying. In the above passage, she cites repeatedly to her dissent in the Muslim Ban case, another matter where the majority waved away public statements from the nation’s chief executive as locker room talk that couldn’t plausibly be connected to the actions of Trump’s direct reports. Why would a cabinet department be Trump’s responsibility? If it weren’t so tragic, the Roberts assault on the premise of the unitary executive theory would be comical.

Supreme Court opinions are unique artifacts in American governance because they come packaged with a narrative account of both their reasoning and context. Yet when the history books are written of this wild tire fire of an era, the Supreme Court reporters will read as if everything was proceeding as normal. Elie Mystal said that this opinion suggests John Roberts isn’t scared of Donald Trump anymore. I think it betrays something else. This Court may be willing to hand Trump unfavorable results, but it will go to any lengths not to shield Trump from any responsibility. It’s always some technical error from some underling and never anything Trump said or did. If one is trying to read this result as a sign that Roberts is going to stick it to Trump on his tax returns, consider how much work he put into not memorializing every racist, “Build the Wall” comment Trump’s made over the years.

As an artifact of the times, Supreme Court opinions will stand out for their insistence on living in a bizarre cloistered bubble. “Sure there are a few administrative quibbles here and there but definitely not a sustained pattern of flagrant disregard for constitutional strictures! No indeedy!”

Again, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

(Full opinion on the next page….)

The “Judicial Resistance” Didn’t Save DACA [Slate]

Earlier: Neil Gorsuch Lays Landmines Throughout LGBTQ Discrimination Opinion

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Since publishing our inaugural litigation finance survey in 2017, in partnership with Lake Whillans, each subsequent iteration has been a story of ever-increasing traction for the practice of third-party funding. Our 2020 findings continue this narrative, and show a marked increase in the scale and momentum of the field’s development and acceptance. Perhaps the most striking finding in this year’s survey was a nearly 30 percent year-to-year increase in the percentage of respondents reporting that they had firsthand experience with litigation finance.

Other findings include:

• Lawyers in every single industry we examined saw a significant uptick (at least 10 percent) in firsthand experience with litigation finance.
• Nearly 100 percent (99.36 percent) of respondents with firsthand experience with litigation finance agreed that they would use litigation finance again.
• The proportion of respondents who would not consider litigation finance has plummeted since the 2019 survey.
• Roughly three-quarters of our respondents stated that litigation finance has become more relevant to their practice in the last year.

We note that our survey data was collected before the COVID-19 crisis and the financial turmoil it has caused. These findings demonstrate that litigation finance is well poised to meet the challenges companies and law firms are now facing. Claim monetization, financing of claimholders, and capital for law firms are core offerings of a litigation financier like Lake Whillans, and are likely to become even more attractive solutions to many more companies and firms as we move through 2020 and beyond. We expect that next year’s survey results will show marked differences as litigation finance further penetrates every segment of the market driven by new necessities and creative problem solving.

Check out the full report on our survey findings here.

New York City is set to enter Phase 2 of post-coronavirus reopening on Monday. Among the things set to open are playgrounds, patio seating, hair salons, and yes, Biglaw firms.

We know that there are a lot of potential issues with reopening waiting just around the corner. But with NYC so close to the next stage of reopening and so many firms with offices in the city, Above the Law wants to know how our readers are reacting to the prospect of returning to the office.

So vote in the poll below, and if you want to sound off about your firm’s reopening plan, you can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Let’s get something clear off the top. Here is the rank order of licensure options for 2020 ranked from best to worst:

1. Diploma Privilege (Utah, Washington)
2. Online July Exams (Indiana, Michigan)
3. Online Fall Exams (DC)
4. Delayed/Staggered In-Person Exams (New York, Massachusetts)
5. July In-Person Exams (a frighteningly non-zero list)
6. Injecting Yourself With Coronavirus To Own The Libs (Mississippi)

When we praise jurisdictions for staggering exams or going online, it’s worth remembering that these aren’t ideal solutions. We don’t really want a bunch of law grads sitting around until February to take the bar exam. But when the world is setting the bar at “sign this waiver in case you die taking our test,” a lot of stuff looks good by comparison.

It may be folly to complain that the pandemic is causing law grads pain and inconvenience — it’s, you know, a global pandemic so there are bigger issues at play than delaying your start date — but that doesn’t excuse heaping that pain disproportionately upon the least advantaged applicants. In a letter pushing the DC Bar to offer a faster path to licensing, Marvin McPherson makes this point:

The bar examiners delayed testing dates months after the posted testing date which increased financial costs to minorities and those who are socioeconomically disadvantaged disproportionately. Each month’s delay added to the probability that a socioeconomically disadvantaged graduate will not be able to study for the exam full-time and decreased their probability of successfully passing the bar exam.

While lenders could and absolutely should delay kicking off repayment schedules until at least next February to avoid dropping a hammer on grads who aren’t going to be able to start working in the autumn, that’s only part of the problem. Many grads are paying their rents on credit while studying and delayed exams are putting them in the position of going deeper into debt or starting work and trying to study on the side. And even though this would impact all applicants, incoming Biglaw associates are going to ultimately get stipends, economically advantaged folks can lean on savings and relatives, but it’s the folks without those perks who are going to end up suffering.

Now in Massachusetts, a state that flirted with an online exam already, a recent statement about the importance of addressing racial injustice in the wake of the George Floyd killing has become the jumping off point for a renewed call for action from recent graduates:

Your April 22nd letter setting out the Commonwealth’s 2020 bar exam plan acknowledges “reasonable concerns about the disparate impact of the bar on law graduates of color.” We implore you to consider that your solution to these “reasonable concerns” (a committee that will study possible alternatives to the bar examination “as soon as the emergency abates”) does not help the Black, Latinx, and Indigenous graduates most likely to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic—an ongoing crisis unlikely to subside prior to the Massachusetts bar exam. We refer once more to your June 3rd statement: “This must be a time not just of reflection but of action.”

With that in mind, the letter asks the state to reconsider its earlier dismissal of a diploma privilege option. Specifically, the letter cites the Washington model where those seeking only local admission could move forward on their applications based on their law school diplomas while those who need the portability afforded by the UBE could still take the exam — which would be less crowded with a number of people opting for the diploma route.

This is becoming a question of common sense. There’s not a lot of good evidence that the bar exam protects the public. Honestly, the bar prep courses, covering a range of subjects that never showed up on the exam, are far more useful than the exam itself. If the bar prep industry transitioned to a state-sanctioned mandatory post-grad training module it would offer more value than insisting on the test.

I guess the best way to put this for bar examiners is: why aspire to having the fourth best solution?

Washington Grants Diploma Privilege To Graduates Of ABA Accredited Schools
With NCBE Quibbling Over Online Bar Exams, Massachusetts Says They’ll Just Write Their Own
Bar Exam Applicants Forced To Sign COVID Waiver In Case In-Person Exam Ends Up Killing Them

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

On Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services withdrew anti-discrimination provisions for LGBTQ patients. Three days later, a landmark Supreme Court decision called the policy change into question.

“It’s a bit of a whiplash. Friday sent a strong message from one branch of government and today sent the opposite message from another branch of government,” said Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of global HIV policy for the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Certainly, the decision (on Monday) changes the calculus from Friday completely.”

The 6-3 Supreme Court decision cemented LGBTQ workers’ protections under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion or national origin. The landmark decision in Bostock v. Clayton County ruled that those protections include sexual orientation and gender identity.

“In Title VII, Congress adopted broad language making it illegal for an employer to rely on an employee’s sex when deciding to fire that employee. We do not hesitate to recognize today a necessary consequence of that legislative choice: An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” the Supreme Court stated in its opinion.

While the decision applies to a different part of the law than HHS’ final rule, it could still have implications further down the line.

“There’s a big question right now about whether that rule is going to be able to go forward,” Kates said. “It would certainly face a lot of challenges in court.”

HHS narrows protections

HHS’ Office of Civil Rights is expected to publish the final rule in the Federal Register on Friday. The agency could potentially withdraw portions of it in response to the Supreme Court ruling.

The final rule would diminish the Affordable Care Act’s anti-discrimination provisions, defining discrimination on the basis of sex solely to mean male or female.

Under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, healthcare providers are required to treat individuals consistent with their gender identity, and insurers are prohibited from imposing transgender-specific exclusions to care. Under the final rule, HHS’ Office of Civil Rights would no longer enforce these protections.

Not only could it affect care specific to an individual’s gender identity, but it could affect discrimination related to other health needs. For example, an insurer could deny coverage for transition-related care or mental health care, Kates said, or a transgender man could be denied treatment for ovarian cancer, or a hysterectomy.

“That is a risk here if this were to go forward unchallenged,” she said.

The American Medical Association wrote a scathing rebuttal of the rule after the initial draft was released last year.

“It legitimizes unequal treatment of patients by not only providers, health care organizations, and insurers, but also by the government itself — and it will harm patients,” AMA CEO Dr. James Madara wrote in a letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar. “It deems certain classes of people less worthy of care, compassion, access, and good health than others. Such policy should not be permitted by the U.S. government, let alone proposed by it.”

Insurance groups, including America’s Health Insurance Plan and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, also spoke out in disagreement with HHS’ decision.

The final rule also narrows where the ACA’s broader anti-discrimination provisions would apply. It would limit them to healthcare providers, and only health plans that receive federal financial assistance, such as ACA marketplace plans or Medicare Advantage plans.

 HHS claims the changes will save insurers $2.9 billion over five years by not having to send “notice and tagline” inserts in healthcare mailings. But it also ignored submitted comments about the “potentially billions in costs” associated with the denial or delay of healthcare to LGBTQ people because of discrimination, Katie Keith, an attorney and researcher for Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, wrote in HealthAffairs.

What it means for health plans

The Supreme Court decision would strengthen future legal challenges to HHS’ final rule, presenting up “uphill battle” for the agency if it continues to go forward with the changes, Keith wrote.

“Title VII and Title IX are structured in the same manner, the courts have long looked between the two statutes, and the Court’s decision made clear that being gay or transgender is “inextricably bound up with sex,” Keith wrote. “One would think that such a resounding Supreme Court decision would end the dispute, but that has almost never been the case with ACA litigation.”

Currently, 23 states specifically prohibit transgender exclusions in health insurance. Despite these protections, transgender patients have faced obstacles in accessing care. In a 2018 survey, a quarter of respondents said they had experienced a problem with their insurance in the past year related to being transgender.

There have been some improvements in the past four years. A growing number of marketplace plans have incorporated language saying they would cover some or all needed treatment for gender dysphoria. That number was 47% in 2020, according to Out2Enroll, an initiative to connect members of the LGBTQ community with health insurance. And the vast majority of insurers — 97% — did not include transgender-specific exclusions in their 2020 silver marketplace plans.

As for how employers and health plans will interpret the final rule, it’s difficult to say.

“It’s a little hard to know. I think we will see this unfolding over several months. Some plans may make changes based on the regulation. There will likely be litigation over it,” said Abigail Coursolle, a senior attorney with the National Health Law Program. “Some of these (rule changes) could lead to more subtle changes in how healthcare is delivered.”

But employers will also look to the Supreme Court decision as they make choices about health insurance benefits. The ruling might give them the impetus to ensure their health plans don’t have transgender health coverage exclusions.

“It is reasonable to assume this extends to benefits like health insurance and that those benefits must be offered equally to LGBT people. Similarly, the Court’s ruling should put insurers on notice that federal sex nondiscrimination protections, such as Title IX and thus Section 1557 of the ACA, extend to LGBT people,” Keith wrote in an email. “Fortunately, many insurers and employers have stopped using these discriminatory practices, but I expect that the ones that still do will be taking a look at their benefits offerings and making changes as needed.”

Most companies, but not all, extend health insurance benefits to same-sex spouses. The Supreme Court ruling could spur the remainder into action.

Photo credit: Matt Wade, Flickr