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Danny Wilf-Townsend

@dannywt.bsky.social
695 followers 431 following 108 posts

Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown Law, currently visiting at Yale Law. Working on civil procedure, consumer protection, and AI. Blog: www.wilftownsend.net Academic papers: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAu…

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Reposted by Danny Wilf-Townsend
Noah Kazis @noahkazis.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I have mostly switched to lurking here but some words are so good they must be shared. “Surface the viscerality of parking and of religion”
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
After reading this, I wanted to know what the numbers would look like with more recent draft law review articles posted to SSRN. So I put a sample of 200 of them through Pangram 4, and found 57 papers with some AI use, 36 of which had >5% of their text from AI: wilftownsend.net/how-many-rec...
wilftownsend.net
How many recently drafted law review articles are written with AI? A quick examination.
AI use in legal scholarship may not be the most important AI topic being discussed these days, but it is having a moment in the corners of the world that care about these things. Julian Nyarko has an ...
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Excited to be back in New Haven for the academic year, visiting at YLS. Let me know if you come to town! So far I've had pizza three times in ten days, it's going to be work to keep that pace up.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Very happy to see this study finally made available publicly. In my many conversations with law professors about AI over the last few months, this study is the one that I have found most consistently helps people update their worldview about AI capabilities.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
This is tangential, but I wonder how the idea / expression distinction will hold up over time with generated AI. Expressing an idea used to be costly, typically taking effort and often some creativity. What happens when ideas serve as prompts and expression is cheap or free, and easily iterated?
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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 13/04/2026
This morning, I became the first New York City Mayor to visit Housing Court. And what I saw will stay with me for a long time. Families on the brink of losing their homes. Tenants navigating unsafe conditions, harassment, and uncertainty, searching for justice in an overwhelming system. Small property owners trying to keep up with their mortgage payments.
I met with Chief Administrative Judge Joseph Zayas, New York City Administrative Judge Shahabuddeen Ally, and other members of the bench, and I walked through Resolution, HP, and NYCHA Parts. I spoke with people in intake, with legal service providers, and with the advocates who show up every day to stand beside New Yorkers who need support.
Housing court is where the promises we make about dignity, stability and public excellence are tested in real time.
In the months ahead, my team will work closely with the Chief Judge and the Chief
Administrative Judge to confront the concerns we heard - directly from judges, tenants, landlords, legal service providers, and advocates.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
New post up about what I think is an under-discussed problem: the low visibility that we collectively have into responsible AI use by legal professionals. We have lots of data points about hallucinations, but many fewer public discussions of responsible uses, even though ...
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
A periodic update about the frequency and intensity of AI use in legal practice: Thomson Reuters reports that 55% of generative AI users at law firms use it at least daily, with 30% multiple times a day:
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
Happy to see a cameo here from one of my favorite tests in all of the law: whether a procedural rule is really a procedural rule depends on whether it "really regulates procedure."
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JP Collins @profjpc.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Imagine, there are still people who think the United States should switch to the metric system and abandon common sense units of measurement like this
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Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
some good climate/energy news: * 96% of new US power capacity was carbon-free in 2024 (56 gigawatts!) * 2025 included the first month ever when 51% of power on the U.S. grid was carbon-free * The golbal trend is overwhelming: The world is now investing more $ in clean energy than fossil fuels
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
I have a new post out in @lawfaremedia.org today about continual learning, the goal of many AI developers to build tools that can learn from their users. That technology could have many uses, but also will challenge existing ways we are trying to regulate AI. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/when...
lawfaremedia.org
When AI Models Can Continually Learn, Will Our Regulations Be Able to Keep Up?
Regulation has already been hard enough for static AI models.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
I have a new post out in @lawfaremedia.org today about continual learning, the goal of many AI developers to build tools that can learn from their users. That technology could have many uses, but also will challenge existing ways we are trying to regulate AI. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/when...
lawfaremedia.org
When AI Models Can Continually Learn, Will Our Regulations Be Able to Keep Up?
Regulation has already been hard enough for static AI models.
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Lawfare @lawfaremedia.org · 18/12/2025
Regulating static AI models is already difficult and if AI tools will become ones that can learn, regulations will need to adapt quickly. @dannywt.bsky.social explores what new regulatory approaches could look like in a future where change is common and comes fast.
lawfaremedia.org
When AI Models Can Continually Learn, Will Our Regulations Be Able to Keep Up?
Regulation has already been hard enough for static AI models.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
A thoughtful thread on the Netflix / Warner Bros merger. I think the points about consumer preferences are particularly important — it’s sometimes hard, but often important, to tease apart when law and policy arguments are inflected by different preferences about product features
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
An update for Sonnet 4.5, released last week: it scored 60.2% on my final exam (with extended thinking on, 54.4% without it). That's a big step up (~20 percentage points) from Opus 4.1's scores, and puts Sonnet 4.5 close to, if slightly behind, other lead models. On a human curve, that's ~ an A-/B+
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
One other note: across the five exam answers and dozens of answer evaluations generated here, I did not notice a single hallucination. This test wasn't designed to measure hallucination rates, but it's consistent with the general sense that they have dropped significantly
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Alex Hemmer @ahemmer.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
Our office is again hiring one or more attorneys for a one-year fellowship to work directly with the Illinois Solicitor General and her team, beginning in August/September 2026. www.governmentjobs.com/careers/ilag...
governmentjobs.com
Job Opportunities | Office of the Illinois Attorney General
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
For my latest round of informal tests of large language models, I looked at how good different models are at taking a law school exam—and also whether they are capable of grading exam answers in a consistent and reasonably accurate way. 🧵 www.wilftownsend.net/p/chatgpt-ta...
wilftownsend.net
ChatGPT takes—and grades—my law school exam
The latest round of informal testing of large language models on legal questions
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
It was very nice to have two of my recent articles featured in JOTWELL reviews this month—Maureen Carroll on "Deterring Unenforceable Terms," courtslaw.jotwell.com/should-draft... and @margotkaminski.bsky.social on "The Deletion Remedy" cyber.jotwell.com/ai-disgorgem...
courtslaw.jotwell.com
Should drafters be penalized for clearly unenforceable terms? - Courts Law
Daniel Wilf-Townsend, Deterring Unenforceable Terms, 111 Va. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2025), available at SSRN (June 6, 2024).Maureen CarrollMost of us (if not all) have entered a contract with one or ...
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
A nice quick read from my colleague @JonahPerlin about an issue that I see a lot of people oversimplifying: whether an attorney's use of a generative AI tool waives privilege. This is an area where I'm very interested to see how the law develops. news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/...
news.bloomberglaw.com
No, Generative AI Didn’t Just Kill the Attorney-Client Privilege
Opinion: Georgetown Law professor Jonah Perlin says using third-party technology doesn't categorically waive the attorney-client privilege.
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
In a stunning moment of self-delusion, the Wall Street Journal headline writers admitted that they don't know how LLM chatbots work.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 17/07/2025
A very pleasant surprise to listen to one of my favorite podcasts and hear my own work being discussed. And it's an excellent episode and overview for anyone thinking of AI's effects on the legal profession. Some thoughts / suggestions below for anyone who wants further reading:
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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 24/06/2025
Judge Alsup has the first true opinion on fair use for generative AI in Bartz v. Anthropic. He holds that AI training is fair use, and so is buying books to scan them, but that downloading pirated copies of books for an internal training-data database is not fair use. 🧵
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
I think this is one of the more common mistakes I see with people trying AI—the idea that if you go to a free chatbot, quickly run a question by it, and it does a bad job, then you've learned that AI cannot do a good job on that question.
A screenshot excerpting a blog post with the following text: Relatedly: if your goal is learning “what AI can do,” there is an asymmetry in how much information you get when AI fails at a task versus when it succeeds. If you try giving an AI tool a task, and it does a bad job at it, you have some evidence that it’s not good at that task—but it could very well be that a different model, a different prompt, or giving the tool more context (such as uploading relevant documents) could give you a different result. In contrast, if you figure out a way to get the AI to successfully do a task, you have strong evidence that the tool at least can be successful at that task, even if the tools’ probabilistic nature means that you should be cautious about assuming equally good results will occur on every run.

Because of this asymmetry, it is particularly worth varying up your approach and trying different ways of tackling a problem if you don’t get success on the first attempt. Try telling the tool that it’s wrong, or what it did wrong, or giving it more information. It is often possible that ten minutes and half a dozen different attempts at a task will move the result from bad to good.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
Significant ruling in one of the big algorithmic price-fixing lawsuits going on right now: www.reuters.com/legal/govern...
reuters.com
US judge rules health insurers, MultiPlan must face price-fixing lawsuits
A U.S. judge on Tuesday said healthcare providers can pursue claims that technology provider MultiPlan and a group of insurers conspired to underpay them billions of dollars in reimbursements for out-of-network health services.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
A good thread on a big new generative AI / IP lawsuit—Disney and Universal vs. Midjourney
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The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) @themerl.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
ChatGPT is down but The Museum of English Rural Life still stands, proving once again that Silicon Valley cannot compete with the history of rural England and its people.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
I've had a few recent conversations with judges and law profs who haven't tried generative AI, or have only used it for a few minutes to write a poem or other trivial fun. After a few people asked me about how to start, I thought I'd write up my suggestions: www.wilftownsend.net/p/some-ideas...
wilftownsend.net
Some ideas for judges, lawyers, and legal academics on trying generative AI
On the usefulness of personal experience, and suggestions about what to try
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Daniel Schwarcz @danielschwarcz.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
After years of studying AI & law here’s my rule of thumb: Lawyers should only use AI only when they can confidently assess, adapt & explain its output without engaging in deep, independent thinking about the core legal/factual issues. More in my new essay: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
papers.ssrn.com
<p><span>Thinking Like A Lawyer In The Age Of Generative AI: Cognitive Limits On AI Adoption Among Lawyers</span></p>
As of mid-2025, there is robust evidence that generative AI possesses the technological capability to significantly reshape legal practice. Yet legal markets an
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Blake E. Reid @chup.blakereid.org · 15/05/2025
The problems are with the affordances of the technology and how they mislead even sophisticated professionals: these tools work extremely quickly and dispense superficially coherent and confident output. These qualities override skepticism and promote reliance.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 16/05/2025
This is one of my favorite books to recommend to students (I actually have two copies). One of my teaching aspirations is to someday have a seminar read this alongside @nbagley.bsky.social’s Procedure Fetish and Kagan’s Adversarial Legalism.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
"Litigation...is not simply a tool...it embodies an organization of political authority that is politically attractive to Americans–and self-reinforcing. Turning away from litigation may require re-legitimating and re-empowering other forms of authority." hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/abundance-...
hypertext.niskanencenter.org
Abundance liberalism versus adversarial legalism
To displace legal vetocracy, abundance liberals must find other ways to generate authority that people can accept.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
Very cool to see that @kevintobia.bsky.social's and my article got @lsolum.bsky.social's "Download it while it's hot!" recommendation on the Legal Theory Blog!
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
People often treat AI-generated legal texts as an issue of legal ethics (e.g., hallucinated citations) or industry economics (will AI replace associates?). But as legal institutions start receiving, processing, and using generative AI, it's going to affect all of us 🧵
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
I've got a new paper up with the inimitable @kevintobia.bsky.social: "Generated Legal Texts"—about texts generated by AI and used in legal institutions. These texts are arising frequently in legal contexts around the world, perhaps faster than many realize. And, we argue ...
Abstract
Generative AI’s sudden growth has transformed the production of data,
images, videos, and especially text. And with that impact on text comes
impact on law. From contracts to judicial opinions, from legislation to
litigation, nearly every aspect of the law operates through text. Yet
while there is much legal scholarship on AI, little work focuses on legal
texts as the relevant unit of analysis.
We introduce the concept of “generated legal texts,” arguing that how
these texts are deployed across different legal institutions creates
common patterns and concerns—making them worthy of study in their
own right. Through a broad empirical survey, we document the breadth
and speed of generated legal texts’ integration into our institutions,
revealing how they are already reshaping the legal landscape.
Next, we classify the types of these new generated legal texts, the forms
of human co-production of these documents, the texts’ audiences, and
the spectrum of regulations concerning generated legal texts. Generated
legal texts raise concerns such as bias and inaccuracy that are common
with AI. But they also raise distinctive new issues, like “floodgates”
problems and concerns about sincerity. We identify and elaborate on
those concerns, and then discuss the emerging putative solution of
“ratification,” in which an individual or body assumes responsibility for
the text by “ratifying” it. By drawing on embedded legal norms,
ratification has many strengths as a tool for shaping the responsible use
of generated legal texts. But it also has limitations, reflecting the need
to pay close attention to generated legal texts going forward.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
A nice new opportunity for an AI+Law "Shark Tank" pitch session to get feedback on early stage paper ideas in time for the summer writing push, organized by @kevintfrazier.bsky.social at UT Law. Would definitely encourage anyone with a paper idea to check it out! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
docs.google.com
Sh[AI]rk Tank - Make Sure Your August Paper Doesn't Sink
The August cycle is on the horizon. Before you get too deep into your paper, now's the time to solicit feedback from others with an interest in AI and the Law. Please express your interest in the fo...
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Noah Kazis @noahkazis.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
In March, HUD declared it was “revising” (read: gutting) its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regs. That was illegal. I got mad and submitted a comment. www.regulations.gov/comment/HUD-... It’s not in the 100 worst things happening right now, but it’s still MY thing. So, thread:
regulations.gov
Regulations.gov
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 30/04/2025
No. One: It’s a fact. Two: The judiciary is political. Three: The appointing president is often relevant to a full understand, hence newsworthy. Three (b): It is often these days a reminder that judges appointed by presidents of both parties are not acceding to Trump’s lawlessness.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
I love this analogy
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
I started a blog! There is a lot of interesting stuff going on in the worlds of AI, consumer protection, and litigation that develops too quickly, or is too inchoate, for law review articles. I’ll be posting here occasionally—thoughts welcome:
wilftownsend.net
Test Case | Danny Wilf-Townsend | Substack
Experimental thoughts on law, artificial intelligence, consumer protection, and more. Click to read Test Case, by Danny Wilf-Townsend, a Substack publication.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
This blog post also contains my favorite AI+Law anecdote so far from the teaching-and-talks circuit.
Text from the linked blog post: One of my favorite anecdotes about AI and legal practice comes from a talk I was giving last spring to a group of lawyers. In the Q+A after the talk, one law firm partner raised his hand and told me about his week. Early in the week, his firm had received a notice from its malpractice insurance provider. The insurance company was giving notice that its malpractice policy did not cover any task on which generative AI was used. Fair enough—with legal news coverage replete with stories of fake cases and other hallucinations, it seems like an insurance provider might want to be cautious about the technology. But then, later in the week, his firm got a letter from one of their biggest clients, a large technology company. The tech company said that it would no longer pay for associates’ time on routine tasks that could be handled by generative AI—in other words, asking the law firm to start using generative AI instead of associates on a number of tasks, to save money.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
I enjoyed two recent empirical papers on AI+Law, but realized they have somewhat different implications—in particular, about whether AI tools are actually useful for lawyers, or are too likely to err. I wrote up a blog post thinking through how to reconcile them: www.wilftownsend.net/p/is-ai-actu...
wilftownsend.net
Is AI actually useful in legal practice, or just a hotbed of errors?
Reconciling a pair of recent empirical studies
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
Notably, from a law professor perspective, this includes accurately identifying a "dog not barking" issue on a long, issue-spotter-exam-style question that explicitly discussed many things but left an appellate jurisdiction issue completely unmentioned. No model had spotted that before.
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
I haven't spent much time with the new o3 model from OpenAI, but it is the first model to get all of the questions right on the informal testing of legal questions that I've been doing for a while when new models come out.
A table of results showing how different generative AI models perform on a range of questions about the law of civil procedure
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Danny Wilf-Townsend @dannywt.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
Several good things about this order. A small, technical detail that is good but easy to miss is the court's ruling on FRCP 65(c). In other times this would be unremarkable (or just absent from the order), but the Trump admin has tried to use Rule 65 to make this kind of civil action harder.
A screenshot of the court's order, stating "Based on the record and the applicable law, the Court also finds that no security is required at this time under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c). See Kaepa, Inc. v. Achilles Corp., 76 F.3d 624, 628 (5th Cir. 1996) (noting that a court “may elect to require no security at all” under Rule 65(c))."
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Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
JUST IN: Trump-appointed judge in Texas blocks removals under the Alien Enemies Act, citing the SCOTUS ruling and the potential for a mistake as revealed in the Abrego Garcia case. This follows a similar order from NY judge on other AEA targets. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
NEWS: Jenner & Block sued to challenge Trump's executive order in D.C. federal court this morning. They are represented by lawyers from Cooley LLP, and are seeking similar relief to the Perkins Coie challenge. Complaint: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
COMPLAINT
Plaintiff, the law firm of Jenner & Block LLP, brings this case against the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Communications Commission, the Office of Management and Budget, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Office of Personnel Management, the General
Services Administration, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of the Interior, the Department of the Treasury, the
Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department
of Veterans Affairs, the United States Postal Service, the United States of America, and, in their respective official capacities, Pamela J. Bondi, Brendan Carr, Geoffrey Starks, Nathan Simington, Anna M. Gomez, Russell T. Vought, Andrea Lucas, Charles Ezell, Stephen Ehekian, Tulsi Gabbard, Scott Bessent, Pete Hegseth, Lee Zeldin, Mark C. Christie, Willie L. Phillips, David Rosner, Lindsay S. See, Judy W. Chang, Andrew N. Ferguson, Melissa Holyoak, Mark T. Uyeda,
Hester M. Peirce, Caroline A. Crenshaw, Doug Burgum, Scott Bessent, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,
Kristie Noem, Douglas A. Collins, and Doug Tulino, and states as follows:PRAYER FOR RELIEF

WHEREFORE, Jenner & Block respectfully requests that the Court:
A.
Declare the Executive Order unconstitutional as violative of the Separation of

Powers and Article Il of the United States Constitution and the First, Fifth and Sixth
Amendments to the Constitution.
В.
Immediately enjoin implementation of the Order pending consideration of a motion
for preliminary injunction.
С.
Preliminarily, then permanently, enjoin implementation of the Order.
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