The Weekly Mutiny #8: Five Courts, One Week
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Judges, a shareholder, a landlord, and a state law. The week's record is almost entirely on dockets.
The Weekly Mutiny #8: Five Courts, One Week
Judges, a shareholder, a landlord, and a state law. The week's record is almost entirely on dockets.
September 16, 2026
Almost everything worth reading this week came off a docket. That is partly a comment on the news and partly a comment on us: ten of the fifteen posts we published in the last seven days trace to CourtListener. The five below are the ones where the filing itself says something the headline did not.
Three federal judges asked the same question
In the Central District of California, Judge Michelle Williams Court ordered both sides in Ameris Bank v. Patrick Byrne to file declarations under penalty of perjury on whether generative AI drafted their recent filings. In the Northern District of Alabama, Judge Annemarie Carney Axon issued a standing order in SEC v. Louisiana State University requiring every party to certify the accuracy of anything AI helped produce. In Illinois, a federal judge fined attorney David Baldemar Reyes $1,000 for a motion built on fabricated citations. The detail that matters is the form: these are sworn declarations and standing orders, not bar guidance. A lawyer who lies on one is exposed to a perjury finding, not a reprimand. The Ameris Bank order, the Alabama standing order, and the $1,000 sanction.
A Microsoft shareholder sues over the training data
A derivative complaint filed in Washington alleges Microsoft's executives misled investors about two things: whether the data used to train its models was legally obtained, and whether Copilot performs as marketed. A derivative suit is brought on the company's behalf against its own officers, which means the plaintiff is not a creator claiming infringement but an owner claiming the infringement risk was hidden from the people who bear it. Read beside Microsoft's own summary-judgment motion in the Authors Guild case, filed the same week and arguing that training on copyrighted books is fair use, the two filings describe the same exposure from opposite ends. The derivative complaint.
The Justice Department settles with a landlord over rent algorithms
DOJ filed a proposed consent decree that would bar Pinnacle Property Management Services from setting rents with pricing algorithms fed with competitor data. A consent decree is a settlement with the force of a court order; the company accepts the restriction and the case ends without a trial. The question to put to the decree text, and to the remaining landlord cases, is whether any term reaches the tenants who paid the rents the algorithm set. The proposed decree.
Minnesota's nudification law survives xAI's first challenge
U.S. District Judge Donovan W. Frank denied xAI's request for an injunction against a Minnesota law that prohibits AI companies from letting users generate nonconsensual sexually explicit images. The ruling is on the injunction only. The practical effect is that the state can enforce the statute against xAI now, before the underlying case is decided. The order.
Six law professors tell the Fourth Circuit where geofence warrants lead
In United States v. Chatrie, an amicus brief from six law professors argues that if the court upholds geofence warrants, the same reasoning permits reverse searches across AI chatbot conversation logs, cloud storage, and facial recognition databases. The brief is worth reading for the list itself: it names the data stores a reverse warrant would reach next, and chatbot logs are on it. The amicus brief.
Friday's Black Box is 008: a federal maintenance backlog measured in the hundreds of billions, and what the first two years of funding against it actually cover.