Judge entries are fixture placeholders, not real appointments. They exist so the judge-level facet has something to resolve against; replace them with real judges before this registry is used for published content.
U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California has dismissed, with leave to amend, claims that Google's Cloud Contact Center AI illegally listened to Home Depot customer service calls in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act. She ruled that none of the three callers alleged Google intended to record without consent, and she sent three other plaintiffs' claims to arbitration.
A federal magistrate judge in San Francisco on October 19, 2026, ordered Meta to identify each person who made, authorized or approved decisions to obtain shadow-library datasets such as LibGen and Anna's Archive, including by BitTorrent. Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson's order covers the authors' class action led by Richard Kadrey and suits by publishers including Entrepreneur Media that accuse Meta of training AI on pirated works.
Bloomberg Law and the ABA Journal reported on October 2, 2026, that Carlsbad's Rubin Law Office filed a putative antitrust class action in the Northern District of California accusing Thomson Reuters of buying Casetext for $650 million and folding it into Westlaw to eliminate a lower-priced competitor. The complaint seeks class certification, treble damages, and an order to divest or restore Casetext; Thomson Reuters said it had not been served and declined comment until review.
A California federal court denied class certification to three putative purchaser classes accusing Energizer Holdings and Walmart of conspiring to inflate disposable battery prices through wholesale distribution agreements. U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts held that the plaintiffs failed to establish commonality and antitrust impact on a classwide basis, finding that their economists' difference-in-differences regression models did not satisfy the foundational parallel trends assumption.
The Trump administration agreed on September 25, 2026 to rescind guidance authorizing federal agencies to initiate reductions in force during appropriations lapses, settling American Federation of Government Employees v. Office of Management and Budget in the Northern District of California, Bloomberg Law, Reuters and Government Executive reported. Agencies must strip blanket RIF authorization from shutdown contingency plans and give plaintiff unions 30 days’ notice before restoring such language. The suit challenged mass layoff notices issued during the 2025 government shutdown.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the California Energy Commission sued the Department of the Interior, federal officials, and Invenergy California Offshore in federal court on Tuesday. The fifty-four-page complaint challenges a June 2026 agreement paying Invenergy over $111 million to surrender its two-gigawatt Morro Bay offshore wind lease. California alleges the buyout violates the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and constitutional spending limits while requiring fossil-fuel investments.
The Province of British Columbia and School District 59 sued OpenAI and Chief Executive Sam Altman in California federal court on Monday, alleging the company failed to alert police to ChatGPT conversations planning a February 2026 school shooting. The complaint asserts OpenAI identified the user as an imminent threat in June 2025 but deactivated the account without notifying Canadian authorities. British Columbia seeks reimbursement for reconstructing Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, psychiatric services, punitive damages, and injunctive safety mandates.
A twelve-state coalition led by California submitted a proposed consent decree in California federal court on Monday, settling antitrust litigation against Paramount Skydance's planned acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery. Under the thirty-two-page agreement, Paramount agreed to divest cable networks including Comedy Central and BET, maintain theatrical film quotas for five years, increase domestic production spending by $300 million annually, and establish independent editorial oversight boards for CBS News and CNN.
Subscribers to paid artificial intelligence services sued Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google in the Northern District of California on September 18, 2026, alleging the companies formed an illegal horizontal agreement to slow frontier model improvements. The complaint claims public statements endorsing coordinated development pacing, presented as AI safety measures, constitute an unlawful restraint on output and product quality under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, depriving consumers of faster competitive innovations.
Corrected . An earlier version of this piece misquoted the complaint. It attributed to paragraphs 111 and 112 a sentence the complaint does not contain; the complaint's words, in paragraph 112, are now quoted. It quoted Sam Altman as writing "OpenAI will do the same"; the complaint quotes "will do the same." It placed quotation marks around several passages the complaint paraphrases, gave some paragraph numbers incorrectly, and said each plaintiff subscribed to one defendant's product; three plaintiffs allege subscriptions to all four. It also quoted Dario Amodei's essay beyond what the complaint quotes. The piece now links the desk's copy of the complaint as filed.