"Ocasio-Cortez faces lawsuits for blocking Twitter critics after appeals court ruling on Trump."

WaPo reports. That's the way case law works.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is facing two federal lawsuits for blocking Twitter users who were critical of her or her policies. Republican congressional candidate Joseph Saladino and former New York assemblyman Dov Hikind sued the freshman congresswoman Tuesday, shortly after a New York appellate court upheld an earlier decision affirming that President Trump violated the First Amendment for doing the same....

The First Amendment limits government action and bars it from discriminating against viewpoints. Public officials, the court said Tuesday, cannot exclude members of the public “from an otherwise open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees.”

Even when the public official is using his personal account on a privately-owned social media site.

“Since he took office, the President has consistently used the Account as an important tool of governance and executive outreach,” Judge Barrington D. Parker wrote in the 29-page opinion. “Because the President, as we have seen, acts in an official capacity when he tweets, we conclude that he acts in the same capacity when he blocks those who disagree with him.”

You can try to say the President of the United States is unique or the way Trump has used Twitter as President of the United States is unique, but I don't think that should work. You need a neutral rule here.

The "cannibal cop" wins in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

"This is a case about the line between fantasy and criminal intent. Although it is increasingly challenging to identify that line in the Internet age, it still exists and it must be rationally discernible in order to ensure that 'a person’s inclinations and fantasies are his own and beyond the reach of the government.'... We are loathe [sic] to give the government the power to punish us for our thoughts and not our actions.... That includes the power to criminalize an individual’s expression of sexual fantasies, no matter how perverse or disturbing. Fantasizing about committing a crime, even a crime of violence against a real person whom you know, is not a crime."

"The Second Circuit Court of Appeals held in the case, which was brought by the ACLU, that the telephone metadata collection program 'exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized.'"

"The Court did not rule on a larger Constitutional issue and sent the case back down to a lower court for further proceedings."

A three judge panel held that the text of the Patriot Act "cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it and that it does not authorize the telephone meta date program."

The Court said, "We do so comfortably in the full understanding that if Congress [chooses] to authorize such a far-reaching and unprecedented program, it has every [opportunity] to do so, unambiguously. Until such times as it does so, however, we decline to deviate from widely accepted interpretations of well-established legal standards."

"The reason we don't have to give equal time to the atheists is because we're depicting the history of 9/11."

"The atheists as a community have nothing to do with the history of 9/11. Our mission is to tell the history in a truthful way," said Mark Alcott arguing for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in a case argued before a 2d Circuit panel yesterday. The atheists who brought the lawsuit (and lost at the trial level) complain of the lack of representation of atheists.

Rescue workers found the "Ground Zero cross" in the rubble of the World Trade Center two days after the attacks. The cross-shaped beam was originally part of the World Trade Center's structure. Rescue workers viewed it as a symbol of hope in the nine-month recovery effort, and priests included it in religious services held at Ground Zero....

The 2d Circuit court says the "fair use" copyright exception doesn't require that a new work of art "refer back to the original."

Richard Prince used somebody else's photographs in his collages, and the court said it's enough that a reasonable observer finds the new work "transformative."

The photographer, Patrick Cariou, made "serene and deliberately composed portraits and landscape photographs depict the natural beauty of the Rastafarians and their surrounding environs," the court said. But "Prince’s crude and jarring works, on the other hand, are hectic and provocative."

In her decision in 2011, Judge Batts gave Mr. Cariou the right to destroy the “Canal Zone” paintings that had not been sold to collectors, a remedy that was criticized by Judge Barrington D. Parker Jr. of the Second Circuit during oral arguments last year.

Destroy?!! But look what Prince did with Cariou's photographs: here. And Prince sold the works for more than $10 million. And yet, don't you feel free to take a book of photographs you own, cut out the pictures, paste them onto poster-board, and scribble and scratch on them? If you made some creepy ugly image out of photos of beautiful models, wouldn't you feel that was yours all yours?

There's a high art/low art issue here. There's the way that the snooty people who exhibit in an elite gallery think they owe nothing to the relatively low people who take sentimental photographs. But that's a topic for debate, not a reason for the photographer to hit up the high-class artist for money or — absurd! — claim a right to destroy the expensive articles of commerce.