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In March of 2021, Chinas most important annual political meetings took place as thousands of delegates to the National Peoples Congress (NPC), the national legislature, and the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the top political advisory body, convened for a week at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Commonly known as thelianghui or Two Sessions this years elite gatherings in Beijing were particularly significant. The Chinese leadership not only set the national socio-economic and political priorities for 2021, but also approved Chinas 14th Five-Year Plan (FYP) (2021-2025), the grand strategic blueprint for the next half decade, as well as longer-term goals for 2035. Whats more, 2021 marks the centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with the 100th anniversary officially commemorated in July.

For the business world, the lianghui provided a critical bellwether for taking stock of how Beijing intends to steer the Chinese economy in the year ahead, through 2025, and beyond. Major themes included:

This article will focus on how the lianghui will impact intellectual property (IP).

As China aims to become a leading innovative country by 2035, the work report laid out an ambitious national technological blueprint for the next five years, emphasizing that innovation remains at the heart of Chinas modernization drive. The government vowed to focus on achieving major breakthroughs in core technologies, including next-generation artificial intelligence, semiconductors, cloud computing, and other key areas, as well as establish more national laboratories and innovation centers. Beijing will also aim to get 56% of the country on 5G networks. By 2025, the government aims to have the digital economy account for about 10% of Chinas newly added economic output.

Eight projects were identified as impacting the digital economy, namely cloud computing, big data, Internet of things, industrial networks, block chain, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality according to the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA).

From 2021-2025, research and development (R&D) spending will be ramped up by more than 7% every year, with expenditures expected to account for a higher percentage of GDP than that during the 13th FYP period. This year, China will increase its spending on basic research by 10.6%. The work report also said that the government will continue the policy of granting an extra tax deduction of 75% on enterprises R&D costs and raise this to 100% for manufacturing enterprises.

As can be seen, this continues a strong trend in increasing R&D funding that started in 1995 and indicates a commitment to R&D as well as providing tax incentives for R&D projects being in China.

In particular, the 14th FYP featured a renewed focus on accelerating the Fourth Industrial Revolution and transforming China into an advanced manufacturing superpower, outlining plans to strengthen Chinas global competitiveness in areas such as robotics, new energy vehicles, aircraft development, and agricultural machinery, among others. Speaking on the sidelines of the Two Sessions, Xiao Yaqing, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, said, The manufacturing industry is the lifeblood of the countrys economy, and the real economy should be further strengthened and improved.

Miao Wei, a government advisor and member of the CPPCC, predicted that it will take at least three decades to achieve Chinas goal of becoming a manufacturing powerhouse, saying that China is still a third-tier manufacturing power and citing Germany and the U.S. as examples of first-tier manufacturing nations. Chinas manufacturing output as a share of its economy has declined in recent years, slipping to just over a quarter of GDP in 2020, and Miao warned that this has been occurring too early and too quickly.

The significant commitments for elevated R&D spending and plans for a reinvigorated manufacturing drive underscored Beijings determination to continue expanding the role of innovation as a major growth engine for the Chinese economy. Coming amid growing rivalries with the United States and other major economies around technology, the goals also reflected a rising urgency to reduce Chinas technological dependency on external markets and mitigate the vulnerabilities of its supply chains to geopolitical tensions. Going forward, this will be a top official priority under DCS. This reliance on external markets has caused issues with R&D in China.

For the first time in a work report, the government also pledged to expand efforts against business monopolies as part of efforts to ensure fair market competition. Coming after the recent launch of an anti-trust crackdown targeting domestic tech giants, the announcement signaled that the tougher approach to governing Chinas booming technology sectors can be expected to intensify further. Companies should be prepared for the likelihood that authorities will take a more active and interventionist role in the Chinese private sector. Similar trends are developing in the United States. See our recent article on "Promoting Competition in the American Economy Executive Order: Antitrust Is Back?"

Intellectual property (IP) owners are advised to have a working knowledge of the recent draft published in April of this year to see what is planned for the coming years. Knowledge of the FYP will help to set the check points for ones own IP strategy and plans.

Intellectual property has taken a key role in the development of technological progress in Chinas big economy. Chinas IP system is gradually changing, with each plan having various focus points. In the FYP, two major focus points are evident:

These two focus areas are further detailed below.

The enforcement system of the patent law has been strengthened with the recent fourth amendment. This includes valuable rights for the pharmaceutical sector. The implementation of the FYP will further emphasize the use of the newly-created, punitive compensation system for infringement of patents and will increase the damage compensation. Exposure to multiples of up to five times the otherwise calculated damages are likely to become a more common. In addition, the criminal enforcement of IP rights has been proposed.

Improvements to the judicial and administrative branches of the law enforcement system of intellectual property rights were announced, together with work on the effectiveness of the arbitration and mediation system. Notarization requirements were also mentioned as being within the scope of the reform.

It can be expected that the next five years will bring a more detailed and standardized IP protection regime of the administrative departments and the judiciary. Besides the abovementioned tools to act against infringers, it will be crucial to check in detail what else will be designed to improve IP enforcement. The details may determine the balance between plaintiff and accused infringers in the infringement proceedings and hopefully will provide a less complex and more predictable proceedings according to accepted guidelines.

Handling of overseas IP disputes will be guided with support from the Chinese government, through new platforms such as the National Guidance Center for Handling Overseas Intellectual Property Disputes with ten local sub-centers. There is also an intention to provide intensive training.

This demonstrates that knowledge on the IP system will be crucial for IP creation and enforcement strategies for IP owners entering the Chinese system as well as for Chinese looking abroad.

The FYP has a clear focus on high-technology fields, of which the following are specifically mentioned: quantum information, photonics and micro-nanoelectronics, network communications, artificial intelligence, biomedicine and modern energy systems. While there is a focus on becoming a leader, or at least becoming fully self-reliant in these technology sectors, the IP related to these technologies will likely see the most benefits in the future investment via national laboratories. In addition, it can be assumed that patentability exclusions and patentability hurdles (e.g. for business methods or software per se) will be further softened or lowered to allow the drafting of claims that cover these fields.

All applicants in the high-tech sector will benefit from these improvements. Therefore, patent applications that face examination challenges may become acceptable in the next five years. It could be worthwhile to pursue inventions in those areas. It will be important to watch for practice changes to see which claim formats are supported by the CNIPA patent office. According to a media interview with Shen Changyu, CNIPA Director, there is currently ongoing research on how to deal with the question of whether works and inventions completed by AI can generate new IP rights. Interesting questions may be posed and answered.

While these high-tech fields will be supported, there is another important initiative that focuses on the quality of IP. This initiative is implemented through the promotion of ownership of high-value invention patents per 10,000 population in the FYP, which replaces the old targets of ownership of invention patents per 10,000 population in previous plans. It is worth noting that the number of high-value invention patents owned by per 10,000 people reach 12 this year and was a record. As part of the quality initiative, we have seen the drafting of a completely new legislation to prevent irregular patent applications, including revisions of the Measures on Regulating Patent Application Behaviors.

The recent discussion has raised concerns on whether the new measures could also be overreaching and may negatively affect IP strategies which have been commonly used to pursue legitimate goals of the innovator (e.g., filing multiple divisional applications to obtain the optimal protection for all the best inventive features). This should be carefully watched to not stumble into the scope of these regulations that should according to its original purpose prevent misuse of the IP system.

Opinions and conclusions in this post are solely those of the author unless otherwise indicated. The information contained in this blog is general in nature and is not offered and cannot be considered as legal advice for any particular situation. The author has provided the links referenced above for information purposes only and by doing so, does not adopt or incorporate the contents. Any federal tax advice provided in this communication is not intended or written by the author to be used, and cannot be used by the recipient, for the purpose of avoiding penalties which may be imposed on the recipient by the IRS. Please contact the author if you would like to receive written advice in a format which complies with IRS rules and may be relied upon to avoid penalties.

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Chinas 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) and Its Impact on Your Intellectual Property Portfolio - JD Supra

A federal judge sentenced a former Starr County gangster to 10 years in prison Monday.

U.S. District Judge John D. Rainey sentenced Hector Pelon Guerra, 41, of La Rosita a former ranking member of the Texas Chicano Brotherhood in Starr County during a hearing Monday afternoon in Victoria.

Guerra pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute more than 2,200 pounds of marijuana. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dropped a gun charge against him and recommended 10 years in prison.

I do accept my responsibility, your honor, Guerra said.

The case brought together Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Criminal Investigations Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

They identified more than 70 people affiliated with the Texas Chicano Brotherhood.

The McAllen investigation revealed that Ricardo GARCIA, Rafael DIAZ, and Hector GUERRA were ranking members within the Starr County faction of the TxCB organization, according to a summary of the case against Guerra filed by federal prosecutors. These ranking members thus became targets of an electronic surveillance (wiretap) investigation.

The Gulf Cartel paid members of the Texas Chicano Brotherhood to transport marijuana throughout the Rio Grande Valley, according to federal court records. The gang also robbed stash houses and sold the stolen marijuana to other smugglers.

Guerra and other members of the gang moved about 330 pounds of marijuana a week, according to information provided to the government by an informant. The gang also participated in kidnappings and murders.

After a grand jury indicted Guerra, agents tracked him to a trailer home in La Rosita. A regional SWAT team from San Juan ripped off the door with a battering ram, set off two stun grenades and arrested him on Nov. 21, 2018.

And that is how the SWAT team in San Juan knocks on the door, said Bill Weir, the host of a short-lived television show called Border Live, which filmed the arrest. Weir said agents had both a federal arrest warrant and a search warrant.

The search warrant had been written by Arturo David Ibarra Jr., an investigator with the Starr County District Attorneys Office.

Ibarra told a judge that investigators believed Guerra was an enforcer in the Texas Chicano Brotherhood.

In early 2018 the suspected party was arrested for the possession of marihuana. During the scope of that investigation intelligence revealed that the suspected party was smuggling narcotics, specifically marihuana, in large quantities and has direct contact to the Gulf Cartel, read the affidavit, according to federal court records. It is my belief that the suspected party has evidence in his possession which can be beneficial to the investigation into the Texas Chicano Brotherhood gang.

Ibarra requested a no-knock warrant based on information provided by an informant.

During the investigation Investigator Ibarra learned that the suspected party attended a Texas Chicano Brotherhood meeting on November 18, 2018 and the suspected party was in the possession of a AK-47 and a handgun, read the affidavit, according to federal court records.

When agents searched the trailer, they didnt find an AK-47. They did, however, find a pistol hidden in an air-conditioning vent.

Attorney Micah Wayne Hatley of Victoria, who represented Guerra, challenged the search warrant.

Information about a months-old marijuana bust simply wasnt enough to justify a search, Hatley argued in a motion to suppress. The warrant also failed to include any information that linked the marijuana bust to Guerras house.

Statements that Guerra made after his arrest should be suppressed too, Hatley argued, because a federal agent questioned Guerra after he invoked his right to remain silent.

Rainey, the federal judge, agreed.

Hector Guerra, 41, of La Rosita was a ranking member of the Texas Chicano Brotherhood. (Photo courtesy of the Starr County Sheriffs Office.)

The Court finds that the search warrant was not supported by probable cause and that the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule does not apply, Rainey wrote in an opinion filed in February. The search of Defendants home after the initial protective sweep incident to his arrest therefore violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

Rainey also suppressed all statements Guerra made to agents.

There is no question Defendant explicitly invoked his right to remain silent. Under Miranda and its progeny, the agents should have immediately terminated the interrogation at that point, Rainey wrote. Instead of ensuring that Defendants right to remain silent was scrupulously honored, they continued, in the Governments own words, trying to encourage him to cooperate with the government.

The Texas Chicano Brotherhood green-lighted Guerra after his arrest, according to a transcript of a court hearing in August 2020. Concerned about his safety, the U.S. Marshals Service kept Guerra in solitary confinement and transferred him at least three times.

Guerra agreed to plead guilty in May.

We made the deal for 120 months, your honor, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia Hubert Booth, who prosecuted the case.

Guerra said he wanted to take classes in prison and become a different person.

The first few times you came into this court, that wasnt your attitude, Rainey said.

Guerra agreed.

I know, Guerra said. And I apologize.

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Texas Chicano Brotherhood 'enforcer' sentenced to 10 years in prison - Progresstimes

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Sadly, we are approaching a time in America when our elected public officials will assault the liberties we have hired them to protect. Whatever the cause, the government will soon blame its failures to contain a virus on a small portion of the population and then impose restrictions on the inalienable rights of all of us.

We cannot permit this to happen again.

During the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln thought it expedient to silence those in the northern states who challenged his wartime decisions by incarcerating them in military prisons, he was rebuked afterward by a unanimous Supreme Court. The essence of the rebuke was that no matter the state of difficulties whether war or pestilence the Constitution protects our natural rights, and its provisions are to be upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, in good times and in bad.

Whether COVID-19 is coming back or not, our central planners have panicked. We do not have a free market in the U.S. in the delivery of health care; rather, we have thousands of pages of statutes, regulations, and controls at the federal, state, and local levels.

Those controls were revealed as manifestly deficient the last time around. The feds were so protective of their control of health care an area of governance that the Supreme Court has ruled is nowhere delegated to them in the Constitution and, but for their power to tax those who defy them, is nonexistent that they insisted that only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta could be trusted to test for the virus.

It took weeks of begging by governors and mayors, and health care professionals for the feds to relent. Of course, once they acknowledged that labs throughout the country were as competent as theirs, they realized that their incompetence had deprived all physicians as well as most private sector and state government-owned labs of the test kits themselves.

We all know how central economic planning diminishes freedom, produces scarcity, and adds to the cost of products. Now we know that central micromanagement of health care kills people.

But these mayors and governors were not to be outdone by the feds in their totalitarian impulses. Many of them issued decrees that are as profoundly unconstitutional as Lincolns efforts to silence dissent.

They ordered the closing of most businesses and nearly all retail establishments. They acted as if they, and not we, owned our faces. They shuttered religious institutions. It took a year for the courts to interfere partially with this madness.

The fulfillment of these totalitarian impulses put millions out of work, closed and destroyed thousands of businesses, and impaired the fundamental rights of tens of millions all in violation of numerous sections of the Constitution that the totalitarians swore to uphold.

And now they are threatening to do this again.

The Contracts Clause of the Constitution prohibits the states from interfering with lawful contracts, such as leases and employment agreements. The Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits the states from interfering with life, liberty, or property without a trial at which the state must prove fault. The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment requires just compensation when the state meaningfully interferes with an owners chosen lawful use of his property.

Taken together, these clauses reveal significant protections of private property in the Constitution. Add to this the threat of punishment that accompanied these decrees and the fact that they were executive decrees, not legislation, and one can see the paramount rejection of basic democratic and constitutional principles in the minds and words and deeds of those who have perpetrated them.

Add to all this the protection in the First Amendment of the rights to worship and associate, and elsewhere the judicially recognized right to travel, and it is clear that these nanny state rules were profoundly unconstitutional, indisputably unlawful, and utterly unworthy of respect or compliance.

Why is this happening again?

Throughout history, free people have been willing to accept the devils bargain of trading liberty for safety when they are fearful. We supinely accept the shallow and hollow offers of government that somehow less liberty equals more safety. It doesnt. This is the governments dream dominance without resistance.

This happened here with the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s when the Federalists feared a second revolution and punished speech critical of them, during the Civil War when Lincoln feared dissent and Congress feared defeat. They locked up innocents during World War I when President Woodrow Wilson punished the speech he hated and feared, and during the Great Depression when President Franklin D. Roosevelt feared economic calamity and seized property without compensation. And, after 9/11, fearing another attack, Congress secretly crafted the Patriot Acts circumvention of the Fourth Amendment and authorized the creation of the total surveillance state.

Of course, just one year ago, we free people were all in lockdown a word used to describe confining prisoners to their cells.

This sordid history came about when the public was fearful of the unknown and trustful of the governments bargain. But the liberty that was sacrificed for the safety that was promised is being taken away again.

Liberty is natural and personal. You can sacrifice yours, but you cannot sacrifice mine. Thus, personal liberty the Declaration of Independence calls our rights inalienable, and the Ninth Amendment reflects freedoms nature as limitless is insulated from totalitarian and even majoritarian interference.

Today, the fear of contagion again gives government cover for its assaults on freedom and poses a question the government does not want to answer: If liberty can be taken away in times of crisis, is it really liberty; or is it just a license, via a temporary government permission slip, subject to the whims of the politicians in power?

We cannot permit this to happen again.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is an analyst for the Fox News Channel. He has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution.

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Freedom in the time of COVID-19 madness - Washington Times

WASHINGTON For months,the Supreme Court appeared to rise above partisan strife becoming a place where rancor could be quieted by compromise. But as is often the case at the nation's highest court, the justices saved their fireworks for the end.

With a string of unanimous or near-unanimous decisions, often decided on narrow grounds, the court's nine-month term that wrapped up last week initially upended expectations about how its new 6-3 conservative majority would handle pressing disputes about religious freedom,the Fourth Amendment and the Affordable Care Act.

Then, in its final two opinions, the court's six conservatives held together against its three liberals to impose curbs on the 1965 Voting Rights Act when voting access has become a political flashpointand opened a debate about whether campaign disclosure requirementscould be subjected tolegal challenges.

"The court managed to rise above the partisan divide this term until the last day," tweeted David Cole, national legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union.

As the U.S. Capitol remained surrounded by fences erected in response to the riot in January, the Supreme Court appeared to be going out of its way to avoid the kind of conservative-liberal, 6-3 splits liberals had warned about for monthsin fundraising emails. Forty-three percent ofthe term's cases were decided unanimously, according to statistics compiled by the SCOTUSblog website lower than the average over the past decade but higher than the past three years.

Before the rulings onvoting rights and charitable donordisclosureThursday, Chief Justice John Roberts "seems to have decided to try to keep the temperature down,"said Georgetown University law professor Paul Smith. "There does seem to be a divergence within the conservative six about how aggressively to rule on a number of issues."

Three liberals and four conservative justicesjoined together to thwart the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act,deciding that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue because they were not harmed by the law's requirements.A unanimous court allowed a Catholic foster care agency in Philadelphia to decline to screen same-sex foster parents on religious grounds.

Third time: Supreme Court turns back Obamacare challenge

Looking ahead: Supreme Court foster care ruling likely to prompt more tests

Sports: Supreme Court rules against NCAA in antitrust case in unanimous decision

Other opinionsdefiedconventional wisdom about the court as conservatives and liberals teamed up in unusual splits. Associate Justice Amy ConeyBarrett wrote the majority opinion absolving a police officer from violating a 1986 anti-hacking law when he ran a license plate in exchange for cash an outcome that meant Americans wouldnt face federal criminal charges for fudging their profile on dating apps such as Tinder.

Barrett was joined by thethree liberals and two conservatives, Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

The court reached many of its larger-than-expected majorities by crafting narrower-than-expected rulings at least on first blush.In the Philadelphia foster care decision, the court declined to give what many conservatives had sought: overturninga 1990 precedent that controls analysis ofmany religious freedom claims.

In a case involving a Pennsylvania high school cheerleader who sued over her punishment for a vulgar social media post, an 8-1 majority ruled that her school violated her First Amendment rights. But they punted on a much broader question about when and how far schools may go generally to regulate a students' off-campus speech.

That slow-go approachmay have been a result of Roberts' influence, Smith speculated, and a "desire not to have the court suddenly and immediately appear extreme" so soon after Barretts rapidconfirmation beforelast fall's election.

The dynamic changed last week when Associate Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a 6-3 majority, upheld an Arizona law that prohibited the third-party collection of mailed ballots, a practice critics call "ballot harvesting." Writing a dissent for the courts liberals, Associate Justice Elena Kagan called the outcome "tragic" and warned that it "lessens" the Voting Rights Act.

An amendment to the act approved by Congress and signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 allowed groups to challenge state election laws if they affect minority voters more than non-minorities. In Arizona, that impact was small too small, Alito wrote, to outweigh the states interest in preventing fraud at the polls. The Voting Rights Act provision at issue still stands, but the courts decision narrowed the circumstances under which voting rights groups may use it to sue.

Ballots: Supreme Court upholds Arizona ban on ballot collection

Donors: Supreme Court rules for charities in challenge to donor disclosure

Alitos opinion thrust the court into a tense national debate over the issue of voting rights. After baseless claims that President Donald Trump lost last years election because of fraud, conservative states are tightening their voting laws, a shift that critics said is designed to suppress turnout among minorities who tend to vote for Democrats.

Earlier: Dissent by Justice Thomas in election case draws fire for revisiting baseless Trump fraud claims

In another opinion with potentially far-reaching implications, the courts six conservatives invalidated a California requirement that charities disclose their largest donors to state regulators. Though the circumstances are limited, the decision appeared to invite challenges to other disclosure requirements, including for political campaigns.

"This term was remarkably devoid of the sort of liberal activism that has characterized many recent terms," said Carrie Severino,president of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network. The court's rulings in the voting rights and disclosure cases, she said, "were capstones to a term that was characterized by adherence to the law and Constitution, thanks in part to the addition of Justice Barrett."

When Barrett joined the court in October after thedeath of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many Democrats predicted she would drive the court to the right. But the formerappeals court judge and Notre Dame Law School professor's influence has so far proved more nuanced than some of those forecasts.

Barrett'sarrival changed the course of a series of emergency cases in which churches and synagogues challenged government COVID-19 restrictions, arguing that they violated the First Amendment by limiting the size of in-persongatheringspermitted to worship. When Ginsburg was on the court, those kind of decisions tended to side with public health officials. By the fall, they went instead for preachers and rabbis.

In other areas, Barrett joined Roberts and Kavanaugh inan alliance with liberals, drawing dissentfrom more conservative justices. In the Philadelphia foster care case, she urged a more middle-ground approach than Alito, Gorsuch and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.

"She, too, seems to be trying avoid appearing aggressive and ultra-conservative," Smith said. "But, again, that may just be temporary."

Barrett, Kavanaugh and Roberts were the three justices in the majority the most during the term, according to the SCOTUSblog statistics. Barrett sided with Roberts in 76% of the term's decisions, according to the website. By comparison, she sided with liberal Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor less than half the time.

Despite predictions that the new conservative super majority would undermine Roberts' power on the court,his influence throughout the term was clear.

"The chief justice remains successful atpushing for broaderunanimity and narrower opinions than people expect, as Fulton and the health care case show," saidJonathan Adler,a professor at Case Western Reserve School of Law.

Some have questioned how narrow the decisions have actually been.

In the Philadelphia case, the court declined to overturn its 1990 decision in Employment Division v.Smith, but itsostensibly narrow ruling left a lot of room for lawsuits that could underminethatprecedent in the long run.

Aziz Huq, a University of Chicago law professor, said that before the two big rulings last week, the term could be summed up as a period of consolidation and seed sowing, rather than a period of dramatic change. Instead of viewing the Philadelphia case as limited, Huq said he sees it as potentially a quite fruitful victory for religious liberty.

The court concluded that whenever there is a secular exception to a nondiscrimination law even if that exception isnt exercised it has to beanalyzedwith the highest level of constitutionalscrutiny. That could have huge implications for issues beyond the conflicts that arise between religious freedomand gay rights.

While it's true that nondiscrimination laws that protect LGBTQ individuals often don't have a discretionary element in them, thats just not true for many other laws, Huq said.

More: Supreme Court declines to hear Virginia school board's transgender bathroom case

In another example, the justices invalidated a California law that permitted labor unions limited time to organize workers on private farms. Roberts, leading the courts conservatives, said the law amounted to a taking that violated the Fifth Amendments prohibition on the government seizing property "without just compensation."

Writing for a 6-3 majority, Roberts insisted the opinion wouldnt have broader implications such as for government inspections at restaurants or power plants.Huq and others are skepticalRoberts' assurances will be the final word. They predict challenges will question whether similar situations amount to takings.

"The court has a section of the opinion where it says, Don't worry, this is not a slippery slope, and the world's not coming to an end, Huq said. It says, Heres all this stuff that's not covered, and you read it and think, but why?

Speculation about Associate Justice Stephen Breyer's retirement hung over the final weeks of the termas liberal groups ramped uppressure on the 82-year-old to step down so President Joe Biden canreplace him.

Senate Democrats have a tenuous majority in the Senate, which may prove hard to keep when next year's midterms roll around.

The final day of the term, when justicessometimes make their retirement plans known, came and went Thursday with no definitive word from the court. Breyer could announce his retirement whenever he pleases. Or he could decide to stay on.

'Apex of his career': Breyer exertshis influence despite retirement calls

As the most senior justice of the court's liberal wing,Breyer took the lead on some notable opinions this year. Breyer wrote for the majority turning away the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act.Days later, he wrote the majority opinion siding with the cheerleader over her school in the First Amendment case.

Artemus Ward, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University, noted that Breyer appears to be at the apex of his influence and power. Maybe, Wardspeculated, Breyer is just not ready to retire.

SCOTUS upholds Affordable Care Act, rules against NCAA

The Supreme Court ruled on some big topics in 2021, including Obamacare, NCAA antitrust cases and religious adoption agencies denying LGBTQ parents.

Staff video, USA TODAY

When the court reconvenes in October, its docket hassome potential blockbuster cases.

The justices agreedto hear a challenge to New York'sgun licensing requirements that could expandprotections for carryingconcealedweapons in public, putting a major Second Amendment disputein front of the justices.

In May, the court announced it would take up a lawsuit againstMississippi's ban onmost abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy,giving the court's conservative majority the chance to consider a direct test of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

And the high court decided Friday to hear a case from parents who want to use a state tuition program in Maine to pay for religious schools, the latest to question the extent to which a governmentmay impose restrictions that may conflict withreligious freedom.

Those polarizing issues, which will be decided months before the2022 midterm election, will probably offer far more insight into Barrett's influenceand the direction in which the court's bolstered conservative majority intends to go.

"If we ever start seeing split rulings from this court that definitively affirm the right to abortion, then it might be time to consider whether there is a moderate wing of this six-justice conservative majority. We are definitely not there," said Elizabeth Wydra, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center.

"Thereal test," she said, "will likely come next term."

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Steady term of the Supreme Court ends with politically fraught cases that reveal divisions - USA TODAY

Last week, a major federal court ruling on privacy rights highlighted the flawed, police-centric way that we typically talk about public safety. In a divided decision, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals barred Baltimore police from using a new aerial surveillance program to indiscriminately target and track peoples movements. Analyzing data collected through the so-called spy plane program, the court said, counts as a search under the Fourth Amendment, and therefore requires police to obtain a warrant, just as when searching a home. Its a cutting-edge decision that comes as courts increasingly grapple with how the Fourth Amendments protections against police intrusions apply to new surveillance technology.

But the case is also important for the debate it sparked among the courts judges. In dissent, Judge J. Harvey Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee, said that restricting police surveillance will tie the citys hands against a serious public safety crisis. He accused the majority of ignoring Baltimores high murder rate and said the ruling leaves only hopelessness for the good people of Baltimore, especially our dispossessed communities where rates of gun violence are highest.

Judge Roger Gregory, the first Black judge to ever serve on the Fourth Circuit, was having none of it. In response, he explained how this critique depends upon a certain premise: Policing ameliorates violence, and restraining police authority exacerbates it. As surely as water is wet, as where there is smoke there is fire, the dissent takes for granted that policing is the antidote to killing. Thus, the dissent repeatedly evokes the grief and trauma of gun deaths only in the name of a familiar cause: police and prisons.

The dissents rhetoric matches that of police chiefs clamoring for bigger budgets, particularly amid a one-year national jump in shootings. But the same assumptions are standard fare in reporting on crime and politics. Last week, for example, the New York Times equated calls for funding the police with treating public safety as a central political concern and adopting themes of public safety. The framing both reduces the concept of safety to narrow criminogenic terms (safety depends entirely on crime rates) and elevates punitive responses to crime and violence (more police, more arrests, and more incarceration) over policies that would invest in communities and promote overall health.

In his concurrence, Judge Gregory emphasized that such a blinkered view misunderstands the structural causes of violence and the futility of policing in addressing them. I am skeptical that [the dissents] logic genuinely respects and represents the humanity, dignity, and lived experience of those the dissent ventures to speak for, he wrote. Segregation effectively plundered Baltimores Black neighborhoodstransferring wealth, public resources, and investment to their white counterpartsand the consequences persist today. . . . So it is no coincidence that gun violence mostly occurs in the portions of the city that never recovered from state-sanctioned expropriation. Absent reinvestment, cycles of poverty and crime have proliferated.

Rather than reinvesting in dispossessed communities, Gregory wrote, the city over-polices them: Baltimore spends more on policing, per capita, than virtually any other comparable city in America, and in 2017, for example, a greater proportion of its general operating fund spending was allocated to policing than to education, transportation, and housing combined.

Gregorys opinion aligns with public health experts who have been calling for a more accurate and equitable conception of public safety, one that includes overall health and well-being and considers the damage that our systems of punishment inflict. Last month, anthropologist and physician Eric Reinhart argued in Health Affairs that redefining public safety to account for the harms of policing and incarceration rather than continuing to cede this influential discourse to reductive criminological terms is key for ensuring health, security, equality, and positive freedom for all U.S. residents.

As law professor John Pfaff wrote in The New Republic last week, our criminal legal system produces tremendous harm and immiseration, even death, not just for [incarcerated people] but for their families and communities. In a damning indictment of our fundamental indifference to the lives of the millions who come in contact with this system, we have no idea what the criminal legal systems actual humanitarian costs are, but they are surely staggering.

Even with incomplete information, we know that police killings are a leading cause of death for young Black men, and that police violence sends tens of thousands of people to the emergency room every year. We also know, as Reinhart writes, that jails and prisons inflict increased rates of chronic diseases that impose long-term medical needs and cost and reduce life expectancy. Even pretrial detention without a conviction, enforces persistent economic hardships and drives high rates of unemployment, homelessness, and food insecurity.

Beyond that, a growing body of researchwhat Reinhart calls carceral-community epidemiologyshows that incarceration spreads disease and increases mortality rates in surrounding communities, that our world-leading proclivity for incarceration, while disproportionately harmful to nonwhite people and dispossessed communities, is killing us all. Given their often poor conditions and porous nature, with high turnover and the constant churn of staff and visitors, jails and prisons are not like Vegas: What happens there does not stay there. Carceral institutions worldwide have long functioned as disease multipliers and epidemiological pumps for surrounding communities in relation to HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis C, influenza, and other infectious diseases, Reinhart wrote.

This reality has been of acute importance throughout the pandemic. In May, Reinhart co-authored a study concluding that cycling individuals through Cook County Jail in March 2020 alone accounted for 13 percent of all COVID-19 cases and 21 percent of racial COVID-19 disparities in Chicago as of early August. Their analysis also showed that jail cycling is the strongest predictor of COVID-19 rates, considerably exceeding poverty, race, and population density.

Other research shows that sending more people to county jails leads to higher rates of premature community death. In February, a retrospective, longitudinal study in The Lancet examined cause-specific mortality at the county level in the U.S. over a 30-year period. It found a short-term association between county jail incarceration and mortality, with mortality due to infectious disease, chronic lower respiratory disease, substance use, and suicide as the strongest drivers. The study put the problem explicitly in public health terms, noting the risks of community-level exposure to high incarceration rates, as though the county jail was polluted water or a toxic waste site.

One of the studys authors, Sandhya Kajeepeta, a doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University, told me that research framing public safety more broadly to include public health and long-term well-being really challenges our reliance on jails and prisons to keep people safe.

For Reinhart, the effort to reclaim and redefine the influential rhetoric of public safety must make clear that collective safety is best improved not by policing and prisons but rather by building robust public systems of carethat is, of economic security, environmental protections, labor rights, and housing.

Thats also the view of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, the grassroots advocacy organization that challenged the Baltimore surveillance program. Lawrence Grandpre, the groups director of research, wrote that their opposition to more surveillance was neither anti-police, nor born of indifference to gun violence. Instead, he wrote, we believe that safety is not simply the absence of violence, but the creation of conditions for human flourishing. Thus, we refuse the false . . . choice between community instability created by violent crime, with the community instability caused by mass incarceration, unaccountable policing, and the slow starving of our community institutions to feed a [half] billion-dollar police budget deemed to be the only investment our community needs.

Policing Is Not Public Safety

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Policing Is Not 'Public Safety' - The Appeal