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This Day in Legal History: The Treaty of Paris

On September 3, 1783, American and British negotiators signed the Treaty of Paris, formally ending the Revolutionary War and, with it, securing the thing the whole war had been fought over: British recognition of the independence of the United States. For the young nation, this was the moment it became, in the eyes of international law, a sovereign country among sovereign countries.

The American delegation—Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay—negotiated remarkably favorable terms. In its very first substantive article, Britain acknowledged the United States to be “free, sovereign and independent.” The treaty set generous boundaries, extending the new nation west to the Mississippi River, granted Americans valuable fishing rights off Newfoundland, and addressed the thorny questions of pre-war debts and the treatment of Loyalists. Franklin, ever the shrewd diplomat, had played the European powers against one another to extract terms far better than a defeated-looking rebellion might have expected.

The significance of September 3, 1783 is foundational in the most literal sense. A declaration of independence is a claim; a treaty of peace in which your former ruler concedes that claim is its legal realization. The Treaty of Paris is the document in which the United States stopped being a rebellion and started being a nation with recognized borders, treaty-making power, and standing in the world. Everything that followed—the Constitution four years later, the entire edifice of American law—was built on the sovereignty this treaty secured. And it’s worth remembering Franklin’s hard-won wisdom, captured in today’s opening quote, from a man who had seen the war up close: there was never a good war, or a bad peace. On a day of stories about the ordinary business of a functioning legal system, it’s worth pausing on the treaty that made that system possible.

Google has won a major victory: a federal judge has declined to force the company to sell off its advertising-technology business, opting for behavioral remedies instead of a breakup. Some background: last year, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia found that Google had illegally monopolized key parts of the ad-tech market—the plumbing that places digital ads across much of the web. This week’s ruling was about the remedy, and remedy is where antitrust cases are won or lost in practice. The Justice Department and a coalition of states wanted a structural remedy: forcing Google to divest its ad exchange, breaking the company up to restore competition. Judge Brinkema declined to go that far. Instead, she imposed behavioral remedies—requiring Google to change how it operates, to open up aspects of its ad auctions and share data with rivals, under ongoing oversight. Here’s the legal significance. Courts are historically very reluctant to order structural breakups; they’re drastic, hard to administer, and risk unintended consequences, so judges tend to prefer conduct remedies that police behavior rather than dismantle a company. We just saw the same pattern in the separate Google search-monopoly case, where a different judge also declined to force a divestiture. So a picture is emerging: Google keeps being found to have violated antitrust law, and keeps avoiding a breakup, landing instead with behavioral restrictions. Critics argue conduct remedies are weak—that a monopolist told to behave will find new ways to dominate. Google and its defenders say a breakup would be overkill. The significance is that this is the central debate in modern antitrust: when you’ve found illegal monopoly power, do you regulate the monopolist’s conduct, or do you break it up? For now, in the ad-tech case, the answer is conduct—and that’s a big win for Google. Google defeats US bid to force ad-tech sale | ReutersCNBC · Bloomberg

Boeing has paid a $3.1 million fine to the Federal Aviation Administration over a raft of safety and quality-control violations—and the number itself is the story. The penalty covers a series of failures, including the January 2024 incident in which a door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 in mid-flight, along with other lapses like unqualified work and improper pressure on an FAA-designated representative. Here’s the thing to understand: $3.1 million is, essentially, the maximum civil penalty the FAA is statutorily allowed to impose for this set of violations. And for a company the size of Boeing—which books tens of billions of dollars in revenue—critics, including families of crash victims and aviation-safety advocates, call a figure like that a rounding error, a cost of doing business rather than a genuine deterrent. That’s the real legal and policy issue here: the gap between the penalties regulators are authorized to levy and the scale of the companies they regulate. When the maximum lawful fine is trivial relative to a company’s balance sheet, the deterrent value of the penalty largely evaporates, and enforcement becomes symbolic. This is separate from the criminal exposure Boeing has faced over the earlier 737 MAX crashes; this is the civil, regulatory side. The significance is a recurring question in regulatory law: statutory penalty caps, often set decades ago and never updated for inflation or corporate scale, can leave regulators without the tools to meaningfully punish or deter misconduct by the largest players. Boeing writes a $3.1 million check, and the deeper questions about its safety culture—and about whether our regulatory penalties have any teeth against a corporate giant—remain very much open.Boeing paid $3.1 million fine to FAA over widespread safety violations | ReutersUS News · CBS News

And finally, a federal judge has blocked the EPA from sending California’s landmark vehicle-emissions rules to Congress for a possible fast-track repeal—a ruling that turns on a genuinely clever piece of administrative-law maneuvering. Here’s the setup. Under the Clean Air Act, California has a unique, long-standing power to set its own, stricter vehicle-emissions standards through “waivers” granted by the EPA, and other states can choose to follow California’s lead. The EPA, this June, took the position that those waivers should have been submitted to Congress under the Congressional Review Act—the CRA—which is significant because the CRA lets the Senate repeal a federal “rule” by a simple majority vote, bypassing the 60-vote threshold that would otherwise be needed. In other words, by reclassifying California’s waivers as “rules,” the EPA could hand the Senate a path to wipe them out with 51 votes. California sued, arguing the waivers aren’t rules and don’t belong in the CRA process at all. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell agreed, and she did not mince words—she said the EPA was asking the court to “engage in Orwellian doublethink,” writing that “the EPA cannot say one thing to Congress while ignoring any consequence from reclassifying these waivers as rules.” The significance operates on two levels. Substantively, it protects California’s authority to regulate tailpipe emissions, which shapes the auto market nationwide because so many states follow California’s standards. Procedurally, it’s a check on a creative attempt to use a reclassification to unlock a simple-majority repeal—a reminder that agencies can’t relabel their actions to reach a preferred political outcome without legal consequences. The fight over how America regulates car emissions just ran into the fine print of administrative law, and for now, California’s rules stand. US judge bars EPA effort to send California vehicle emissions rules to Congress | ReutersPolitico · Courthouse News

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