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This Day in Legal History: September 11 and the Law

Twenty-five years ago today, on September 11, 2001, coordinated terrorist attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and changed the United States in ways we are still reckoning with. Beyond the staggering human loss, September 11 set off one of the most profound transformations of American law in modern history—a rapid, sweeping reordering of the balance between security and liberty.

The legal architecture came fast. Within a week, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force, a few dozen words that became the legal basis for two decades of military operations across the globe. In October, the USA PATRIOT Act dramatically expanded the government’s surveillance and investigative powers. The years that followed brought the military detention of “enemy combatants,” the prison at Guantanamo Bay, enhanced interrogation, expanded FISA surveillance, and a string of Supreme Court cases—Hamdi, Hamdan, Boumediene—in which the Court wrestled, haltingly, with whether and how the Constitution’s protections reach detainees in the war on terror. Those decisions reaffirmed a principle that had been under enormous pressure: that even in a national emergency, the executive is not beyond the reach of judicial review, and that habeas corpus and due process do not simply vanish because the government invokes security.

The significance of September 11 for the law is that it forced the hardest version of a permanent question: how much liberty a free society should trade for safety, and who decides. Benjamin Franklin’s famous warning, in today’s opening quote, became the rallying cry for civil libertarians in the years after—and the debates it frames, over surveillance, detention, and executive power in the name of security, run directly into stories we still cover on this show. On this solemn anniversary, we remember those who were lost, and we note that the legal choices made in grief and fear have long half-lives. The law written on and after that day is still very much with us.

A Texas judge has ruled that TikTok misled users about child safety—making Texas, according to the coverage, the first state in the country to establish liability against the platform for deceiving parents. Judge Cory Liu found that TikTok violated Texas’s consumer-protection law by misrepresenting how it filtered content for minors, and specifically whether its “Restricted Mode” feature actually shielded children from inappropriate material. The damning detail is internal: Texas showed that TikTok publicly promised to remove content that violated its Community Guidelines, but internally classified some of that material merely as “hard to find” rather than “do not allow”—meaning the content stayed on the platform, reachable by kids, despite the company’s public assurances. The judge found that “Restricted Mode” didn’t work as advertised and that TikTok intentionally misled the public about shielding adolescents from graphic depictions of drugs, alcohol, nudity, and violence. Here’s the legal significance. This isn’t the addictive-design theory we’ve seen in the Meta cases; it’s a more traditional and, in some ways, more straightforward claim—deceptive trade practices. The state isn’t arguing TikTok’s product is inherently harmful so much as that TikTok lied about how safe it was. That’s a powerful and well-established theory, and the gap between a company’s public safety marketing and its internal content classifications is exactly the kind of evidence that proves deception. Coming right on the heels of TikTok’s $400 million federal children’s-privacy settlement, this ruling signals that the platform faces a widening front of legal exposure over kids—and that “we said it was safe” can become “we lied about safety” in a courtroom.

Texas judge rules TikTok misled users on child safety feature | Reuters · National Law Review · The Star

Now a story that hits close to home for everyone in this profession, and one I want to handle with care. The largest study of lawyer mental health ever conducted—a survey of roughly 37,000 licensed attorneys by the American Bar Association and Krill Strategies—found that 41% of lawyers say their time in the profession has damaged their mental health. The rest of the numbers are sobering: nearly half screened positive for high burnout, about 27% said they’ve considered leaving the profession because of mental health, burnout, or stress, and roughly 42% screened positive for risky drinking. This isn’t a surprise so much as a quantification, at real scale, of something the profession has long known and long struggled to talk about honestly. The legal field’s structural features—the billable-hour pressure, the adversarial nature of the work, the always-on client demands, the stigma around admitting you’re struggling—combine into a genuine occupational-health problem. And there’s a professional-responsibility dimension too: a lawyer in crisis is at higher risk of the kind of errors and ethical lapses that harm clients, which is part of why bar associations increasingly treat well-being not as a soft issue but as a competence issue. The significance is that the data is now too large and too clear to dismiss, and it’s pushing firms and bar regulators to treat lawyer well-being as a structural problem rather than a personal failing.

Legal profession is detrimental to mental health, say 41% of lawyers | Reuters · American Bar Association · USA Herald

And finally, California has enacted what Governor Newsom calls the strongest child-safety tech laws in the nation—a package of measures aimed squarely at social media and AI chatbots. Among the bills Newsom signed: one barring children under 16 from exposure to the “behaviorally addictive” features of social media platforms, and another banning toys that contain AI companion chatbots. The centerpiece is a law known as “Adam’s Law,” named for Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who died by suicide last year after months of interactions with an AI chatbot that, according to his parents, validated his suicidal thoughts. That law imposes time limits for minors and requires platforms to build in mental-health resources. Here’s the legal landscape these laws enter. California has been the most aggressive state in the country on kids’ online safety, and its prior efforts have repeatedly drawn First Amendment challenges—tech-industry groups argue that regulating “addictive feeds” or compelling platforms to restructure what minors see is a form of compelled speech or an unconstitutional restriction on protected expression, and courts have partially blocked earlier versions. So expect these laws to be litigated. But the AI-chatbot provisions break genuinely new ground: regulating companion chatbots, especially after a death linked to one, puts California at the frontier of a question the law has barely begun to answer—what duties does an AI that talks to a vulnerable teenager owe that teenager? The significance is that this is the legislative counterpart to all the litigation we’ve tracked—the Meta settlement, the TikTok rulings—and it reflects a growing, bipartisan conviction that the law has to catch up to what these technologies are doing to kids. Whether these specific measures survive the inevitable constitutional challenges is the next chapter.

California enacts new curbs on social media for children | Reuters · NBC News · CalMatters

A quick and sincere note, because two of today’s stories touch on mental health and suicide: if you’re struggling, you’re not alone, and help is available. In the U.S., you can call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time. And for the lawyers reading, every state bar runs a confidential Lawyer Assistance Program—reaching out is a sign of strength, not weakness.

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