A newsletter by Reuters and Westlaw

By Diana Novak Jones, Mike Scarcella and Sara Merken

Good morning. President Donald Trump’s executive orders have sparked lawsuits and left TikTok in legal limbo. A wave of former Biden administration officials landed new law firm gigs; the SEC created a crypto taskforce; and Harvard settled lawsuits over antisemitism on campus. Plus, we’re halfway to Friday, which is cool.

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REUTERS/Carlos Barria

President Trump has released a spate of executive orders since being sworn in for a second term on Monday, including one on TikTok. The executive order restoring access to TikTok has created a thicket of new legal questions for the short-video platform, along with new tensions between the White House, members of Congress who want the platform banned, and tech companies caught in the middle.

Legal experts said despite Trump's order, service providers and app distributors such as Google and Apple still face major uncertainty and potential massive financial liability for defying a law that banned TikTok in the U.S. unless Chinese parent ByteDance divested the company by Jan. 19. Read more about TikTok’s legal limbo.

Another executive order, one reinterpreting birthright citizenship, has also sparked legal questions. A coalition of 18 Democratic-led states along with the District of Columbia and city of San Francisco filed a lawsuit in federal court in Boston on Tuesday arguing that Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship is a flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution. That lawsuit followed a pair of similar cases filed by the ACLU, immigrant organizations and an expectant mother in the hours after Trump signed the executive order, marking the first major litigation challenging parts of his agenda since he took office on Monday.

Birthright citizenship is a principle that has been recognized in the U.S. for more than 150 years. Does Trump have the legal authority to restrict it?

When Toyota Motor Corp subsidiary Hino Motors settled criminal and civil charges for falsifying emissions data for diesel truck engines with the U.S. Justice Department last week, the $1.6 billion agreement did not require the company to hire an outside corporate compliance monitor. It’s a bigger win for Hino than it might sound, and one that may hold lessons for other corporate defendants, writes Jenna Greene in On the Case. Will such outcomes be more common under the new Trump administration?

— 9th Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay in a dissent to the appeals court’s 2-1 ruling that rejected Macy's challenge to the NLRB’s recent expansion of money remedies. Bumatay criticized the board for what he called a "power grab," and said the expanded remedies violated Macy's constitutional right to a jury trial. The ruling creates a circuit split.