Blue laws. They are quirky and annoying outdated restrictions on activities to ensure Sunday is a day of rest and worship. Some go beyond dictating when you can or cannot get a drink, and sometimes they leave you scratching your head wondering, why in the world are they still on the books?

In this season's fourth episode, we dive into the history and impact of the laws. We explore the story of a Brooklyn nightclub suing New York for refusing to issue a special event permit for extended hours on New Year's Eve and the ongoing debate surrounding blue laws and their place in modern society. And we also look at the upside: how these laws give some workers the reprieve they need from a long work week.

Prepare for a joyride through a legal antique shop, just hope the lawman doesn't catch us!

Special guests:

• Polina Buckley, owner of nightclub Eris Evolution
• Jonathan Corbett, a civil rights attorney
• Patricia Campos-Medina, executive director of the Worker Institute at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, around 60 million American households have pets. That is a ton of good boys and girls out there. But have you ever stopped and wondered about the laws that define pet ownership? Are there specific pets that you can't own where you live? How regulated is the pet trade? And what about exotic animals, where the sale and trade of such creatures is a state-by-state issue?

In this episode, we break down the wild and wooly world of pet law  —  from the protections granted (or not so much) in the Animal Welfare Act to the effect that Netflix's breakout pandemic hit "Tiger King" may have had on getting the Big Cat Public Safety Act passed and what's next for regulating primate ownership in the U.S.

And it's not just big mammals that need to be regulated to stop wreaking havoc on communities, but also pythons and feral cats. In Florida, the Burmese python population has exploded so much that the state has declared open season on them allowing them to be hunted year-round without a license or permit. And nationwide, the songbird population has declined by drastic numbers due to the skilled hunting of cats.

Special guests:

• Kate Dylewsky, assistant director of government affairs at the Animal Welfare Institute
• John Goodwin, senior director of the Stop Puppy Mills campaign at the Humane Society of the United States
• Tim Pylate, executive director at Armand Bayou Nature Center
• Zandra Anderson, animal law attorney

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Heads up for listeners: this episode contains explicit language. 

When legal battles come down to damages, most consider the final judgment to show who won the game and by how much. But in a highly specialized area of law, that judgment is just the beginning when the losing team refuses to pay. 

In our second episode this season, we introduce you to a few judgment enforcement attorneys, a small specialized group that only numbers in the dozens. Judgment enforcers are lawyers expected to file writs, subpoenas and anything of the like with the courts. But they are also private detectives, investigating where debtors hide their money. 

On the other side, Alki David. Born into a shipping family that owned Coca-Cola bottling plants, David has had a series of businesses himself, including a modeling agency, a video streaming website, and a marijuana company with boxer Mike Tyson called Swissx. He lives in a $20 million Malibu beach house, but not for long due to a court order to seize that house to pay for a sexual harassment judgment against him. 

Special guests:

• Joseph Chora
• Jay Adkisson
• Ron Slates

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Welcome to season three of Sidebar! You'll want to strap in while we bring you closer to the stars as new technology and more investors bring us deeper into space. Science fiction is rapidly becoming science fact. One thing rarely discussed in your favorite sci-fi movies is the laws that govern outer space.

If billions of dollars, dozens of political manifesto and decades of Trekkie dreams come to fruition, there is nothing protecting man's interstellar impression. Even Neil Armstrong's footprint on the moon could go unprotected.

And what about all that space junk? Thousands of active satellites, inactive satellites, pieces of rockets, debris and uncategorized things are out there, floating around our planet. All are governed by little more than the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. 

Special guests:

• Michelle Hanlon, co-director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi
• Kojiro Fujii, attorney at Nishimura + Asahi in Japan and executive committee member at Nishimura Institute of Advanced Legal Studies
• Skip Smith, space law attorney at Sherman & Howard
• Michael Dodge, associate professor of space studies at the University of North Dakota
• Kelli Kedis Ogborn, vice president of space commerce and entrepreneurship at Space Foundation
• Avishai Melamed, graduate student in Cornell University's Department of Government

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Season three of Sidebar, a podcast from Courthouse News, kicks off just around the corner. Join our hosts and reporters as they take you around the nation to break down lawsuits, the law and how they impact you and the life you live. Follow us on Twitter @SidebarCNS and www.courthousenews.com for more.

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

While some aspects of 2022 felt like a return to easier, simpler days, the news coming out of courthouses across the country did not stop.

In this episode, we look at the year's most memorable trials: the ones that made us laugh, the ones that made us cry and the ones that made us stop and question how we got here.

We take you back to the Alex Jones defamation trials in Texas and Connecticut, which garnered enormous damages for the family members of Sandy Hook victims and swamped our social media feeds. Jones wasn't the only right-winger to see his day in court: members of the Oath Keepers were held accountable for seditious conspiracy for their parts in the Jan. 6 insurrection, and in Michigan, a plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, went bust.

It was also a big year for celebrity trials. R&B singer R. Kelly's child abuse conviction in a Chicago courtroom, film producer Harvey Weinstein's second sexual assault trial, a jury deadlocking on rape charges against "That '70s Show" actor Danny Masterson, and a certain defamation trial involving movie stars Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. The headlines didn't stop as trial after trial captured the attention of readers and reporters. 

Come on in, settle down and let us bring you back through the year as we take you through these cases and more until we are back in 2023.

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Bounty hunters. Figures from folk tales, fantasy and reality TV; free agents that work as an extension of the law. Whatever comes to mind, this latest chapter in vigilante justice is shaking things up even more at a polarized time in the country.

The enaction of Texas's Senate Bill 8 allows private citizens to file civil lawsuits against anyone who provides or helps someone attain an abortion, with a possible award of at least $10,000 per lawsuit. Since then, California has passed a law modeled on Texas, allowing private citizens to sue gun law violators. 

How likely are they to catch on in the future?

These sorts of citizen enforcement laws aren't totally new, but the way SB 8 has played out is a lot different than a hired hand chasing after a bank robber who skipped town on bail.

What does it mean to put this kind of power into the hands of ordinary people who end up selecting themselves to take up the cause of policing or surveilling others' decisions?

We talked to experts in our penultimate episode to explore the implications of SB 8 and what it could mean for other constitutionally protected rights. And, to really understand what can happen with these laws, we go back in time to some of the darkest chapters in U.S. history: the enforcement of slavery and Jim Crow laws.

Special guests:

• David Noll, law professor at Rutgers Law School
• John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life
• Louise Melling, deputy legal director at the ACLU and director of its Ruth Bader Ginsburg Center for Liberty

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

Pour yourself a hot drink, settle in beside the fire and get ready for a hauntingly good time as we bring you four chilling tales just in time for Halloween.

In our first chapter: McKamey Manor, arguably the scariest haunted house in operation, with an even scarier 40-page liability waiver. Among the things that you agree to possibly experience? Medieval torture devices. Nails removed from their nail beds. You may be subjected to extreme temperatures or have your head enclosed in a box with bees and wasps. These experiences aren't enough to stop over 20,000 fright seekers from joining the waitlist.

Next up on the demon docket: Stambovsky v. Ackley, also known as the Ghostbusters ruling. A man bought a house in Nyack, New York, that turned out to be so haunted that not only did he get out of his purchase, but the appellate division of the New York Supreme Court found that, "as a matter of law, the house is haunted."

A copyright case to turn your blood cold: the battle to keep "Dracula" out of the public domain and the classic silent film "Nosferatu" out of homes. Eventually, the fight landed before a German judge who ordered all remaining copies of “Nosferatu” to be burned, but it was too late — the movie and the infamous vampire live on.

We finish our tour of scary stories with one steeped in the occult: Mark Twain's return from the grave. Or, alleged return. Two mediums, Emily Grant Hutchings and Lola V. Hayes, claimed to speak with the spirit of Mark Twain. The famous storyteller supposedly tasked them with recording his next novel, "Jap Herron: A Novel Written From the Ouija Board.”

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

While this U.S. Supreme Court term shouldn't result in as many sweeping decisions as the last, which upended nationwide abortion rights and gun control precedents, it'll be far from a lightweight season. The court's cases are varied: from redistricting to artist integrity to the legality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which gives tribal governments jurisdiction over the adoption and foster care of Native American children.

In this episode, we break down some of the heavyweight appeals the court will hear with the help of our very own Kelsey Reichmann.

First, we delve into two cases that could affect elections for decades to come, deciding whether states should take race into account during redistricting and if legislatures should be the ones to draw those lines or if the courts have any say in the process.

The Supreme Court will also weigh in on a copyright dispute between the Warhol Foundation and Lynn Goldsmith over a photo she took of the artist Prince that Andy Warhol used as a reference in several prints. Another case rooted in the visual arts comes to the court from Colorado. A website designer is challenging the state's Anti-Discrimination Act, saying it violates her First Amendment rights by forcing her to serve LGBT couples.

Last, we lay out the Indian Child Welfare Act, what is at stake over its continued legality, and what the law means to tribal governments, courts and their people.

Special guests:

• Sophia Lin Lakin, interim co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voter Rights Project
• Mitchell Brown, counsel for voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice
• Amelia Brankov, attorney and chair of the Art Law Committee of the New York Bar Association
• Kathryn Fort, director of clinics at the Michigan State University College of Law
• Angelique EagleWoman, law professor and director of the Native American Law and Sovereignty Institute at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.

It's a First Amendment fight for the modern ages: the right to free speech versus the pursuit of justice, and the stakes are often someone's freedom. In courtrooms across the country, prosecutors are going after rappers using the artists' lyrics against them.

While not a recent development in the law, the issue has entered the spotlight with the arrests of rappers Young Thug and Gunna in Georgia on charges of violating the state's RICO Act. Prosecutors allege the high-profile artists directly engaged in criminal activity ranging from drug-related to murder as members of the gang Young Slime Life, and cite some of their rap lyrics as evidence to support the claims.

Where do protections for the right to freedom of speech end under the First Amendment? Why do rap music and Black artists seem to be the target of these prosecutions when artists in other genres tell similar tales of crime and violence? We dive into this and more in our 10th episode in this season of Sidebar.

Special guests:

• Roqy Tyraid, hip-hop artist and member of the ACLU of Arizona’s Board of Directors
• Clay Calvert, law professor at the University of Florida
• Margaret Russell, law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law
• Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute
• Charis Kubrin, professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine
• Adam Dunbar, professor at the University of Nevada, Reno
• J. Christopher Hamilton, assistant professor at the Newhouse School for Public Communications at Syracuse University

This episode was produced by Kirk McDaniel. Intro music by The Dead Pens.

Editorial staff is Ryan Abbott, Sean Duffy and Jamie Ross.