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Jurisdiction, Abuja (2026)

10/09/2026

Meta, Minors and the Emerging Law of Digital Child Protection
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Meta’s recent settlement with almost all U.S. states marks a significant development in the legal regulation of social-media platforms and the protection of minors online.

The settlement, reportedly worth up to $18 billion, resolves claims that Meta deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram in ways that encouraged excessive engagement among children and teenagers, exposed young users to harmful content, and failed adequately to protect children’s personal data. Meta denies wrongdoing.

What makes the settlement particularly important is that it is not merely monetary. It imposes substantive changes to the way Meta's platforms operate. Among other measures, Meta must introduce a default two-hour daily usage limit for users under 18, nighttime restrictions between midnight and 6 a.m., stronger age-assurance mechanisms, restrictions on notifications during school hours, enhanced parental controls and additional safeguards concerning harmful content and social-comparison features.

The legal significance lies in the underlying conception of responsibility.

For years, the relationship between social-media companies and young users was largely framed around parental responsibility and individual choice. The settlement reflects a different approach: where a platform's architecture is capable of encouraging compulsive use or exposing minors to foreseeable risks, the platform itself may bear responsibility for how its product is designed.

This represents a shift from regulating merely what users post to regulating how platforms are designed to influence user behaviour.

The settlement is therefore important beyond Meta. It establishes a potential regulatory benchmark for other platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat, particularly because part of Meta's additional payment is conditional upon comparable commitments by competing platforms.

It also illustrates the increasing convergence between consumer protection, privacy law and child-safety regulation. The litigation involved allegations concerning both youth harms and the collection of children's personal information without the consent required under the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

There is, however, an important limitation. A settlement is not the same as a judicial finding that Meta was liable for all of the alleged harms. Meta has not admitted wrongdoing, and the agreement resolves litigation rather than establishing, through a final judgment, every factual and legal proposition advanced by the states.

Nevertheless, the settlement signals an important legal principle: digital platforms may increasingly be expected to design their services with the vulnerability of minors in mind, rather than treating child safety as a matter left principally to parents and users.

The next question is whether this U.S. development will influence regulatory approaches elsewhere. In the EU, UK and Australia, policymakers are already pursuing stronger obligations concerning children's online safety. The Meta settlement therefore forms part of a much broader movement toward treating the digital environment as a space in which platforms have affirmative duties of care and risk prevention toward children.

- Precious Anamelechi, LL.B., LL.M.

07/09/2026

“New America”? Can a President Actually Rename a State?
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I've just come across a Truth Social post from POTUS suggesting that New Mexico should be renamed “New America,” and it got me wondering: is this even legally possible?

The short answer is that it can't be done with just a presidential decree.

The U.S. Constitution does not give the President a general power to rename states. An executive order can direct the executive branch, but it cannot unilaterally alter the constitutional identity of one of the fifty states.

The Constitution is also telling in what it does say. Article IV, Section 3 gives Congress the power to admit new states and expressly requires the consent of affected state legislatures when altering state boundaries or creating states from existing ones.

A state's name is not expressly addressed. That creates an interesting constitutional gap, but certainly not one the President can simply fill.

Even Congress acting alone would face a serious constitutional question. The Supreme Court's “equal footing” doctrine recognises states as sovereign equals within the Union, limiting federal interference in matters lying exclusively within state authority.

So, the constitutionally safest route would likely begin in the state of New Mexico itself; a change through its own constitutional and democratic processes, followed where necessary by federal legislative recognition.

In other words, POTUS can propose New America. He can campaign for it. He can post about how “beautiful” the name sounds.

But he cannot wake up tomorrow, sign an executive order, and erase New Mexico from the American map.

05/09/2026

The Missouri Redistricting Case: Democracy Beyond the Legislature
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A legislature may have the power to pass a law. But where a constitution reserves to the people the power to challenge that law through referendum, the legislature does not necessarily have the final word.

That was the central principle behind the Missouri Supreme Court's recent unanimous decision in Von Glahn v. Hoskins.

Missouri's legislature had enacted a new congressional map expected to benefit Republicans. Opponents responded not primarily by arguing partisan gerrymandering, but by invoking their constitutional right to subject legislative acts to a referendum.

The Secretary of State rejected the petition, arguing that congressional redistricting was beyond the referendum process.

The Court disagreed.

Missouri's Constitution permits a referendum on “any act of the General Assembly.” Congressional redistricting legislation was still an act of the General Assembly, and the Court refused to create an exception that the Constitution itself did not provide.

The consequence was remarkable: the Court held that the new map had not legally taken effect and could not take effect unless approved by voters. The previous map therefore remains operative for the general election.

The case is a powerful reminder that constitutional democracy is not simply about who has the power to legislate. It is also about who ultimately retains sovereignty when the constitution deliberately reserves power to the people.

Sometimes, the most important constitutional question is not whether the government acted within its powers, but whether it remembered that those powers are not unlimited.

04/09/2026

Democracy or Legal Expertise? The Dilemma at the Heart of Trial by Jury
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The Lindsay Clancy mistrial raises an uncomfortable question about the jury system: should questions involving highly complex medical, psychological and legal evidence ultimately be decided by people whose role is not to practise law?

A jury’s great strength is also its weakness. It brings ordinary citizens into the administration of justice, ensuring that the determination of guilt is not left exclusively to a single judicial officer. But jurors are not lawyers. They are generally not trained to analyse legal doctrines, reconcile competing expert testimony or apply intricate evidentiary rules.

Of course, juries do not decide the law. The judge instructs them on the applicable legal principles, while the jury determines the facts. Yet difficult cases can require more than simply deciding what happened. They may require careful evaluation of competing medical explanations, causation, intent, mental state and the legal consequences flowing from those findings.

The Clancy case illustrates another problem: twelve people must ultimately reach a collective conclusion. When they cannot, the result may be a mistrial, not because the evidence has been resolved, but because unanimity has proved impossible.

That does not necessarily mean judges should replace juries. Judicial decision-making carries its own risks, including excessive deference to professional assumptions and reduced public participation.

Perhaps the real lesson is that the jury system represents a deliberate compromise: democratic participation in exchange for less specialised decision-making.

And in the most complex criminal cases, that compromise deserves serious scrutiny.

04/09/2026

Tupac, Thirty Years Later: A Lesson in Accomplice Liability
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Thirty years is an extraordinary length of time for a murder case to remain unresolved. Witnesses disappear. Memories fade. Evidence deteriorates.

Yet the conviction of Duane “Keffe D” Davis for the murder of Tupac Shakur demonstrates something legally important: criminal liability does not belong exclusively to the person who pulls the trigger.

Davis was not convicted because prosecutors proved that he personally fired the fatal shots. The prosecution's case was that he orchestrated and facilitated the attack, providing the means and participating in the retaliatory enterprise that led to Tupac's killing. Under principles of accomplice liability, the hand that enables the crime can carry the same criminal responsibility as the hand that commits it.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this case is the evidence.

For decades, the murder lived in the realm of speculation, conspiracy theories and unsolved-crime mythology. Then Davis began speaking. Interviews, recorded statements and ultimately his own memoir reportedly became central to the prosecution's case.

There is a certain irony in that.

Time may weaken an investigation, but it does not necessarily erase criminal responsibility.

The Tupac case is therefore more than a story about delayed justice. It's a reminder that the passage of time does not necessarily extinguish criminal responsibility; and that in criminal law, participation can be just as consequential as ex*****on.

Justice may have arrived late.

But legally speaking, the verdict sends a clear message:

You do not need to pull the trigger to be responsible for the murder.

02/09/2026

The Hypocrisy of Distance
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Distance has always made conviction easier.

It is easier to judge circumstances one will never personally inhabit. Easier to demand harsh consequences when those consequences have someone else's name on them. From a comfortable distance, empathy can appear unnecessary, even inconvenient.

Milo Yiannopoulos spent years occupying precisely that distance.

The British commentator became a prominent advocate of aggressive immigration enforcement in the United States. Deportation, viewed from his position, was principally a question of sovereignty, legality and enforcement.

Then the abstraction acquired a name; and it was his.

Yiannopoulos was deported from the United States to Britain, the country of his citizenship, after falling foul of the very immigration system whose aggressive enforcement he had so enthusiastically supported.

There is no contradiction in believing that immigration laws should be enforced. States are entitled to regulate entry and residence, and an individual without a legal basis to remain cannot ordinarily claim immunity merely because removal is personally inconvenient.

That is not where the irony lies.

The irony lies in the sudden discovery of empathy when distance disappears.

It is remarkably easy to view deportation as a clean legal outcome when it happens to an anonymous other. The individual becomes an immigration status, a visa violation, an unlawful presence. But when the same machinery places you inside the category, the abstraction collapses. Procedure acquires emotion. Enforcement acquires a human face.

And suddenly, what was once a policy becomes an experience.

This is the philosophical difficulty with hypocrisy: it rarely announces itself as hypocrisy. It often presents itself as principle, right until the principle demands something from its author.

Milo's deportation therefore presents an almost perfect inversion. The observer became the observed. The advocate became the subject of enforcement. The distance from which judgment had once been comfortably delivered vanished.

The law did not suddenly become illegitimate because it reached him. Nor does the unpleasantness of deportation invalidate a state's authority to enforce its immigration rules.

But his experience exposes a more enduring question about conviction:

How many of our strongest principles would survive if we were required to live under them ourselves?

Perhaps that is the true measure of a principle.

Not whether we can defend it when others bear its consequences, but whether we can still recognise its consequences when we do.

01/09/2026

The Ballroom May Be Unlawful. But Who Can Stop It?
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The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed Trump's White House ballroom project to continue, but crucially, it did not declare the project lawful.

The Court avoided to answer the question about the legality of the project but rather focused it's decision on a different issue: standing.

Before a court can determine whether the government broke the law, it must first ask whether the person challenging it has suffered a sufficiently concrete injury to bring the case.

The majority concluded that the government was likely to succeed in arguing that the National Trust lacked Article III standing. On that basis, it stayed the lower court's injunction and allowed construction to resume.

The irony is striking. Chief Justice Roberts, in dissent, suggested the project was likely unlawful because Congress had not expressly authorised it. Yet the majority never reached that question.

That is the uncomfortable hierarchy of constitutional litigation:

Standing before legality. Jurisdiction before merits.

A government action may be unlawful. But if nobody can establish the legal right to challenge it, a court may never decide whether the law was actually broken.

And while lawyers debate who has the right to enter the courtroom, construction continues outside it.

31/08/2026

Iceland and the Sovereignty Dilemma
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Sometimes, a referendum is not really about the question printed on the ballot.

Iceland's August 29th 2026 vote on whether to reopen EU accession negotiation is a perfect example.

By a narrow margin, Icelanders rejected reopening negotiations on joining the European Union. But this was not a referendum on EU membership itself. No one was voting to join or remain outside the Union. The legal question was more preliminary: should Iceland reopen accession negotiations?

The answer was in the negative.

And behind that answer lies one of the oldest constitutional tensions in international law: how much sovereignty is a state willing let go.

Iceland already occupies a fascinating legal position. It is not an EU Member State, yet through the European Economic Area it participates extensively in the EU's internal market. It is also part of Schengen. Icelanders can therefore enjoy substantial economic integration and freedom of movement without having representatives voting in the EU institutions.

In legal terms, Iceland has something many states might consider an attractive compromise: integration without membership.

But full membership is different.

Joining the EU is not simply signing a trade agreement. It means accepting the EU's legal order, the supremacy of EU law within areas of Union competence, the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the principle that certain decisions affecting national policy will no longer be made exclusively in Reykjavík.

That is where the real political difficulty begins.

For Iceland, fisheries are not merely an economic sector. They are a question of national control over natural resources. The prospect of subjecting aspects of that control to the EU's Common Fisheries Policy has long been politically explosive.

Then came geopolitics.

Donald Trump's rhetoric regarding Greenland, alongside growing tensions in the Arctic, gave supporters of EU membership a powerful new argument: in an increasingly unpredictable world, Iceland needs stronger alliances.

However, Iceland appears to have concluded that cooperation with Europe does not necessarily require constitutional and institutional absorption into the EU.

The debate was never simply Europe versus Iceland.

It was about whether a small state like Iceland can remain deeply integrated into a larger legal and economic order while retaining sufficient control over the matters it considers fundamental.

Iceland's answer, at least for now, is clear:

We can cooperate without fully integrating. We can participate without becoming members.

Because Iceland did not reject Europe.

It rejected the idea that Europe's benefits necessarily require Europe's full constitutional embrace.

30/08/2026

The Battle Over Presidential Immunity
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Donald Trump's New York criminal conviction has produced an unusual legal afterlife. Even after a jury found him guilty, sentencing took place, and the ordinary state appeal process began, Trump continued pursuing a separate route: trying to move the case out of the New York courts and into the federal judiciary.

On August 28, 2026, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected that effort again. But the legal significance of the ruling is more complicated than simply saying “Trump lost his immunity argument.”

Trump was originally tried in the New York Supreme Court, New York County and convicted in May 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The prosecution concerned the alleged concealment of a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election.

The federal litigation is a different procedural battle.

Trump first attempted to remove the criminal prosecution to federal court after his indictment. Judge Hellerstein rejected that attempt. Following Trump's conviction, however, the legal landscape changed dramatically when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Trump v. United States in July 2024.

That decision held that presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for certain official acts and, crucially, restricted prosecutors from using evidence of immunized official conduct even in prosecutions concerning allegedly private behaviour.

Trump therefore made a second, belated attempt at removal, arguing that evidence introduced during his state trial, including evidence relating to his time in the White House, required federal intervention.

Hellerstein rejected that request too.

But Trump appealed, and in November 2025 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated that ruling and sent the matter back. Importantly, the appeals court did not hold that Trump was immune or that his conviction was invalid. Instead, it concluded that Hellerstein had not adequately addressed important questions, including whether evidence introduced at trial related to potentially immunized presidential acts and whether that affected the removability of the case.

That remand produced last week's decision.

After reconsidering the arguments, Hellerstein again refused to allow the case into federal court. He found that the central conduct concerned Trump's private affairs, not the exercise of presidential power. As he put it, paying hush money or covering up an embarrassing affair is not conduct protected by presidential immunity.

The ruling therefore draws an important distinction but not necessarily the simplistic one that anything personal is automatically outside presidential immunity.

The real constitutional question is whether the conduct, or evidence relied upon by prosecutors, falls within the sphere of official presidential responsibility. Trump's argument was that some evidence from his presidency triggered the protections recognised in Trump v. United States. Hellerstein ultimately concluded that it did not provide a basis for removing the case or undoing the conviction.

This was not Trump receiving a mysterious “third appeal” against the same conviction. Rather, he has been pursuing parallel legal routes:

First: challenging his conviction through New York's state appellate system.

Second: attempting to invoke federal-officer removal jurisdiction to transfer the prosecution into federal court, partly on the basis of presidential immunity.

The latest decision concerns the second route.

Trump's lawyers have already indicated that they will appeal Hellerstein's latest ruling.

The broader legal question remains fascinating: Can a Supreme Court decision handed down after a criminal conviction fundamentally change the procedural route available to a defendant?

The Second Circuit thought that question deserved serious consideration. Judge Hellerstein reconsidered it, and reached the same conclusion.

For now, Trump's conviction remains where it began in the New York state court system, subject to his separate state appeal.

29/08/2026

The CFTC’s $173,000 Insider Trading Case
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Imagine having access to a President's speech before the President delivers it, and discovering that people are literally placing bets on whether he will say particular words.

According to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Gabriel Perez, a White House teleprompter operator, allegedly found himself in exactly that position.

Perez had advance access to President Trump's prepared remarks. On Kalshi, a federally regulated prediction-market platform, traders could buy contracts predicting whether Trump would mention specific words or phrases during upcoming speeches.

The CFTC found that Perez used his privileged access to trade those contracts.

If a word appeared in the prepared speech, he could bet “Yes.” If it didn't, he could bet “No.”

Between late 2025 and early 2026, Perez traded dozens of contracts linked to Trump's speeches. According to the CFTC's consent order, he won 39 out of 43 contracts and generated $107,539.02 in profits.

But this was not treated as ordinary gambling.

The CFTC considered the contracts to be financial derivatives subject to the Commodity Exchange Act. Its case was essentially an insider-trading case: a government employee allegedly used confidential information obtained through his official position for personal financial gain.

Perez ultimately settled the administrative proceedings. He agreed to surrender the $107,539.02 in profits, pay a $65,000 civil penalty, and accept a three-year trading ban; a total financial sanction of approximately $172,539. He neither admitted nor denied the CFTC's findings.

The story may sound almost absurd: a teleprompter operator betting on presidential vocabulary.

But legally, it raises a much bigger question.

Prediction markets are increasingly turning real-world events into tradable financial contracts. Elections. Economic decisions. Corporate announcements. Political speeches.

And as more information becomes something people can bet on, one question becomes unavoidable:

What happens when the person betting already knows the answer?

In Gabriel Perez's case, federal regulators had a clear answer: privileged information may be valuable, but using it as your personal betting advantage can come at a very expensive price.

Jurisdiction

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