Soldiers, Screens, and the Algorithm That Rejected You: Rights Don't Expire

Three legal battles filed in 2026 tell the same story — the institutions designed to protect you learned how to ignore you at scale, and the law is only now catching up.

Start with New Mexico. The U.S. Department of Justice — its Civil Rights Division, not some private plaintiff — filed suit against the New Mexico Supreme Court and its Board of Bar Examiners. The allegation: systematic violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. The SCRA is one of the cleaner pieces of American federal law. It exists for one reason. When you are deployed — when the government sends you somewhere you cannot refuse to go — your civilian life does not stop accruing obligations. Your bar application deadline doesn't pause. Your fees don't waive themselves. The SCRA says: we will hold the door open for you. New Mexico, according to the DOJ, let the door close anyway.

What makes this case remarkable is the defendant. This is not a landlord who ignored a deployment notice. This is a state supreme court. The body that administers justice in New Mexico stands accused of denying it to the people who served. The Civil Rights Division made its message explicit: every state bar association in the country should read this filing and audit itself before it receives its own. That is not a suggestion. That is a warning dressed in polite language. The DOJ has a long memory and a long docket.

Now move the frame from New Mexico to Silicon Valley, because the next battle is already being fought inside machines you cannot see.

IBM is facing a discrimination lawsuit that the legal community is watching with the particular attention reserved for cases that might rewrite the rules. The claim is straightforward in structure and seismic in implication: an AI system used in hiring rejected applicants in ways that, if a human recruiter had done the same thing, would constitute unlawful discrimination. Andrew Adams at DarrowEverett put it precisely — a form rejection that appears to originate with an AI system may be enough. Enough for a claim. Enough to open discovery. Enough to make a company explain, under oath, exactly how its algorithm weighted the variables it weighted.

Here is the legal mechanism that most people miss. Anti-discrimination law in employment — in the United States, across the EU, in Malta under the Equal Treatment in Employment Regulations — does not require intent. Disparate impact is sufficient. You do not need to prove that IBM wanted to discriminate against anyone. You need to prove that the system's outputs had a discriminatory effect on a protected class, and that IBM deployed the system without adequate testing to prevent that outcome. The AI didn't mean to. IBM may not have meant to. The law does not care what you meant. It cares what happened.

For Malta and the EU, this is not an American story with no local consequence. The EU AI Act — which entered application in stages through 2024 and 2025 — classifies AI systems used in employment and recruitment as high-risk. High-risk means mandatory conformity assessments. Mandatory human oversight. Mandatory documentation of the decision-making logic. If a Maltese employer, or a European employer operating here, is using an AI screening tool that was built elsewhere and imported into their hiring process, the question is not whether it's convenient. The question is whether it has been tested, documented, and certified in the way the regulation demands. Most haven't been. Most companies don't know they haven't been. That is where the next wave of claims will originate — not from lawyers looking for trouble, but from applicants who received a form rejection and eventually asked the right question.

I came to law because someone I cared about needed a fighter who understood how institutions close doors on people they're supposed to serve. That's what connects these three cases. A state bar failing soldiers. A corporation delegating bias to a machine. The mechanism changes. The pattern doesn't.

Then there is 50 Cent. Curtis Jackson has reportedly spent $24 million in legal fees filing what courts have begun to characterise as litigation for sport. Twenty-four million dollars. Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure exists specifically to sanction this — to hold parties and their attorneys accountable when filings are brought without reasonable legal basis, for improper purposes, or as harassment. The fact that $24 million has moved before Rule 11 teeth have apparently been applied is itself a lesson. Rule 11 sanctions are available. They are not automatic. They require a motion, a 21-day safe harbour period, a judge willing to