Ohio Republicans have tightened their grip on the Ohio Supreme Court from 4-3 to 6-1 by ousting two incumbent Democratic justices and winning a third, open seat, the Associated Press projects based on unofficial results. Results remain unofficial until they are certified by local county boards of elections and the Ohio Secretary of State.

The Ohio Supreme Court will rule on a variety of issues that affect the daily lives of Ohioans ranging from education and environmental issues to gerrymandering and elections to civil and reproductive rights.

The state’s highest court has been under Republican control since 1986 and Republicans currently have a 4-3 majority that will increase to 6-1 starting in 2025.

Republican Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas Judge Megan Shanahan defeated incumbent Democratic Justice Michael P. Donnelly, according to unofficial results.

“I’m honored and grateful to the millions of Ohioans who have put their trust in me to be their Ohio Supreme Court Justice,” Shanahan posted on her campaign Facebook page. “I’ll be true to what I campaigned on and will be a Supreme Court Justice who knows that my job is to interpret the law, not to make it. I’ll go to work each day and focus on protecting Ohio’s citizens, communities, and constitution.”

Incumbent Republican Justice Joseph Deters defeated incumbent Democratic Justice Melody Stewart — ousting her from the court, unofficial results show.

Deters decided not to run for his current seat and won a full six-year term. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Deters, a former prosecutor, to a vacant seat in January 2023, even though he had no prior experience as a judge.

In the race for an open seat, Republican Judge Dan Hawkins defeated Democratic Judge Lisa Forbes, the AP projected.

This race was for Deters’ open seat, a term that expires on Dec. 31, 2026. Hawkins currently serves on the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas and Forbes is on the 8th District Court of Appeals. Hawkins will face reelection for a full six-year term in 2026.

In 2021, Republican state lawmakers added party labels to the Ohio Supreme Court races, which were previously nonpartisan.

Democratic Justice Jennifer Brunner’s seat will be up in 2026. The seats of Republican Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy, Republican Justice Pat DeWine, and Republican Justice Pat Fischer will be up in 2028.

Although the appellate judges firmly asserted that counting late ballots violates federal law, even if those ballots are postmarked by Election Day, the judges stopped short of an order immediately blocking Mississippi from continuing the practice. Their ruling noted federal court precedents have discouraged court actions that change established procedures shortly before an election.

The outcome may be negligible in most elections in heavily Republican Mississippi, but the case could affect voting in swing states if the Supreme Court ultimately issues a ruling.

The appeals court said its ruling Friday would not be returned to a lower court until seven days after the deadline for appealing their decision has passed — which is usually at least 14 days. That would put the effect of the ruling well past Nov. 5.

UCLA law professor Richard Hasen wrote on his election law blog that the appeals court ruling was a “bonkers opinion” and noted that “every other court to face these cases has rejected this argument.”

Republicans filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging various aspects of vote-casting after being chastised repeatedly by judges in 2020 for bringing complaints about how the election was run only after votes were tallied.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley praised the ruling for upholding “commonsense ballot safeguards” and said voters deserve “a transparent election which ends on November 5th.”

A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee did not immediately comment on the ruling.

Mississippi is one of several states with laws allowing mailed ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The list includes swing states such as Nevada and states such as Colorado, Oregon and Utah that rely heavily on mail voting.

In July, a federal judge dismissed a similar lawsuit in Nevada. The Republican National Committee is asking the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to revive that case.

Fourteen people arrested earlier this year during protests at Tulane University over the Israel-Hamas war were acquitted on misdemeanor criminal charges Friday in New Orleans.

The people — some of whom were students at Tulane or neighboring Loyola University — were arrested May 1 after police broke up a two-day encampment at Tulane in front of campus buildings fronting St. Charles Avenue. They were charged with “remaining in places after being forbidden.”

State District Judge Ben Willard ruled the defendants were not guilty the same day their trial began, New Orleans news outlets reported.

Defense lawyers argued in opening statements Friday morning that the defendants were not on campus but on public sidewalks or street medians when they were arrested.

Dozens of supporters of the 14 people gathered outside the courthouse and in hallways during the hearing. The defendants were among hundreds who have been arrested nationwide during college campus demonstrations arising from the war that followed the Oct.

7 Hamas incursion into Israel. Protesters have called for universities to separate themselves from companies advancing Israel’s military efforts in Gaza and in some cases from Israel itself.

The largest trial court in the country was closed Monday after a ransomware attack shut down its computer system late last week, officials with the Superior Court of Los Angeles County said.

The court disabled its computer network upon discovery of the cybersecurity attack early Friday, and the system remained down through the weekend. Courts remained open for business Friday, but officials said all 36 courthouse locations in the county would be closed Monday.

“The Court experienced an unprecedented cyber-attack on Friday which has resulted in the need to shut down nearly all network systems in order to contain the damage, protect the integrity and confidentiality of information and ensure future network stability and security,″ Presiding Judge Samantha P. Jessner said in a statement.

Officials said Monday night that all 36 courthouses would reopen on Tuesday.

“As a result of the tireless work of court staff and security experts, the Court will reopen all 36 courthouses tomorrow, July 23,” according to a statement posted on the court website. “Court users should expect delays and potential impacts due to limits in functionality.”

The attack was not believed to be related to the faulty CrowdStrike software update that disrupted airlines, hospitals and governments around the world, officials said in a statement Friday.

A preliminary investigation shows no evidence that users’ data was compromised, according to Friday’s statement.

The Superior Court of Los Angeles County is the largest unified superior court in the United States, serving the county’s 10 million residents over 36 courthouses. Nearly 1.2 million cases were filed and 2,200 jury trials were conducted in 2022.

The Supreme Court sided with Native American tribes Thursday in a dispute with the federal government over the cost of health care when tribes run programs in their own communities.

The 5-4 decision means the government will cover millions in overhead costs that two tribes faced when they took over running their health care programs under a law meant to give Native Americans more local control.

Covering those costs is “necessary to prevent a funding gap,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. Not reimbursing them forces tribes to “pay a penalty for pursuing self-determination.”

The Department of Health and Human Services had argued it isn’t responsible for the overhead costs associated with billing insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid.

Paying those costs for all tribes that run their own health care programs could total between $800 million and $2 billion per year, the agency said.

“The extra federal money that the Court today green-lights does not come free,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the dissent, which was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett. “In my view, the court should leave those difficult appropriations decisions and tradeoffs to Congress.”

The federal Indian Health Service has provided tribal health care since the 1800s under treaty obligations, but the facilities are often inadequate and understaffed, the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona said in court documents.

Health care spending per person by the IHS is just one-third of federal spending in the rest of the country, the Northern Arapaho Tribe in Wyoming said in court documents. Native American tribal populations have an average life expectancy of about 65 years, nearly 11 years less than the U.S. as a whole.

Attorney Adam Unikowsky, who represented the Northern Arapaho Tribe, said the decision puts tribes on equal footing with IHS on health care and will “promote tribal sovereignty and provide resources for health care in under-served communities.”

The tribes contracted with IHS to run their own programs ranging from emergency services to substance-abuse treatment. The agency paid the tribes the money it would have spent to run those services, but the contract didn’t include the overhead costs for billing insurance companies or Medicare and Medicaid, since other agencies handle it when the government is running the program.

The Arizona Supreme Court gave the go-ahead Tuesday to prepare to enforce a long-dormant law that bans nearly all abortions, drastically altering the legal landscape for terminating pregnancies in a state likely to have a key role in the presidential election.

The law predating Arizona’s statehood provides no exceptions for rape or incest and allows abortions only if the mother’s life is in jeopardy. Arizona’s highest court suggested doctors can be prosecuted under the 1864 law, though the opinion written by the court’s majority didn’t explicitly say that.

The Tuesday decision threw out an earlier lower-court decision that concluded doctors couldn’t be charged for performing abortions in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.

The Civil War-era law, enacted long before Arizona became a state on Feb. 14, 1912, had been blocked since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing the constitutional right to an abortion nationwide.

After Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, persuaded a state judge lift an injunction that blocked enforcement of the 1864 ban. Then the state Court of Appeals suspended the law as Brnovich’s Democratic successor, Attorney General Kris Mayes, urged the state’s high court to uphold the appellate court’s decision.

The court itself was expanded in 2016 from five justices to seven, all appointed by Republican governors.

The high court said enforcement won’t begin for at least two weeks. However, plaintiffs say it could be up to two months, based on an agreement in a related case to delay enforcement if the justices upheld the pre-statehood ban.

The law orders prosecution for “a person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life.”

The Arizona Supreme Court suggested in its ruling Tuesday that physicians can be prosecuted, though justices didn’t say that outright.

“In light of this Opinion, physicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman’s life, are illegal,” and additional criminal and regulatory sanctions may apply to abortions performed after 15 weeks of pregnancy, the ruling said.

The law carries a sentence of two to five years in prison upon conviction. Lawyers for Planned Parenthood Arizona said they believe criminal penalties will apply only to doctors. But the penalties also apply to providing abortion pills — the most common method in the United States.

In other places with abortion bans, some women have obtained pills both through underground networks and from telehealth from medical providers in states that have laws intended to protect prescribers from out-of-state prosecutions. This was already illegal in Arizona, the attorney general’s office said.

Dr. Maria Phillis, an Ohio OB-GYN with a law degree, said she believes women who obtain pills through those means could be prosecuted under the 1864 law. Across the country, new abortion bans have not been used to prosecute women in similar cases, and measures that have been introduced to punish those who obtain abortions have not been adopted.

Fourteen other states are now enforcing bans on abortion in all stages of pregnancy.

The Supreme Court cast doubt Monday on state laws that could affect how Facebook, TikTok, X, YouTube and other social media platforms regulate content posted by their users. The cases are among several this term in which the justices could set standards for free speech in the digital age.

In nearly four hours of arguments, several justices questioned aspects of laws adopted by Republican-dominated legislatures and signed by Republican governors in Florida and Texas in 2021. But they seemed wary of a broad ruling, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett warning of “land mines” she and her colleagues need to avoid in resolving the two cases.

While the details vary, both laws aimed to address conservative complaints that the social media companies were liberal-leaning and censored users based on their viewpoints, especially on the political right.

Differences on the court emerged over how to think about the platforms — as akin to newspapers that have broad free-speech protections, or telephone companies, known as common carriers, that are susceptible to broader regulation.

Chief Justice John Roberts suggested he was in the former camp, saying early in the session, “And I wonder, since we’re talking about the First Amendment, whether our first concern should be with the state regulating what we have called the modern public square?”

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas appeared most ready to embrace arguments made by lawyers for the states. Thomas raised the idea that the companies are seeking constitutional protection for “censoring other speech.”

Alito complained about the term “content moderation” that the sites employ to keep material off their platforms.

“Is it anything more than a euphemism for censorship?” he asked, later musing that term struck him as Orwellian. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh, seemingly more favorable to the companies, took issue with calling the actions of private companies censorship, a term he said should be reserved for restrictions imposed by the government.

“When I think of Orwellian, I think of the state, not the private sector, not private individuals,” Kavanaugh said.

The precise contours of rulings in the two cases were not clear after arguments, although it seemed likely the court would not let the laws take effect. The justices posed questions about how the laws might affect businesses that are not their primary targets, including e-commerce sites like Uber and Etsy and email and messaging services.