Gus Hurwitz on the TikTok Lawsuit
ICLE Director of Law & Economics Programs Gus Hurwitz was quoted by the Associated Press in a story about the lawsuit the company filed challenging a recently passed law that would force its divestiture from Chinese-based ByteDance. You can read the full piece here.
ByteDance will first likely ask a court to temporarily block the federal law from taking effect, said Gus Hurwitz, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School who isn’t involved in the case. And the decision whether to grant such a preliminary injunction could decide the case, because its absence, ByteDance would need to sell TikTok before the broader case could be decided, he said.
Whether a court will grant such an injunction remains unclear to Hurwitz, largely because it requires balancing important free speech issues against the Biden administration’s claims of harm to national security. “I think the courts will be very deferential to Congress on these issues,” he said.