At the emergency-injunction stage, the game is timing

Federal courts do not resolve constitutional questions at the emergency-injunction stage. They resolve whether the challenger moved fast enough. Today in Minnesota, xAI learned exactly that. The company's challenge to the state's "nudify"-app ban, the first state-level law of its kind, arrived three days before the law took effect and roughly three months after the bill was signed. The ruling from U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank was a one-line teaching on laches.

The pattern is older than AI and bigger than Minnesota. When a plaintiff files at the last possible moment, the court reads the lateness as evidence that the emergency is not really an emergency. "Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate," Frank wrote. The substantive First Amendment arguments, xAI's claim that the law is "overinclusive" and that "there are far less restrictive alternatives that function to achieve the same ends," never got reached. They are still on the docket.

The law is live. The lawsuit is alive. The merits ruling is the one that actually matters, and it has not happened.