A federal judge in South Dakota has preliminarily enjoined enforcement of a state abortion-advertising restriction against a reproductive-health education nonprofit and an attorney, concluding the challengers are likely to succeed on their First Amendment claims. The ruling is another important entry in the growing body of post-Dobbs litigation testing how far states can go when regulating not just abortion procedures, but speech about abortion.

At this stage, the court did not finally decide the statute’s constitutionality.

A Massachusetts federal judge has allowed a multistate challenge against the federal government to continue, concluding at this early stage that the plaintiff states had already shown harm from the challenged federal actions. That ruling is important not because it resolves the merits, but because it clears one of the biggest threshold obstacles in public-law litigation: whether the states can establish a sufficiently concrete injury to stay in court.

According to the reporting, the U.S. Department of Justice will continue litigating the case in the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts after the judge determined the states had made the necessary showing of harm.