John Oliver has already used his show to crash an FCC server to make a point about net neutrality and to burn FIFA long before several of FIFA's top officials were arrested for corruption, but this could be his biggest impact yet.
A federal judge cited a Last Week Tonight segment in the footnotes of her ruling in a class action lawsuit against Guam concerning tax refunds. Keep in mind, this is a space usually reserved for citing previous rulings and boring law journals, not HBO comedy series.
As reported first by Above The Law, Judge Marsha S. Berzon was referring to Oliver's segment on "insular cases," a collection of Supreme Court rulings that say United States constitutional don't automatically extend to people in U.S. territories, when she wrote that the cases were "the subject of extensive judicial, academic and popular criticism."
Here's the full Last Week Tonight segment that was cited:
Now we're just waiting to see where this IRS and exploitative churches thing goes.
