FILE: An aerial view of the UC Berkeley campus in Berkeley, Calif.

A filing in San Francisco court last week has researchers from the University of California feeling bullish about an ongoing legal fight with the Trump administration. 

Last year, the administration, through various agencies, cut money from thousands of research grants within the UC system. It sparked a yearlong legal saga between the federal government, which made the cuts, and a group of university professors who lost the research money. As part of a court filing last week, the researchers’ lawyers wrote that per sworn statements, the agencies in question “used ‘search terms, keywords, or phrases’—and in some cases ‘artificial intelligence tools or software’—‘to identify grants for termination review.’”

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The lawyers argue those cuts violate the First Amendment because they targeted researchers who work in Democratic-leaning states or were pursuing ideas that........

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