New on the Short Circuit Podcast: Duke professor Nita Farahany dives deep into her book Battle for the brain And how to make future governments able to read your mind.
- DC Circuit: We are not suggesting that these plaintiffs were not on the terrorist watch list when the lawsuit was filed.we just say that ifHypothetically, the government’s ex parte opinion indicates that the plaintiffs were not on the terrorist watch list at the time the lawsuit was filed and therefore they were ineligible. Furthermore, the plaintiff has no standing.
- The nature of “property” has mystified philosophers from Grotius to Pufendorf to Locke, but one thing we now know, thanks to two-thirds of the D.C. Circuit panel, is that it absolutely includes the federal The employee serves in his or her capacity as a member of the senior executive staff. Pufendorf never figured this out.
- Former presidential adviser Steve Bannon was found in contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with a Jan. 6 subpoena issued by the committee. Bannon: Ah, but the statute requires “willful” disobedience. I may be willfully disobeying, but I am not willfully disobeying because my lawyer told me not to. D.C. Circuit: We rejected this exact “advice of counsel” defense in 1961.
- As part of the celebration of Eid al-Adha, an important four-day Islamic holiday, Sing Sing Prison provided a series of activities, meals and services to inmates on the first day of the festival. But according to one prisoner, there were not enough meals on the third day and he was not given a special religious meal, violating freedom of movement terms. 2nd Circuit: Factual dispute regarding meal denial means summary judgment in favor of jail is inappropriate.
- When a Ukrainian couple with two young children were separated, the mother took the children with the promise of bringing them back the next day, but instead went to an undisclosed location, war broke out, and the father was in Dubai, the mother took the children What will happen when you go to Dubai? According to the Second Circuit, this is a “rare circumstance” under the Hague Convention in which a court can order the return of a child to a parent who is “temporarily in a third country.”
- On the one hand, federal patent law encourages invention by granting time-limited monopolies. On the other hand, it encourages generic drug manufacturers to challenge brand-name patents, and antitrust laws prohibit anticompetitive dealings.In balancing these competing interests, the Supreme Court held that possible In violation of antitrust laws, a brand-name pharmaceutical company paid a “huge and unreasonable” settlement to a generic drug to force it to drop a patent challenge and delay market entry. But what if a well-known brand not only pays a substantial sum to a generic drug, but also enters into a separate commercial agreement with the generic drug? 2nd Circuit: At least in this case, it was legal because the consumer antitrust plaintiffs did not allege any facts showing that these business agreements were illegal.
- If during the trial many jurors and alternates withdraw due to the inevitable hardships in life, leaving only eleven on the jury, resulting in a mistrial, does this constitute double jeopardy? 3rd Circuit says that’s not always the case.
- Parents of Montgomery County, Maryland, public school students will not receive notifications and will not be able to opt out of certain books for their children.An example is Proud puppy!, an alphabet primer that tells the story of a family’s puppy who gets lost in a Pride parade, each page focuses on a letter of the alphabet, guiding readers as young as three and four in search of drag kings, drag queens and items such as underwear. The school board also provided teachers with a script for answering student questions, including that “our body parts do not determine our gender.” The parents sued, citing the free exercise clause. 4th Circuit: With few records, parents did not (yet) have the evidence needed to preliminarily enjoin the program. Objection: Parents have shown that the school board has given them the choice of compromising their beliefs or abandoning their children’s public education, so issuing the ban now is the right thing to do.
- A woman has filed a lawsuit claiming that while she was serving time in the Berrien County Jail in Michigan, her roommate repeatedly sexually assaulted her and that instead of protecting her, police retaliated against her and placed her in solitary confinement. Official: Qualified immunity! Sixth Circuit: You abandoned this argument in your summary judgment brief by referring to it “in a perfunctory manner and lacking applicable facts or a sophisticated argument.” But even if you don’t give up, you still lose.
- A Kentucky mom, dad and their 10-year-old daughter were working on painting the interior of their home for three days when police unexpectedly arrived to serve a search warrant. Just seconds after knocking on the door and announcing the call, police broke the front window and began firing through the shattered windows in response to the family’s terrified screams. They dragged the family out, handcuffed the trio and searched the empty house, finding no criminal activity. Sixth Circuit (unpublished): Their Fourth Amendment rights were violated. Whether the police department is responsible is a question on remand.
- Defendant: Look, of course, I had just been convicted of drug trafficking, and yes, I testified that I deposited all of my legitimate earnings in the bank, and I had all of my drug proceeds in cash, and, well, you discovered a The large amounts of cash piled around my house, near my drugs, scales, and notebooks that carefully documented my drug dealings, did not prove that the cash was the proceeds of drug trafficking. 6th Circuit: Actually, you’re right (about some of the money).
- Security at a high-crime apartment complex in Des Moines, Iowa, called police after he saw a car driving into multiple illegal parking spots late at night with a passenger brandishing a gun.Police arrived, the vehicle attempted to leave, and police conducted Cui Stopping, they discovered the gun. oops! The person holding the gun is a felon, so it is a federal crime for him to possess the gun. District Court: Carrying without a permit is legal in Iowa, so these circumstances did not provide reasonable suspicion for stop and search; gun suppressed. 8th Circuit: We find it suspicious that the gun was not suppressed.
- The Eighth Circuit’s opinion teaches us two lessons. First, the parallel universe of sovereign citizens is a wild place filled with legal mumbo jumbo. Second, a criminal defendant has a constitutional right to “immolate himself if he wishes” by representing himself, and the fact that the defendant politely presented his “outlandish” argument before trial does not mean that his destructive conduct resulted in He loses his rights.
- Allegation: The white man complained that a black female colleague at the Missouri agency repeatedly attacked him, including suggesting that “if you’re not your race, it’s not cheating.” He was fired about two months later and then sued under Title VII for racial and gender discrimination and retaliation. 8th Circuit: You still need to show motive. Objection: Temporal proximity is sufficient for revenge.
- When the Ninth Circuit issued six 241-page opinions in March on whether the federal transfer of Oak Flat to Resolution Copper violated the rights of the Apache Indians who hold the land sacred, your The abstractors are flatly telling you to read it yourself, because we can’t. Because our words matter to us, we will not read this revised opinion either. We write again simply to point out that – according to page 13 of this newly published opinion – you can apparently request an en banc review of the en banc decision, which is both puzzling and, in any event, denied.
- If you call 911 to report that you took hostages and killed two of them, and then confront the police with a machete, that’s probably not going to end well. 10th Circuit: Police receive immunity from shooting even though they might have acted differently.
- Looking back at the past short circuit again! Back in March, we rounded up a decision regarding Timothy Sepi, star of the Netflix series Tiger King and now Former photographer of Joe Exotic who is in jail. Last time, the 10th Circuit rejected nearly all of Seppi’s copyright claims against Netflix’s use of clips from his film, but sent it back to the trial court to scrutinize one of the clips.This week, the 10th Circuit reversed that opinion and requested supplemental briefings on how the Supreme Court’s recent ruling Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith should affect its fair use analysis of the remaining film clips.
- One thing that nearly a decade of writing Short Circuit has taught us is that when you see a judicial opinion that requires a “table of contents,” you’re in trouble—especially if, as in the case of the Eleventh Circuit’s opinion , the table of contents does not appear until page 12.
- A Georgia Sheriff’s Office’s health insurance didn’t cover gender reassignment. Violation of Title 7? Eleventh Circuit: Of course! The Supreme Court just ruled that Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination includes discrimination based on gender identity. These include denying coverage for surgeries that only transgender people want. Objection: The plan also doesn’t cover bariatric surgery and Viagra. “It’s not discrimination; it’s just a cheap plan.”
- In en banc news, the 2nd Circuit will not revisit its previous decision that the Promoting Safety and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act of 2019 violated due process by requiring groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority to make payments in In US courts, families of imprisoned or dead terrorists “are deemed to have consented to personal jurisdiction”. Three judges disagreed with the denial. At the same time, as a senior judge, Judge LeVar was unable to vote on whether to rehear the case, adopting Ninth Circuit Judge Oska Lane’s unique practice of issuing a “statement of opinion” (in this case, he agreed that the case should not be reheard). should be re-examined).
- In an amicus brief, the IJ urged the Michigan Supreme Court to rule that the smell of marijuana alone does not provide police with probable cause to stop, search and arrest a person when marijuana is legal because of the drug’s presence in Michigan .
The words “zoning” and “justice” don’t often appear together, but they do in IJ’s new zoning justice plan, which aims to protect and promote the freedom to use property. For more than a century, abusive zoning practices have eroded property rights and ignored individual freedoms while emphasizing top-down planning. IJ has been fighting zoning for years, but with the housing affordability crisis raging, we wanted to focus all our efforts in one place. From links to our ongoing zoning cases to our latest amicus briefs filed with the Montana Supreme Court to operational advice on challenging zoning laws, you’ll find it all at the Zoning Justice Project.
