Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions
Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.
Los Angeles friends, come and join us on Thursday, June 30 at UCLA for a live recording of the Short Circuit podcast, plus the unveiling of our interactive study on clearly established law sufficient to overcome qualified immunity for each circuit. The event features Eugene Volokh of UCLA, Julia Yoo of the National Police Accountability Project, and Nicholas Yoka of Panish Shea Boyle Ravipudi LLP, among others. Click here to RSVP.
- When is a pipe just a pipe—and not a pipeline? San Juan, P.R. liquified natural gas facility: When it’s only a 75-foot pipe from our facility to the power plant next door. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission: Anytime a pipe is used to receive or send out gas for use in foreign or interstate commerce it’s a pipeline. D.C. Circuit: To FERC’s jurisdiction you must submit.
- Victor “Little Vic” Orena, former Colombo family boss whose leadership led to intra-family mob war, is serving a life sentence in federal prison. And there he’ll stay, despite deteriorating health (including apparently thinking that he’s the president of the U.S.), says the Second Circuit.
- Following the 2018 gov’t shutdown, FBI employees sue the United States. Allegation: Had you contributed to our retirement accounts when you were supposed to, those contributions would’ve been a lot more valuable. Gov’t: Sovereign immunity! Employees: Aha, but the Federal Employees’ Retirement System Act of 1986 waives sovereign immunity for beneficiaries of our retirement plan to sue “to recover benefits.” Gov’t: Double Aha! What you’re suing about here isn’t a “benefit” but rather consequential damages stemming from our late payments. Third Circuit: The gov’t is right. No waiver. No lawsuit. (NB: A restive faction among your humble staff wishes to offer big respect to Judge Bibas for going out of his way (at page 9) to correct the Supreme Court’s failure to rigorously hyphenate its phrasal adjectives.)
- The Constitution guarantees prisoners the right to access the courts, which includes the right to access the tools needed to file a complaint. But does that mean Pennsylvania corrections officials violated clearly established law when, the weekend before a prisoner’s trial, they refused to let him use the main law library or lend him paper copies of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Evidence? Third Circuit: Going forward, prisoners definitely have a right to access the courts even after they’ve filed a complaint (it’d be “ludicrous” to hold otherwise), but qualified immunity will protect the officials here.
- Is assault by strangulation a “crime of violence” under North Carolina law? For folks who are new to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines rigamarole, the Fourth Circuit explains why the answer is not so simple—but also why it is yes.
- Across the U.S., “supermax” prisoners are held in solitary confinement for 22-24 hours per day, every day, without any meaningful opportunity to enter general population. Can the officials responsible for Virginia’s solitary-confinement policy claim qualified immunity in a class-action lawsuit based on the harms caused by this long-term solitary confinement? Fourth Circuit: Negatory. We’re at the motion to dismiss stage; plaintiffs have alleged that the defendants knew the harms of long-term solitary confinement but ignored them; and “qualified immunity does not protect knowing violations of the law.”
- North Carolina charter school: Our requirement that female students wear skirts isn’t rooted in sexist stereotypes; it’s just that women are “fragile vessel[s]” and need to be taken care of. Fourth Circuit (en banc): [blank stare]. Second dissent: I guess chivalry is dead.
- The baroque doctrine of Younger abstention says the federal courts must decline to interfere with certain state-court proceedings. But there’s an exception for “extraordinary circumstances.” What are extraordinary circumstances? Fourth Circuit: It’s hard to say with any precision, but the district court didn’t abuse its discretion in finding extraordinary circumstances here, where there’s a paper trail strongly suggesting West Virginia launched an administrative proceeding to “shut down” an out-of-state air-ambulance provider in favor of its in-state competitor. (We explored the doctrine in some detail on the podcast.)
- The Constitution forbids striking potential jurors
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