Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions
Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.
Last week, IJ’s cofounder and former president Chip Mellor passed away after a battle with leukemia. Godspeed, Chip. You’re a legend. Click here to learn more.
New on the Short Circuit podcast: What happens when the gov’t claims it doesn’t enforce the law? It avoids a lot of civil rights lawsuits.
- Economists like to say that incentives matter. Consider, for example, the incentives created by a prenup under which a man’s wife receives $8 mil if he dies, but only $3.5k a month for 36 months if they divorce within a year. First Circuit: Murder-for-hire convictions affirmed.
- Can the State of New York assert parens patriae standing to sue a school district for its alleged failure to address repeated complaints of student-on-student sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gender-based violence and bullying? Second Circuit: It certainly can. Concurrence dubitante: That seems pretty screwy, but our whole jurisprudence of parens patriae standing is screwy, so the Supreme Court should clear this up.
- If one of your aims in life is to figure out whether a “subsection” is anything within a “section” or, alternatively, only the next-smallest-thing within a “section” but not something smaller, than that then your ship has come in. You’ll also need to wade through whether a registered nurse must be part of certain investigations under the Medicaid Act, but otherwise your perusal of this Second Circuit opinion (no on nurses needed), including the dissent (yes on nurses needed), will be totally worth it.
- The Video Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1988 after a reporter dug into the video-rental history of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork (and discovered it to be entirely non-salacious). But does this dusty law written in the era of VHS tapes have any continuing vitality? Second Circuit: “The VPPA is no dinosaur statute.” Thus, a lawsuit alleging that the NBA violated a basketball fan’s rights when it disclosed his video-watch history to Meta Platforms may proceed.
- In 2021, Texas enacts a law restricting paid “vote harvesting services,” defined as “interaction with one or more voters, in the physical presence of an official ballot or a ballot voted by mail, intended to deliver votes for a specific candidate or measure.” The law is challenged in August 2021, but the district court doesn’t get around to enjoining it until September 28, 2024, three weeks before voting begins in Texas. The state moves to stay the injunction. Fifth Circuit: And it is stayed. Under the Purcell principle, you can’t mess around with things this close to an election.
- Man is celebrating his birthday in Detroit and listening to street musicians when a police officer tells him to move along. They argue for a bit, and the man is passively resisting arrest by hugging his girlfriend when the officer tases him without warning. Qualified immunity for excessive force? Sixth Circuit: Nope, it’s “clearly established in this circuit tha
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