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.
New on the Short Circuit podcast: The IRS hands out some excessive fines and the Ninth Circuit’s dicta-is-law rule.
- Are historic restrictions on gunpowder stores “relevantly similar” to the District of Columbia’s 10-round cap on gun magazines? D.C. Circuit: “The suggestion . . . is silly.” OK, what about bans on trap or spring guns? “This analogy is too generalized.” Alright, stretching a bit here, but maybe Bowie knives? “[A]t this interlocutory juncture, the District has met its burden.” Dissent: Long, long ago the Stuart kings disarmed Protestants.
- Allegation: FBI agents violated Religious Freedom Restoration Act when they retaliated against Muslim Americans who declined to be informants by baselessly putting them on the No Fly List. District court (2015): You can’t seek damages under RFRA. Supreme Court (2020): There’s no atextual exclusion of a damages remedy in RFRA. Second Circuit (2024): How about an atextual qualified immunity bar to these claims instead?
- Second Circuit (en banc): If a guilty plea could lead to denaturalization and deportation, lawyers must advise their clients of that fact or they’re giving unconstitutionally ineffective counsel.
- New York man uploads a file to his Gmail account containing an image with a “hash value” (a digital footprint assigned by Google) matching content that Google previously identified as child porn. Without inspecting the image, Google passes it along to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which in turn passes it along to NY State Police without inspection. The police open it. It’s child porn. Did they need a warrant to visually inspect the image when Google had already conducted a “private search” of its hash value? Second Circuit: Yes. “Human visual examination” of the image went beyond what could be learned by Google’s hash-matching algorithm. But the good faith exception applies. Conviction affirmed.
- Do project labor agreements that require workers be associated with a specific union violate the First Amendment? Third Circuit: We’re not gonna tell you this time, but the plaintiff contractors definitely have standing to challenge Philadelphia’s recent PLA policy. And they can go forward on their equal protection claims too.
- This week’s remake of Trading Places stars defendant election officials who argue the guys suing them—a couple political party entities—have standing while the guys themselves “sheepishly” suggest maybe they don’t. That’s because the guys would rather be somewhere else: in North Carolina state court. However, once the film begins you’ll learn what an “embedded federal question” is (basic
Article from Reason.com
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