Short Circuit: An inexhaustive weekly compendium of rulings from the federal courts of appeal
Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.
Victory! Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of an innocent Atlanta family, represented by IJ, whose home was mistakenly raided by an FBI SWAT team. The Court undismissed all five of the family’s claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act and rejected a novel and atextual rule that the Eleventh Circuit had invented to ding worthy cases. Click here to learn more.
New on the Short Circuit podcast: A whodunit with a serial-fabulist detective.
- Sesquipedalian federal judge Bruce Selya may be gone, but his influence lives on in First Circuit citations like this one: See Cohen v. Brown Univ., 16 F.4th 935, 944 (1st Cir. 2021) (concluding that an argument was preserved where “we have no reason to doubt that the district court grasped the gist of the [party’s] argument” even though it was not made “with lapidary precision”). In other news, the First Circuit grants a new trial to a Puerto Rican man convicted of possessing a machine gun, whose objection to the conditions under which the jurors examined the weapon was just lapidarian enough to get the job done.
- In the latest as-applied attempt by a nonviolent convicted felon to get back his right to keep and bear arms, we have a New York man who in 2015 was convicted for defrauding a bank of tens of millions of dollars and cheating on over $1 mil in taxes. Second Circuit: We used to hang felons like you. That’s why there “are no twins of the modern felon-in-possession laws” from the Founding. At least you’ve got your health.
- Allegation: Eyewitness fingers two teens for 1999 murder in New Haven, Conn. deli. But only after he said 18 times that he could not identify the masked perpetrators and detectives threatened to revoke his probation. Second Circuit (unpublished): That’s the sort of thing that the jury should have heard about it. No qualified immunity. (The teens’ convictions were vacated in 2018.)
- During the Vietnam War, the feds compelled Dow Chemical to make Agent Orange under threat of criminal liability and under strict supervision. So when people exposed to Agent Orange sued Dow in state court, Dow was able to have the case removed to federal court under the federal-officer removal statute. Third Circuit: Which Dow cannot avail itself of here. Though it made an allegedly toxic cleaning product to the gov’t’s specifications, it was not “acting under” the feds’ direction. Back to New Jersey state court.
- But what if the wannabe-remover is a pharmacy benefit manager that negotiates a bunch of drug prices all at once and some of that includes drugs for federal employee insurance plans? Fourth Circuit (joining the First and Ninth Circuits on the same question): Sounds like a federal officer to me! In federal court ye shall stay.
- Former student files federal Title IX suit claiming Beaufort, S.C. school officials turned a blind eye to bullying, sexual harassment. District court: If she were filing a state-law negligent supervision claim, she’d have filed too late. And since that’s the most analogous state law to Title IX, she filed too late. Fourth Circuit: No need to overcomplicate things. Title IX is analogous to Section 1983, which is most analogous to state-law personal injury claims, under which the suit was timely. Undismissed!
- Officials in t
Article from Reason.com
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