Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.

New Case Alert! Before dawn, Cathy George awakes to a squad of heavily armed officers banging on the door to her Georgia home and aiming rifles at her. They're looking for a fugitive. Yikes! Problem 1: The fugitive was arrested months earlier—in Indiana—and remains behind bars. Problem 2: He had no connection to Cathy. Now, represented by IJ, Cathy is suing over the raid, because when officers screw up that badly, the Constitution promises more accountability than "oops, we made a mistake." Read more here.

New on the Bound By Oath podcast: A history of Rooker-Feldman, a slightly treasonous doctrine that we hope SCOTUS is going to blow to smithereens next week.

1. D.C. Circuit (over a dissent): We have exclusive jurisdiction over challenges to final TSA decisions refusing to take somebody off the No Fly List, which means that the district court wasn't allowed to hear this guy's lawsuit demanding to be taken off of the Terrorist Watchlist, since taking him off the Terrorist Watchlist would necessarily take him off the No Fly List. Instead, his only remedy is to file a petition asking us to overturn the TSA's final order and take him off the No Fly List.


2. D.C. Circuit (same day): Also, we're denying that same guy's petition asking us to overturn the TSA's final order and take him off the No Fly List.


3. Many have been following the escalating tensions between the feds and courts about the former's efforts to remove members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador. Well, the D.C. Circuit has now mandamus-ed a second time. The newest "extraordinary remedy" puts an end to the criminal contempt proceedings, deeming it unnecessary as the district court already knows who ordered the planes to depart (Kristi Noem) and the TRO language cannot support criminal contempt charges. Concurrence: Slicing and dicing the Saturday evening emergency hearing transcript and the subsequent order shows why the feds didn't violate the order in the first place. Dissent: "Contempt of court is a public offense, and the fate of our democratic republic will depend on whether we treat it as such."


4. Cops in Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, spy youths potentially dealing drugs. Upon confrontation, the youths flee. One cop shoots a 17-year-old in the back. Another allegedly pistol whips him. Later the cops falsify reports. But word gets out, feds prosecute, and convictions follow. First Circuit: The pistol-whipper should have been able to cross-examine the whippee. Vacated and remanded on that count (but not three others).


5. Circuit split alert! The First Circuit (splitting with the Tenth) holds that Maine's law requiring a firearm seller to wait at least 72 hours before delivering a purchased firearm doesn't infringe the right to "keep" or "bear" arms because the purchaser remains free to "keep" and "bear" them three days after buying them.


6. Second Circuit (unpublished): The Supreme Court's decision in Bruen tells us the Second Amendment extends to weapons in common use for self-defense, but whether a weapon is in common use seems like the kind of thing you should have tried to prove at summary judgment, not the kind of thing you should be trying to prove by citing stuff to us in your appellate briefs.


7. The Fourth Circuit (en banc) vacates a preliminary injunction that had prevented DOGE staffers from accessing confidential Social Security data and in so doing manages to generate six different opinions fighting about everything from whether the Supreme Court's unexplained emergency-docket orders count as "precedent" to whether preliminary-injunction opinions should look more like word problems from your junior-high math class, all of which is really extremely fun reading for the really extremely small group of people who like that sort of thing.


8. Plaintiff: Sure, the case law says school officials have leeway to search students' belongings, but you can't apply that pre-digital precedent to the much more intrusive search of a teenage student's cell phone (on which the assistant principal found an explicit photo of a different teenager). Fourth Circuit: That's a real interesting argument you've got there; it's a shame you've waived it. Also, you're wrong.


9. Before searching for the names of a Supreme Court justice in a hospital database and then posting the results online, you might want to read this tale of caution from the Fourth Circuit, which ends with a 24-month visit to federal prison.


10. Fairfax County, Va. police arrange a controlled drug buy in the parking lot of a shopping complex. Once the target arrives, he becomes suspicious and begins to drive away. A half dozen detectives pursue him in unmarked vehicles, ram his car, block him in it, and shoot him. (They feared that he was reaching for a gun; he was unarmed.) District court: reasonable response, no excessive force here. Fourth Circuit: Not so fast. The man was driving slowly out of a parking lot, posing no danger to anybody; police hadn't even given him a chance to pull over first; and there's a dispute over whether he reached for his console. Try again.


11. The rara avis case in which a court of appeals (here, the Fifth Circuit) uncovers a reversible error in an Anders appeal. Concurrence: This means the "party-presentation principle" is totally bunk and shouldn't apply in any context ever, right? Right?


12. No American has been able to legally distill consumable spirits at home since 1868. That ends now, says the Fifth Circuit, as the law violates the Constitution's Taxation and Necessary and Proper Clauses. (On appeal, the feds didn't challenge the district court's conclusion that the law also violates the Commerce Clause, so Wickard lives to fight another hay.) Let the fun be-gin.


13. Most criminal defendants try to avoid being sentenced under the Armed Career Criminal Act, which sets a 15-year mandatory minimum for certain defendants if they have three previous convictions for certain qualifying offenses. Defendant: In the district court, I pleaded guilty and accidentally agreed that I had three qualifying offenses. But on reflection, I had only two! So my 212-month sentence is a mistake. Sixth Circuit: You and your lawyer should've been more careful. Sentence affirmed. Dissent: This seems like an error we should correct.


14. As part of their investigation into an online collection of sexually explicit images of local underage girls, cops in Toulon, Ill., send a link to the files to their IT guy, for help in identifying the victims. He does. Huzzah! But turns out he's a collector of child sexual-abuse material in his own right. Yikes! And he keeps the photos and distributes them. Double yikes. Seventh Circuit: This whole situation seems to have been pretty shambolic, but the victims don't have a due-process claim against the cops who gave the IT guy access to their photos. (The guy is now serving a 35-year prison sentence, and claims against him personally are proceeding in the district court.)


15. Find someone who loves you as much as the Seventh Circuit loves excoriating lawyers for inaccurately certifying the completeness of the short appendix required by Circuit Rule 30.


16. The key to a life well lived is to find a hobby that you relish as much as the Seventh Circuit relishes castigating lawyers for inaccurately certifying the completeness of the short appendix required by Circuit Rule 30.


17. Milwaukee man is convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault after a bailiff improperly tells the jury they're not allowed to deadlock. The conviction is overturned, and the man sues both the loose-lipped bailiff and another bailiff who heard the remark but didn't intervene. Seventh Circuit: We don't have jurisdiction to decide if the bystander bailiff gets qualified immunity because the district court didn't make a definitive ruling. Dissent: All we need to know is that the district court didn't grant immunity, and here the plaintiff didn't even try to meet his burden to overcome it.


18. Courts across the country are inconsistent about whether plaintiffs may proceed pseudonymously in suits challenging university disciplinary proceedings for sexual assault. But here, the Seventh Circuit adheres to its distinctively strong presumption against pseudonymous litigation: John Doe may either dismiss his pending appeals or have them resolved under his real name.


19. After a carjacking at a St. Louis County, Mo. Waffle House, police use the "Find My" app to track down AirPods that were in the stolen car. They get a warrant for the house purportedly containing the AirPods, smash in, force the mother (in her underwear) and children to go outside, punch a hole in a wall, and otherwise ransack the place. And discover it and the occupants are unconnected to the crime. Turns out the AirPods were in the street out in front. Eighth Circuit: Find My and qualified immunity pair nicely.


20. In the Ninth Circuit, here's a generally gross story of an ICE agent convicted for trying to have sex with what he thought was a 13-year-old prostitute. (Spoiler: The "13-year-old prostitute" was also federal law enforcement.)


21. What do you get when you mix Kevin Costner's Yellowstone with slightly less murder and slightly more promissory estoppel? This sprawling litigation between a conservancy nonprofit and a financier who desperately wants to build a 2,500-square-foot guesthouse on his Wyoming ranch. Tenth Circuit: The conservancy is not promissorily estopped based on a conversation its director had with the financier on the deck of the Teton Pines Country Club, at which (the financier insists) the director said a guesthouse could be built so long as it wasn't called a "guesthouse."


22. This Tenth Circuit case is interesting for two reasons. One, it accepts the gov't's concession that it's plain error to sentence an assault defendant more harshly because he was an off-duty police officer. Two, it's kind of the 1997 Julia Roberts movie My Best Friend's Wedding—but an R-Rated version where Rupert Everett almost gets shot.


23. "Lincoln may have freed the slaves, but I'm keeping you." As a matter of law, that's an off-color comment rather than a ground to find an objectively hostile work environment. Query, though, whether the Eleventh Circuit should have addressed the speaker's conflation of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.


24. And in en banc news, the Ninth Circuit will not reconsider its decision that an objection to COVID-19 testing was not sufficiently connected to religious doctrine to state a claim under Title VII. Fans of dissentals will be chuffed.

New Case Alert! In San Jose, Cal., drivers have to navigate a network of nearly 500 automated license plate readers that the police department installed all over the city. These high-tech surveillance cameras blanket hospice facilities, churches, and countless other sensitive places, and they snap hundreds of millions of warrantless images every year, instantly converting them into easily searchable data that thousands of gov't employees can access on demand. Yikes? Yikes. Fourth Amendment Yikes, to be precise. Which is why IJ has entered the fray

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