It’s Sixth Circuit week on Short Circuit with a couple Sixth Circuit lawyers who clerked on the Sixth Circuit and practice law in Michigan. (Which is where? That’s right, in the Sixth Circuit.) David Porter and Sean Dutton spin yarns about some recent Sixth Circuit opinions, including with a bit of an inside look on what the circuit’s judges think about dissenting from not going en banc. First we look at how “homely” a home needs to be to be a home. What even is a “home” for it to receive the pr...
Aug 15, 2025•1 hr 7 min
Did you know the feds can send a subpoena to social media companies to find out stuff about your accounts and also order the same companies not to tell you? Turns out it happens all the time. But the law says that a court has to make an individualized assessment of each request. Some federal agents convinced a district court to just let them do all the paperwork and give a blanket gag order for a bunch of requests. Betsy Sanz of IJ joins us to explain why the DC Circuit said that’s just not good...
Aug 08, 2025•46 min
On the heels of the trade deadline, Rob Johnson of IJ reports on some baseball news. But it doesn’t concern the latest in Major League Baseball. Instead, it’s about the business of baseball and how broad is the “business of baseball” exemption from the antitrust laws. There’s a baseball league in Puerto Rico that gave some pretty rough justice to an owner, who then took the league to court. Does the history and tradition of “baseball’s” exemption from antitrust laws apply to this league, or only...
Aug 01, 2025•51 min
Steve Lehto of Lehto’s Law rejoins Short Circuit—and for the first time on a YouTube episode—to spread the common sense he delivers daily on his own show. Steve shares a recent opinion from the Kansas Supreme Court about license plate covers. The police and lower courts had interpreted the law to make it a crime if a license plate cover blocked not just the actual license number but the name of the state. This basically turned a huge percentage of car owners into unknowing criminals. And gave th...
Jul 25, 2025•43 min
We look into the gray area between a multi-level-marketing venture, like Amway, and a “pyramid scheme.” Appellate attorney Kyle Singhal joins us to discuss a matter of his from the Sixth Circuit where the court examined whether prosecutors in a mail-fraud case got over their skis by repeatedly calling what the defendants did a pyramid scheme. “Pyramid schemes” are bad, obvs., but they’re not actually a federal crime. So was it OK to use that term when speaking to the jury? Kyle explains what the...
Jul 18, 2025•49 min
Can the government force you to only exercise a constitutional right once a month? Could it do that with speech? Or practicing religion? How about keeping and bearing arms? IJ’s Will Aronin asks that question when discussing a California law that restricted gun purchases to buying one gun a month. The Ninth Circuit recently found the law violated the Second Amendment. That’s something the Ninth Circuit doesn’t do very often, so we made sure to take a close look at this “unicorn” of a case. Plus,...
Jul 11, 2025•57 min
Is speaking to a yoga class speech? The Ninth Circuit recently proclaimed that the answer to that question is actually “yes.” But before you turn away from this episode because it simply parrots Captain Obvious, please know that it was not so obvious to the district court. Or the city of San Diego, which tried to define the teaching of yoga—but not the teaching of anything else—in public parks as conduct, not speech. Teaching all kinds of other things was fine, but teaching yoga to four or more ...
Jul 04, 2025•40 min
Who doesn’t love a nice beard? It seems the firefighters in Atlantic City. One of their employees wants to wear a beard because of his religion. He doesn’t actually fight fires as part of his job, but there’s a possibility he’d be told he needs to and therefore he supposedly can’t have a beard because his special air mask wouldn’t fit. Does this violate the First Amendment’s protection of free exercise? Matt Liles of IJ reports on this case from the Third Circuit that digs into how “generally ap...
Jun 27, 2025•45 min
We at the Institute for Justice are increasingly involved with combatting retaliation against free speech. Which is why we were highly interested to hear from Daniel Cragg and his recent win at the Eighth Circuit. Dan is a Minneapolis attorney who regularly sues the government for all kinds of things. This particular case was about a doctor who made a few remarks that weren’t very politically popular at her place of work—a public hospital—at the height of the pandemic and cultural ferment in 202...
Jun 20, 2025•1 hr 11 min
Is making someone file a form “in the public interest”? The Fifth Circuit took a look at that age-old question in a recent case regarding the FCC and its gathering of demographic data. What might seem like a small issue opens the door to how the administrative state works, where agencies get their power, and how narrow the courts are reading those powers these days. IJ’s Bob Belden explains the twists and turns of this story that goes back several decades. Then Nick DeBenedetto of IJ walks us th...
Jun 13, 2025•53 min
With the recent major tariff rulings we had to pull in a major tariff expert, Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute. Scott digs into the “shocking decision,” as even he puts it, from the Court of International Trade declaring many of the recent “emergency” tariffs unlawful. He takes a look at what’s behind the opinion and what’s next as the case goes on appeal to the Federal Circuit and perhaps also to the Supreme Court. The law the tariffs are justified under might not even allow for tariffs, b...
Jun 06, 2025•45 min
Fans of truckers should enjoy this episode, although they may grow angry hearing about a truck stop that never was to be. Tahmineh Dehbozorgi of IJ tells us of a property owner in Georgia who wanted to turn his land by a highway into a truck stop. But the county was dead set against him, leading to a decades-long zoning battle. A gas station would be OK, but not if it looks more like a place where truckers can fuel their rigs and get a little rest. In the end, when the controversy finally reache...
May 30, 2025•54 min
Sometimes a short ride goes a long way. Casey Mattox of Stand Together comes on to tell us how a dirt biker in Nevada may end up making some constitutional history. Agents of the Bureau of Land Management gave the dirt biker a citation for riding without a license-plate light. His public defender argued the underlying law was unconstitutional because Congress hadn’t given the Bureau an “intelligible principle” to guide the underlying traffic regulation and thus violated the nondelegation doctrin...
May 23, 2025•56 min
Two federal appellate opinions involving a murder and whether justice was served. First, IJ’s Dan Alban reports on a Sixth Circuit case where a man alleges he was wrongfully accused and spent seven years in jail waiting for trials on various false charges, including not just murder but others too—including sodomy—and where the trials never happened. All of this, the man claims, was because of a conspiracy directed toward getting him to testify—and lie—in another case. It’s a crazy story that the...
May 16, 2025•47 min
Constitutional rights protect everyone, even people we might not be terribly fond of. This week we discuss two defendants who perhaps don’t deserve a lot of sympathy but nevertheless had their rights vindicated in a way that protects those rights more broadly. First, an IJ alumna, Anna Goodman Lucardi, rejoins Short Circuit to update us on goings on in the Fifth Circuit where the court applied last year’s SCOTUS case about jury trial rights, SEC v. Jarkesy , to a similar situation involving the ...
May 09, 2025•48 min
All kinds of constitutional goodies this week, from sovereign immunity to the First Amendment right to dance. But we begin with our annual Kentucky Derby preview from IJ’s Kentucky boy, Brian Morris. After that Brian keeps things local with a case from the Derby’s home circuit, the Sixth, which features another old favorite of the podcast, Ex parte Young . That precedent helps a pipeline company with some litigation against the governor of Michigan concerning an easement under the Straits of Mac...
May 02, 2025•52 min
Short Circuit went mile high for a live show before the students at Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver. The focus was qualified immunity. That’s because Colorado led the way with qualified immunity reform a few years ago when its legislature adopted SB 20-217, which created a cause of action for suing state and local officials when they violate rights protected by the state constitution and also made sure that qualified immunity wouldn’t get in the way. Our panel were three local e...
Apr 25, 2025•44 min
An old friend returns to Short Circuit, but it’s not a guest. It’s a case, Villarreal v. City of Laredo , where police retaliated against a citizen journalist. We’ve talked about the matter a few times before, most recently last year when the Supreme Court was considering whether to take it. The thing is, the Court did take the case, reversed what the Fifth Circuit did on qualified immunity, and remanded for a do over based on IJ’s victory last year, Gonzalez v. Trevino . Which the Fifth Circuit...
Apr 18, 2025•55 min
Last week the Short Circuit staff celebrated ten years of our inexhaustive coverage of the federal courts of appeals. At the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. we welcomed about 150 of our closest friends to an evening of reminiscing about “how it all began” with John Ross, Robert McNamara, and Clark Neily plus a “showcase panel” discussing the future of the federal circuits with moderator Ben Field eliciting comment from retired judges Kent Jordan (Third Circuit) and Diane Wood (Seventh Circuit...
Apr 11, 2025•33 min
Bad news for our AI listeners this week. The D.C. Circuit ruled that you cannot be the “author” of a copyrighted work. Only humans get that perk. Dan Knepper of IJ comes by to explain this latest victory in humanity’s war against the machines. Dan also lays out how the court actually kind of dodged some of the trickier issues when it comes to artificial intelligence and copyright law, but notes that those may be coming soon. IJ’s Dan Nelson (no relation) then steps up and takes us on a trek to W...
Apr 04, 2025•45 min
Most weeks we summarize two, sometimes three, cases from the federal courts of appeals. This week we provide to you free of charge (as always) one, single, case. But, hang on, it has four opinions! It’s also 169 pages, which is way way more than our guests usually read for all an episode’s cases put together. We did, however, so you don’t have to. The matter is about a Florida public school that didn’t abide by the wishes of a child’s parents when it comes to what pronouns to use for the child. ...
Mar 28, 2025•48 min
Is stretching out one’s middle finger at the police protected by the First Amendment? And whether it is or not, can the police trump up charges and assault someone who flips that bird? We dig into those deep constitutional issues with Jaba Tsitsuashvili of IJ when he discusses an Eighth Circuit case about a man stopped in Des Moines, Iowa. The police claim it was because he drove dangerously. The courts bought that—until the man got a hold of the video. It showed that the police may not have bee...
Mar 21, 2025•40 min
Often in old constitutional cases you see judges of yonder years invoking this mysterious substance called “the police power.” It’s something that has fallen out of a lot of our constitutional conversations, and unfortunately when it’s remembered today it’s often taken to mean “the government can do whatever it wants.” We take an episode to try and set things straight. Joining us is Professor Daniel B. Rodriguez of Northwestern, who has written a book to explain what the police power is, where i...
Mar 14, 2025•55 min
What’s the difference between a campaign contribution and a bribe? More than the Sixth Circuit seemed to think. Or so argues Paul Sherman of IJ about a recent appeal of a bribery prosecution of a Cincinnati city councilmember. The councilmember was speaking to a developer and asking for a contribution. Unknown to him, the developer was working with the FBI and wearing a wire. They had some conversations about contributions and approving projects that were very confusing and also raised important...
Mar 07, 2025•46 min
A long-time friend of the Institute for Justice, Robert Thomas, joins us this week. For years he’s litigated property rights cases across the country, lately for the Pacific Legal Foundation, and also blogged his adventures—and a whole bunch of other property rights news—at inversecondemnation.com. With some years since his last visit to Short Circuit, he comes back to discuss a recent North Carolina case where the legislature revived some claims after a statute of limitations had lapsed. Was th...
Feb 28, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Everyone agrees we need to build more homes. But what if those homes are going to be in your backyard? For some reason that possibility often leads to discoveries of endangered species. Ben Field of IJ joins us to report on an environmental case from the Fourth Circuit where the dispute came down to whether new homes would hurt a species of bat. The problem is no one had seen a bat. So are they really endangered? And what does this have to do with the famous snail darter “species” from a 1970s S...
Feb 21, 2025•46 min
You probably know that all-too-many jobs require a license to work. But how is that license administered, who enforces its rules, and who makes the decision on whether to take the license away? Almost always it’s a board composed of people with the same license. Rebecca Haw Allensworth joins us to discuss her new book The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong . Unlike other studies on licensing it digs deep into how licensing boards operate, what their inc...
Feb 14, 2025•53 min
Two cases, from the Fourth and Sixth Circuits, came out within just a few days of each other, and each was about a city tearing a house down. And whether that was OK. They came to different conclusions, partly because one seemed to have been litigated a bit better, but also for other reasons we discuss. First, IJ’s Christian Lansinger describes a Virginia property that wasn’t in great shape, but also where the officials didn’t act quite right before they tore it down for being a nuisance. Unfort...
Feb 06, 2025•54 min
We welcome back Easha Anand of Stanford Law’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic for her third (or is it fourth?) appearance. Last time she was on she had not yet argued at the Supreme Court, but now she’s done it four times. She tells us if it gets easier (not so far) and then gives a report on a recent Third Circuit case where the court got qualified immunity all wrong. In ruling on a malicious prosecution claim the court helped the pernicious doctrine of QI grow from just being about rights to a...
Jan 31, 2025•48 min
If you have a greenhouse, and a government agent sees it on Google Maps, is that fact probable cause to charge you with growing illegal cannabis, fine you $10,000 a day, and not give you a hearing for years? Humboldt County, California thought it was and threatened ruinous fines against innocent property owners for years in an abusive enforcement scheme. IJ represents innocent property owners in the county who had to take their case to the Ninth Circuit to move forward with their constitutional ...
Jan 24, 2025•59 min
