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2026-04-18T07:00:00Z

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Virginia's Unconstitutional Effort to Strip Property Tax Exemptions From Pro-Confederate Groups

2026-04-17T23:11:35Z

Logo of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. (NA)

Earlier this week, Virginia Governor Abigal Spanberger signed into law a bill stripping property tax exemptions from various pro-Confederate nonprofit organizations:

On Monday, Virginia's governor, Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat and the state's first female governor, signed into law a bill that eliminates tax exemptions for organizations connected to the Confederacy.

HB167, passed by Democrats in the Virginia house and senate, specifically removes the Virginia division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial, the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, along with other groups, from the state's list of organizations that are exempt from state property taxes.

While well-intentioned, this law nonetheless violates the First Amendment. I do not say that because I have any sympathy for the groups in question. I hate the Confederacy and all it stood for, oppose attempts to whitewash its reputation by claiming it wasn't established for the purpose of defending the evil institution of slavery, support taking down Confederate monuments, and oppose right-wing efforts to restore restore military base names honoring Confederate generals.

Thus, I very much sympathize with what the New York Times describes as the bill sponsors' desire to "distance Virginia from its Confederate past." As a Virginia resident and a state employee (professor at a Virginia state university), I agree the state should repudiate the Confederacy rather than honor it.

But this is not the way to do it. It seems obvious the groups in question lost their tax exemptions because of state officials' hostility to their views. While those views are indeed odious, eligibility for tax exemptions should not depend on viewpoints. Making them so dependent violates the First Amendment, which - among other things - forbids conditioning government benefits and exemptions on political and social views.

Imagine a red state legislature enacting bill discriminatorily denying nonprofit tax exemptions to left-wing "social justice" groups, or groups promoting racial minority group rights (such as the NAACP), groups promoting abortion rights, and so on. Such a bill would obviously violate the First Amendment. The Virginia law targeting pro-Confederate groups is much the same, differing only in its ideological valence.

One could try to defend the bill on the grounds that it was just amending a preexisting law specifically singling out these groups for property tax exemptions. If the state legislature can pass a law singling out certain groups by name for tax exemptions, then it can also repeal it.

I agree that the state is not required to continue these property tax exemptions forever. But there is an important difference between the original law, and this new one. The preexisting law gave property tax exemptions to a wide range of nonprofit civic and historic preservation groups, not just those espousing a particular ideology. The groups appear to have been chosen based on function not viewpoint. Here is the complete list of organizations granted exemptions, which includes veterans groups, historic preservationists, groups promoting the arts, and more:

the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, the Association for the Preservation of Petersburg Antiquities, Historic Richmond Foundation, the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union, the Virginia Historical Society, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Incorporated, the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation, Incorporated, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial, Incorporated, George Washington's Fredericksburg Foundation, Home Demonstration Clubs, 4-H Clubs, the Future Farmers of America, Incorporated, the posts of the American Legion, posts of United Spanish War Veterans, branches of the Fleet Reserve Association, posts of Veterans of Foreign Wars, posts of the Disabled American Veterans, Veterans of World War I, USA, Incorporated, the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of Virginia, the Manassas Battlefield Confederate Park, Incorporated, the Robert E. Lee Memorial Foundation, Incorporated, the Virginia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the General Organization of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Memorial Foundation of the Germanna Colonies in Virginia, Incorporated, the Lynchburg Fine Arts Centers, Incorporated, Norfolk Historic Foundation, National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, Historic Alexandria Foundation, and the Lynchburg Historical Foundation.

The new law strips property tax exemptions from the pro-Confederate groups, while leaving them in place for all the others. That's pretty obvious discrimination based on political ideology. The Virginia state legislature could end this tax exemption for all the groups in question, or reduce it in various ways. It could eliminate some groups but not others based on nonideological criteria. But it cannot do so based purely on the views of the groups in question.

Such viewpoint discrimination with respect to tax exemptions and government benefits is a potentially very dangerous tool that government can use to penalize opposition (even as it rewards its supporters). If courts were to uphold the Virgina law against First Amendment challenges, it would set a dangerous precedent that state and federal officials of various political stripes could exploit to target their opponents.

Even if you trust our current Democratic governor and state legislature with this kind of power, I bet you don't have similar confidence in the Republicans (and vice versa). The Trump Administration has been trying to find ways to strip tax exemptions from nonprofit groups opposed to its agenda, including various left-wing ones. If you think Trump's efforts along these lines are unconstitutional (and they are), then the same reasoning applies to the new Virginia law.

The truth is neither Democratic politicians nor Republican ones can be trusted with the authority to dole out and remove tax exemptions and other benefits based on ideology. That's one of the reasons why we have a First Amendment in the first place.

And here, as elsewhere, freedom of speech cannot be limited to those who espouse viewpoints we like. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously put it, this right must include "freedom for the thought that we hate." It must extend even to those with deeply odious and reprehensible views - including, in this case, apologists for the Confederacy.

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Elon Musk's Mistaken Call for a 'Universal High Income'

2026-04-17T21:08:08Z

Even before artificial intelligence was a meaningful force in the economy, technologists, politicians, and policy wonks of all political persuasions have endorsed a universal basic income to cope with the mass unemployment that will be caused by the AI revolution.

The familiar case is that an AI-powered economy will be able to automate most economic production, making the economy as a whole much richer, but leaving the average person jobless and destitute. The solution is then to redistribute some of the gains from AI to the public by sending everyone, regardless of income, a check.

Businessman Elon Musk has gone one step further by calling for a "universal HIGH INCOME" to pay for the AI-induced unemployment, which he suggested would be inflation-free thanks to the downward pressure AI will put on prices.

Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.

AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 17, 2026

Musk is almost certainly right that AI will put downward pressure on prices, as one would expect of any productivity-enhancing technology.

He's mistaken in believing that this makes a universal income (regardless of whether it's basic or "HIGH") a wise policy.

Even in a future in which AI does revolutionize the economy, we will not see technologically driven mass unemployment. In fact, a universal basic income would likely result in more of the joblessness it's meant to mitigate.

To the first point, the industrial revolution has been outsourcing more and more tasks to labor-saving machines for roughly 300 years now. While this ongoing process has certainly made lots of individual jobs obsolete, it has not made jobs generally obsolete.

Excepting the monthly ups and downs of the unemployment rate, the total number of jobs in the economy continues to rise precipitously in the long run.

If labor-saving technology destroyed the need for labor, we should have fewer jobs today than ever before. We don't. Even as farms and factories employ fewer people, we keep finding ways to keep ourselves busy.

The AI boosters and doomers argue that this time will be different, because unlike spinning jennies, combine harvesters, and email, AI will eventually be smarter than humans at everything. When there's nothing that flesh-and-blood humans can do better than machines, we'll end up doing nothing at all.

These arguments are obviously speculative because we don't have artificial general intelligence yet. Even when we do, it's reasonable to assume that humans will continue to have employable comparative advantages, if only because humans prize human interaction.

There are lots of jobs today that could be automated but aren't. Plenty of people work in offices even if their tasks could be completed remotely. So long as people are social creatures, I can only assume we'll find something marketable to do with our time.

Outside of speculative future scenarios, here in the real world, the economic impact of AI continues to look similar to the impacts of past productivity-enhancing technological innovations. That's true even in industries that have been most influenced by AI.

Language translation is something that AI has long been pretty good at, and language translation services have become increasingly automated over time.

When journalist Timothy Lee looked at the impact of AI on the industry in 2023, he found that the technology had caused prices for translation to fall, and more consumption of translation services. Translators themselves were adapting by either specializing in translation of legal or medical texts (which still requires human oversight), using AI to increase their productivity, or dropping out of the industry.

The effects of AI on translators weren't all positive. But that basic story of falling prices, rising productivity, some jobs disappearing, and others becoming more specialized sounds a lot like every industry revolutionized by technology.

The evidence that AI will finally be the technology that puts everyone out of work just isn't there.

Economic transitions don't happen automatically. It will take time for people to find new jobs as AI destroys the old ones.

That's precisely why a universal basic income or ("HIGH INCOME") would be so dangerous to adopt.

A pretty robust finding in the research is that giving people unconditional cash grants leads them to work less and even stop working at all if the benefits are generous enough.

Pairing advancing AI with a universal basic income would give people a major incentive not to work, right as many existing jobs are being automated away. Instead of people finding their next comparative advantage in an economy being made more productive but also automated by AI, many would probably just stay home instead.

Far from mitigating the employment effects of AI, a universal income would seem to usher in the jobless dystopia that those convinced of AI's transformative effects are worried about.

We should have a little faith in humans and technology. For centuries, technological progress has made us richer while creating more jobs. The only way AI will be different is if we use its productivity gains to pay people not to work.

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Pete Hegseth Wants the D.C. Circuit To Let Him Punish a Senator for Criticizing Him

2026-04-17T22:53:13Z

Mark Kelly, a Democrat, is an American citizen and the senior U.S. senator representing Arizona. He serves on the Senate's Armed Services Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence. But according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Kelly's status as a retired Navy captain constrains what he is allowed to say in those other capacities. Hegseth thinks he has the authority to punish Kelly, a legislator whose job includes oversight of Hegseth's department, for criticizing his leadership of the Pentagon and the Trump administration's military policies.

In February, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, rejected that astonishing claim, deeming it inconsistent with the First Amendment. Leon issued a preliminary injunction that barred Hegseth from "giving effect" to a letter of censure that faulted Kelly for saying things that irked Hegseth and from penalizing Kelly by reducing his retirement grade and pension. Now Hegseth is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to override that injunction, reiterating his argument that retired military officers are subject to punishment, potentially including criminal prosecution, for political speech that he unilaterally deems "prejudicial to good order and discipline in the armed forces."

In an amicus brief filed on Friday, 73 former admirals, generals, and service secretaries who held positions under presidents of both major parties emphasize the alarming implications of that position. Hegseth has taken "the unprecedented step of punishing a U.S. Senator and retired Navy Captain for accurate statements of law and criticisms of federal policy," they note. "No retired servicemember could be lawfully sanctioned for these statements, least of all one whose public office requires that he speak on these issues."

If Hegseth's vendetta against Kelly were allowed to proceed, the brief warns, it "would chill public participation by veterans everywhere. Diverse viewpoints are critical to a free marketplace of ideas, and silencing veteran voices would be especially harmful—depriving the public of experienced and informed views on critical matters of national security."

According to the brief, that threat already has had an intimidating impact. "Amici are aware of many fellow veterans who would participate in public debate, but are declining to do so today, fearing official reprisal," it says. "This chilling effect risks silencing dissent from those who served in uniform—a critical ingredient in American self-governance dating back to those who fought for our independence."

Hegseth's beef with Kelly stems mainly from a November 18 video in which he and five other Democratic members of Congress reminded military personnel of their duty to "refuse illegal orders." That obligation is legally uncontroversial. "Members of
the armed forces must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit
law of war violations," the Defense Department says. "Through rigorous instruction and tragic lessons from history," Pam Bondi, who served as President Donald Trump's attorney general until last month, noted in 2024, "military officers are trained not to carry out unlawful orders, and they know they may be held criminally liable if they [do] carry out such orders."

The video did not give any specific examples of unlawful orders, but it was critical of the Trump administration. "This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens," Kelly et al. said. Addressing "members of the military," they noted that "you all swore an oath to protect and defend" the Constitution. But "right now," they warned, "the threats to our Constitution aren't just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders." Although "we know this is hard" and "it's a difficult time to be a public servant," they added, "your vigilance is critical" and "we have your back."

Trump was apoplectic. "It's called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL," he wrote on Truth Social. "Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL." He added that "their words cannot be allowed to stand" because "we won't have a Country anymore!!!"

Hegseth echoed that assessment. "The video made by the 'Seditious Six' was despicable, reckless, and false," Hegseth said in an X post. "Encouraging our warriors to ignore the orders of their Commanders undermines every aspect of 'good order and discipline.' Their foolish screed sows doubt and confusion—which only puts our warriors in danger." While "five of the six individuals in that video do not fall under [military] jurisdiction," he added, Kelly "is still subject to [the Uniform Code of Military Justice]—and he knows that."

The letter of censure that Hegseth sent Kelly on January 5 falsely stated that Kelly had advocated "resistance to lawful orders"—a mischaracterization that Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate repeats over and over again in his D.C. Circuit brief. Hegseth also inaccurately claimed that Kelly "identified [himself] as 'a Captain in the United States Navy.'" Kelly actually said, "I was a captain in the United States Navy" (emphasis added).

In addition to the video, Hegseth cited "a sustained pattern of public statements that characterized lawful military operations as illegal and counseled members of the Armed Forces to refuse orders related to those operations." Notably, he did not quote any specific statements fitting the latter description.

Kelly had been critical of Trump's domestic military deployments. He participated in hearings on the subject and co-sponsored legislation that would have increased congressional oversight and restricted the president's use of the National Guard. He also criticized Trump's murderous military campaign against suspected cocaine smugglers. But judging from the evidence that Hegseth has been able to muster, Kelly never explicitly "counseled members of the Armed Forces to refuse orders" related to specific "operations."

The closest Kelly came to that was when he was asked, during a November 30 interview on CNN, whether "a second strike to eliminate any survivors" of a U.S. attack on an alleged drug boat would constitute "a war crime"—specifically, a violation of the rule against attacking shipwrecked sailors. "It seems to," Kelly said. "I have got serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over." He added that he would have refused to follow such an order.

Hegseth resented Kelly's criticism of the boat strikes, which he said amounted to an accusation that Hegseth was guilty of war crimes. Hegseth complained that Kelly had defended the video, that he had described the principle it enunciated as "non-controversial," and that he had said "intimidation would not work" to silence him. Hegseth also did not like it when Kelly said he would "ALWAYS defend the Constitution." And he was mad that Kelly had faulted him for "firing admirals and generals" and surrounding himself with "yes men."

This catalog of complaints is hard to square even with the position that Shumate takes on Hegseth's behalf. Shumate concedes that "retired servicemembers like Kelly undoubtedly…have a broad right to criticize military policy, participate in public debate, and express even vehement disagreement with military leaders." Hegseth nevertheless seems to view criticism of him as inherently threatening to national security.

As Hegseth told it, the unifying theme of Kelly's comments was his determination to interfere with military discipline. "When viewed in totality, your pattern of conduct demonstrates specific intent to counsel servicemembers to refuse lawful orders," Hegseth wrote. "This pattern demonstrates that you were not providing abstract legal education about the duty to refuse patently illegal orders. You were specifically counseling servicemembers to refuse particular operations that you have characterized as illegal."

Hegseth averred that Kelly had "undermine[d] the chain of command," "counsel[ed] disobedience," "create[d] confusion of duty," brought "discredit upon the Armed Forces," and engaged in "conduct unbecoming of an officer." Those sins, he said, amply justified censure and might justify cutting Kelly's retirement pay. "If you continue to engage in conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline," he warned, "you may subject yourself to criminal prosecution or further administrative action."

In defense of these actions, Hegseth cites Parker v. Levy, a 1974 case in which the Supreme Court upheld speech restrictions imposed on active-duty service members. That case involved Capt. Howard Levy, an Army physician assigned to Fort Jackson in South Carolina during the Vietnam War. Levy had publicly said that black soldiers "should refuse to go to Viet Nam and if sent should refuse to fight because they are discriminated against and denied their freedom in the United States." He also stated that "Special Forces personnel are liars and thieves and killers of peasants and murderers of women and children."

As Kelly's lawyers note in their D.C. Circuit brief, that situation was starkly different from the senator's. "Far from resting on all fours with this case, Parker involved an
active-duty officer directly urging soldiers at his wartime military post to refuse specific orders to deploy and fight," they say. "Senator Kelly, by contrast, is a retired officer and legislator who publicly called, alongside other Members of Congress, for adherence to settled law, not defiance of it. Nor have Defendants ever cited a single case expanding Parker's application from active-duty servicemembers to retirees like Senator Kelly."

Leon made the same point when he issued his preliminary injunction. "Secretary Hegseth relies on the well-established doctrine that military servicemembers enjoy less vigorous First Amendment protections given the fundamental obligation for obedience and discipline in the armed forces," he wrote. "Unfortunately for Secretary Hegseth, no court has ever extended those principles to retired servicemembers, much less a retired servicemember serving in Congress and exercising oversight responsibility over the military. This Court will not be the first to do so!"

The defendants "rest their entire First Amendment defense on the argument that the more limited First Amendment protection for active-duty members of the military extends to a retired naval captain," Leon noted. If they are wrong about that, as Leon concluded they were, Hegseth's retaliation against Kelly is obviously unconstitutional, since the speech that triggered it is "unquestionably protected" by the First Amendment, as Leon also held.

Urging the D.C. Circuit to overturn that decision, Shumate argues that Kelly is still part of the armed forces, noting that retired officers theoretically can be called back to active duty "as a manpower source of last resort after other sources are determined not to be available" or as "a source for unique skills not otherwise obtainable." But even in that unlikely event, Kelly's lawyers note, Defense Department policy says those officers "should be deployed [only] to civilian defense jobs." Shumate nevertheless maintains that Kelly "may be recalled to active duty 'at any time'" to "command the very servicemembers whose disobedience he just urged"—a claim that Kelly's lawyers call "far-fetched at best."

The government "cannot justify sweeping restrictions on a retiree's speech based on the hypothetical threat of recall to active duty," says the brief from former admirals, generals, and service secretaries. "Lawful recalls are extremely rare," they note, and "recall for the clear purpose of retaliating against a retiree for their protected speech" would violate the First Amendment. "A recall like the one hypothesized by the government would be, in our understanding, without precedent," they add. "For good reason: the government's power to address legitimate staffing exigencies does not authorize a perpetual gag order over every retired military member's political speech."

The post Pete Hegseth Wants the D.C. Circuit To Let Him Punish a Senator for Criticizing Him appeared first on Reason.com.

Eric Swalwell, Pope Fight, Tax Day Woes

2026-04-17T20:39:18Z

Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi discuss the allegations against former congressman Eric Swalwell and how that will affect the gubernatorial race in California. Then they jump to talking about President Donald Trump's feud with the pope and the "shadow fleet" in Iran. Finally, they end by defending Waymo and autonomous vehicles and complaining about filing their taxes.

0:00—All things Eric Swalwell

13:21—Katie Porter's role in Swalwell's downfall

16:14—Former Lt. Gov. of Virginia Justin Fairfax

23:01—Is it easier to sift through sexual assault allegations now with the internet?

27:09—Police in TV shows are "the biggest morons."

31:03—The pope is feuding with Trump.

40:54—Christian explains the "shadow fleet" in Iran.

43:38—Robby finally finished his fantasy novel.

51:34—Richard Hanania's essay about AI writing

1:08:34—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is so bad on economics and AI.

1:16:34—D.C. mayor brought back the teen curfew

1:21:04—Robby and Christian did not fight as children.

1:29:10—Doing taxes drives Robby and Christian crazy.

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Alabama Supreme Court to Cops: It's OK To Force a Pastor Watering Flowers To Show His ID

2026-04-17T21:08:54Z

A recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling has vastly expanded police power in the state, holding that law enforcement can demand physical identification under the state's stop-and-identify law when someone provides "incomplete or unsatisfactory" answers to police questions about their name, address, and actions during a police stop.

Although Alabama's law clearly requires some individuals to carry ID, like drivers and voters, the state supreme court's ruling seems to imply a general requirement for individuals to carry identification at all times—even when watering flowers.

On May 22, 2022, Michael Jennings, a pastor who lives in Childersburg, Alabama, southeast of Birmingham, was approached by a police officer while watering flowers. Body cam footage shows an officer responding to a 911 call about a suspicious person and asking Jennings about the vehicle in the driveway and the house. "It's my neighbor's vehicle," Jennings answered. "Well, they're saying that this vehicle isn't supposed to be here, and you're not supposed to be here," continued the officer.

"I'm supposed to be here," Jennings replied. "I'm Pastor Jennings. I live across the street….I'm looking after their house while they're gone, watering their flowers.

Apparently unsatisfied with Jennings' forthcoming response, the officer then asks Jennings for "identification" while gesturing as if holding a card. "Oh no, man, I'm not going to give you no ID….I ain't did nothing wrong," Jennings responds. Agitated over the officers' continued requests to produce identification, Jennings begins walking away. A second officer places him in handcuffs as the men continue to argue and ultimately places him under arrest.

A few minutes later, the neighbor who had placed the initial 911 call speaks with the officers. Answering whether Jennings has permission to water the flowers, the neighbor replies, "He may, because they are friends, and they went out of town today. So he may be watering their flowers." "That would be completely normal," she continues. "This is probably my fault."

Under the Alabama law, an officer "may stop any person abroad in a public place whom he reasonably suspects is committing, has committed or is about to commit a felony or other public offense and may demand of him his name, address and an explanation of his actions." (emphasis added.) But despite Jennings volunteering much of this information from the start and later clarifying his full name when asked, the officers arrested Jennings because he refused to produce physical identification—an item not expressly articulated in the state's law.

Jennings was charged with obstructing a governmental function, a misdemeanor offense punishable by up to one year in jail and a $6,000 fine.

Although the charges against him were later dismissed, Jennings filed a civil federal lawsuit and accused the officers of violating his Fourth Amendment rights by, in part, arresting him without probable cause. And while the district court initially dismissed his suit, finding the officers were immune from civil liability, the 11th Circuit of Appeals disagreed. By reading the text of the Alabama code plainly, the appellate judges found that the officers lacked probable cause to arrest Jennings because they were only authorized to demand three things: his name, address, and an explanation of his actions.

"While it is always advisable to cooperate with law enforcement," wrote the appellate court, "Jennings was under no legal obligation to provide his ID." The 11th Circuit reversed the district court's decision to dismiss.

But rather than simply reopen the case as instructed, the district court turned to the Alabama Supreme Court to clarify whether officers are prohibited under state law from demanding physical identification if they receive an "incomplete or unsatisfactory oral response" under the state's stop-and-identify law. In answering that question, the Alabama Supreme Court effectively overruled the appellate court, deciding that "Alabama law is clear—once an officer has reasonable suspicion to believe that a suspect is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a felony or other public offence, [the law] empowers the officer to demand that the suspect disclose his or her name and address in a format that would allow the officer to affirmatively identify the suspect," and that "the suspect bears the burden to completely identify himself."

Although normal for a district court to ask for the state supreme court's input on legal questions, it is decidedly "not normal to circumvent an appellate court's ruling the district court didn't like," Matthew Cavedon, the director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute, told Reason in a recent interview. But now, under the state supreme court's binding decision, the officers who arrested Jennings may now attempt to avoid accountability by claiming the arrest was in line with the stop-and-identify law. "Courts don't like accountability for officers when rights are violated," Cavedon continued.

What's more is that the decision effectively gives a "ton of discretion to police officers," said Cavedon, leaving it up to officers and prosecutors to decide when and where a physical ID will be demanded and opening up "equal protection problems and concerns about discrimination."

After all, there is nothing in the Alabama law that requires pedestrians to carry ID, according to an amicus brief joined by the Cato Institute in this case. But now, it seems, Alabamians better have their physical identification handy, or else face the wrath of unaccountable law enforcement officers.

The post Alabama Supreme Court to Cops: It's OK To Force a Pastor Watering Flowers To Show His ID appeared first on Reason.com.

Short Circuit: An inexhaustive weekly compendium of rulings from the federal courts of appeal

2026-04-17T19:10:59Z

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.

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.
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.
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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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."
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.
"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.
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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Yale Admits Self-Censorship and Political Bias Are Eroding Trust in Higher Education

2026-04-17T19:23:34Z

Last year, Yale University President Maurie McInnis formed a committee of Yale faculty members to "undertake a project of thorough self-examination." She wanted to know: Why is the public losing trust in higher education institutions like Yale?

This week, after a year of gathering input from students, faculty, journalists, and critics of higher education, the committee released its findings: The culprits for this erosion of trust, as The New York Times summarized, are "Schools like Yale."

The report identified several reasons Yale has lost public favor, including grade inflation, bureaucratic bloat, rising tuition costs, and controversial admissions practices. Notably, the report details at length Yale's shortcomings regarding "matters of free speech, political bias, and self-censorship."

The committee writes that Yale has "repeatedly affirmed" the Woodward Report, a pro–free speech document adopted by the school in 1975.

"Even so," the committee admits, "the campus has not been immune from pressures toward conformity, intimidation, and social shaming that have affected the rest of higher education and, indeed, the rest of American society. Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that a great deal of campus life is now lived online. "

The report also references the infamous Halloween incident at Yale from 2015, where school administrators emailed the student body and told them not to wear culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. A Yale lecturer subsequently told students to make their own choices about their costumes and quoted her husband (a Yale professor), who advised students to either look away when they see an offensive costume or tell the person why they find the costume offensive. Students surrounded the professor on campus and demanded that he apologize or resign. The viral video of the confrontation sparked national debate about political correctness, student safe spaces, and free expression.

"Few episodes have done more to raise public questions about Yale's commitment to freedom of expression and open, reasoned debate," the report says.

Reason's Robby Soave warned of the incident's chilling effect on speech at the time, writing, "a great many students, it seems, don't actually desire a campus climate where such matters are up for debate. By their own admission, they want anyone who disagrees with them branded a threat to their safety and removed from their lives."

And it appears the chilling effect on speech has only worsened since 2015. The report, citing a 2025 university survey, says that nearly a third of undergraduate respondents said they did not feel free to express their political beliefs on campus. The committee notes that the figure is "up from 17 percent in 2015," the time of the Halloween episode. The report also says, "post-doctoral fellows and international students at Yale report that they now hesitate to speak out, even about their own research, for fear of government retaliation."

According to the report, no subject was "more contested" than the issue of ideological conformity on campus. The report notes that among Yale faculty in 2025, "registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 36 to 1 across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management," according to an estimate by the Buckley Institute. While conservative students "said they had found a real home at Yale," there were communities and classes in which they felt unwelcome. Some alumni worry "the campus was trending toward intellectual and ideological conformity," while other "members of the Yale community pushed back against that narrative," seeing "the issue of intellectual diversity as a smokescreen for mounting restrictions on academic freedom."

The Yale faculty members say the university has taken steps to address these problems and encourage a more open academic environment, including adopting an institutional neutrality policy. The report also lists recommendations for how the school should foster open inquiry and expression going forward.

Yale's self-critical examination is refreshing to see, even if it's long overdue. Still, the university has a long way to go before it can live up to its free speech promises. Committee reports by tenured faculty and top-down university policies might be the first step, but they can only go so far in ensuring that students and staff can freely express their opinions without fear of retribution.

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Jury Finds Live Nation and Ticketmaster To Be Monopolists Over $1.72 Concert Ticket Price Increase

2026-04-17T22:54:24Z

Live Nation and Ticketmaster were found liable for monopolizing parts of the live entertainment market on Wednesday, after a panel of jurors concluded that concertgoers were overcharged a whopping $1.72 per ticket at certain venues.

Live Nation, a venue operator and concert promoter, acquired Ticketmaster, which facilitates primary and secondary ticket sales, in 2010. In 2024, Live Nation was sued by the Justice Department, states, and the District of Columbia for allegedly monopolizing primary ticketing services, concert venues, and promotional services. (The motivation for the suit was misdirected public outrage over resale ticket prices to Taylor Swift's Eras Tour exceeding $2,000, whose sale Ticketmaster did not facilitate.)

In March, Live Nation settled with some of the plaintiffs, including the Justice Department, Arkansas, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, by setting aside a combined $18.6 million for these states and accepting structural remedies.

The District of Columbia and 33 states, however, rejected these terms and continued the case against Live Nation, leading to the Wednesday verdict, which found that Live Nation had monopolized large amphitheaters and tied artists' use of these spaces to use of Live Nation's promotional services. Since Live Nation owns 78 percent of large amphitheaters in the United States, it is hard to avoid Live Nation venues on a major summer tour. But "'hard to avoid' isn't the same as 'formally conditioned,'" says Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics.

Ticketmaster, a subsidiary of Live Nation, was found liable for monopolizing primary ticketing services to major concert venues by facilitating 86 percent of ticketing for these venues, 70 percent of which are controlled by its parent company. The ruling was made despite the number of primary ticketing services (such as AXS and SeatGeek) increasing since Live Nation purchased Ticketmaster, showing that Ticketmaster has not prevented new companies from entering the market.

Still, the existence of competitors does not necessarily imply robust competition. For example, if one firm offers a platform that is far and away superior to the alternatives, it might be able to exercise some degree of pricing power. Case in point, Mitch Helgerson, chief revenue officer of the Minnesota Wild NHL team, testified that SeatGeek had significantly less experience than Ticketmaster in handling high-demand on-sales for concerts and had a long way to go to build up its credibility.

Accordingly, Albrecht says we need to examine Ticketmaster's actions, rather than the number of competitors it may or may not have, to determine if it is a monopolist.

One action cited at trial was Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino telling then–Barclays Center CEO John Abbamondi that if the venue chose another ticketing platform, he would have a hard time delivering tickets without Ticketmaster. (Live Nation's consent decree with the Justice Department "expressly prohibited [Live Nation] from retaliating against any venue that considers or works with another primary ticketing service.")

Albrecht tells Reason that shows promoted by Live Nation at the Barclays Center dropped from 23 to 14 when the venue switched from Ticketmaster to SeatGeek in 2021. Then, when Barclays switched back in 2023, this figure increased to 28, and then 34 one year later.

While this evidence could indicate anticompetitive conduct, it could just as easily be explained by efficiency gains from vertical integration.

Albrecht explains that "integrated firms have real reasons to prefer their own downstream systems — shared fan data, unified [customer relationship management system], faster settlement." Because of this infrastructure, it is cheaper for Live Nation to route "a show into a Ticketmaster-ticketed venue…than rebuilding all of that for SeatGeek each time."

If Ticketmaster had successfully monopolized ticketing for the major concert venue market, the company should have higher profit margins in this market.

Economist Dennis Carlton testified that Ticketmaster's gross profit margin is 3.2 percentage points lower within the major concert venue market than outside of it. If Ticketmaster were extracting rents from fans—that is, behaving like a monopolist—its "inside-market margins should be higher than outside," explains Albrecht. Economist Nicholas Hill, an expert witness for the plaintiffs, affirmed that he did not offer "any evidence of [major concert venues]…being charged monopoly prices" by Ticketmaster.

Regardless, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have been found liable on all counts; the question is not whether they'll be punished, but how severely. If the companies are broken up, consumers should not expect their live entertainment experiences to become significantly cheaper, but to involve more hassle.

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Trump's Iran Deal Looks a Lot Like the Previous Ones He Hated

2026-04-17T18:29:53Z

The best sign of a U.S.-Iranian compromise is both sides insisting that they aren't giving anything up. On Friday morning, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he had reached a deal with Iran to give up its enriched uranium. "No money will exchange hands," he claimed, and the "deal is in no way subject to Lebanon, either," though he also declared that "Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer."

The lady doth protest too much. Axios reports that in Pakistani-brokered talks, the U.S. has offered to unfreeze several billion dollars of Iranian money in foreign banks in exchange for the uranium. And the Israeli press reports that Trump pushed Israel to accept a ceasefire with Lebanon, over the Israeli government's objections, because Iran threatened to walk out of talks.

Meanwhile, the same morning, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared the Strait of Hormuz "completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire, on the coordinated route" announced by Iranian authorities. Iranian officials rushed to downplay Araghchi's statement, claiming that there is actually "no new agreement" on Hormuz, that ships transiting the strait must continue paying Iran a toll, and that Iran was reserving the right to retaliate for the U.S. blockade. The lady, again, doth protest too much.

Trump also claimed that the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports would "REMAIN IN FULL FORCE" until a final peace deal was reached, which "SHOULD GO VERY QUICKLY." While the U.S. military says that it has turned around 19 ships, shipping data show that several Iranian-linked ships have crossed the U.S.-declared blockade line over the past few days.

Of course, nothing is over until it's over. U.S.-Iranian talks have broken down into war twice already. And the Trump administration has used optimistic statements—which later failed to pan out—to pump markets several times. The real test is whether momentum will continue once the U.S.-Iranian ceasefire officially expires next week. An Iranian source told Al Jazeera on Friday afternoon that "we are still at the beginning of the process, not at the level of a finalized agreement."

Ironically, the deal on offer is similar to past deals that Trump bashed Democratic presidents for making. Rather than a total ban on the Iranian nuclear industry, the U.S. and Iran are discussing a temporary freeze on uranium enrichment, with the duration subject to haggling, according to Axios. Back in 2018, the Trump administration had promised to get a nuclear deal with Iran that "never expires."

And Iran would reportedly receive economic relief in exchange. Trump is technically correct that "no money will exchange hands" in the proposed deal, because Iran will get to access its own money, which had been paid out by oil customers into foreign bank accounts that were later frozen by the U.S. Treasury. But when former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden similarly unfroze Iranian money, Trump accused them of giving "American taxpayer dollars" to Iran.

Limits on Iran's missile arsenal, which were a major demand of the Trump administration and Republican hawks before the war, seem to have been dropped from the negotiations. Instead, the administration is insisting that it has "functionally destroyed" Iran's missile force. U.S. military officials disagree.

"Iran retains thousands of missiles and one-way attack UAVs that can threaten U.S. and partner forces throughout the region, despite degradations to its capabilities from both attrition and expenditure," Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. James Adams testified to Congress on Thursday.

Of course, Iran has taken serious damage from the war. Iranian authorities estimate war reconstruction costs at $270 billion, and it will be unable to recover without U.S. sanctions being lifted, which is a major U.S. point of leverage. Moving forward, Israel has won direct U.S. support against Iran and Hezbollah, the pro-Iran militia in Lebanon.

But thousands of innocent people have been killed and millions of people around the world have been pushed into poverty to get to this point, not to mention the potential $1 trillion cost to American taxpayers. And Trump had originally planned for this war to be a three-day operation to overthrow the Iranian government once and for all. If the end result is a deal that was already on the table—or a return to war—then was it all worth it?

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The U.S. Military Has Finally Left Syria

2026-04-17T17:32:40Z

For the first time in a decade, there are no U.S. bases in Syria. The Syrian foreign ministry and U.S. Central Command both announced on Thursday afternoon that U.S. forces had handed over their last base in Syria to the Syrian army. The U.S. military may continue to advise and support the Syrian army without permanent outposts, reports The New York Times.

U.S. troops first entered Syria in 2015 to support Kurdish rebels against the Islamic State group, which lost its last Syrian territory in 2019. President Donald Trump flip-flopped several times in his first term about whether U.S. troops would stay. He declared a U.S. withdrawal in December 2018, backtracked on it, declared another withdrawal in October 2019, and backtracked again after neighboring Turkey invaded Kurdish-held areas of Syria.

U.S. officials pushed to keep a military presence in Syria, shifting its mission from fighting the Islamic State group to confronting Iran and Russia. Trump administration envoy James Jeffrey publicly admitted to playing "shell games" to hide the full size of the U.S. deployment and preempt political pressure to leave.

The Syrian civil war (and the major Russian-Iranian presence) ended with the December 2024 revolution, led by Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former commander in Al Qaeda who became a U.S.-friendly reformer. But the Trump administration considered keeping U.S. forces in Syria for good. Late last year, the U.S. military began joint patrols with the new Syrian army and visited the site of a potential U.S. base to monitor the Syrian-Israeli border.

Events in Syria seem to have made that option completely unpalatable. In December 2025, a Syrian police officer shot up a meeting between Syrian and U.S. troops in Palmyra, killing three Americans. It was a reminder that despite the new Syrian government's eagerness to please Washington, many of its rank-and-file supporters still resented the foreign army on their soil.

Then, in January 2026, negotiations between the Kurdish rebels and the new Syrian government broke down. The Syrian army launched a lightning offensive that forced Kurds to submit to central government rule. Fearing a prison break amid the chaos, the U.S. military evacuated thousands of Islamic State suspects from Syrian Kurdish custody to Iraq. The decade-old alliance that had brought the U.S. military to Syria in the first place was over.

Finally, the war with Iran showed just how vulnerable American troops in the Middle East were to missiles and drones. Unlike the well-defended U.S. fortresses in Israel and the Persian Gulf monarchies, U.S. outposts in Syria were ramshackle affairs that lacked air defenses. A drone attack by Iraqi guerrillas in January 2024 had already killed three U.S. troops on the Syrian-Jordanian border.

The U.S. withdrawal from Syria happened under the best possible circumstances, with a friendly Syrian government in power and a minimum of violence. But it still happened against the will of hawks who wanted the U.S. military in Syria forever—with a constantly shifting justification.

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Trump Ended Free Trade for Mexican Tomatoes. Prices Are Up 23 Percent in the Last Year.

2026-04-17T17:25:07Z

When the Trump administration tore up a trade agreement that allowed fresh tomatoes to be imported from Mexico without tariffs, the White House framed it as a victory for "American farmers, growers, and business owners."

Experts in the produce industry, however, warned that consumers would be paying the price.

The end of the Tomato Suspension Agreement between the U.S. and Mexico was a "big concern," Javier "JJ" Badillo, chair of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas (FPAA)'s tomato division, told FreshFruitPortal.com, a trade publication, in July. Badillo predicted higher prices and diminished volumes of fresh tomatoes, even though it would take "six to nine months" for the consequences to become apparent.

Chalk up another victory for the experts over the politicians.

Nine months after the Trump administration blew up that trade agreement, prices for fresh tomatoes at American grocery stores are skyrocketing. A pound of tomatoes cost an average of $2.26 in March, according to the latest consumer price index report released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). That's the highest price recorded in eight years, and a 15 percent increase from February to March.

Tomato prices are now 23 percent higher than they were in March 2025, according to the BLS. That means tomato prices have risen significantly faster than overall inflation (up 3.3 percent in the past year) and food prices as a whole (which are up 2.7 percent). Even gas prices, which get more attention, are up just 18.9 percent in the past year.

So why are tomatoes suddenly much more expensive? In part, it's because tomatoes imported from Mexico are now subject to tariffs. With the tomato trade agreement gone, Mexican tomatoes are now subject to a tariff of about 17 percent—and, like with many other products, the tariff gets passed along down the supply chain.

There's also been a notable reduction in tomato imports.

"Tomato imports from Mexico declined by over $500 million," reported Joseph Glauber, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in a report published this week. That decline, Glauber notes, was due to the elimination of the "long-standing agreement that allowed Mexico to export tomatoes to the US" and the new tariffs "that resulted in fewer imports."

You might expect higher prices for fresh tomatoes to drive up the price of products made from tomatoes—everything from pizza sauce to ketchup. That's unlikely, however, because the supply chains are actually quite different.

The market for processed tomato products is highly concentrated in the United States. About 95 percent of tomatoes used for processing originate in California. Meanwhile, the U.S. imports about 70 percent of its supply of fresh tomatoes, and the vast majority comes from Mexico.

Higher prices for fresh tomatoes are good news for American farmers, as the White House said last year when terminating the trade agreement. Still, the administration's reasoning is quite telling. As the administration was considering terminating the tomato trade deal, Commerce Department officials told The Wall Street Journal last year that the deal "has failed to protect U.S. tomato growers from unfairly priced Mexican imports."

That's a good illustration of how the Trump administration approaches economic issues. Framing trade in terms of "fairness" is a typical left-wing tactic—and it always misses huge parts of the picture.

Those imported tomatoes from Mexico don't just provide inexpensive salad and sandwich components for Americans. They also support tons of American jobs. A 2025 study calculated that imported tomatoes provided more than $8.3 billion in economic impact in the U.S.

When the Trump administration prioritizes the interests of American tomato farmers over the interests of consumers and the rest of the tomato-related market, it is not scoring a victory for fairness or sound economic principles. It is just playing favorites and expecting everyone else to bear the cost.

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The Gun Debate Hasn't Changed in 500 Years

2026-04-17T16:03:05Z

The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires, by Catherine Fletcher, Princeton University Press, 352 pages, $35

The introduction of firearms was as important as that of the printing press. Or so argues the author of The Firearm Revolution, a fascinating book on the social impact of guns in Europe. Firearms empowered relatively untrained commoners to challenge aristocrats who'd spent their lives mastering expensive arms and armor. Guns enriched skilled artisans, leveled the playing field between the weak and the strong, and disrupted the established order. In the process, they sparked modern-sounding debates over whether the government could effectively regulate such weapons.

The author, Catherine Fletcher, teaches history at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her specialty is early modern Italy—a focus that lends itself well to this subject, given that peninsula's fractured political landscape at the time. Italy's mutually hostile republics, principalities, and possessions coveted the advantages that firearms offered over competing powers. So those states encouraged gunmakers to produce new weapons, they trained troops to use firearms and deployed them in seemingly endless conflicts, and then they found themselves trying and largely failing to curtail the resulting social transformations.

"Many of the arguments raised today in relation to gun control are to be found in sixteenth-century sources," Fletcher notes. "These include calls for restrictions on the ownership of those weapons judged most dangerous, demands from users that they be allowed to keep guns for self-defence," and so on.

Thanks to firearms, a farmer or part-time militiaman could shoot an armored knight off a horse. Fletcher quotes a 16th century critic complaining that "it is very often the case that a manly and brave hero is brought down by a pathetic little brat with a gun."

Princeton University Press

Firearms weren't entirely unique in this regard. Bows—especially crossbows—had long been viewed with suspicion for similar reasons. An 1139 papal decree attempted to ban them as "hateful to God." That decree turned out to be as impotent as modern bans on "assault weapons." And guns were even more democratizing than bows: That brat could put paid to an aristocratic hero because, as Fletcher observes, guns "may well have been cheaper than the crossbow and certainly required less physical strength to shoot than the longbow." They also punched through expensive armor at a distance, and mastering their use required less training than did swords. Political assassins quickly adopted them as tools of the trade.

The hero-cidal "brat" described above acquired his firearm from a burgeoning and soon powerful industry that depended to an extent on government contracts but acquired significant leverage of its own. "Arms control was only ever as strong as the state, and the Renaissance states were often rather weak, which gave arms producers considerable clout," comments Fletcher.

Part of that weakness lay in governments' need to maintain viable arms industries. Occasional contract purchases for guards and militia left fallow times between orders. If producers were to make a living, rulers had to allow exports and, often to their chagrin, civilian sales. Venice attempted to restrict emigration by master firearms artisans who sought greater opportunity elsewhere. These restrictions were often evaded, as we can see from 1548 records of threats by the city-state to confiscate the left-behind property and goods of firearms artisans who had moved to Florence.

One way members of the public became familiar with firearms was through militia service. Militias were well-established by the time arquebuses and other firearms joined the pikes and halberds traditionally issued to militiamen, and the utility of the new weapons was soon apparent. "A gun would more reliably kill the fox eating your chickens than the alternatives," Fletcher writes. It would also put food on the table, defend your home from bandits, and protect yourself from thugs in city streets. Familiar with firearms through militia service, regular people purchased them on their own or pilfered them from armories.

Matchlock arquebuses were handy for killing predators of all sorts, but the smoldering cord needed to ignite a charge didn't make such weapons easy to carry for self-defense. The development of the clockwork mechanism of the wheel lock allowed the transport of weapons that were ready to fire, particularly pistols. Officials responded like modern politicians panicking over "high-capacity" semiautomatic weapons: with restrictions.

"An explicit ban on small wheellocks was in place in Sicily by 1530," reports Fletcher. "Milan…had prohibited wheellocks by 1538."

Weapons control measures were not new to firearms. Even when blades dominated, many places limited where and when weapons could be carried within city walls—with the level of restriction dependent on social class. Carrying weapons of any sort often required licenses, though the frequency with which decrees were issued and reissued suggests that many people ignored such rules. Then as now, the rulers attempting to disarm members of the public were themselves well-protected by guards armed at state expense. Among those who carried weapons were people suspicious of the state, including the growing ranks of Protestants in mostly Catholic Italy.

"In 1553, the Venetian rector Cattarino Zen observed that in Gardone (among other places) 'everyone carries an arquebus and…they're not content with one, but even the women carry two, one in their hand and the other in their belt, both wheellocks, and they're a bad breed, untameable overbearing Lutherans.'"

The references to "everyone" and "even the women" carrying firearms underlines the equalizing power of the new technology. Fletcher doesn't cite the Georgetown historian Carroll Quigley, whose posthumously published Weapons Systems and Political Stability argued that power dynamics between people and the state are largely determined by available weapons. "Only with the arrival of a cheap and convenient hand gun in the nineteenth century and the economic revolution to mass production did men (and women) become equal in power," Quigley wrote in the 1983 book. But Fletcher's extensive research reinforces the point while suggesting that the rebalance of power began centuries earlier than Quigley believed.

"If we can speak of a print revolution in early modern Europe, then we can speak of a firearm revolution, too," Fletcher writes. Both industries enriched new breeds of manufacturers and merchants who had little in common with titled aristocrats. The new technologies enabled ideas to spread (via print) and protected those who adopted such ideas from repression (with guns). And both challenged the old order and the power of those who had once exercised relatively unchallenged dominance.

Unlike many academics, Fletcher produces prose that is engaging and generally easy to read. My only real complaint is that she uses the term handgun in a somewhat unusual way to describe any human-portable firearm rather than a one-handed weapon. But it's easy enough to become accustomed to her meaning, and she's generally careful to differentiate between one- and two-handed firearms, especially as that distinction becomes important with the introduction of wheel locks.

A somewhat surprising omission is any mention of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and its protection for the right to bear arms. That amendment, of course, was a product of a culture that fully came down on one side of the arguments over the role firearms play in the eternal power struggle between individuals and the state—to the point where British attempts to disarm colonists helped spark the American Revolution.

Perhaps the American experience could feature in a follow-up book. There's plenty of room for sequels: The social and economic revolutions sparked by firearms are still playing out, with no end in sight.

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A Flashback On The Two-Year Clause

2026-04-17T15:30:56Z

People often ask me if I always wanted to be a law professor, or if I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer. The answer to both questions is no. My entire youth focused on technology. I went to Staten Island Technical High School, a leading engineering high school. For college, I received a degree in Information, Sciences & Technology at Penn State. I did not take a single constitutional law or political science class in my undergraduate education. (I took one class on business law, but that doesn't really count.)

After graduation, I would begin working at the Department of Defense in Arlington on network security. During the summer between my Junior and Senior year, I decided to apply law school to focus on Intellectual Property. It was not a well thought-out decision. I had no lawyers in my immediate family and I knew nothing about IP. But law schools published these shiny pamphlets promising salaries of $160,000, so I thought it could work well.

I studied for the LSAT for a few weeks. I took two or three sample tests, and did well enough. I took the actual LSAT in October of my senior year and did not plan to take it again. I then applied early decision to George Mason Law School as an evening student. My plan was to work during the day at my office in Arlington, and go to class at night. Mason had a well-regarded IP program. I was aware of the conservative and libertarian reputation (Professor Walter Williams would often guest host on the Rush Limbaugh show), but that is not why I applied there. I did not apply anywhere else. I discussed this background in an article, From Being One L to Teaching One L.

During my 1L year, I fell in love with Constitutional Law. Indeed, for evening students, ConLaw was not taught till the third semester. But I regularly attended FedSoc events on campus and the National Convention. I was hooked. For my 1L summer, I attended the Institute or Justice Bootcamp (as it was then called), and my eyes were opened. I still remember the moment when Clark Neily convinced me that the war on drugs was a mistake. (Clark also told me about this new Second Amendment case he was working on, Parker v. District of Columbia.) Still, I did not even conceive that a career in constitutional law was possible for me. The most likely path, I thought, would be BigLaw.

I applied for on campus recruiting during the start of my 2L year. (I realize today firms recruit students with no grades, but there were still timelines in 2007.) I managed to secure a summer associate position with a D.C. firm. I was beyond thrilled for the opportunity, and the compensation. At the time, the $3,500/week salary was more than double what I was making at the DOD. In the lead-up to the summer, the firm circulated a "get to know you" questionnaire. One of the questions was "What are you interested in?" Of course, I wrote "The Constitution." I didn't give the form much thought.

Summer arrived. After the first day of work, we had a cocktail reception at a swanky club nearby. (To this day, I feel guilty about how much money the firm spent on entertaining law students.) One of the partners came over to me and asked "Were you the person who said he was interested in the Constitution?" He did not mean it in a good way. I said, "Yes." He replied, "The Constitution has nothing to do with my practice." Again, this was my first day on the job, where I was trying to impress the partners to make me a permanent offer.

Perhaps the prudent course for a young Josh would have been to make a joke, and laugh it off. But that's not what I did. I knew the lawyer worked on military contracts. I whipped out my pocket Constitution, and I turned to the Armies Clause in Art. I, § 8, Cl. 12, the Armies Clause. I read it, " The Congress shall have Power . . . To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years. . . ." I said every payment that you work on is authorized by this clause. The partner looked back at me, dumbfounded. He had built a successful practice on military contracts, though I doubt he ever realized or cared what the constitutional basis was those contracts.

At that moment, I realized my future was not in Big Law. The rest of the summer was enjoyable, but I regularly felt something was lacking. For example, I was working on a memo in a government contracts case, and I realized there was a notice problem, so I raised a Due Process argument. The partner told me (correctly) that constitutional issues could not be raised in this administrative proceedings, and to stick to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). By the middle of the summer, I decided that I wanted to clerk. (Back in the day, you would apply to clerkships during your 2L summer.) During my 3L year, I realized that academia would be my path. And I pursued that path. The rest is history.

In a funny way, I may owe my entire career to the obscure Armies Clause. The irony is that the "Two Years" provision of this clause has largely been ignored. Appropriations for the military routinely stretch beyond two years. I have been aware of this problem, but never gave it much thought.

That was, until I saw a new article titled Reviving the Military's Term Limit. Professors Matthew B. Lawrence and Mark Nevitt argue that the two-year limitation was obliterated by 1904 Solicitor General opinion. If this clause's original meaning is restored, then the partner (who may not still be in practice) will realize how the Constitution affects his work.

The post A Flashback On The Two-Year Clause appeared first on Reason.com.

California Progressives Want 'Big Oil' To Fix an Insurance Crisis Created by the State's Price Controls

2026-04-17T14:33:56Z

The Orange County Register Editorial Board once interviewed state Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) about his bill to decriminalize the use of some psychedelics. We questioned the obvious inconsistency between his anti-prohibition stance on mushrooms and his prohibitionist stance on vaping and flavored-tobacco products. He reminded us that he's a San Francisco progressive and not a libertarian. Fair point.

I recall that encounter as I mulled Wiener's Senate Bill 982, which mainly encourages the state attorney general to sue oil companies "for climate-attributable damage to recover costs and losses suffered by the California FAIR Plan." The Fair Access to Insurance Requirement Plan is the state-created, insurance-industry-funded, barebones insurer of last resort. It has been teetering on the fiscal brink since property insurers began exiting the state or reducing their underwriting, thus overloading the plan with customers.

This legislation wants Big Oil to pay for an insurance crisis caused by the state's price controls. This is non-serious lawmaking—a transparent virtue-signal rather than an effort at problem-solving. Wiener is a thoughtful lawmaker who championed groundbreaking housing-deregulation laws, but in this case the San Francisco progressive won out.

What's wrong with drilling oil companies? For starters, it's wrong to pin the state's wildfire-related troubles on companies that sell a legal, highly taxed and regulated product to consumers. Climate change likely has contributed to severe wildfire seasons, but that's a multifaceted public-policy failure. Senate Bill 982 is just a blame game and an effort to get "free" money from a deep-pocketed third party. It's a fancy way to engage in a financial taking.

The bill's supporters rely on conspiratorial hyperbole that would make a MAGA podcaster proud. This is from an op-ed from Wiener and the bill's co-author Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson (D–San Diego): "Large multinational oil and gas corporations spent decades lying to the public about their products' contribution to climate change and working to undermine the transition to cleaner energy sources. They're uniquely responsible for the mess we're in; it's only fair they share the financial consequences."

Oil companies, and opponents of a government-forced transition to windmills and solar panels, have every right to express views that are contrary to the green-energy mantra. There's substantial academic disagreement and new thinking on many aspects of climate change—and numerous places to assess blame for what's ultimately a global challenge.

For instance, California's government has only conducted a tiny portion of the land-clearance work its own CalFIRE says is necessary to reduce wildfire risk. A University of Chicago report found that a single year of California's "wildfire emissions is close to double emissions reductions achieved over 16 years." In other words, the state's own wildfire failures are obliterating its climate goals. Maybe the AG should start by suing the state government.

State officials are now concerned about the exodus of refiners, which is driving up gas prices. If you don't like the oil industry, fine—but good luck powering the world's fourth-largest economy without it. We already have the nation's steepest prices because of our highest-in-the-nation gas taxes, stringent environmental regulations, and special-fuels mandate that limits our ability to buy gasoline from other states. This could be the last straw for refiners foolish enough to remain here.

Fundamentally, this legislation gives short shrift to the real cause of California's insurance crisis: voters and regulators. Californians in 1988 approved Proposition 103, which created a system of price controls. The insurance commissioner gained the power to approve and roll back rates. And the state has failed to implement those regulations in a way that allows insurers to deftly adjust their underwriting and pricing to reflect risk from a changing climate.

After some ferocious wildfire years, insurers faced massive losses. Their risk soared, but the Department of Insurance capped their rates. Inflation also played a role, as it became more costly to rebuild damaged properties. So insurers started exiting the market or stopped writing new policies, thus reducing competition. This is how price controls always backfire. Meanwhile, the best way to keep rates low is to have a vibrant market filled with competitors.

Until recently, California wouldn't even let insurers use catastrophe models to help determine rates. If the climate is warming, then why would insurers have to base rates on past losses rather than forward-looking models?

Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara created the Sustainable Insurance Strategy, which addressed some of the major issues. It sped up the rate-review process, allowed insurers to factor the rising cost of reinsurance policies in their rates, and bolstered the FAIR Plan. Lara also granted painful but necessary rate hikes. There's much more to be done, but several companies have announced their plans to jumpstart California underwriting.

"No one should be priced out of their homes because they can't afford insurance," the senators wrote. Agreed, but this bill substitutes the long, painstaking, and complex work of fixing California's troubled insurance market with finger-pointing and posturing. One needn't be a libertarian to recognize that reality.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post California Progressives Want 'Big Oil' To Fix an Insurance Crisis Created by the State's Price Controls appeared first on Reason.com.

Will the Eleventh Circuit Allow the Endangered Species Act to Commandeer the Florida Department of Environmental Protection?

2026-04-17T14:06:58Z

New Hampshire is not the only state subject to court-ordered commandeering. Next week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit will hear oral argument in Bear Warriors United v. Lambert, in which Florida is appealing a district court order effectively commandeering the state under the Endangered Species Act.

Bear Warriors United (BWU) is an environmental organization "dedicated to defending Florida's wildlife and serving as a powerful voice for nature." Among the species BWU seeks to protect is the manatee, which is currently listed as a "threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

In 2022, BWU filed suit against the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) alleging that it was violating the ESA by failing to adopt and enforce sufficiently stringent regulations governing nitrogen discharges from septic tanks and wastewater treatment plants into the Indian River Lagoon, which is frequented by manatees. This failure, BWU alleges, contributes to eutrophication and the loss of seagrasses upon which the manatees rely and is thus a "take" under Section 9 of the ESA, which prohibits actions that "harm" listed species.

At heart, BWU's claim is that the FDEP is "taking" manatees because it is failing to control the private and other activities that threaten manatee populations. As the district court noted, it is "FDEP's ongoing failure to use its authority to regulate" more stringently that is at issue. Therein lies the problem.

There is reasonable debate about the extent to which the ESA's definition of harm encompasses conduct that affects species indirectly. The Supreme Court embraced a relatively broad definition of "harm" in the Sweet Home decision that encompasses habitat modification that, in turn, impairs the feeding, breeding or nesting activity of listed species. Relying upon this definition, some courts have concluded that omissions--in this case, failure to prevent activities that could adversely affect species--qualify as "harm." This is a controversial conclusion, however, and the Trump Administration has proposed narrowing that definition.

Whatever the proper definition of "harm" is under the ESA, BWU's claim has a larger problem: Under its theory, state governments are obligated to use their regulatory authority to enforce a federal regulatory scheme. This is not a case in which effluent from a state-run sewage treatment plant or other state activities are allegedly harming a listed species. It instead involves a state failing to use its sovereign regulatory authority in a manner that serves the federal government's goals. This is textbook commandeering. Thus even if one is inclined to accept the broad definition of "harm" that some courts have accepted, it cannot be enforced against state governments in this fashion.

The district court dismissed Florida's commandeering concerns in a cavalier (and somewhat incoherent) fashion. After noting in one order that "the anticommandeering doctrine does not bar federal laws that 'regulate state activities, rather than seeking to control or influence the manner in which States regulate private parties'" (quoting Reno v. Condon), the court proceeded to accept BWU's argument that the ESA's take prohibition could be used to control how FDEP regulates private parties. In another order the court correctly noted that "the anticommandeering doctrine does not apply when Congress evenhandedly regulates an activity in which both States and private actors engage" (quoting Murphy v. NCAA), but somehow missed that regulating private septic systems and wastewater treatment plants is not "an activity in which both States and private actors engage." It is, rather, precisely the sort of exercise of sovereign authority that only governments engage in, and is thus precisely what the anticommandeering doctrine protects from federal control.

This is not the first time a lower court has interpreted the ESA in a manner that violates the anticommandeering doctrines. In Strahan v. Coxe (1997), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit concluded Massachusetts could be required to revoke licenses and permits for gillnet and lobster pot fishing under the ESA and Marine Mammal Protection Act without violating the anticommandeering doctrine. In the First Circuit's view, this was just federal supremacy in action, and the state was merely required to comply with federal law. But this misunderstands the dynamic. There is no question a state cannot immunize private action from federal prohibition, but this does not mean a state can be required to regulate or inhibit activity the federal government wishes to control, and this is true even if the state chooses to act within the relevant policy space. This is as true of gillnets and nitrogen discharges as it is of marijuana and gambling.

Although Strahan was wrong (as I discussed here at pp. 428-30), district courts have largely followed the First Circuit's reasoning. This has occurred even though, in 2018, in Murphy v. NCAA, the Supreme Court expressly held that the anticommandeering doctrine prevents the federal government from barring states from permitting a federally targeted activity (in that case, gambling) under state law.

The same principle applies in the environmental context. The federal government is free to regulate nitrogen discharges and other activities that harm listed species, and even to authorize citizen suits to assist in federal law's enforcement. It cannot require states to prohibit such activities, however. And just because a state has chosen to create its own regulatory apparatus, that apparatus cannot be required to apply standards dictated by federal law. Thus however expansively one is inclined to interpret the ESA's take prohibition, it cannot be applied as the district court did here.

I will be curious to hear how the Eleventh Circuit engages with these arguments next week, and whether it recognizes the errors of the First Circuit's analysis. There seems to be lots of confusion about commandeering these days. I also have a draft manuscript ("Conservation Commandeering") which goes into these arguments in greater depth. It will go up on SSRN soon. Until then, stay tuned.

The post Will the Eleventh Circuit Allow the Endangered Species Act to Commandeer the Florida Department of Environmental Protection? appeared first on Reason.com.

FISA Reform Blues

2026-04-17T16:05:55Z

Short-term FISA extension. The House voted early Friday to extend the expiring Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for another 10 days, as members debate whether to include privacy protections in a longer-term extension of the law.

The House vote extends FISA, which was set to expire on Monday, through April 30. Some Republican House members have been demanding that Section 702 of the law, which allows the federal government to collect the communications of foreigners as well as Americans they communicate with without a warrant, be amended to include additional privacy protections.

Some lawmakers want to require that the government get a warrant before it searches Americans' data collected under Section 702.

The White House and Congressional Republicans have been demanding a "clean" FISA extension without any additional privacy safeguards.

Wyden to the rescue. In the upper chamber, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), a longtime FISA reform advocate, is urging his fellow Democrats to oppose a clean reauthorization bill.

"With recent developments in AI supercharging how the government can surveil Americans, Congress must use this upcoming debate to make necessary reforms to all our surveillance laws," wrote Wyden in a letter to his Senate colleagues obtained exclusively by Politico.

See this interview Wyden gave Reason about FISA and internet privacy.

Scenes from D.C.: Riders on the D.C.-area Metro's Red Line can enjoy a quintessential D.C. experience this summer: not riding the Red Line. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), the regional agency that operates the Metro, announced that several stops on the line will be closed from June to September while repairs are performed.

Read my 2023 magazine feature on the D.C. Metro's persistent problems.

QUICK HITS

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives a refreshingly libertarian answer on raw milk.

Rosa DeLauro: "You are the Secretary of Health and Human Services! Is there not some moral responsibility to say don't drink raw milk!"

RFK Jr.: "Every product can contain contaminants. We inform the public and we let people make a choice." pic.twitter.com/MVeOL6vdw5

— Reem Ibrahim (@ReemAmirIbrahim) April 16, 2026

The most cursed headline imaginable. Click if you dare.
President Donald Trump calls the stunt in which he ordered DoorDash to the White House, done to promote his "no tax on tips policy," "a little tacky."

Trump on DoorDash grandma Sharon Simmons's delivery to the White House: "To be honest, it was a little tacky" pic.twitter.com/ID8skObWip

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 17, 2026

Norway gets robotic buses.

For the first time in Norwegian history, a bus will carry passengers in regular traffic without any human behind the wheel. The first pilot without a safety driver was tested Friday, and if all goes as planned, anyone can ride driverless buses starting in May. pic.twitter.com/rlcI9cPfq4

— Joakim (@joakial_) April 16, 2026

Hezbollah appears to be holding to a truce with Israel.

The post FISA Reform Blues appeared first on Reason.com.

Not Judge Judy, Juror Judi—But "Stupid Mistake" Isn't "Actual Malice" for Libel Purposes

2026-04-18T00:41:35Z

From Scheindlin v. Accelerate 360, LLC, decided today by Judge Kyle Dudek (M.D. Fla.):

For many decades, Plaintiff Judy Sheindlin—known to millions of daytime television viewers simply as Judge Judy—has cultivated a public reputation as a tough-on-crime, no-nonsense arbitrator. The defendants in this case, A360 Media, LLC and Accelerate360, LLC (collectively "A360"), operate in a very different sphere: they publish and distribute celebrity news and tabloids, including the National Enquirer and In Touch Weekly.

In April 2024, their worlds collided. A360 published articles claiming that Sheindlin had appeared in a true-crime docuseries to advocate for the resentencing of Lyle and Erik Menendez, the notorious brothers convicted of murdering their parents. The articles reported that Scheindlin felt the brothers had been railroaded. And they quoted her as claiming the trial was "rigged."

It turns out none of this was true. An A360 reporter had watched a clip from the docuseries and mistakenly identified a different older woman—an alternate juror named Judi Zamos—for the famous television judge. Predictably, Sheindlin was not pleased. She filed this defamation lawsuit, alleging that the false reports subjected her to public ridicule and tarnished her carefully curated brand.

A360 now seeks summary judgment. It readily admits the stories were wrong, but argues that the misidentification was an honest, if unfortunate, mistake. Because of this, A360 contends that Sheindlin cannot clear the high constitutional hurdle of proving actual malice—a strict requirement for public figures suing for defamation. Furthermore, A360 argues that Sheindlin cannot prove she suffered any actual, compensable damages under Florida law.

Because the First Amendment requires a showing of actual malice rather than mere negligence, and because Sheindlin has failed to produce evidence meeting that heavy burden, her defamation claim must fail. A360's motion for summary judgment is thus GRANTED….

Here's the court "side-by-side comparison of the two" women's images:

And a bit more:

How did a reporter make such a colossal mix-up? The misidentification traces back to a promotional pitch. In March 2024, Fox News contacted A360 about an upcoming docuseries on the Menendez brothers. The pitch included a link to the show's trailer. That trailer featured a brief clip of an older woman with short hair, wearing a black top with a decorative white collar, who opined that the brothers' trial was rigged. The woman was not identified by name in the video.

Upon watching the trailer, A360 reporter Michael Jaccarino jumped to a conclusion: the woman was Judge Judy. He based this on her clothing—which he thought resembled Sheindlin's signature judicial robe and lace collar—and the fact that she was commenting on a high-profile legal matter. Jaccarino admitted he had not seen a photograph of Sheindlin in years and simply assumed she had aged into the woman on his screen.

Seeking to flesh out his story, Jaccarino emailed Fox asking for more footage of the "Judge Judy interview." A Fox public relations representative replied with a link to a longer, 40-second clip, telling Jaccarino to "please see below for a link to the Judge Judy clip."

This is where the investigation fatally stalled. In this second clip, an on-screen caption appears for roughly three seconds, explicitly identifying the interviewee as "Judi Zamos," an alternate juror from the first Menendez trial. Jaccarino testified that he completely missed this flashing red warning sign. His explanation was simple: he was looking down at his keyboard, laser-focused on transcribing the audio rather than watching the screen.

Operating under the unshaken assumption that he had his star subject, Jaccarino pressed forward with the article. He researched the gruesome details of the murders and called a defense attorney for a quote on the current legal proceedings. What he did not do, however, was conduct a basic internet search coupling Sheindlin's name with the Menendez brothers to verify the connection. Nor did he follow standard journalistic practice by reaching out to Sheindlin or her representatives for comment prior to publication.

The editorial review process provided no safety net. Jaccarino sent his draft to his editor, Michael Hammer, and included the link to the video clip—the very clip that identified the speaker as Judi Zamos. Hammer never clicked the link or watched the video. He testified that he simply took his reporter at his word. From there, the story was cleared for the National Enquirer and In Touch Weekly….

Despite this, the court concluded (legally correctly, I think) that there wasn't enough evidence "proof that a defamatory statement was published with either 'actual knowledge of its falsity or with a high degree of awareness of its probable falsity'" (so-called "actual malice") for the case to go forward:

A publisher's failure to investigate a statement's accuracy alone won't cut it. Nor will "even an extreme departure" from reasonable journalistic standards…. Against this backdrop, it is apparent that A360 merely made a genuine (though stupid) mistake.

Charles D. Tobin, Jacquelyn N. Schell, Bradley Gershel, and Saumya Vaishampayan (Ballard Spahr LLP) represent defendants.

The post Not Judge Judy, Juror Judi—But "Stupid Mistake" Isn't "Actual Malice" for Libel Purposes appeared first on Reason.com.

Despite Trump's Promises and Rodríguez's Amnesty Law, Hundreds of Venezuelan Dissidents Are Still Behind Bars

2026-04-17T15:17:19Z

Hours after American forces seized Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and flew him to New York to face narco-terrorism charges, President Donald Trump stepped before the cameras with a message for the Venezuelan people: "You're gonna have peace, and you're gonna have safety. You're gonna have justice."

The mechanism for delivering that justice arrived in February, when Maduro's successor, Delcy Rodríguez, signed an amnesty law designed to free almost 1,000 political prisoners who were incarcerated at the time. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the passing of this law was "very positive," but warned it was not enough. A few months later, nothing has really changed for Venezuelans.

The same judicial apparatus that imprisoned more than 2,000 people for protesting Maduro's fraudulent 2024 reelection is now deciding who gets to be freed. To obtain amnesty, detainees must petition the same courts that prosecuted them and hope to get a response within 15 days. The regime says more than 4,000 amnesty applications have been filed since February, and hundreds of prisoners have walked free.

At least 485 people remain in political detention as of early April, some of whom aren't Venezuelan citizens, according to Foro Penal, a human rights watchdog. In recent weeks, authorities have denied 111 amnesties, Martha Tineo, director of the Venezuela-based human rights organization Justicia, Encuentro y Perdón, tells Reason. The real number is likely higher, she says, because accurately tracking denials is "practically impossible," as many affected individuals choose not to make the information public for fear of retaliation.

Many dissidents affected by the arbitrary application of the amnesty law have found themselves excluded from its protections. The text bars actions linked to "terrorism," a vague term that has been used with significant discretion by prosecutors to criminalize political opposition.

This has been the case with Daniel Echenagucia, a 48-year-old cattle industry administrator, who was arrested in 2024 while traveling in the country with his wife, Marien Padilla, and their two teenage children. Padilla says officers never showed the family the arrest warrant they claimed to have. She and the children were also detained, their phones confiscated, and later taken back to the family home, where officials searched the house and seized passports, phones, and electronics. Padilla and the children have not seen Echenagucia since.

Daniel Echenagucia with his wife, Marien Padilla, and their two children.

Echenagucia, an Italian-Venezuelan dual national, has been charged with terrorism, conspiracy, financing of terrorism, and criminal association. Padilla says her husband has lost roughly 60 pounds in prison, and though a release order was issued in January, he remains behind bars. Authorities recently denied his amnesty request, arguing that he was implicated in events from 2019. Padilla disputes that, claiming the family lived in the United States from 2018 to 2022 and was not in Venezuela at the time. Echenagucia's mother is a U.S. citizen and has appealed directly to Trump and Rubio to secure her son's release.*

Court order in which a Terrorism Court tells Marien Padilla that her husband will not be a beneficiary of amnesty.

The Rodríguez regime argues the exclusions are legitimate. However, the pattern of denials evidences arbitrary application. Nakary Mena Ramos, a journalist detained over her reporting on rising criminality, was denied amnesty on March 13, only for the charges to be dismissed and her freedom granted days later.

In March, a court told Gabriel González, a journalist working on María Corina Machado's presidential campaign, that he was granted amnesty, barring him from appointing a private attorney or accessing his case file. Weeks later, the same court formally denied his amnesty request.

Hoy 13 de abril me fue notificada la negativa da la solicitud de Amnistía.

A inicios de marzo en el Tribunal 3ro de Juicio de Terrorismo se me informó, luego de que revisaran en una computadora, que aparecía que había sido "beneficiado" por la Amnistía, por lo que no me… pic.twitter.com/O81dcFDJYP

— Gabriel González (@IsmaelGabriel22) April 14, 2026

Javier Tarazona, a university professor, spent more than four years imprisoned, tied to his reporting on violence along the Venezuelan border. Although he was released in February, he was denied amnesty, and the case against him remains active.

Trump has repeatedly invoked Venezuela as proof that his interventionist model works, drawing a direct link to his ongoing military campaign against Iran. But for the Venezuelans whose amnesty requests sit unanswered in courts that answer to the same regime that jailed them, the transformation Trump promised hasn't materialized. The dictator's name has changed, but the oppressive apparatus has not.

*CORRECTION: This piece originally misstated the nationality of Daniel Echenagucia's parents.

The post Despite Trump's Promises and Rodríguez's Amnesty Law, Hundreds of Venezuelan Dissidents Are Still Behind Bars appeared first on Reason.com.

Most Young Australians Successfully Evade the Country's Social Media Ban

2026-04-16T18:46:00Z

Among the great many bogeymen of the current moment is social media, which stands accused of making young people anxious and unhappy. Whatever the merits of those charges—and they're debatable—politicians have predictably tried to address concerns by applying the blunt instrument of coercive law to kids' online activities rather than simply let parents help their children make better choices. The experience in Australia now shows the subjects of the law have, once again, proven cleverer than law enforcers.

Would-Be Internet Regulators Target Troubled Youths

Generation Z is famously more anxious than older generations and subject to increased mental health issues. And never mind that young people have been raised in a chaotic world and were isolated from normal social interactions by public health officials for part of their childhood—the problem must be the online world which they're immersed in.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt gets much of the credit (or blame) for laying the fault at the door of the internet. The author of the 2024 bestseller The Anxious Generation, Haidt believes digitally focused lives have done harm to young people and calls for restrictions (imposed by parents or government) on minors' use of smartphones and social media.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic embrace of that message is in Australia, where "as of 10 December 2025, age-restricted social media platforms need to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under the age of 16 from creating or keeping an account," notes the country's eSafety Commissioner. Platforms must implement age verification or face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($35.4 million).

But when has a ban or restriction ever gone without significant resistance? Imposing internet-use restrictions on technologically savvy young people was always going to be an uphill battle. The evidence so far suggests that Australia's law has been met with more defiance than compliance.

Young People Are More Tech-Savvy Than Regulators

"There are significant questions about the effectiveness of Australia's social media ban," reports the U.K.'s Molly Rose Foundation, which supports internet restrictions, of the results of a poll of Australian young people. "Three fifths (61%) of 12–15 year-olds who previously held accounts on restricted platforms continue to have access to one or more active accounts."

The group adds that "70% of children still using restricted sites say that it was 'easy' to circumvent the ban. In most cases, social media platforms have failed to detect or seek to remove under 16s accounts."

Importantly, officials agree that young people subject to the law are actively evading its impact. In a compliance update published last month, Australia's eSafety Commissioner, which enforces the ban, conceded that "a substantial proportion of Australian children under the age of 16 continue to retain accounts, create new accounts, or pass platforms' age assurance systems."

Like the Molly Rose Foundation, Australian regulators note that noncompliance is not just a concern for the small platforms with limited exposure in Australia which were expected to become refuges for Australian teens seeking online connections. They also point to large, established companies including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

In the majority of cases, according to both reports, young people ignoring the law have not yet been asked to verify their age. But, according to the Molly Rose Foundation, "around a quarter of children still using each restricted platform had been successfully able to get around an age check on a pre-existing account." Some changed their claimed age, others had older friends and relatives set up accounts for them, and still others gamed technology intended to estimate their age by their appearance.

Interestingly, only about one in 20 young Australians report using the easiest workaround: virtual private network (VPN) software that makes them appear to use the internet from outside Australia. That suggests enforcement of the social media ban has been remarkably ineffective.

"This data suggests that, at least in the medium term, an Australia-style ban is unlikely to deliver the improvements in safety that parents and children deserve and demand," concludes the Molly Rose Foundation. "At worst, the Australian ban risks giving parents a false sense of safety."

With Troubled Youngsters, Politicians May Have Reversed Cause and Effect

Of equal concern, it should be noted, is a false sense of fault for the mental health issues suffered by young people. Part of the problem is that researchers worried about social media appear to have decided on a conclusion and then gone looking for supporting evidence.

"Social media has become conceptualized as something almost like a toxin—in that the more of it that teens consume, the more harmful it is to them," Rebecca Etkin of the Yale Child Study Center commented last month. "Most research in the past decade has focused on trying to show this very relationship between more social media use and worse mental health outcomes in teens. But interestingly, studies have generally failed to find support for this relationship."

Etkin doesn't claim that extensive online activity is harmless. She says we don't yet know and that the blame placed on the digital world is not supported by current science.

The authors of a paper published two years ago in the Journal of Pediatrics suggested that excessive social media use might be a symptom rather than a cause. They noted evidence of "declining mental health leading to more social media use rather than the reverse." Their belief was that "a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults."

To put it bluntly, overprotective adults may have driven kids nuts and caused them to take refuge online.

Covid-era lockdowns contributed to depriving children of the opportunity to independently interact with their peers. In 2022, Pew Research reported concerns among childhood experts that "these disruptions could have lingering effects on young people's mental and emotional well-being." Unable to mingle with friends in person, many unhappy kids were forced into online interaction.

Politicians in Australia and elsewhere claiming to be concerned about young people's mental health would do well to remember that meddling policies and hovering parenting styles probably caused the current crisis. Governments should leave the kids alone. And worried parents could do worse than to occasionally take away phones and send children outside to play, unsupervised.

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Today in Supreme Court History: April 17, 1978

2025-07-10T18:35:54Z

4/17/1978: Penn Central Transportation Corporation v. New York argued.

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Review: This Cirque du Soleil Show Reminds Us Nature Knows No Borders

2026-03-25T14:08:10Z

Cirque du Soleil's stunning stage show Luzia, touring five North American cities in 2026, follows a parachutist as he experiences Mexico. In the process, it reveals striking resemblances between Mexican and U.S. culture.

The show's production value and feats of human strength uphold the Cirque du Soleil reputation for high-quality physicality and staging. Pushing the limits of what's possible under the big tent, Luzia brings the outdoors in, using impressive engineering to highlight water's beauty. Its characters—birds, reptiles, mountain lions, monarch butterflies—reflect a diversity that is at once familiar and mysterious to many Americans.

Each year, those monarch butterflies migrate from southern Canada across the U.S. down to the heart of Mexico and back. Throughout the show, those butterflies serve as a graceful reminder that nature knows no borders—and suggest that human beings, across any border, don't have differences worth fearing.

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Brickbat: Coming Back Clean

2026-04-15T18:02:12Z

A local TV news investigation found that hundreds of people in Georgia who were arrested for DUI in 2025 were later shown to be sober, based on blood tests from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The records show that 701 of the 6,875 blood samples tested had no illegal or prescription drugs in them, even though those people had been charged with driving under the influence. Police only test for drugs in these cases if a driver's blood alcohol level is below the legal limit. As a result, many arrests depended solely on field sobriety tests that were designed to catch drunk drivers, not drug-impaired drivers. Critics say these tests are not reliable for detecting drug use and can lead to false positives, with studies showing a high error rate. As a result, some people spent time in jail and faced charges before later being cleared.

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Open Thread

2026-04-17T07:00:00Z

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Trump Tweets About Standing!

2026-04-17T04:38:17Z

A few days ago, the D.C. Circuit sent the East Wing case back down to Judge Leon. In my view, the plaintiffs clearly have no standing. Judge Rao's separate opinion cogently explains why.

Judge Leon, undeterred, ruled against Trump again! The White House can continue with "underground" construction but not "aboveground" construction! I suppose Judge Leon is an expert in construction, as he seems to think these two levels can be separated! His new order had fewer exclamation points, but he still declined to address standing. Should this case get to SCOTUS, it will be very easy for the proceduralists to smack down this ruling on standing grounds.

Indeed, even President Trump gets the standing analysis. In a series of social media posts, Trump explains why the plaintiffs in this case lacks standing. I never know how much of Trump's tweets are his and how much come from his lawyers. But at a minimum, these postings (which seem to have been made aboard Air Force One) suggest Trump understands the jurisdictional issues.

Here, Trump points out (correctly) that the only possible plaintiff with an injury is a woman who walks her dog near the White House:

The person who filed the meritless and lawless suit on the desperately needed White House Ballroom, being built as a GIFT to America (without Tax Dollars!), a woman walking her dog, has absolutely NO STANDING to bring such a monumentally important case against our Country. The Trump Hating Judge's opinion is radically different from his first opinion, that was issued weeks ago, while still being unlawful and ambiguous, which never even addressed her COMPLETE lack of Standing. Every Political "Pundit" has said this case is meritless, even a JOKE, but it's not a joke to me, or the people of America. Too much hard work, time, and money spent in order that a Judge can claim that he ruled against "DONALD TRUMP," something which I have gotten very used to, BUT WILL NOT ACCEPT! President DJT

Here Trump points out (correctly) that Judge Leon once again does not even mention standing:

The out of control Trump Hating, Washington, D.C. District Court Judge, who doesn't want to accept a $400 Million Dollar GIFT of one of the most beautiful Ballrooms anywhere in the World, desperately needed by the White House and its future Presidents (Due to time constraints, I will barely get to use it!), wants me to build the "underground" portion of the Ballroom, without the "above ground" portion, but the underground doesn't work, isn't necessary, and would indeed be useless, without the above ground sections. The underground portion is wedded to, and serves, the upper portion, including the Bomb Shelters, a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities, Protective Partitioning, Top Secret Military Installations, Structures, and Equipment, Protective Missile Resistant Steel, Columns, Roofs, and Beams, Drone Proof Ceilings and Roofs, Military Grade Venting, and Bullet, Ballistic, and Blast Proof Glass. It's all tied together as one big, expensive, and very complex unit, which is vital for National Security and Military Operations of the United States of America! The Judge's decision, which doesn't even discuss the vital subject of STANDING, of which the plaintiff has none, severely jeopardizes the lives and welfare of the people who work, and will be working, at the White House — including all future Presidents of the United States, and their families. President DONALD J. TRUMP

During oral argument, Judge Leon apparently refused to discuss standing, and told the lawyer from DOJ to take up standing with the Court of Appeals.

This post goes more to the merits, and explains the underground construction cannot be separated from the aboveground construction. Standing comes in at the end.

The White House doesn't have a Ballroom (No Taxpayer Money!), which Presidents have desperately wanted and desired for over 150 years, but a Trump Hating, Washington, D.C. District Court Judge, a man who has gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn't get built, is attempting to prevent future Presidents and World Leaders from having a safe and secure large scale Meeting Place, or Ballroom, one with Bomb Shelters, a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities, Protective Partitioning, Top Secret Military Installations, Structures, and Equipment, Protective Missile Resistant Steel, Columns, Roofs, and Beams, Drone Proof Ceilings and Roofs, Military Grade Venting, and Bullet, Ballistic, and Blast Proof Glass —which all means that no future President, living in the White House without this Ballroom, can ever be Safe and Secure at Events, Future Inaugurations, or Global Summits. This Magnificent Space will allow them to carry out their vital duties as the Leader of our Nation. Furthermore, the Ballroom, which is being constructed on budget and ahead of schedule, is needed now. Almost all material necessary for its construction is being built and/or on its way to the site, ready for installation and erection. Much of it has already been paid for, costing Hundreds of Millions of Dollars. If somebody, especially one with no standing, had a complaint — Why wasn't it filed many months earlier, long before Construction was started? The Public Record was open for all to see. Everybody knew that it was planned, and going to be built. This highly political Judge, and his illegal overreach, is out of control, and costing our Nation greatly. This is a mockery to our Court System! The Ballroom is deeply important to our National Security, and no Judge can be allowed to stop this Historic and Militarily Imperative Project. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Finally, Trump thinks that Judge Leon works for Chief Judge Boasberg, who was MANDAMUSED.

A Trump Hating Judge, for the first time in History, wants Congress to pay Hundreds of Millions of Dollars for a Glorious Ballroom, instead of accepting Donations from Great American Companies and Citizens. This is a first — In other words, he wants Tax Payers to pay for the Ballroom, instead of Donors and Patriots! The Ballroom is FREE to our Country, A GIFT, and vital for our National Security. This Judge, who works for another Judge who was just MANDAMUSED for the unfair and biased way he treats me, should be ashamed of himself! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Know who can't get mandamused? The President. Say what you will about Trump, but he gets procedure.

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The Slowing of Fourth Amendment Law, and Now Advisory Opinions: A Comment on Chatrie v. United States

2026-04-16T21:36:12Z

On April 27th, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Chatrie v. United States, on the Fourth Amendment implications of geofencing. I have already posted the amicus brief I wrote for the Court in the case, and I am writing a series of posts in anticipation of the argument. This is the second post in the series.

In this second post, I want to focus on how the Court hasn't handed down a case on the Fourth Amendment and new technology in a long time, and that it is now doing so in what amounts to an advisory opinion. These two things are related, I think. And for those of us interested in how Fourth Amendment law develops, they're related in an important way.

First, consider the timing. Chatrie comes after a surprisingly long gap in Supreme Court attention to how the Fourth Amendment should apply to new technologies. It has been 8 years since the Court's 2018 ruling in Carpenter v. United States on the Fourth Amendment implications of cell-site location information. That's a relatively long gap. After City of Ontario v. Quon in 2010 on pagers, United States v. Jones in 2012 on GPS devices, Riley v. California in 2014 on searching cell phones incident to arrest, the Microsoft warrant case in 2018, and Carpenter that same year, it had become a staple of the Justices' speeches that Court was going to have to take a lot of cases on the Fourth Amendment and digital technologies in the future.

Instead, for eight years, we get bupkes.

Next, ponder the advisory-opinion aspect of the case. The cert petition in the case asked the Court to take on two issues: Was the Fourth Amendment violated, and does the exclusionary rule apply? In the proceedings below, the fifteen judges on the en banc Fourth Circuit were hopelessly divided on the Fourth Amendment issues—but only one of the fifteen Judges thought the exclusionary rule applied. Instead of taking both issues, the Supreme Court granted cert limited to the first issue.

Think about that. Even if the Court holds that Chatrie's Fourth Amendment rights were violated, it won't make any difference to Chatrie. The lower court has already held that there is no remedy, and that is a retrospective question unaffected by what the Supreme Court might rule on the merits in coming months. Going forward, the Court gets to hand down what is in a practical sense an advisory opinion on how the Fourth Amendment applies to geofencing. Many people care a great deal about what that practically-speaking-advisory-opinion will say, of course. But the actual individual involved, Chatrie, won't get relief.

What is going on? I think these two points are directly linked.

The common origin is the Supreme Court's cutting back on the exclusionary rule, and in particular its rulings like Davis v. United States in 2011 and earlier cases like Herring in 2009. The basic thinking of these cases is that it's wrong to punish the government with suppression of evidence if the government wasn't culpable for doing what it did. If the government didn't do something it should have known was illegal, there shouldn't be a suppression remedy.

Some will like that approach, and others won't. But think about how that changes Fourth Amendment litigation. When you mix that principle with the novel questions of new technologies, there is usually an exclusionary rule "out" when a defendant moves to suppress evidence in a case on new technology. By virtue of the issue being technologically novel, the government will not have been culpable for trying out the technique it used. And that will often mean that judges can avoid reaching the merits of how the Fourth Amendment applies by relying on the good faith exception.

It's not hard to think about what this does to Fourth Amendment litigation. Indeed, my sense is that, since Davis in 2011, caselaw development on the Fourth Amendment and new technology has noticeably slowed. Fourth Amendment caselaw as a whole has slowed, too. A few years ago, I had a research assistant look into this: There were fewer circuit court merits rulings on the Fourth Amendment in 2022 than in 2002 or 1982. But the technology cases have been hardest hit. It's just harder to get a merits ruling on the Fourth Amendment and technology than it used to be, and that has meant less caselaw development.

We have seen a taste of this dynamic in lower court cases I have blogged about before, like the computer search cases of United States v. Ganias in 2015 from the Second Circuit and United States v. Morton from the Fifth Circuit in 2022. Both were fascinating panel rulings. But in both cases, the United States successfully petitioned for rehearing en banc, and the en banc courts handed down opinions saying the good faith exception applied and expressing no views on the merits. We still don't know what the law is on the questions those courts addressed, either in those circuits or in other circuits.

And what's happening in circuit courts is just the tip of the iceberg.

After all, to get to a circuit court, someone needs to have pressed the argument below. And the real problem in Fourth Amendment litigation these days is just getting defense lawyers to file challenges in trial courts. Today's criminal defense lawyers know not to bother with novel Fourth Amendment arguments involving digital technologies. Even if you have what looks like a good argument on the merits, the novelty of the claim itself means you probably lack a remedy. And lacking a remedy, you won't bother filing the motion to suppress. There's no point in filing if you don't have a remedy even if you're right.

I have learned this first-hand with my draft motion to suppress Internet records seized by unlawful Internet preservation. Defense lawyers just have to fill in their client's name and add the date of preservation and they can file it. I think it's a seriously good argument on the merits, and I know prosecutors who are worried about defense lawyers filing such motions because they realize that the arguments against them are strong. But it's been pretty much impossible to get defense lawyers to file the motion. The problem is that the argument is novel. It is saying that an existing practice has major constitutional limits that haven't been spotted before. For a lot of defense lawyers, that basic feature means there is no point in filing. Again, there's no point in challenging the government if you don't have a remedy even if you're right.

What does this have to do with the long gap in Fourth Amendment cases and the advisory nature of the case? The long gap is probably obvious. The Supreme Court waits for circuit splits and percolation. But with defense attorneys not interested in challenging government practices, litigation over those practices is more rare, and you don't get the cases to generate a split. Fewer splits means fewer plausible cert petitions, and that means a long window with no grants.

The advisory nature of the case is also part of the story. The slowing of Fourth Amendment caselaw in the lower courts creates pressure on the Supreme Court to speed things along. If you want to create clarity on what the law is, you don't want the "out" of the good-faith exception. You want to forget the remedy entirely, and just focus entirely on the merits. This is just speculation, of course, but I would guess that this is why the Justices decided to grant cert only on the merits—denying cert on whether the good-faith exception applied. Limiting the cert grant serves a forcing function. It makes both the lawyers briefing the case, and the Justices deciding it, focus on the law-clarifying questions of how the Fourth Amendment applies.

In a sense, this is a variation of what I proposed back in 2011, in my article Fourth Amendment Remedies and Development of the Law: A Comment on Camreta v. Greene and Davis v. United States. In that 2011 essay, I predicted that Davis and similar cases were going to cause a future slowing of the development of Fourth Amendment law. (I argued and lost Davis, and had written about this problem before Davis, so this has been a longstanding concern of mine.) I suggested in that essay that one way to help along that development was for the Justices to be active in adding questions presented. In effect, they should fill in closely related questions that would have been the subject of cert grants if the cases had been litigated, but were not litigated because the incentives to litigate them had been removed.

Limiting the cert grant in Chatrie to the merits seems to me a sort of cousin of that: It doesn't add to the issues in play, but it makes sure that at least some merits issues are reached. Indeed, in some sense the decision to grant in Chatrie is a cousin of that. By (surprisingly) granting cert from a one-line affirmance, the Court gives itself maximum flexibility to address a host of issues in the case.

Next up: Some thoughts on where the Court might go if they take on what is a "search."

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San Jose's 'Creepy' and 'Deeply Intrusive' ALPR Camera System Is Unconstitutional, a New Lawsuit Says

2026-04-16T21:39:10Z

Five years ago, police in San Jose, California, began using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to record information about vehicles traveling through the city. The initial experiment involved four Flock Safety cameras at a single intersection. Today the San Jose Police Department (SJPD) has access to data captured by a network of 474 ALPR cameras that blanket the city, recording residents as they go about their daily lives.

More than 1,000 SJPD employees are authorized to search that information, which does not require a warrant, probable cause, or even individualized suspicion of involvement in criminal activity. Because San Jose shares its information, it also can be perused by people at nearly 300 other government agencies across California.

That "creepy" and "deeply intrusive" surveillance system violates the Fourth Amendment, the Institute for Justice argues in a lawsuit it filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. "Government employees search San Jose drivers' data thousands of times every day with almost no oversight, creating a situation that's ripe for abuse," warns Institute for Justice attorney Michael Soyfer.

The lawsuit involves three named plaintiffs, but it aims to represent a class consisting of "all San Jose residents who were drivers of vehicles" that have been photographed by the city's cameras during the last year or will be photographed in the future. The plaintiffs are seeking a court order that would require the SJPD to delete or block access to images and data collected by the cameras after 24 hours unless it has "a specific warrant based on probable cause" or invokes a recognized exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement.

The SJPD initially retained ALPR information for a year, paying Flock, which installs the devices and charges rent for them, an extra $300 per camera to store the data for that long. "There is no need for that information," the city's digital privacy officer conceded in 2024. "It is strictly what our attorney's office has decided is the current interpretation." That interpretation changed in response to a public outcry, and the SJPD currently keeps the data for a month, which is Flock's default.

Despite that concession, the city is still collecting a huge amount of information about the locations and itineraries of drivers. In 2024, the ALPR system recorded more than 360 million images. "Thousands of government employees across California have
access to this massive trove," the lawsuit notes, "and they search it with abandon—nearly 2.5 million times in the last six months of 2025, an average of over 15,000 searches per day."

Although that database is supposed to help detect and prevent crime, "only a tiny sliver of those photographs" prove "relevant to law enforcement," the complaint says. In 2024, for example, about 0.25 percent of those 360 million or so images corresponded to one of the SJPD's "hotlists," which include stolen vehicles, drivers with outstanding warrants, criminal suspects, and missing persons.

The lawsuit explains how the city's ALPR cameras, combined with artificial intelligence software, license plate databases, video camera footage, and ALPR data from other jurisdictions, have enabled routine, far-reaching surveillance that was financially and technologically infeasible until recently. It is a situation that would have dismayed the Fourth Amendment's framers.

In addition to license plate numbers, which can easily be connected to names, addresses, and other personal information, police can search "vehicle fingerprints" that Flock's software generates based on each car's characteristics. The software also can produce a "vehicle journey map" showing "everywhere the car has been seen," the complaint notes. It can be used to "analyze patterns of movement," "flag repeat visitors to a location," "identify vehicles frequently seen together," "generate lists of vehicles that have visited multiple locations of interest," and "predict the future route a vehicle might take."

Nearly all of this information involves innocent people who have done nothing to justify police attention. It includes data that can reveal a person's work and shopping habits, relationships, and visits to locations such as health care facilities, immigration lawyers' offices, houses of worship, and political protests.

"All of this is done without a warrant," the lawsuit notes. "No officer ever has to establish probable cause, swear to the facts in a warrant application, or await the approval of a judge. Instead, all they need to do is log in and enter a vague justification to pull up monthly logs of people's movements. Because of this, officers can run searches based on a hunch, idle curiosity, or even personal animus. Around the country, officers have been caught using ALPR databases to stalk their ex-partners, monitor protestors, and even track down a woman who reportedly had an abortion."

Given such dangers, what safeguards has San Jose established to prevent abuse of its digital dragnet? The SJPD's ALPR policy says the cameras may not be used to "collect data that is not within the public view," "monitor individual or group activities legally allowed in" California or "protected by the First Amendment," aid immigration enforcement, issue "automated citations…without manual review," or collect data for profit. But "in practice," the lawsuit says, "SJPD employees commonly search ALPR data without probable cause, a warrant, or individualized suspicion."

Because judicial approval is not required, the SJPD's official restrictions can be easily evaded. Although the information is not supposed to be used for immigration enforcement, for example, federal officials can and do gain access to it because it is widely shared across the state. According to the complaint, the city "has admitted that federal agencies," including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), "were able to get 'side-door' access" by "asking friendly California law enforcement officers to run searches."

That workaround is potentially problematic not just for unauthorized residents but also for U.S. citizens who oppose the Trump administration's deportation campaign. The lead plaintiff, Tony Tan, is a software engineer who grew up in China. Tan "goes to protests in downtown San Jose and across the Bay Area," the complaint says. He "also volunteers as a legal observer to monitor ICE activity in San Jose and inform people of their rights."

Tan "has heard stories of ICE and other law enforcement officers retaliating against people who criticized or opposed them," the lawsuit says. ICE agents, for example, have been "accused of using license plates to identify legal observers, so that [they] can show up at their homes or place them on watchlists." As Tan sees it, "the Flock Cameras make that type of retaliation all too easy" by "placing an unprecedented record of people's movements across a city in the hands of so many officers without any judicial oversight."

Tan's background makes him especially sensitive to such risks. "As an engineer specializing in privacy, I know how important it is to protect people's data and how even just a few points of location history can reveal profound and sensitive insights about a person's life," he says. "Having spent time in China, I know what an authoritarian surveillance state looks like, and I worry about the proliferation of similar mass surveillance technologies across the United States. I want to ensure that police state tactics do not become commonplace here."

San Jose's ALPR system has "the potential to reveal where [Tan] goes, what he does, and whom he associates with in a way that would have been impossible in the past," the lawsuit notes. If a private individual "created a similar record of his movements," it adds, Tan "would consider it stalking." He "finds this creepy," the complaint says. "It reminds him of the Chinese surveillance state."

According to Tan's lawyers, San Jose's ALPR system is unconstitutional as well as creepy because it "violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as objectively reasonable"—the Fourth Amendment test that the Supreme Court established in the 1967 case Katz v. United States. Historically, they note, Americans expected that "the government would not and could not create a retrospective catalogue of every person's movements across hundreds of strategically chosen locations in a city." San Jose's use of ALPR cameras, the plaintiffs argue, "contravenes society's traditional expectation of privacy by generating a long-term, retrospective, and easy-to-search government database of people's movements, with no requirement that police have a warrant, probable cause, or even individualized suspicion to collect or search the data."

That conclusion is consistent with the logic of the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling in Carpenter v. United States, which held that warrantless tracking via cellphone location data violated the Fourth Amendment. Like the data collection at issue in that case, San Jose's ALPR system can reveal detailed information about an individual's past whereabouts and travels.

The Fourth Amendment "prohibits searches, including electronic surveillance, unless the government has obtained a specific warrant supported by probable cause," the complaint notes. "This requirement is subject only to a few, narrow exceptions. None of these exceptions apply to Defendants' warrantless, suspicionless operation of the Flock Cameras."

This lawsuit is part of an Institute for Justice project that aims to curtail abuse of ALPR cameras, which have proliferated across the country in recent years. Flock alone has installed some 90,000 cameras in more than 5,000 local jurisdictions. The company says its "mission" is "to eliminate crime" by "collect[ing] the objective evidence police need to solve crime, which includes license plates and vehicle information." Flock is unfazed by civil liberties concerns about that mission. Garrett Langley, the company's president, says his goal is "a Flock camera on every street corner."

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Did the Media Miss the Eric Swalwell Story?

2026-04-16T21:39:58Z

Last week, former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D–Calif.) was a high-profile member of Congress (the sort of anti-Trump #Resistance figure who appeared regularly on MSNOW) and the leading Democratic candidate to be the next governor of California. Today, he's a disgraced ex-candidate and ex-congressman.

Swalwell has quit both jobs following numerous sexual misconduct claims reported on by the San Francisco Chronicle and also CNN. Five women have alleged varying levels of improper behavior: The most serious accusation, made by Lonna Drewes, involves rape. She says that Swalwell lured her to his hotel room and choked her while sexually assaulting her. For his part, Swalwell has tacitly confessed to infidelity but denies that he forced himself on anyone.

"These accusations of sexual assault are flat false," he said. "I will fight them with everything I have."

Given all this, Swalwell's resignation seems appropriate, though I would remind everyone that it is difficult to parse the truth of sexual misconduct accusations that surface years after the fact. Alleged victims deserve to be heard and respected, not automatically believed. Numerous men in politics have been accused of long-ago misdeeds that are impossible to properly vet and therefore mostly ignored—including former President Joe Biden, whose campaign was hardly derailed by an accusation from ex-staffer Tara Reade 30 years after the fact.

Moreover, Swalwell's exit from Congress was prompted by the fact that his colleagues had planned to expel him over the allegations. While it's hardly a tragedy when politicians lose their jobs (I'm all in favor of throw the bums out!), I am very reluctant to endorse the idea that a congressman should be tossed over unproven accusations contrary to basic norms of fairness and due process. Swalwell's constituents chose him to be their guy, and I generally think that it's the voters' responsibility to decide who represents them in Congress, not other legislators.

I say that as someone who finds Swalwell a fairly ridiculous and gullible political figure and a terrible choice for governor of California. The good news for Democrats is that they have numerous other choices: far-left billionaire Tom Steyer, former Rep. Katie Porter (who is herself accused of some nasty behavior), the comparatively moderate San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, and others. The bad news for Democrats is that currently the two highest polling candidates are both Republicans, which could actually result in the Democrats getting shut out of the general election. Additional consolidation is clearly necessary.

Which brings me to my next question, and one I've seen various conservatives asking on social media this week: Why now? At first blush, it does seem rather strange that the accusations against Swalwell would take so long to come out. CNN's Brian Stelter described the Swalwell story as a "testament to the power of investigative reporting," and there's some truth to that. The Chronicle and CNN reporters did a great job, but still. Swalwell has been a major national Democratic figure for years. He even ran for president in 2020!

Eric Swalwell ending his bid for California governor is, among other things, a testament to the power of investigative reporting pic.twitter.com/4xzUg944dt

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) April 13, 2026

Additionally, he's been a constant fixture on progressive and mainstream media programs. Per usual, now that the story is out there, one encounters all sorts of Democratic staffers, politicos, and media figures whispering that they had heard the gossip about him for years. It takes a lot of work for a media reporter to hit publish on a story that contains such weighty accusations, but I find it strange that no one tried back in 2020, particularly with #MeToo still being a major topic of interest for the media at the time.

That said, conservatives inclined to complain about this might consider whether their own media institutions also missed the story. After all, there was nothing stopping them from digging into it, but that means investing in real reporting talent, not just clickbait and hot takes.

This Week on Free Media

I discuss Swalwell's exit with Amber Duke. Also, on Freed Up, Christian Britschgi challenges me to guess: death metal album or military operation? Play along!

Worth Watching

I finished Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I did not enjoy, and have returned to Agatha Christie's Miss Marple series. Next up: Pocketful of Rye.

The post Did the Media Miss the Eric Swalwell Story? appeared first on Reason.com.

Pete Hegseth's Pulp Fiction Prayer Isn't the First Time He's Used Religion To Justify Illegal War in Iran

2026-04-16T21:39:40Z

During a worship service at the Pentagon on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth read a prayer to bless the government's war efforts in Iran, which "was shared to him by the lead planner" of the Combat Search and Rescue operation (CSAR) that "rescued two Air Force crew members shot down over Iran," reports USA Today.

"The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men," Hegseth read. "Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee, and amen."

The prayer, known as CSAR 25:17, is "meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17," according to Hegseth. This passage foretells a "great vengeance" against ancient Israel's enemies for taking "revenge with malice in their hearts" against the nation. While CSAR 25:17 is supposedly meant to "reflect" scripture, it reads closer to Samuel L. Jackson's monologic prayer from Pulp Fiction. In it, Jackson's hitman character declares that "the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men" and "you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you," before killing a guy who had been stealing from his boss.

Hegseth's Wednesday prayer was not the first time he has used scripture or the Christian faith out of context to support the administration's illegal war. Last month, in the first Pentagon worship service since the war started, Hegseth used a mix of Bible verses and metaphors to ask God to "break the teeth" of the Iranian oppressors and give the United States success in its efforts. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has said that God supports the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran because "God wants to see people taken care of." Comments like these led Pope Leo XIV on Thursday to condemn "a handful of tyrants" who "manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military…and political gain."

Indeed, the Trump world has time and again exploited the faith of the president's supporters to further a political agenda that expands the state's power and perpetuates civil liberties violations. In February 2025, the president signed an executive order that established a federal task force to "eradicate anti-Christian bias" in the U.S., which the Interfaith Alliance recently warned will "weaponize a narrow understanding of religious freedom to legitimize discrimination against marginalized groups," including the LGBT community.

After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents earlier this year, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) defended the administration's deportation campaign on Facebook by citing Romans 13, where apostle Paul directs Christians to submit to "governing authorities." The post received backlash from the faith community, including from Benjamin Cremer, a pastor who writes about the intersection of politics and Christianity, who called Johnson's interpretation of the scripture "to sanctify a vision of government authority that demands submission while refusing accountability….not a faithful reading of the text."

In Oklahoma, Christian nationalist politicians have tried to force their beliefs by proposing strict penalties on pornography and mandating Bibles—notably, Trump-endorsed Bibles—in classrooms. Louisiana, meanwhile, recently saw its law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms struck down in court and later allowed to temporarily proceed in some districts while the legal battle continues.

Hegseth may very well believe that the U.S. is fighting a holy war in Iran and that God is on his side. But as the Trump administration has repeatedly shown, when politicians use faith to justify expansions of the state and illiberal policies, Americans ought to be skeptical of their motivations and the movement that brought them into power.

The post Pete Hegseth's Pulp Fiction Prayer Isn't the First Time He's Used Religion To Justify Illegal War in Iran appeared first on Reason.com.

62-Year-Old Protester Acquitted on All Charges for Wearing Penis Costume

2026-04-16T17:04:15Z

This week, a 62-year-old Alabama woman faced a criminal trial for wearing an inflatable penis costume during a protest.

After three hours of testimony, a judge acquitted her of all charges—a welcome result for her free speech rights.

In October 2025, Jeana Renea Gamble wore the offending phallus—holding a "No Dick-Tator" sign—at a "No Kings" protest. Responding to the scene, Cpl. Andrew Babb of the Fairhope Police Department threw Gamble to the ground and arrested her for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Prosecutors later added charges of disturbing the peace and giving a false name to law enforcement—the latter because when she was asked her name, Gamble replied "Aunt Tifa," a play on antifa, the shorthand used by antifascist activists.

The case was flawed from the start: Babb's body camera footage shows his tone was aggressive as soon as he arrived, and he threw her to the ground less than a minute after arriving, even though she was walking away from him at the time.

Besides, wearing an offensive costume is fully protected by the First Amendment.

Predictably, the prosecution faced an uphill battle. Judge Haymes Snedeker dropped the false name charge before the trial even began. And prosecutors struggled to establish why Gamble should even have been arrested in the first place, much less prosecuted.

"She was obstructing traffic and was a safety risk," Babb testified at trial, adding that he tried to de-escalate the situation. The prosecution played "a single non-emergency phone call to police from a driver who was offended by the display," according to Courthouse News.

But as defense attorney David Gespass noted, that wasn't what Babb said on the scene. Bodycam footage shows that before he threw Gamble to the ground, Babb had only objected to her costume, demanding to know "how you would explain to my children what you're supposed to be." Even after the arrest, Babb took a phone call in which he says he told Gamble, "This is a family town….Being dressed like that is not going to be tolerated." He never says anything about Gamble obstructing traffic.

"That's all he talked about when he was confronting her was, 'I am not going to put up with this in my town,'" Gespass said at trial. "Certainly, if you watch the video, he is not de-escalating anything. He approached her aggressively."

"There is no constitutional right to wear a total erect penis on the side of the road," said prosecuting attorney Marcus McDowell. "It was in the middle of the day, and during a [youth] baseball season."

"Imagine going to the trouble of going to law school, passing the bar, standing up in front of a judge, and being this wrong," First Amendment attorney Adam Steinbaugh of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression responded on X, adding, "This may be the most eye-rolling invocation of 'what about the children' I've heard."

Ultimately, the judge was unswayed. "There was probable cause for arrest, but I can't convict and sentence someone unless I'm sure," Snedeker said, acquitting on all charges. Gespass, Gamble's attorney, disagreed about the probable cause and said they may sue the department for violating Gamble's First Amendment rights.

"Free speech wins!" Gamble proclaimed after the acquittal, addressing the crowd of supporters that had gathered outside the courthouse. "We have civil rights in Fairhope!"

"We have some growing and relearning to do about the rights the citizens of this town have," she added. "And as Alabamians, we dare defend our rights, and this fight is not over."

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Justice Ginsburg Cancer Treatment Leak Prosecution: Blame the Cat

2026-04-16T16:37:39Z

From U.S. v. Russell, decided Tuesday by Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Albert Diaz, joined by Judges Robert King and Stephanie Thacker:

Before Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, … [i]n January 2019, employees at George Washington University Hospital discovered a Twitter post that revealed information about Justice Ginsburg's recent visits to the hospital. The post contained a screenshot of the hospital's patient search screen, which highlighted Justice Ginsburg's name and showed the dates of ten visits, along with medical services she received (which included radiology, oncology, and surgery services)….

Law enforcement later learned that before circulating on Twitter, the screenshot was posted on the anonymous message board 4Chan. It appeared on a thread titled "Politically Incorrect," where users promoted a conspiracy theory that Justice Ginsburg had died and prominent Democrats were covering up her death.

The hospital's Chief Information Officer, Nathan Read, investigated the leak. He obtained search logs for anyone who had used the hospital's system to look for patients with last names starting with "Ginsb" in the relevant time frame….

Read's … search parameters revealed that a non-hospital issued device, operating under Russell's username, searched for "Gins" on January 7, 2019. That search was sandwiched between two others. Seconds before, the same device searched for "Barker," and seconds after, it searched for "Ginston." Barker was a hospital patient, but the hospital had no record of ever serving someone with the last name Ginston.

After concluding its investigation, the hospital deactivated Russell's account, notified his employer, and gave Harlow's and Russell's names to law enforcement….

Federal Agents Mosi Forde and Chris Lalonde interviewed Russell at work. The CEO of Russell's company, Lori Brigham, sat in on the interview "because she was concerned about the case and interested in the outcome." Neither Forde nor Lalonde had asked her to attend. Brigham remained silent during the interview, except to once "wonder[ ] aloud what sensitive information could be derived from simply searching someone's name."

The agents told Russell that the interview was voluntary, he was free to leave at any time, and he could decline to answer any questions. According to Forde, Russell's "affect was pleasant and measured" during the interview, and he "appeared to be under no apparent duress."

The agents showed Russell the relevant search logs. He confirmed that the credentials used for the searches belonged to him. Russell also admitted that he'd run the search for "Barker," who was his patient. But Russell denied searching for "Gins" and "Ginston." {At trial, the government argued that Russell searched for "Ginston" to conceal that he was looking for Justice Ginsburg's health records.}

When asked what "Gins" stood for, Russell said that "if he had to take a guess, it was Justice Ginsburg." The agents hadn't yet mentioned the Justice's name in the interview. Russell also "guessed" that the agents were speaking with him "because someone had taken a screenshot of Justice Ginsburg's medical record."

Russell insisted that he didn't know how his credentials had been used to run the "Gins" and "Ginston" searches. But he theorized that "potentially his cat had run across the keyboard and typed in those letters." He also suggested that the searches could be typos or that a coworker may have used his login information….

Russell was prosecuted, and convicted of "destroying and altering records, and … obtaining individually identifiable health information," and acquitted "of disclosing individually identifiable health information." He was sentenced to 2 years in prison.

The court concluded there was enough evidence to sustain the conviction:

The jury convicted Russell under 42 U.S.C. § 1320d-6(a)(2), which prohibits "obtain[ing] individually identifiable health information relating to an individual." This includes any information that

(A) is created or received by a health care provider … and

(B) relates to the past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition of an individual, the provision of health care to an individual, or the past, present, or future payment for the provision of health care to an individual, and—

(i) identifies the individual; or

(ii) with respect to which there is a reasonable basis to believe that the information can be used to identify the individual.

A person violates the statute "if the information is maintained by a covered entity … and the individual obtained … such information without authorization." Healthcare providers like George Washington University Hospital are covered entities….

Russell argues that the information about Justice Ginsburg in the screenshot doesn't qualify as "individually identifiable health information." Although he admits the screenshot showed that the Justice received medical care from the hospital, Russell asks us to limit the statute's application to individuals who obtain "information about [a patient's] specific health conditions," such as "details about the [patient's] particular physician and type of treatment." In Russell's view, because the screenshot didn't disclose the precise nature of Justice Ginsburg's illness or the names of her doctors, it can't serve as the basis for his conviction.

We reject this crabbed view of the statute. The screenshot identified the Justice by name and disclosed where she was being treated, her arrival and discharge dates, and the medical services provided, which included radiology and oncology services. As a witness testified, this information revealed that Justice Ginsburg "had been receiving treatment from [the hospital] for various things related to cancer seemingly since at least 2014."

This information falls well within the heartland of the conduct the statute is aimed at because it "relates to the past … health or condition of an individual, [and] the provision of health care to an individual." To hold otherwise would flout the spirit of the law. At the very least, a reasonable juror could accept that the screenshot contained personal health information sufficient to support a conviction under § 1320d-6(a)(2).

And the court held that the CEO's presence during the interview didn't make Russell's statements to law enforcement "involuntary" for legal purposes and thus inadmissible:

[T]he district court didn't say that implied threats to employment can never be coercive. It simply found that there was no such threat here. Russell didn't identify a case where "the mere presence of the employer or the CEO [in a conversation with law enforcement] could be construed as a threat, implicit or explicit." …

The district court concluded that "there's nothing in the record that suggests that the interaction between the agents and [Russell] involved coercive police activity, either in the words that were spoken or in their actions[,]" [because] … (1) Russell was an English-speaking adult with higher education; (2) law enforcement questioned him in a conference room with windows and at least one unlocked door; (3) the agents told Russell that he "was free to leave at any time, [and] that the interview was voluntary"; (4) the agents didn't brandish weapons or any other indicia of force or coercion; (5) Russell "felt free to admit certain inculpatory evidence"; and (6) the agents hadn't asked the CEO to attend the interview.

Given these findings, the CEO's presence (without more) doesn't rise to the level of coercive police activity. So the district court correctly denied the motion to suppress.

Lauren Nicole Beebe and Zoe Bedell represent the government.

The post Justice Ginsburg Cancer Treatment Leak Prosecution: Blame the Cat appeared first on Reason.com.

Congress Declines Again To Rein in Trump's Iran War

2026-04-16T21:40:53Z

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch (R–Idaho) has never believed that now is the right time to vote on war with Iran. "There is no clear line of delineation between actual war and the use of kinetic force," he said during a war powers debate in 2020, adding that President Donald Trump has used force "very sparingly" against Iran. "This is not the start of a forever war," Risch said after Trump launched a one-off air raid against Iran in June 2025.

Now that Trump has started an undeniable, no-kidding war with no clear ending, Risch believes that a war powers resolution would unfairly tell the President to "put your tail between your legs and run."

Risch got what he wanted on Wednesday night when the Senate voted 47–52 against a war powers resolution, which would have forced the president to either get congressional approval for the war or end it. It was the fourth attempt to pass a war powers resolution in the Senate since the war began. Every single one went exactly the same way: All Republicans except libertarian-adjacent Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) voted for the war, and all Democrats except the pro-Israel heavyweight Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.) voted against the war.

On Thursday morning, the same resolution failed in the House of Representatives in the same way, with every Democrat except Rep. Jared Golden (D–Maine) voting to end the war, and every Republican except for the libertarian-adjacent Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) voting to continue it.

The U.S. and Iran have agreed to a temporary ceasefire to allow for peace talks. After walking out of negotiations last weekend, the Trump administration declared it was enforcing a blockade on Iranian ports. Trump and his advisers insist that they are ready to resume fighting once the ceasefire expires next week. "We are reloading with more power than ever before. We are locked and loaded," Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters on Thursday morning.

Members of Congress are more supportive of the war than the people who elected them. On average, polls at the beginning of the war showed that 43 percent of Americans disapproved of it, compared to only 35 percent who approved. When the U.S. and Iran agreed to a temporary ceasefire on April 8, disapproval stood at 53–38. A poll released by Reuters and Ipsos on Tuesday shows that only 24 percent of Americans think the war has been worth it, and 54 percent think that the war has made their personal financial situation worse.

That may be why the war's supporters in Congress want to avoid voting on it—and why the opposition insists on doing so. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) has promised weekly war powers votes to force senators to go on the record. Democrats have signaled that they are going to make the cost of the war a major issue in the midterm congressional elections. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D–Ill.), sponsor of Tuesday's resolution, said that it would force Republicans to "prove that they're actually putting America first."

One cop-out by the administration and its supporters has been to simply deny that a war ever took place. On March 6, after voting down a war powers resolution, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) insisted that "we are not at war." Three days later, Trump himself called it a "war." A few days later, Trump insisted that the "military operation" should not be called a "war" because "as a military operation, I don't need any approvals. As a war, you're supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that."

Another cop-out has been insisting that Congress has 60 days before it can weigh in on war under the War Powers Act. That's not quite true. While the War Powers Act sets a 60 day deadline for the president to "terminate" an undeclared war, it also states that the president can only "introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities" under an authorization from Congress or "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States," and has to "consult regularly with the Congress until United States Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities."

Still, Sens. Susan Collins (R–Maine), James Lankford (R–Okla.), and John Curtis (R–Utah) used the 60-day deadline as an excuse to vote against the war powers resolution on Tuesday while insisting that they support some limits on war powers, at some point in time. "I support the president's actions [in Iran] taken in defense of American lives and interests. However, I will not support ongoing military action beyond a 60-day window without congressional approval," Curtis wrote in an article for Deseret News.

During the debate on Tuesday's resolution, Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) proverbially rolled his eyes at the idea that his colleagues would actually "jump up and say that's it, it's one second past 60 days, everybody come home." After all, Collins has already backed down on her previous war powers position; she supported war powers resolutions in February 2020 and January 2026 to restrain actions far short of Trump's all-out attack on Iran.

The same day that the Senate voted on the war powers resolution, it also voted on two bills by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) to block weapons shipments to the Israeli military, which attacked Iran alongside U.S. forces. Both of them failed, but gained much more support than Sanders' last attempt. On Wednesday night, 36 senators voted against a shipment of bombs and 40 voted against a shipment of armored bulldozers. All Republicans—along with Schumer, Fetterman, and four other Democrats—voted for both shipments.

Although bombs may seem more controversial than bulldozers, Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.) explained to the Jewish Insider that the split voters considered the bulldozers to be a referendum on Israel's rule over the Palestinian territories and the bombs to be a referendum on its war with Iran. "The United States should ensure that Israel has the tools it needs to protect its people and deter its adversaries while opposing transfers of equipment that are used to demolish homes, expand settlements, and further entrench a reality that weakens the already fragile prospects for a durable peace" with Palestinians, he said.

The two may not be so easy to separate in reality. In Lebanon, where Israel is fighting the pro-Iran militia Hezbollah, the Israeli army is "behaving just like we did in Gaza. There's a list of homes to be demolished, and we measure success based on the number of buildings destroyed in a day," an army source told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Nonetheless, the Senate vote is an indicator of falling American public support for the Israeli government. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that 60 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, including 80 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans under the age of 50. Similar numbers do not trust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "do the right thing," according to the poll.

Overconfident in the level of pro-Israel public sentiment, the Trump administration first justified the war with Iran in terms of protecting Israel. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 2 that the U.S. joined the war because "we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action," and Trump said the next day that he had to fight Iran because "they were getting ready to attack Israel." Faced with unexpected backlash, the administration scrambled to backtrack.

Clock Tower X, a firm run by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, released a pro-war YouTube ad a few days before the ceasefire. "This decision wasn't about Israel. It was about our safety," the ad states. "This material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel," it concludes.

The post Congress Declines Again To Rein in Trump's Iran War appeared first on Reason.com.

Who Owns The President's Papers?

2026-04-16T16:05:59Z

The Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) is unconstitutional. In Civitas Outlook, I explained why I thought this opinion was consistent with recent Supreme Court precedents, including Trump v. Mazars.

Others, unsurprisingly, disagree. Christopher Fonzone, who headed OLC during the Biden Administration, writes that the PRA is constitutional. Here, I want to focus on one aspect of Fonzone's analysis: who owns the President's papers?

Fonzone writes:

First and foremost, the Property Clause. Article IV of the Constitution expressly grants Congress the "Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting" U.S. property. Since the Constitution and Congress create and fund all of the offices in the White House, those offices are unquestionably government offices. As OLC recognized in the 1978 testimony concerning the constitutionality of the PRA, "[i]t is well established that the work product of government employees prepared at the direction of their employer or in the course of their duties is government property." Thus, Congress may "extend this principle" to require the preservation of "records prepared or received by the President in the course of his duties" and "no substantial separation of powers problems would, in our view, be raised." (As I discuss below, the April 1, 2026 OLC opinion includes no discussion of the Property Clause.)

The Carter Administration may have reached this conclusion, but (thankfully) one executive branch cannot bind another executive branch--especially one that was "especially pleased" to acquiesce to so many congressional constraints on presidential power.

Fonzone does not mention that the Supreme Court expressly left this issue open in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (1977):

We see no reason to engage in the debate whether appellant [President Nixon] has legal title to the materials. . . .

The litigation over Nixon's records did not end in 1978. There was extensive caselaw that stretched decades. In 1992, the D.C. Circuit stated that the papers did belong to Nixon:

The government has, pursuant to PRMPA, taken complete possession and control of the Nixon papers. Although a great public interest may justify a taking, it does not convert the taking into mere regulation. Here, the few rights that Mr. Nixon retains in the materials are so fractured that his original property interest has been destroyed. Indeed, the rights that have been granted to Mr. Nixon are so modest that they cannot be equated with "property." In such a case, we have little difficulty in concluding that PRMPA constitutes a per se taking of Mr. Nixon's property.

For those who keep track, the panel opinion was written by Judge Harry Edwards, and Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined it in full.

The recent OLC opinion mentions the 1992 case⁠ and points out that the Presidential Records Act nowhere authorizes payment of just compensation: ". . . we note that the PRA is plainly not an attempt to exercise the power of eminent domain: Unlike the PRMPA, it contains no just-compensation provision."

And wait, there's more! The Domestic Emoluments Clause is relevant. Seth Barrett Tillman and I discussed this issue in our contribution to the Heritage Guide to the Constitution:

After President Richard Nixon resigned from office, the General Services Administration (GSA) took custody of certain materials from the Nixon presidency. Nixon sued the government to retain control of these papers, recordings, and other items. Nixon claimed that these materials were his property. But the government argued that "the salary and benefits provided to Mr. Nixon by the United States during his presidency were the only economic benefits the United States could have provided him."²⁶ As a result, the government claimed, the Domestic Emoluments Clause prohibited Nixon "from receiving any 'emolument' from the United States beyond the compensation fixed by Congress before he . . . took office."²⁷ Moreover, Nixon would be "precluded from taking materials and selling them for personal profit during, or after, his . . . presidency."²⁸ Thus, he was "not entitled to any [further] compensation by virtue of the Emoluments Clause."²⁹ Nixon countered "that since the presidential papers were never public property to begin with, the [Domestic] Emoluments Clause does not apply to them."³⁰

In Griffin v. United States (1995), a federal district court recognized that the Domestic Emoluments Clause "addressed the Framers' concern that the President should not have the ability to convert his or her office for profit."³¹ However, the court also found that the clause "does not bar the award of compensation." This provision applies while a President is in office, but the clause "would not be violated because Mr. Nixon would receive compensation subsequent to the expiration of his term of office."³² Any "proceeds derived from the sale of Mr. Nixon's presidential papers do not constitute an emolument."³³ Past Presidents had negotiated "fancy sums" for "lucrative library deals," and the Library of Congress has "authorized purchases" of materials from Presidents.³⁴ The court declined to address whether "a sitting President could sell his or her papers while in office" because those facts were not presented.³⁵

Griffin is in some tension with an earlier district court decision, Nixon v. Sampson (1975).³⁶ That case held that Nixon's materials from the White House were "directly related to the performance of the Office of the President and are of incalculable value." The judge ruled that it would violate the Domestic Emoluments Clause if the President was "given or . . . permitted to assert a personal right to such materials." Nixon argued that this material was "not an emolument because his right of ownership does not come into existence until he leaves office."³⁷ The court rejected this argument: "[I]f [Nixon's] claim of ownership does not come into existence until he leaves office, then it can only be concluded that while he is in office the documents, papers, tapes and other materials were government property." Sampson was later vacated, and Griffin did not cite Sampson.

The issue of who owns the the President's papers is not a settled question. When an issue is not yet settled by the Supreme Court, the only way to resolve the issue is what I call the Nike approach: "Just do it!" The executive concludes that the PRA is unconstitutional, stops voluntarily complying with it, and waits to be sued. Without such affirmative action, the President will forever be bound by the leadership of Jimmy Carter. In CASA, the Solicitor General stated clearly that lower courts cannot universally bind the executive branch, but the Supreme Court can. And now, the issue will race to SCOTUS.

In other news, the litigation filed by American Oversight to block the implementation of the OLC opinion hit a stumbling block. The group attempted to judge shop the case to Judge Howell, a friendly forum. They listed this case as "related" to a pre-existing case before Judge Howell involving FOIA and DOGE. The government moved to randomly reassign the case, and Judge Howell agreed:

The only basis for relation to American Oversight asserted in plaintiffs' Notice of Related case was that the two cases supposedly "involve common issues of fact." See Pls.' Not. of Related Case (checking the "common issues of fact" box). Belatedly, and somewhat surprisingly, plaintiffs now assert in response to defendants' noticed objection to relating the two cases, that they "mistakenly selected only the box for 'involves common issues of fact,' and not also the box for 'relates to common property,'" and proceed to rely first and most heavily in their opposition on the contention that these cases involve as "common property" the records sought by the plaintiff in American Oversight (the "American Oversight Records"). Pls.' Opp'n at 1-2 & n.1.1 Neither of these prongs in D.D.C. Local Civil Rule 40.5(a)(3)(i) and (ii) provides a basis for relation.

The case was reassigned to Judge Bates.

You see, judge shopping is only bad when conservatives do it. When progressive use chicanery to draw a favored judge, there is no cause for concern. If people wanted to get serious about judge-shopping, the first area of focus is not a few single judge divisions. The rampant abuse of the "related cases" option should be the first priority.

The post Who Owns The President's Papers? appeared first on Reason.com.

Federal Judge Delivers Due Process Win Against DOJ Registry Overreach

2026-04-16T15:26:10Z

To protect the fundamental right to due process, a federal judge has permanently blocked the Justice Department (DOJ) from prosecuting Californians who fail to register under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) if the state doesn't require them to do so.

In a lawsuit filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a public-interest law firm, four John Does described the impossibility of complying with the DOJ. A rule issued by former Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021 required anyone who's ever been convicted of a sex offense to register with their state, regardless of whether their state's laws match the federal requirements. Anyone who fails to fully register faces up to 10 years in federal prison.

This new rule was particularly problematic for individuals who are no longer required, nor permitted, to register as a sex offender in their home state. One plaintiff, identified as John Doe #2, was convicted 21 years ago of a misdemeanor offense for which he spent 60 days in jail, according to the complaint. While he was initially required to register as a sex offender in California, after receiving intensive therapy and "obtain[ing] a master's degree in Social Work to help treat other people with sex addictions," reads the complaint, his conviction was expunged, and he was issued a certificate of rehabilitation. Under California law, he is no longer required to register as a sex offender and is even prohibited from doing so. But under federal law, he was still required to comply with SORNA's registration requirements under threat of prosecution.

Another plaintiff, named in the complaint as John Doe #4, similarly faced the distressing threat of federal prosecution. Although he was required to register with the state at the time the lawsuit was filed (he successfully petitioned to be removed from the registry in 2023), California only required a registrant's address and a copy of their identification. But "the new rule requires much more," Caleb Kruckenburg of the Pacific Legal Foundation told Reason when the lawsuit was filed. "A registrant must include his social security number, his 'remote communication identifiers' (e.g., internet usernames), his work or school information, and information concerning any international travel, passport and vehicle registration, or professional licenses."

The Pacific Legal Foundation says there are thousands of individuals in California alone facing the same penalties for circumstances outside of their control. In 2023, District Judge Jesus G. Bernal issued a preliminary injunction against the DOJ, citing SORNA's inconsistency with due process. "May the Government attempt to imprison California registrants like Plaintiffs for up to a decade for failing to do the impossible, unless they, not the Government, prove impossibility?" wrote Bernal. "This Court holds that the answer is no."

Under the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and 14th amendments of the U.S. Constitution, the government is required to bear the burden of proving all essential elements of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Under SORNA, however, the government "presumes that Plaintiffs are guilty of a federal crime unless they prove their lack of culpability at trial," Bernal continued. In issuing the now permanent injunction on April 9, Bernal reiterated these due process violations and blocked the DOJ from prosecuting individuals who've failed to fully register without first confirming that the state of California requires the person to register or collects certain information.

"This ruling is an important win for the fundamental principle of due process: the government must bear the burden to prove that someone broke the law," Allison Daniel, a PLF attorney, tells Reason. "It cannot transfer that burden to the accused by requiring that they affirmatively prove they did not."

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'The Rich Don't Pay Their Fair Share' and 4 Other Tax Myths That Won't Die

2026-04-16T14:45:49Z

Every April, Americans spend more than 7 billion hours filing taxes and roughly the same amount of time arguing over them, almost entirely on the basis of several common myths. Here are the five most consequential.

Myth No. 1: The Rich Don't Pay Their Fair Share

This is the most repeated claim in American tax politics and one of the least supported by actual data. The top 1 percent of earners take in 22 percent of total income and pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 10 percent earn about half the nation's income and pay 72 percent of its taxes. The bottom half of earners, collectively, pay roughly 3 percent of the tax revenue. The United States, in fact, has the most progressive income-tax system in the developed world.

Myth No. 2: We'll Fix the Budget Deficit by Taxing the Rich

We simply cannot. The collective net worth of every American billionaire is estimated at somewhere around $8 trillion. The projected federal deficit over the next decade alone approaches $25 trillion. Even a one-time total confiscation of every billionaire's wealth wouldn't come close, and you only get to do it once.

The real driver of America's fiscal crisis isn't a shortage of tax revenue from the wealthy. It's the structural growth of Social Security and Medicare. The Congressional Budget Office projects that such mandatory spending and interest payments will permanently exceed all federal revenue starting next year. No amount you could tax the rich will correct an imbalance like this.

Myth No. 3: If You Can't Tax the Rich, Tax Corporations

Corporations are the next most likely target for those who want large government without the middle class paying for it. The problem is that corporations don't actually pay taxes. Once you understand why, this starts to look like one of the worst ideas in America's tax code.

Corporations write checks to the IRS, but they don't bear the tax burden. Every dollar collected for corporate tax comes from a human: the worker who's paid a lower wage, the shareholder who earns less, and the consumer who pays higher prices at checkout. Research shows that workers bear somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the corporate tax burden through lower wages. If you have a 401(k), you're paying it too, quietly, through lower returns on every stock in the fund.

Further, corporate profits are returns on investment. Tax them and you get less investment. Less investment means lower productivity, which leads to lower wages over time. Decades ago, economists Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka showed a better way: Replace the corporate income tax with a consumption-based system under which businesses deduct all wages and capital investment immediately. No double taxation, no penalty on investment, and revenue without unintended economic damage.

The corporate tax survives because voters mistakenly believe someone else pays it. This belief is expensive.

Myth No. 4: Capital Gains Should Be Taxed Like Ordinary Income

This proposal sounds like common sense, but it's bad economics. When a company earns a dollar of profit, it pays roughly 26 cents in combined federal and state corporate taxes before distributing the rest to its shareholders. When it's all said and done, the government has taken close to half of every dollar the company earned. That's not a tax on the rich—it's two taxes on the same income.

Those who want to raise capital-gains rates assume the U.S. is a low-tax haven for investors. It's not. America's combined federal, state, and net investment income tax rate on capital gains already sits at 29.2 percent, well above the average of 19.1 percent in fellow Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) democracies. We're already an outlier, and not in a good direction.

Myth No. 5: Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves

Politicians on the right have said this for 40 years. But it's not quite true. Tax rates affect behavior. Cut the marginal rate on work and investment, and you get more of both, which generates more revenue than a static calculation predicts. But generating more revenue than expected is not necessarily enough to cover the cost of the rate cut. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act proved it. Growth picked up, wages rose, business investment increased, yet the deficit still widened.

The honest argument is different: A tax cut that costs real revenue but improves the allocation of capital and raises long-run productivity is still the right policy. The question is not whether tax cuts pay for themselves but whether the economic growth is worthwhile. That's harder to fit on a bumper sticker, but it's the version of the conservative tax argument that actually holds up.

That said, we should always offset the loss of revenue when possible. There is plenty of spending to cut, and there are plenty of tax breaks to close for that.

The post 'The Rich Don't Pay Their Fair Share' and 4 Other Tax Myths That Won't Die appeared first on Reason.com.

'Blue Power' and the Rise of Police Union Politics

2026-04-16T14:17:03Z

Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, by Stuart Schrader. Basic Books, 432 pages, $34

"Everybody else can indulge in politics—every black group, every political party group, every church group," groused Carl Parsell, then president of the Detroit Police Officers Association, in 1969. "Why are police officers so different?"

The question goes to the heart of Stuart Schrader's Blue Power, a new book charting how police unions accreted and cemented power in the decades following Parsell's query.

It's a ripe subject for review: Police officers' savvy use of public sector unions and lobbying to largely immunize themselves from oversight is one of the greatest political coups in recent American history. In under four decades, police unions evolved from beer-drinking clubs to organized bargaining units to potent political forces at the local, state, and national levels.

The idea that those empowered to enforce law and order could also leverage their position to gain more power has always sat uncomfortably in a democratic republic. "Who is going to uphold this order?" a San Francisco judge wondered in the 1970s, when striking officers defied his commands to stop picketing while carrying guns. Schrader argues that law enforcement's victories at the bargaining table and in statehouses have hurt "the very public safety and security that are to be democracy's police-enforced guarantors."

Police misconduct settlements cost cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Arbitration makes it hard to fire officers, even for gross misconduct. At their most militant, police unions threaten to remove departments from any external democratic control, and to capriciously withdraw or overapply their power to punish anyone who would oppose them.

Several recent books have explored the history of individual police departments in major cities and the battles to reform them. The Minneapolis Reckoning covered the Minneapolis Police Department both before and after the killing of George Floyd. The Oakland Police Department's long history of corruption was the subject of The Riders Come Out at Night. Both The Highest Law in the Land and The Power of the Badge examined the unusually powerful office of the county sheriff in American policing and local politics.

But Schrader, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, gives a national perspective, from the birth of police organizing in the 1960s through law enforcement's emergence on the national political stage in the 1980s, the passage of the 1994 crime bill, and the turbulent Black Lives Matter years. What's remarkable is how much the police achieved without a national union or top-down campaign.

Police used the titular phrase blue power in the 1960s as a direct response to the Black Power movement. One 1968 assessment called blue power "the political force by which radicalism, student demonstration, and Black Power can be blocked." (There were less successful efforts to co-opt the language of the Black Power movement, such as when striking Minneapolis officers called for "Pig Power." ) But police organizing was not simply a backlash. One of Schrader's insights, and one of the more interesting threads of the book, is that rank-and-file police organizations stoked public fears of radicals and crime as a tactic in a more concrete fight against administrators.

At the end of the Progressive Era, cities began to untangle their police departments from machine politics and turn them into independent agencies focused on crime control. When the Los Angeles Police Department unveiled a new slogan in 1955, "To Protect and to Serve," it was intended to signal a new era of professionalism. Officers soon discovered that being independent meant having to advocate for their own interests in what they saw as an increasingly hostile world, besieged by radicals on the streets, clueless liberals in Washington, and hostile bosses on the floors above them.

Officers had genuine grievances. Patronage still governed hiring and promotions at several major police departments. In Baltimore in the 1960s, it was normal for police officers to do maintenance and sanitation work around the city while on duty. "Some had been painting walls for so many years they couldn't remember how to write a ticket," Schrader writes.

When Detroit police officers began a ticket-writing slowdown in 1967—supported by the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters, and the Detroit chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees— they were protesting a much-hated quota for traffic tickets, which city officials wanted to raise to generate more revenue. The slowdown cost Detroit an estimated $583,000.

Police chiefs were autocrats, and officers had no formal grievance or disciplinary processes to turn to. In Baltimore, Commissioner Donald Pomerlau had an intelligence unit that kept tabs on officers and civilians who were of interest to him. (Asked by a reporter if his intelligence unit spied on elected officials, Pomerleau responded, "Just the blacks. Just the blacks.") Meanwhile, police chiefs used the frequent bribery scandals of the 1960s and 1970s to press for more powerful internal affairs departments.

Schrader's labor-vs.-management framing shows these competing forces as sophisticated political actors in a multifront battle. Police unions learned early on that they could sell relatively dry policies to the public by presenting them as life-and-death matters. For example, when New York City's police unions launched a signature drive in 1966 for a referendum to abolish the mayor's newly created police review board—which would have had no investigative authority or power to make disciplinary recommendations—-the union's public ad campaign was so effective that conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr. personally delivered 40,000 signed petitions to the city clerk's desk. ("The civilian review board proposed by Mayor Lindsay is an emotional artifact, designed primarily to soothe the unrealistic fears of a small minority of New York voters who worry without objective justification that the police are regularly guilty of the abuse of their powers," Buckley said.)

Collective bargaining rights and forced arbitration for officers tilted the balance of power away from police chiefs. As police officer unions grew in influence over the 1970s, so did their ambitions and tactics: political lobbying and campaigning, litigation, and retaliatory work actions.

Schrader documents some of police unions' forays into the culture war, such as when the Houston Police Officers' Union sued the Houston punk band AK-47 in 1980 for its single, "The Badge Means You Suck," which listed the names of several people who'd been killed by Houston police in recent years.

But it's the strikes, riots, and other actions that are the most controversial. In addition to sick-outs (waves of what's known as the "blue flu"), officers engaged in malicious compliance or noncompliance to punish cities that refused to meet their demands. In the 1970s, the day after San Francisco voters approved a proposition to cut police wages, police issued three times the normal number of traffic citations.

In one notorious 1992 incident, thousands of New York officers, many of them drunk, surrounded City Hall to protest Mayor David Dinkins' plan to create a civilian review board. They were egged on by future Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and they later marched down the Brooklyn Bridge, blocking traffic. A New York councilwoman said that cops refused to let her enter City Hall and called her the n-word.

Left-wing labor activists have never been quite sure how to square their principles with the existence of right-wing police unions, and Schrader also struggles with this a bit.

"Many public sector unions were militant, but police maintained this militancy long after it had crested among other public employees," he writes. "Most public sector unions experienced setbacks or stasis beginning in the 1980s, but police unions continued to succeed. To this day, with around 7 million unionized public employees in the United States, it is difficult in most cities to consider other unions as part of the same movement as police unions—only one type of union representative approaches the bargaining table or meeting of a city's central labor council packing a pistol."

Of course, other public sector unions such as teachers and sanitation workers know how to apply particular and unpleasant pressure to have their demands met. But the Punisher bumper stickers aren't the only difference; there's another one resting in a holster on most cops' belts. Schrader argues that what makes police different is that they are able to augment their political power—the use of political tactics and channels to advance their interests—with their "operational power," officers' authority to use violence and the discretion over when to use it.

At one point, Schrader notes that police unions have saddled municipalities with huge unfunded pension liabilities and other pernicious perks. Sadly, he thinks the problem is that every other public employee doesn't have the same benefits. "Although all workers should have access to the types of compensations and benefits available to police with powerful unions, the underlying alteration that must occur is to keep this one particular profession from holding primacy in our politics, distorting and dominating the entire sphere."

Still, Blue Power is a detailed and often interesting history of police organizing that rightly recognizes what officers have known for years: Policing is politics.

The post 'Blue Power' and the Rise of Police Union Politics appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump Administration Presents Update on its Tariff Refund Plan

2026-04-16T04:48:59Z

After the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump's massive International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs in a case I helped litigate along with the Liberty Justice Center and others, litigation continued over tariff refunds owed to the many businesses that paid illegally collected tariffs under IEEPA - a total of some $166 billion. In March, Judge Richard K. Eaton of the US Court of International Trade - the judge assigned to oversee the refund process - ordered the administration to grant refunds to to all those businesses that were forced to pay the tariffs - including those that had not filed lawsuits seeking refunds. This week, on April 14, in response to Judge Eaton's court order, the US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) submitted a required update on the status of their refund plan. The Hill has a helpful summary:

Roughly 330,000 importers who paid a combined $166 billion as part of President Trump's emergency tariffs are waiting on refunds after the Supreme Court in February struck down the levies in a blockbuster 6-3 decision.

CBP, the federal agency in charge of collecting tariffs, has warned the immense scale of the refund effort requires time. Officials have been working to launch the first phase of the new system on April 20, though the agency previously suggested importers may need to wait an additional 45 days afterwards to actually receive their funds.

Lord said the system will be able to process electronic refunds for about 82 percent of the affected tariff entries. That accounts for about $127 billion in deposits. More than 56,000 importers have already signed up, and the number continues to grow as the system nears its launch.

Others won't be able to use that automated process. Some entries that haven't gone through a formal close-out step called "liquidation" and are subject to antidumping orders must instead go through a manual, administrative process that requires additional steps, Lord noted.

CBP says that applies to about $2.9 billion worth of tariff deposits that need refunding.

This seems less bad than the worst-case scenario in which the administration could simply stonewall most victims of the illegal tariffs, through some combination of malice and bureaucratic incompetence. It is also significant that the administration has - so far, at least - not tried to appeal Judge Eaton's order. In my earlier post on this subject, I indicated they might at least appeal the universal nature of the order, which could potentially be attacked based on the Supreme Court's 2025 ruling Trump v. CASA, Inc. (though I also indicated that I believe Judge Eaton correctly distinguished CASA).

But, as the Hill article notes, the process may still be time-consuming and difficult for many businesses. That is particularly true for smaller importers that have less bureaucratic capacity than bigger firms. Meanwhile, the longer the process drags on, the more interest payments we taxpayers will be on the hook for, a point Judge Eaton rightly stressed in his March ruling.

And, as I pointed out in my previous post, even the most complete possible tariff refund system will not fully compensate many harms inflicted by the illegal tariffs on both businesses and consumers. Among other things, they cannot compensate businesses for lost sales, disruptions in supplier relationships, lost investments, and more. Consumers, of course, will not be compensated for having to pay higher prices.

For these reasons, as also noted in my earlier post, courts made a mistake when they stayed the Court of International Trade injunction against the tariffs issued when we won our initial trial court victory in May 2025. As I noted at the time:

One factor courts consider in assessing a motion to stay is which side is likely to ultimately prevail on the merits….

Another key factor is which side is likely to suffer "irreparable harm" if they lose on the stay issue. We argue that our clients - and thousands of other businesses - will suffer great irreparable harm if a stay is imposed. They will lose sales due to higher prices, good will can be lost, relationships with suppliers and investors will be disrupted, and more. Those harms can't be made up merely by refunding tariff payments months from now, after the appellate process concludes.

All of the noncompensable harms we warned against came true. And, in addition, the administration has been slow to enact an effective tariff refund system, thereby further exacerbating the harm, and leaving taxpayers on the hook for rapidly growing interest payments.

I hope courts learn from this experience. When and if they strike down Trump's newest massive illegal tariffs - those imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 - they should know not to stay any injunction issued against them. Judges should not blindly accept administration assurances that any harms will be promptly remedied by refunds issued after the fact.

NOTE: As I have previously noted, I am no longer a member of the V.O.S. Selections legal team, because my role ended after the Supreme Court issued its decision. Thus, I am not involved in the refund phase of this litigation.

The post Trump Administration Presents Update on its Tariff Refund Plan appeared first on Reason.com.

In Poisoned Ivies, Stefanik Sees Censorship as a Cure for 'Anti-Americanism'

2026-04-16T13:55:59Z

Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities, by Elise Stefanik, Threshold Editions, 256 pages, $29.

Elise Stefanik seems to be stepping away from politics, having suspended her gubernatorial campaign and announced that she will not seek re-election to Congress. The New York Republican's new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities, was presumably intended to advance her political career. It may instead serve as a coda to it.

Central to Poisoned Ivies is a congressional hearing held December 5, 2023, when three Ivy league presidents went viral—and not in the good way—for their response to Stefanik's question: "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university's code of conduct on bullying or harassment?"

Stefanik excoriates the presidents for the "deadpan" and "nearly verbatim" answers they all gave: "It depends on the context." Two presidents, Harvard's Claudine Gay and Penn's Liz Magill, were out of the job soon after the hearing, and Stefanik laments that MIT President Sally Kornbluth managed to escape the fallout with her title intact. Stefanik suggests that the "hearing heard around the world," as she repeatedly calls it, is the zenith of her political accomplishments.

As Stefanik emphasizes throughout the book, this was intended as a simple test of good or evil, one that requires only one word: "Yes." But Stefanik asked these presidents a question about law and policy, then faulted them for not instead answering the unasked moral question about whether they personally condemn pro-genocidal speech. Conservatives have long objected when university bureaucrats blur their personal convictions with their institutional policies to the detriment of neutral speech principles. But here, Stefanik directly demands it.

Despite Stefanik's claims, the context of speech does actually matter. Without more, a comment perceived as "calling for genocide" is indeed unlikely to meet either the Supreme Court's standard for peer-on-peer harassment or the limits of First Amendment protection. Later in the book, Stefanik shows her hand and demonstrates why it's necessary for university leaders to approach such questions with caution: She says the phrase "from the river to the sea" is a "genocidal chant"—presumably one she expects universities to ban.

Readers can draw their own conclusions about the meaning and impact of this and similar phrases. But under the First Amendment, their legal status is not a hard call: This is protected speech. Separating how you feel about speech from your analysis of whether it's protected is a First Amendment fundamental that we should expect elected officials to understand.

Poisoned Ivies does highlight some genuinely disturbing incidents that took place on campus in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. A Cornell student threatened to commit a mass shooting at a kosher dining hall, for example, and there were times when students or workers were trapped inside buildings during occupations. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, where I work, noted, it does not violate the First Amendment for universities to protect students against actual threats or physical harm.

But Stefanik does a real disservice to that cause by conflating unlawful conduct, which universities have a responsibility to address, with what she perceives as offensive speech about October 7 and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which she expects the universities she herself derides as censorial to censor. There is a difference between what morality may require of us and what limits the law can place upon us. And that chasm exists for good reason: The beauty and promise of living in a free country is our right to pursue our own version of the good without being forced to live by the values embraced by our politicians. One legislator's "moral rot" is another American's core beliefs and values.

Stefanik also keeps pairing antisemitism with the hazy concept of "anti-Americanism." She never bothers to define the second concept, nor does she address the obvious First Amendment questions raised by an elected official's endeavours to crack down on such an amorphous, subjective concept. But those distinctions require context and nuance, which Stefanik treats as impediments to the moral clarity demanded by these threats. At one point, the list even balloons to include a murky "anti-West" hate.

In these repeated dismissals of "anti-Americanism," Stefanik derides student bodies who she suggests reject America, its freedom, and its founding ideals. But what is a greater rejection of the founding ideals of the United States than an overreaching federal government trampling the First Amendment? That overreach is exactly what this book celebrates.

Stefanik calls the Trump administration's funding freezes to universities like Columbia and Harvard a correct use of "the federal government's considerable power." Whether that power is employed lawfully is, once again, a pesky nuance that this book is uninterested in addressing. Nitpicky questions of constitutionality are not welcome distractions in a battle cast in these dire moral terms. Harvard's reaction to the administration's strongarming—a lawsuit defending itself—is, she complains, a "vicious[] attack." She calls President Alan Garber's assertion of the university's constitutional rights a result of "radicalized Trump-deranged faculty."

Stefanik rightly notes the broad challenges posed by academic ties with countries like China and Qatar and the associated risk that foreign governments will instill their censorship preferences onto our universities. There is a serious threat that foreign censorship will diminish our universities in both blunt and subtle ways, and I document how vast the problem is in my book Authoritarians in the Academy. Fears of political retaliation in the form of revoked funding can and have pressured universities to contort themselves to please the governments who are proffering those funds, to the detriment of free expression.

But for a critic so concerned with the threat of censorship levied by foreign governments, Stefanik is curiously eager to see it imposed domestically.

Perhaps most disturbing of all is Stefanik's celebration of this administration's crackdown on international students. This includes the newly instituted requirement that their social media accounts be made public so officials can spot "any indications of hostility" to U.S. institutions. ("Rightly so," she writes.) Poisoned Ivies expresses some valid concerns about some students' inability to express views unpopular with their peers or administrators, but the book valorizes something far, far worse: an inability to express views unpopular with elected officials, with arrest and deportation as punishment. In the land of the free, international students are forced to swallow their criticisms of the very government threatening to deport them for wrongthink.

Universities are "no longer educating international students, as they once did, into core American principles and values," Stefanik complains, "because the universities themselves no longer believe in American principles and values." Unfortunately, some of our elected officials aren't interested in educating international students in American values such as freedom of speech either.

Poisoned Ivies is a book heavy on rhetoric and light on substance. Stefanik diagnoses universities as partisan, censorial institutions, but her plan for reform is more partisanship and more censorship. Whatever reasonable criticisms Stefanik raises about higher education are drowned out by her advocacy not for institutions that do not censor, but for ones that censor more to her liking.

Stefanik never quite explains what she means by "anti-Americanism." But readers searching for a definition can find displays of it littered throughout Poisoned Ivies' pages.

The post In Poisoned Ivies, Stefanik Sees Censorship as a Cure for 'Anti-Americanism' appeared first on Reason.com.

Another Drug Boat Bombing

2026-04-16T14:06:45Z

More alleged drug boat slayings. The U.S. military announced last night that it had bombed another boat it claims was smuggling drugs into the country.

U.S. Southern Command claimed on social media to have killed three male "narco-terrorists" in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The post includes a video of the "kinetic" strike turning the bombed boat into a fireball.

On April 15, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known… pic.twitter.com/EaGDMHmpan

— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) April 16, 2026

The New York Times reports that this is the 51st time the Trump administration has used the military to bomb suspected drug boats. The attacks have killed a total of 177 people.

Though it shouldn't be, trafficking drugs is a crime. Criminals are normally arrested by the police, instead of being killed by the military. Trump's use of the military to kill suspected drug smugglers in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean has been legally controversial since the strikes began in September of last year.

The administration has adopted the seemingly contradictory position that it can summarily execute alleged narco-traffickers because they are terrorists engaged in "armed conflict" with the U.S., but that the strikes themselves do not count as "hostilities" that Congress could stop under the War Powers Resolution.

Neither the administration's designation of drug smugglers as armed combatants at war with the U.S. nor its denial that it is engaged in hostilities makes sense on its own.

Standard definitions of armed conflict and armed combatant can't be stretched to cover drug smugglers. Blowing up drug smugglers, on the other hand, would seem to very clearly meet the definition of hostilities.

The Trump administration has tried to say it's not engaged in hostilities that would trigger the War Powers Resolution because the U.S. military personnel blowing up the drug boats are not at risk of being attacked by their targets.

"This argument concedes that the targets posed no immediate threat, meaning Trump authorized the use of lethal force in circumstances where it was morally and legally unjustified," wrote Jacob Sullum in a recent issue of Reason.

Lawmakers have put forward multiple resolutions to stop the Trump administration from continuing with boat strikes, but all have failed thus far.

As it stands, the president continues to exercise the effectively unchecked power to kill people he alone decides need killing.

Blockade broadens. Meanwhile, in our other noncongressionally sanctioned conflict, the U.S. military has broadened the scope of Iranian shipping that's subject to its blockade.

That blockade that began on Monday initially targeted ports and oil terminals along the Iranian coast. Lloyd's List reports this morning that U.S. Central Command has issued updated guidance asserting a right to board and seize Iran-linked vessels anywhere on the open seas.

The expanded geographic scope of the blockade, when combined with the U.S. military's wide definition of contraband subject to the blockade, means "almost any industrial cargo bound for Iran could plausibly be intercepted," the publication notes.

As The Wall Street Journal detailed in a story yesterday, there's a cat-and-mouse game being played in waters near Iran between the U.S. military and "shadow fleet" ships that have long used various means of deception (like spoofed locations and turned-off transponders) to smuggle sanctioned Iranian oil.

U.S. Central Command claims no Iranian-linked ships have managed to slip its blockade within the first 48 hours. The Journal reports that at least 10 ships, some of which show signs of shadow fleet activity, have managed to transit the Strait of Hormuz.

More money, more problems. Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Unified School District reached an agreement with three employee unions to avoid a strike by raising salaries for teachers and other staff.

Despite shrinking enrollment, Los Angeles' per-pupil spending has continued to increase at a much higher rate than overall inflation.

Bizarre situation brewing in LA public schools, as reported by WSJ today

Teachers and parents say schools regularly run out of cleaning supplies and toilet paper

But per-student spending rose from $11.7k to $29.3k since 2014 — about 5x the rate of inflation

Notably…. the…

— Rachel Premack (@rrpre) April 15, 2026

As The Los Angeles Times reports, the district will likely have to dip into its already depleting reserves to pay for the pay increases that the unions extracted. Absent aid from the state, district officials are at an apparent loss as to how to pay for the employee raises.

It's quite possible that L.A. teachers and school staff do deserve a raise. It's hard to say one way or another when the government is the one setting the price of labor.

But a school district going broke while it spends more and more money educating fewer and fewer students is not something taxpayers, parents, or students should have to accept.

Scenes from Washington, D.C.: On X, the account Echoes of War shared an early–20th century image of the National Mall and surrounding areas, as seen from the top of the Washington Monument.

The Victorian landscaping and architecture of the Mall looking east from the top of the Washington Monument, showing the influence of the Downing Plan and Adolph Cluss on the National Mall c. 1904. pic.twitter.com/0hVfeiADlw

— Echoes of War (@EchoesofWarYT) April 14, 2026

That generated some complaints about today's comparatively treeless mall.

Nobody in DC in the summer is glad there's a wide treeless mall instead of this shady park. https://t.co/02MYzyNbX5

— Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) April 15, 2026

can they put trees on the national mall again, it's unbearable to go on for half of the year https://t.co/R1vT38aXyT

— meowtown (@hieywieyneue) April 15, 2026

All things considered, I think today's mall functions pretty well as a summertime park. The walking paths themselves are all tree-lined. Today's open spaces allow people to use the mall for sports, kite flying, and other fun activities that would be difficult to pull off in an urban forest.

The real upgrade that the mall needs is a few more permanent bathrooms and water fountains that actually work.

QUICK HITS

A woman who was arrested for wearing a penis costume to a No Kings protest in Alabama has been found not guilty on all charges.
Tom Palmer at Reason says good riddance to Viktor Orbán.
Also read Scott Alexander on how Orbán was still bad, even if he wasn't a full-on dictator.
Make World Cup attendees pay for their bus trips.
In the wake of Eric Swalwell's exit from the California governor's race, Tom Steyer surges.

The post Another Drug Boat Bombing appeared first on Reason.com.

"Cabotage": It's Not "Sabotage" with the "S" Switched to Russian

2026-04-16T13:35:47Z

Just learned this largely legalese word today; it means, according to Black's Law Dictionary,

1. The carrying on of trade along a country's coast; the transport of goods or passengers from one port or place to another in the same country….

2. The privilege of carrying traffic between two ports in the same country.

3. The right of a foreign airline to carry passengers and cargo between airports in the same country.

Black's also offers this quote:

"Some writers maintain [that cabotage] should be applied only to maritime navigation; in this context one can distinguish between petit cabotage — transport between ports situated on the same sea (e.g. Bordeaux-Le Havre) — and grand cabotage — transport between ports situated on different seas (e.g. Bordeaux-Marseille). However, the term is also properly applied to transport between two inland points on an international river within one State, although the term grand cabotage is sometimes incorrectly applied to transnational transport between the inland ports of different riparian States on the same waterway. River cabotage properly so called is sometimes also referred to as local transport. Finally, the term has also been adopted to describe commercial air transport between airports situated in the same State." Robert C. Lane, "Cabotage," in 1 Encyclopedia of Public International Law 519–20 (1992).

Pedantic disclaimer: Yes, I know that the post title should probably technically have said "Cyrillic" and not just "Russian," but I thought "Russian" would be clearer to many readers.

The post "Cabotage": It's Not "Sabotage" with the "S" Switched to Russian appeared first on Reason.com.

"Can Speech Policy Protect Public Health?" in Print in Utah Law Review

2026-04-16T12:29:27Z

My coauthors Cassandra Robertson, Zoe Robinson, and I just published an article entitled "Can Speech Policy Protect Public Health?" in the Utah Law Review. Here is the abstract:

Government speech shapes public health outcomes, yet political incentives often lead officials to either remain silent about emerging threats or subordinate scientific evidence to partisan goals. This Article examines how three factors interact to influence public health: the constitutional status of health-related speech, the political economy of public health policymaking, and the modern information environment. Drawing on insights from public choice theory, we demonstrate how misaligned incentives lead political actors to avoid communicating about health risks or spread misinformation that serves their short-term interests at the expense of population health. The conventional tools of public health policy were developed when official sources could effectively shape public understanding, but today's fragmented information landscape demands new approaches to health communication.

This Article analyzes both the constitutional framework governing health-related speech and the practical dynamics that complicate effective public health messaging. We propose specific mechanisms to combat harmful misinformation while creating stronger incentives for accurate government communication about health threats. Throughout, we move beyond binary debates about censorship versus free speech to develop approaches that reflect the complex relationship between information flows, political incentives, and public health outcomes. The history of public health challenges—from the AIDS crisis of the 1980s to today's emerging strains of avian influenza—shows how institutional responses often falter. Understanding these dynamics can help shape better responses to current and future health crises.

The post "Can Speech Policy Protect Public Health?" in Print in Utah Law Review appeared first on Reason.com.

$5K Sanctions for "Egregious, Repeated, and Ongoing" AI Hallucinations in Self-Represented Litigant's Filings

2026-04-15T17:58:41Z

From last week's decision by Judge Virginia Kendall (N.D. Ill.) in Obi v. Cook County:

The Court strikes Plaintiff's motion [to alter or amend the judgment dismissing her complaint] for violating Local Rule 7.1 and sanctions her $5,000 for violating Rule 11.

Plaintiff's motion is 10.5 pages single-spaced and her core argument runs six straight pages in a single paragraph. 10.5 single-spaced pages is 21 pages double-spaced. Plaintiff's reply briefs are 23 pages single-spaced (46 pages double-spaced) and 13 pages single-spaced (26 pages double-spaced). Plaintiff never sought leave to file such voluminous papers. The lack of table of contents is also problematic because, as discussed below, many of Plaintiff's citations are fictious. Plaintiff violated Local Rule 7.1. "Neither a motion nor brief in support … shall exceed 15 pages without prior approval of the court." Any brief that exceeds 15 pages "must have a table of contents with the pages noted and a table of cases." "Any brief … that does not comply with this rule shall be … subject to being stricken by the court." The Court "strictly enforce[s]" this rule. The Court therefore strikes Plaintiff's motion and replies.

Normally the Court, recognizing Plaintiff's pro se status, would offer leeway and consider Plaintiff's briefs despite violating Local Rule 7.1. Plaintiff's egregious, repeated, and ongoing Rule 11 violations, however, foreclose any such possibility. Plaintiff generated each brief using AI. Plaintiff's motion is riddled with AI hallucinations, made up cases, quotes, and statements of law and fact. [Citing filing] (identifying 13 hallucinated cases, quotes, and statements of law)….

This is not the first time Plaintiff has done this. In a prior filing, Plaintiff's brief contained at least 17 instances of fake cases, quotes, and statements of law and fact from AI hallucinations. The Court then gave Plaintiff grace—Plaintiff has exhausted that leniency. Plaintiff's replies suffer from similar Rule 11 violations….

The severity of Plaintiff's Rule 11 ongoing and repeated violations warrants sanctions. "Pro se status does not shelter plaintiffs from sanctions pursuant to Rule 11." "When a self-represented party files a document in federal court, that party is certifying to the court that the legal contentions contained in it 'are warranted by existing law.'" "'Carelessness, good faith, or ignorance are not an excuse for submitting materials that do not comply with Rule 11.'" Plaintiff "must ensure that the case citations and representations she presents to the court are accurate and are supported by valid precedent; the fact that she is representing herself does not relieve her of that duty."

"Filing a document that contains citations to nonexistent cases, quotes language that comes from no real case, or that contains arguments wholly unsupported by the record violates Rule 11." Plaintiff did just that repeatedly. "This demonstrates that [Plaintiff] failed to make a reasonable inquiry into the supporting law or facts. This wastes both the parties' and the Court's time attempting to locate nonexistent cases and unpack made up factual assertions." The Court sanctions Plaintiff $5,000 for filing false cases, quotes, and statements of law and fact to the Court in violation of Rule 11.

The post $5K Sanctions for "Egregious, Repeated, and Ongoing" AI Hallucinations in Self-Represented Litigant's Filings appeared first on Reason.com.

When the U.S. Censored a Movie About the American Revolution and Imprisoned Its Producer

2026-04-15T18:51:40Z

What if I told you that the U.S. government once imprisoned a filmmaker for making a movie about the American Revolution because it depicted British troops in an unflattering light?

In today's edition of the Injustice System newsletter, let's talk about censorship, freedom of speech, and the infuriating—if aptly named—1917 case of United States v. "The Spirit of '76."

When President Woodrow Wilson led the U.S. to war against Germany in 1917, he also vowed to crush all enemies that arose closer to home. "There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit," Wilson declared, "who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life….[T]he hand of our power should close over them at once."

Congress responded to this call for domestic repression by passing the Espionage Act, which made it illegal to "cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States." In effect, the Espionage Act made it mostly illegal to speak out against American involvement in World War I.

Perhaps the most famous victim of this notorious law was the socialist politician and labor union leader Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned for the "crime" of giving an anti-war speech to an audience at an afternoon picnic. In Debs v. United States (1919), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction. "One purpose of [Debs'] speech, whether incidental or not does not matter, was to oppose not only war in general but this war," stated the majority opinion of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. "The opposition was so expressed that its natural and intended effect would be to obstruct recruiting."

The ruling in Debs echoed Holmes' earlier decision in Schenck v. United States (1919), which upheld the Espionage Act conviction of a socialist who had been arrested for distributing anti-war pamphlets. "When a nation is at war," Holmes declared, "many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured."

Filmmaker Robert Goldstein was also targeted by federal prosecutors at this time under the Espionage Act. But his saga is not as famous in free speech lore as it should be, probably because his case never made it to the Supreme Court.

Goldstein's "crime" was producing a silent film about the American Revolution titled The Spirit of '76. Among other things, the film reportedly contained scenes that depicted British troops bayoneting women and children. Because Britain was then an ally of America's in the First World War, the U.S. government quickly suppressed the film and prosecuted Goldstein for interfering with the war effort. "History is history, and fact is fact," conceded the trial judge. But "this is no time" for "those things that may have the tendency…of creating animosity or want of confidence between us and our allies." Goldstein was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Two years later, his conviction was upheld on appeal.

Tragically, it seems that Goldstein never recovered from this persecution by the U.S. government. According to Michael Innam of the New York Public Library's Rare Book Division, "upon his release [from prison], Goldstein moved to Europe and attempted without success to reestablish his film career. After being expelled from Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s, he returned to the United States where, so far as is known, he died in obscurity." As for the "offending" motion picture itself, Inman noted that The Spirit of '76, "like a great many films of the silent era…is now considered lost, with no print known to survive."

Is there a lesson to be learned from this terrible story of injustice? Perhaps this: Sometimes all three branches of the U.S. government come together for the purpose of trampling upon the Constitution. Be alert.

The post When the U.S. Censored a Movie About the American Revolution and Imprisoned Its Producer appeared first on Reason.com.

Today in Supreme Court History: April 16, 1962

2025-07-10T04:59:31Z

4/16/1962: Justice Byron White takes oath.

Justice Byron White

The post Today in Supreme Court History: April 16, 1962 appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump's 'Great Healthcare Plan' To Replace Obamacare Isn't Much of a Plan

2026-03-24T19:56:22Z

For the better part of a decade, Republicans ran on a single mantra when it came to health care: repeal and replace Obamacare. When the slogan was conceived, it made political and strategic sense.

But Republicans never had a plan for what to replace it with. Multiple proposals at various levels of completion circulated, but there was never any agreement about even the broad outlines of a GOP health care plan, much less the myriad complicated specifics.

When pressed, Republicans often defaulted to vague, poll-tested language to describe their ideas, such as "personalized" and "patient centered"—or, in the case of President Donald Trump, "great" and "terrific." In debates leading up to the 2016 election, Trump stumbled over phrases like "lines around the states," likely a reference to allowing interstate purchase of insurance, and praised European socialized medicine. When asked about his health care policy ideas during his 2024 campaign, he claimed to have "concepts of a plan."

In January 2026, Trump finally delivered something he dubbed "The Great Healthcare Plan." Whether it's great might be a matter of debate. But it is in no way, shape, or form an actual plan.

Trump's health care proposal consists of a single page laying out four big goals: "lower drug prices," "lower insurance premiums," "hold big insurance companies accountable," and "maximize price transparency." Each item gets a few brief bullet points' worth of explanation.

And that's it.

These are not inherently problematic goals: Cost reduction is always welcome, health care is indeed beset by opaque pricing, and while big corporations aren't the biggest problem with American health care, accountability is generally a good thing.

But these slogans give no clue as to how Trump actually thinks the system should work. The closest thing to a major proposal in the document comes in the accountability section: "Send the money directly to the American people."

"The money" that this is presumably referring to is the roughly $35 billion a year that, since 2021, had been spent on topping up Obamacare's subsidies for private individual insurance. Actually doing so would require legislation, which doesn't exist, and policy details, like how to allocate those funds, which also don't exist. Spending that money on direct transfers would mean persisting with tens of billions in unnecessary health care spending on top of the existing system.

But even this level of analysis treats Trump's pseudo-proposal too seriously. The rollout of the Great Healthcare Plan was attended by little more than a brief Oval Office speech and a handful of online posts. It generated little notice, even among Republicans in Congress, who barely seemed to register that it existed. Trump briefly mentioned the plan in his State of the Union, but there was certainly nothing like a floor debate or a push for a vote—because, well, there wasn't anything to vote for or against.

That's because legislation, much less a debate about the details that legislation would entail, wasn't the point. The point was to have a piece of paper that Republicans can point to when asked about health care policy. Trump has a plan, they can now say, and it's great. It says so right in the name!

The fact remains that American health care needs serious surgery. Decades of subsidies, spending, and tax system distortions have rendered it a confusing, frustrating, bloated, and—for taxpayers as well as individuals—increasingly unaffordable mess. Health care spending is the biggest single driver of long-term debt and deficits, and one of Medicare's main funds (itself a sort of accounting fiction) is set to become insolvent in under a decade. But since Trump was first elected, Republicans have explicitly promised not to touch Medicare.

Quality, substantive policy ideas do, in fact, exist; Cato Institute Health Policy Studies Director Michael Cannon has long touted a system of very large health savings accounts that would radically shift not only how health care is financed but how health care decisions are made. Republicans don't want to master the wonky details, and they don't want to be seen as disrupting the status quo, unsustainable as it is.

That's how, more than a decade and a half after the passage of Obamacare, Republicans ended up with Trump's Great Healthcare Plan, a proposal so empty it makes nothingburgers look like they have the calorie count of the entire dessert menu at a Cheesecake Factory. There's no there there. But rest assured—it's probably "patient centered" and "terrific."

The post Trump's 'Great Healthcare Plan' To Replace Obamacare Isn't Much of a Plan appeared first on Reason.com.

Brickbat: Home Is Where the Heart Is

2026-04-14T03:06:56Z

San Diego voters will decide in June whether to approve a tax on empty homes. The $8,000 tax would affect homes that are unoccupied more than 182 days a year. The tax is projected to cover 5,000 homes and expected to bring in as much as $24 million in revenue, which city officials say they will spend on affordable housing projects.

The post Brickbat: Home Is Where the Heart Is appeared first on Reason.com.

Open Thread

2026-04-16T07:00:00Z

The post Open Thread appeared first on Reason.com.

Trump Says He's Willing To 'Risk' Your Rights for His Surveillance Powers

2026-04-16T21:40:25Z

As he was running for another term in the White House in 2024, President Donald Trump made it clear that he was not a fan of the government's electronic spying powers contained within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

"KILL FISA," he wrote in an all-caps message on Truth Social. "IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS."

It's been two years and five days since Trump wrote that, but it might as well have been another lifetime. On Wednesday, Trump again took to Truth Social as Congress was debating a possible extension to Section 702 of FISA, which allows intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications between Americans and individuals overseas.

Now, Trump says he's willing to "risk" the rights of Americans in order to keep those spying powers intact.

"I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!" he wrote. "We need to stick together when this Bill comes before the House Rules Committee today to keep it CLEAN!"

The context here is the April 20 deadline for reauthorizing Section 702. As Reason's Joe Lancaster detailed a few weeks ago, that deadline provides opportunities for members of Congress to demand changes to how FISA works.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), for example, tried to offer amendments that would, among other things, require law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before trolling through communication records that end up in the FISA database. On the other side of the aisle, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has vowed to vote against a "clean" reauthorization.

But Trump no longer wants to "KILL FISA." In fact, he doesn't even want to see any basic reforms that might better protect Americans from unlawful surveillance.

That happens a lot, as I've written before. In 2021, for example, the FBI used its FISA powers to run more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database. A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report unsealed in 2023 showed that the FBI improperly used its warrantless search powers more than 278,000 times during 2021—targeting "crime victims, January 6th riot suspects, people arrested at a protest in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020," and donors to congressional candidates.

The 2024 reauthorization implemented some reforms that limit how broadly the FBI and other law enforcement agencies can use the records in the FISA database. Despite that, The New York Times reported this month that federal law enforcement agencies have been using a new "filtering" process to search records without properly logging those queries.

That's proof that more guardrails are needed, civil liberties groups say.

"This warrantless surveillance system is broken, and extending it absent reforms would be an abdication of the fundamental responsibility to protect Americans' privacy," Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the security and surveillance project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a statement to Reason. "The answer for fixing the problems and endless abuse of queries is simple: If you want to query an American's private messages, get a warrant. It's time Congress enacted a warrant rule and closed this backdoor search loophole."

It sure would be nice if Trump, who was once a prominent target of these surveillance powers, were willing to advocate for changes. Alas, now that those powers are ones he gets to wield, there is no need for consistency or principles.

The post Trump Says He's Willing To 'Risk' Your Rights for His Surveillance Powers appeared first on Reason.com.