Tag: hit&run

From a Texas Attorney General opinion issued yesterday (No. KP-0296):

Dear Representative Burrows:

You ask whether city or county officials may prohibit the sale of firearms through an emergency declaration that excludes firearms retailers as essential businesses.

Multiple provisions within the Government Code recognize governmental entities in Texas may require additional authority during times of disaster to address emergency situations. Relevant here, the Legislature authorized the presiding officer of a governing body of a municipality or county to declare a local state of disaster. {Your question is limited to municipal or county authority to restrict the sale of firearms. You do not ask about, and we do not address, any emergency authority the Governor has to limit or suspend the sale of firearms during a disaster declaration. See Tex. Gov’t Code § 418.019 (“The governor may suspend or limit the sale, dispensing, or transportation of alcoholic beverages, firearms, explosives, and combustibles.”).}

Once a local state of disaster has been declared, the “county judge or the mayor of a municipality may control ingress to and egress from a disaster area under the jurisdiction and authority of the county judge or mayor and control the movement of persons and the occupancy of premises in that area.” Pursuant to that authority, some counties and municipalities in Texas, in recent days, declared local disasters due to the spread of the disease COVID-19 and issued orders requiring all non-essential businesses to limit or cease operations. You indicate  that  some  of  these  orders  exclude  firearms  retailers  as essential businesses, thereby prohibiting or restricting those retailers from operating their businesses.

While the Legislature granted local officials certain emergency powers to address disaster situations, that local authority is not without limitation. Relevant to your question, provisions in the Local Government Code prohibit municipalities and counties from regulating, among other things, the transfer, possession, ownership, or sale of firearms, “notwithstanding any other law.” Section 229.001 of the Local Government Code prohibits certain municipal regulation:

“Notwithstanding any other law, … a municipality may not adopt regulations relating to:

“(1) the transfer, possession, wearing, carrying, ownership, storage, transportation, licensing, or registration of firearms, air guns, knives, ammunition, or firearm or air gun supplies or accessories;

“(2) commerce in firearms, air guns, knives, ammunition, or firearm or air gun supplies or accessories; or

“(3) the discharge of a firearm or air gun at a sport shooting range.”

Using almost identical language, section 236.002 of the Local Government Code prohibits counties from adopting regulations related to the same matters. Texas courts recognize that the phrase “relating to” is a “very broad term.” In addition, when the Legislature uses the phrase “notwithstanding any other law,” courts construe that language as “an express, unambiguous conflicts-of-law provision.”

Thus, although section 418.108 of the Government Code may generally allow municipal and county officials to “control the movement of persons and the occupancy of premises” in a local disaster area, notwithstanding that general authority, emergency orders from local officials may not relate to the transfer, possession, ownership or sale of firearms. {Some local disaster declarations and related orders restrict the operation of business to delivery or curbside service for certain retail operations. However, federal regulations governing the purchase of firearms generally require in-person transactions with licensed dealers. Thus, limiting retail sales of firearms to delivery or curbside service will effectively prohibit firearms sales from licensed dealers.}

In addition to prohibiting county or municipal regulation in these areas, the Legislature articulated the effect of a municipal or county regulation related to the transfer, possession, ownership or sale of firearms. Any attempt to adopt or enforce an “ordinance, resolution, rule, or policy … , or an official action, including in any legislative, police power, or proprietary capacity” taken in violation of subsection 229.001(a) or 236.002(a) “is void.” The statutes’ unambiguous words disclose the Legislature’s intent: if a municipality or county adopts a regulation related to the transfer, possession, ownership or sale of firearms, that regulation will be void to the extent of a conflict with section 229.001(a) or section 236.002(a). Thus, municipal and county officials may not use their emergency powers under section 418.108 of the Government Code to regulate or restrict the sale of firearms.

Section 229.001 of the Local Government Code recognizes municipal authority under other law to “regulate the use of firearms, … in the case of an insurrection, riot, or natural disaster if the municipality finds the regulations necessary to protect public health and safety.” Thus, municipal governments possess limited authority to regulate firearms during a disaster.

However, the action of using a firearm is distinct from the transfer, ownership, or sale of the firearm, each of which can be accomplished without actual use. Thus, municipal authority to regulate the use of firearms during a disaster does not grant authority to also regulate the transfer, possession, ownership or sale of firearms.

Thanks to Josh Blackman for the pointer.

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3/28/1955: Williamson v. Lee Optical decided.

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Some people thought the disease was a bioweapon. Others were sure the whole thing was a hoax—a story spread, one writer said, so the public would accept “restrictive curbs upon their freedoms.” Another tale, fanned at times by the Chinese Communist Party, claimed that the outbreak had actually originated not in China but in the United States. In the U.S. itself, one Asian restaurant after another had to fend off whispers that a staffer had contracted the illness.

If you think those sound like the stories that have circulated since COVID-19 first emerged last year, you’re right. But they all come from the SARS outbreak of 2002–03. I lifted them from An Epidemic of Rumors, a 2014 book by the folklorist Jon D. Lee. Lee in turn compared the tales he’d gathered to similar legends from the AIDS crisis.

As these stories recur, they inevitably shift to reflect the specifics of each crisis. Lee notes, for example, that the H1N1 virus of 2009 inspired many more vaccine conspiracy theories than SARS did, probably because an H1N1 vaccine was produced so quickly. But “the nature of the disease itself is almost of secondary consideration,” he concludes. “Narratives are recycled from one outbreak to the next, modified not in their themes but in the specific details necessary to link the narratives to current situations.”

Some of those stories have roots that go back centuries. Long before modern medicine emerged, medieval authorities were blaming outbreaks on the machinations of Jews, or sometimes Muslims, or sometimes even the diseased themselves. In 1321 in France, the country’s lepers were accused of conspiring to infect everyone else. According to the historian Carlo Ginzburg, summarizing the account of the Dominican inquisitor Bernard Gui, the purported plotters had allegedly “strewn poisonous powders in the fountains, wells and rivers, so as to transmit leprosy to the healthy and cause them to fall ill or die.” As the story spread, lepers were arrested, imprisoned, compelled to confess, and burned.

Deliberate disinformation goes back centuries too. The authorities may well have launched that legend of the leprous conspiracy, and they certainly fanned the fear once the story took hold. Those efforts paid off when the revenues from the lepers’ asylums were seized for the royal treasury.

It shouldn’t be surprising that tales like these take off when especially deadly or disfiguring diseases are on the loose. Any period of heightened anxiety is going to produce fearful rumors. Some of those rumors will be absurd, but others will seem plausible; sometimes, as we’ll see below, they’ll even have some truth to them.

When those anxieties recede, the stories they sparked often disappear from public memory. And so, when another crop of anxieties appears and the old stories resurface in new skin, they’re widely seen as something novel. Today rumors travel through social media, and so they are mistaken for a product of social media themselves. One disinformation researcher, Renee DiResta, rightly noted in mid-March that some rumors circulating online about COVID-19 were “extremely similar” to stories that appeared during the Ebola epidemic of 2014–16 and the Zika outbreak of 2015–16—but she also framed these recurring legends as an artifact of the “the social-media-news era.” They’re clearly much older than that.

That’s worth keeping in mind as Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms try to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation. It turns out that all those other ways of communicating haven’t gone away; we can still forward emails and text messages. So now the counter-disinformation crowd is worrying about the “hidden virality” at work in private networks they can’t see, and NBC is warning us that “there’s no sense of how widespread the rumors are, making them harder to rein in.” In Kashmir, where the Indian government has shut down internet access since last summer, the inability to go online has made the information ecology less reliable: Karl Bode reports in TechDirt that “rumors and dis/misinformation are spreading quickly via Whatsapp and word of mouth, with no ability for citizens to research and confirm the claims.” Maybe rumor-mongering and conspiratorial fears haven’t been more common in the social media era after all; maybe they’re just easier to observe.

At any rate, we shouldn’t focus a disproportionate amount of attention on the stories sprouting from the grassroots. The biggest thing that governments and media outlets could do to stop the spread of COVID misinformation would be to try a lot harder not to spread misinformation themselves. Some inaccuracies are inevitable, especially in the foggy early days of a pandemic, but the failures this time around have been stunning. That’s especially true in China, where the authorities tried to cover up the outbreak when they should have been sharing what they knew, but it’s true in more open societies too. In the U.S., the most preposterous moment of official misinformation might have been when the president misstated his own policies in a March 11 address, with disastrous consequences. But there have been plenty of other sad examples, even setting aside the deception machine in the Oval Office.

“It is difficult to express how badly almost all legacy ‘expert systems’ simultaneously underperformed during the initial phases of the crisis,” writes Adam Elkus, a PhD student in computational social science at George Mason University. Meanwhile, he adds, “the global COVID-19 response depended on an enormous amount of information developed and shared often in defiance of traditional media.” If you can’t always trust official sources, you can’t always reject the rumor mill either. Sometimes it knows things that the official sources don’t.

And that’s been true for a long time too.

“Last week there were rumors that an exotic new disease had hit the gay community in New York,” the New York Native announced in May of 1981. It was the first sentence of the first known press report about the disease that would come to be called AIDS. The article didn’t predict the plague to come: It quoted an official from the Communicable Diseases Center—that’s what CDC stood for back then—who assured everyone that the stories were “for the most part unfounded.”

The CDC soon realized that this was wrong, and within a few weeks it would be offering a rather different story. The press followed suit. But before the mainstream media, before the CDC, before even that gay newspaper in New York, there were those rumors. They hadn’t been relaying an urban legend that time. The street had sensed that something was happening.

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How many people are infected with the coronavirus, what will it mean for our hospitals, and how many will die?

Those are the questions at the front of everyone’s mind. To get the best possible sense of things, Nick Gillespie talks with Reason‘s science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, about the constantly changing, often contradictory information coming from official channels.

They also discuss whether social distancing and nation-wide lockdowns have flattened the curve, how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continue to get in the way of solutions, the lessons we’ve already learned for future pandemics, and whether individual freedom will be a casualty of future public-health breakdowns.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by John Osterhoudt.

Photo credits: Nicolas Economou/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Richard Harbus / MEGA / Newscom; Ron Adar / M10s / MEGA / Newscom; CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom

‘Snowmen’ by Kai Engel is licensed under CC BY 4.0

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How many people are infected with the coronavirus, what will it mean for our hospitals, and how many will die? Those are the questions at the front of everyone’s mind. To get the best possible sense of things, Nick Gillespie talks with Reason‘s science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, about the constantly changing, often contradictory information coming from official channels.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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U.S. military physician Walter Reed and his medical colleagues famously had mosquitoes bite volunteers in order to establish that the disease was in fact borne by the flying pests. This finding was the basis of successful mosquito control efforts to reduce the incidence of the disease in tropical areas. The volunteers in these experiments were paid $200 to participate and $500 if they contracted yellow fever. These substantial payments, made in gold, would amount to approximately $8,000 and $20,000 respectively in today’s dollars.

Now Rutgers University bioethicist Nir Eyal and his colleagues are proposing something like Reed’s “human challenge” study as a way to speed up the development of a vaccine against the novel coronavirus that is responsible for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The idea is that vaccine developers can cut more directly to what is essentially a phase three clinical trial. In phase three, vaccines already tested for safety are generally given to a large group of folks who are at risk of the targeted infection and monitored for a considerable period of time to see how many of the vaccinated people actually come down with the disease versus a group of unvaccinated people.

As Eyal explains in Nature, the proposed idea would “gather a group of people at low risk from any exposure—young and relatively healthy individuals—and ensure that they are not already infected. You give them either the vaccine candidate or a placebo and wait for enough time for an immune response. And then you expose them to the virus.” So instead of waiting around for the virus to find (vaccinated and unvaccinated) folks in the wild as researchers do in regular phase three trials, you speed things up by bringing the virus to them.

Setting aside the misery of illness, the risk of death rate for folks under age 50 is about 1 in 200. Eyal argues that such a trial would be ethical on the grounds that we allow people to engage in risky activities all of the time such as volunteering for emergency medical services that increase their risks of exposure. In addition, volunteers in the trial who are being carefully monitored for the disease would likely be safer than folks relying on the general health care system to treat them.

The authors argue that such human challenge studies, by accelerating vaccine evaluation, could reduce the global burden of coronavirus-related mortality and morbidity. If both test subjects and researchers volunteer to take this on, let’s do it.

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It was quite clear by March 5 that the COVID-19 outbreak was going to be trouble. At least 200 Americans in 17 states were already infected with the virus. The Dow Jones fell by more than 1,000 points that day. Vice President Mike Pence admitted there would not be enough coronavirus test kits available to meet growing demand.

And on that same day, the federal government rejected a request from Gojo Industries, the company that makes Purell hand sanitizer, to exempt some of its products from the 25 percent tariffs that President Donald Trump imposed in 2018. Specifically, the company was seeking to avoid paying tariffs on automated dispensers, which are assembled in the United States but depend on electronic parts manufactured in China.

“Your request was denied because the request failed to show that the imposition of additional duties on the particular product would cause severe economic harm to you or other U.S. interests,” wrote Joseph Barloon, general counsel for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

The process for gaining an exemption from Trump’s anti-China tariffs is a complex, opaque process with no due process for businesses whose requests are denied. The system gives the executive branch unilateral authority to determine what products get taxed and which do not.

Gojo Industries applied for that exemption in 2019, before the coronavirus was a threat or there was a shortage of hand sanitizer on American store shelves. But the March 5 rejection demonstrates acutely how Trump’s trade policies undermined U.S. public health in advance of the outbreak by forcing American consumers and businesses to pay higher prices for goods needed to fight the outbreak, likely resulting in lower inventories.

The rejection also shows that, even as the coronavirus was starting to have an impact in America, the administration was still working to keep trade barriers raised. Less than a week later, on March 10, the administration would issue a blanket exemption for many medical goods and equipment imported from China.

The Trump administration imposed tariffs on hand sanitizer, patient monitors, thermometers, oxygen concentrators, medical protective clothing, and sterile gloves in three phases since July 2018. Those tariffs were imposed despite repeated warnings from medical professionals that they would disrupt supply chains and erode the health care industry’s ability to respond to a crisis.

According to research from the Peterson Institute of International Economics, imports of Chinese-made medical products fell by 16 percent from 2017 (the last full year before Trump’s tariffs) to 2019.

The administration’s protectionist policies “can only happen by imposing wrenching costs on businesses and consumers throughout the economy,” says Dan Ikenson, director of the center for trade policy studies at the Cato Institute. “It is shocking, though, that they will even go so far as to sacrifice public health and undermine efforts to contain the pandemic in service to their evil ideology.”

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer defended the decision to impose those tariffs in op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. “By encouraging diversification of supply chains and—better yet—more manufacturing in the U.S., President Trump’s economic and trade policies are helping” reduce America’s vulnerability of having to import medical goods from other countries, Lighthizer argued.

But in requesting an exemption for their automated dispensers, Gojo Industries made it clear that moving production back to the United States was not possible.

“Attempts by GOJO to unilaterally move production out of China would require reverse engineering of the RFID chip that is manufactured by a Canadian company in China,” the company wrote in its application. “Such action would violate their intellectual property. GOJO does not control the ability to move that production.”

Moving production to another country was similarly out of the question.

“Third country sourcing is being explored but changing source requires time and money. An exclusion protects the existing supply chain for the U.S. manufactured product,” the company explained in its request.

Nevertheless, the request was denied.

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Despite the best efforts of Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), the House of Representatives just passed the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act by a voice vote. The Senate had already approved the bill by a 96–0 vote on Wednesday, so it now goes to President Donald Trump’s desk.

That’s good news for the country’s airlines, which are set to receive roughly $60 billion in financial assistance.

That includes $32 billion in cash grants to air carriers to prevent employee layoffs, with $25 billion of that going to passenger airlines and $4 billion to cargo carriers. The bill also gives $3 billion for contract workers hired by the airlines. Passenger and cargo carriers will also be eligible for another $29 billion in government loans.

Companies that take advantage of these grants and loans are forbidden from laying off workers or cutting pay through September 30 of this year. They are also barred from buying back their own stock. Executive compensation is also capped at 2019 levels.

This is pretty much everything the industry asked for. The CEOs of 10 major air carriers, including Delta, American, and Southwest, sent a letter to congressional leaders on Saturday asking for $58 billion in aid split evenly between grants and loans.

“We applaud the Administration and the U.S. Congress for reaching agreement on bipartisan legislation intended to assist the U.S. airline industry in continuing to make payroll and protect the jobs of hardworking men and women despite devastating impacts to the industry,” declared Airlines for America chief Nicholas E. Calio in a statement after the Senate passed the bill. The unions representing pilots and flight attendants praised the stimulus package as well.

Less pleased is Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this website). He argues that airlines do not deserve special treatment.

“The airlines don’t have a significant claim that they are a more vital business than railroads, trucking, all sorts of things that make the economy go,” says Poole. “All the others don’t have a special program.”

This line of criticism has been echoed by a range of bipartisan voices. Reps. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–New York) have both criticized the CARES Act giving too much away to corporations.

This bipartisan deal is a raw deal for the people. It does far too little for those who need the most help, while providing hundreds of billions in corporate welfare, massively growing government, inhibiting economic adaptation, and widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) March 25, 2020

.@AOC notes that 13 ppl died in Elmhurst Hospital in NY last night before ripping into $2 trillion bill. "What did the senate majority fight for? One of the largest corporate bailouts…in American history. Shameful. The greed of that fight is wrong, for crumbs for our families!”

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) March 27, 2020

Amash has argued against any direct assistance to corporations, saying all aid should be given as cash subsidies to individuals.

Poole thinks loans to businesses—provided they are given at a reasonable rate of interest—are an appropriate way to help otherwise profitable firms injured by government-enforced closures and quarantines. Loans help “separate the wheat from the chaff,” says Poole, by targeting aid at companies that actually have a chance of paying taxpayers back. Grants, he says, do a poor job of distinguishing between poorly managed companies that would be in financial difficulty anyway and competently run outfits that need only short-term liquidity to ride out the immediate crisis.

The coronavirus outbreak has radically upended American politics to an almost unthinkable degree. The near-unanimous passage of a $2.3 trillion economic assistance bill is evidence of that. But with corporate special interests extracting the lion’s share of benefits coming out of Washington, some things still feel normal.

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

New on the Short Circuit podcast: cert petitions, a prison shank public records request, and an arrest for being a smart mouth. Click here for iTunes.

• For years, scientists could serve on EPA advisory committees while also receiving EPA grants. In 2017, the EPA put a stop to that. A group of scientists sues. Scientists: By excluding the many scientists who rely on agency grants, the EPA has ensured that an uneven number of advisory committee members now hail from regulated industries. That violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act. EPA: The courts can’t review any of the scientists’ claims. First Circuit: Yes we can. The case can proceed.
• The feds give out grants to state and local law enforcement under a program called the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program. May the attorney general withhold grants from so-called sanctuary cities and states that refuse to share information with the feds about, or allow them access to, arrested undocumented immigrants? Siding with three other circuits, the First Circuit says no. (The Second Circuit created a split last month.)
• Somerville, Mass. police officer is forced into retirement after the dep’t learns he is nearly blind in one eye. First Circuit: Could be a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, among other things. In his 19 years of service, his monocular vision never seemed to have caused a problem, and, though the dep’t claims high-speed pursuits are an essential element of his job, that may or may not be true, and in any case he may be able to safely conduct such pursuits. Back to the district court for more fact-finding.
• Public defenders sue the feds after access to their clients in Brooklyn, N.Y. prison is repeatedly denied on short notice, and, after reports that heating had failed during a period of intense cold, prison officials refuse to provide info on their clients’ well-being. District court: The defenders lack a cause of action under the Sixth Amendment; the right to counsel belongs solely to the accused. Second Circuit: Not so fast. The district court needs to give that claim, plus another about whether prison officials violated Bureau of Prisons policies on attorney-client visits, a closer look.
• Outside the trial of a Baltimore gang leader who allegedly murdered a witness, some of the defendant’s friends hold up their cell phones near a juror. She tells the other jurors, “guys, this is really serious, they’re taking pictures of us.” The judge investigates, thinks nothing happened, and dismisses the worried juror. The remaining jurors convict. Fourth Circuit: Dismissing the worried juror was not enough. The judge must hold a hearing to decide whether other jurors were afraid of gang retaliation—and thus possibly biased against the defendant. Dissent: It was just cell phones.
• Man is shot in the chest while handcuffed in the back seat of a cop car. He dies. Iberia Parish, La. police say he committed suicide and that they must have missed a gun when they patted him down. His family sues, and the parties settle. A judge seals the record and makes the settlement terms confidential. Fifth Circuit: No way. This is a matter of local and national concern, and the record should be opened.
• We may have thrice said police can’t conduct Terry stops to investigate mere misdemeanors, notes the Sixth Circuit. But that was dicta; police officers can absolutely do that.
• Allegation: When the Chicago P.D. conducts investigative stops, officers take people’s ID and won’t return it until after conducting a warrant check. A Fourth Amendment violation? Seventh Circuit: Papiere, bitte.
• Woman is arrested at protest over Ferguson shooting, released without charge. Rather than returning the $30.97 she was carrying, Multnomah County, Ore. officials give her a debit card that has a monthly service fee (imposed five days after release), a fee for using certain ATMs (with incorrect info as to which machines incur fees), and a fee for requesting the balance of the card by check, among others. Debit card company: There are several ways she could have avoided the fees, like having the funds promptly transferred to her bank account. Ninth Circuit: Her federal law, state law, and Takings Clause claims against the company should not have been dismissed.
• Goldwater Institute seeks FDA documents related to the approval of an investigational drug for treating Ebola. FDA: Sorry, all documents related to investigational new drugs are confidential. Ninth Circuit: Not from FOIA, they aren’t.
• San Francisco allows owners of units in multiunit buildings to convert to condominiums if they agree to give a lifetime lease to the current occupant. Property owners apply for conversion but then decide they would rather not give the lifetime lease. They sue instead, alleging a regulatory taking. Ninth Circuit: But they failed to seek a timely exemption from the city, so their claim isn’t final under Williamson County. Dissent: Finality is about knowing how the law applies, not jumping through procedural hoops, and everyone agrees that the city will not waive the lease requirement. The case should go forward.
• Turn to the Eleventh Circuit for a sterling opinion about a famous gold bar that, in the court’s words, “lived its best life” as a museum exhibit until it was stolen by a thief named Jared Goldman. There are Spanish galleons, The Goonies, and a holding that famous gold is worth more than its weight in gold. Which is really too bad for Goldman and another thief paying restitution. But just how much more remains to be seen. The thieves get a re-do of the sentencing court’s valuation, which may have been too high.
• Forty-three years ago, an intellectually disabled man confessed to a murder. But newly tested evidence shows that his DNA was not on the bindings used to tie up the victim. The Georgia Supreme Court says he gets a new trial. (via @ASFleischman)
• Woman pleads guilty to tax fraud in 2011, is sentenced to five years in prison. After getting out of prison on supervised release, she casts a vote in the 2016 election. Yikes! Texas forbids those with felony convictions whose sentences aren’t yet complete from voting, which her ballot said in its form language. She’s convicted of illegal voting, sentenced to five years in prison. Texas Court of Appeals: We can review neither the decision to prosecute nor the statute’s wisdom. Conviction affirmed.
• And in en banc news, the Second Circuit will not reconsider its decision that the First Amendment forbids President Trump from blocking users from the “interactive space” of his Twitter account, over a dissent that contends that the fact that the president uses the account to tweet official tweets should not mean he is barred from blocking those who tweet meanly in response. (We discussed the original panel opinion on the podcast.)
• And in more en banc news the Fifth Circuit will reconsider (on its own motion!) its decision holding that the single director structure of the CFPB was constitutional, a decision that was issued on the exact same day the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the exact same question.
• And in additional en banc news, the Eleventh Circuit granted rehearing after Judge Newsom wrote a concurrence to his own unanimous panel opinion urging the en banc court to reconsider earlier circuit precedent regarding the interaction of (real) Article III standing and (phony baloney) Fourth Amendment standing.
• And in further en banc news, the Federal Circuit will not reconsider its decision that (1) administrative patent judges were principal officers and thus should have been appointed by the president but that (2) with APJs’ protections against removal revoked, they are converted into inferior officers, and it no longer offends the Constitution that they were appointed by the secretary of commerce. One of the dissenters (from denial of en banc review): We should have given Congress and the agency a chance to fix the issue instead of severing the removal protections.

If the gov’t seizes tens of thousands of dollars from you and then returns all of it after you sue to get it back, did you “substantially prevail”? Last year, the Eleventh Circuit said no, thereby depriving Miladis Salgado, who was raided by the DEA after a bad tip, of the attorney’s fees necessary to make her whole. (Though the feds released all $15k they took from her, a third of it went to her attorney, who took the case on contingency.) Next week, on Friday, April 3, the Supreme Court will consider whether to grant an IJ cert petition arguing, among other things, that Miladis should indeed be awarded her attorney’s fees under the plain terms of the relevant statute. Click here to learn more.

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