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

Victory! This week the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected the “open fields doctrine” under its state constitution, ruling in favor of IJ’s clients the Punxsutawney and Pitch Pine hunting clubs. They challenged warrantless searches of their property by state gov’t agents. At the federal level, the doctrine allows searches of private land without a warrant. As a result, about 96% of all private land in the country is exposed to warrantless searches and surveillance. Pennsylvania had followed the doctrine but the court found its precedent failed to protect the rights of our clients and everyone else in Pennsylvania.

New cert grant! Since 2012, the state of Alaska has been trying to permanently forfeit Ken Jouppi’s $95,000 airplane after he transported a passenger carrying a six-pack. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide if it can. For decades, Ken flew his Cessna across the Alaskan wilderness, shuttling locals and tourists who depend on bush pilots like him. Then, state troopers found some Budweiser tucked in a passenger’s luggage. Ken and the passenger were charged with misdemeanors, fined $1,500, and sentenced to 3 days in jail. But Alaska tried to take his plane too. Now, the Court will decide whether taking a man’s plane over a six-pack is an unconstitutionally excessive fine.

New on the Short Circuit podcast: Men in black and Presidents in ultra vires.

1. Don’t leak a President’s tax returns or you could go to prison for a while, the D.C. Circuit informs us. It also informs us that even though this particular crime occurred in 2017, the defendant housed the data on, among other devices, an iPod. Footnote 2: “Yes, iPod, not iPad.”
2. How do things work at the NLRB now that the Chevron doctrine has “run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible”? NLRB: Congress has provided us with policymaking authority so we still get to do a lot of what we want. D.C. Circuit: But not here. Dissent: Chevron is gone but it wasn’t everything to do with agency discretion.
3. After the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, the U.S. established a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi to help the country transition from a dictatorial regime to a democracy. An Islamic militant group attacked the outpost in 2012, killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. The militiaman who helped lead the attack is captured, sentenced to 22 years in prison. D.C. Circuit (2022): Shockingly light, try again. District court: Okay, 28 years. D.C. Circuit (2026): The sentencing court’s discretion is vast—but not this vast. He’s a terrorist whose only stated regret is that every American there wasn’t killed. He needs a much longer sentence.
4. Russian auditor of $4 bil hedge fund stumbles onto a tax-fraud scheme implicating the Russian gov’t and mob. After bringing the scheme to light, Russian authorities whisk him away to prison, never to emerge again. The fund’s founder gets Congress to pass a law authorizing sanctions for human rights abusers. Russian-American lobbyist living in D.C. sets out to refute the story and rehabilitate Russia’s image. He’s present at a 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., about which the fund’s founder goes on a media offensive, including appearing in NYC on a CBS This Morning segment where he described the lobbyist as a shady “spy operator in Washington.” The lobbyist sues for defamation in D.C. federal court. D.C. Circuit: Commenting about D.C. residents over mass media doesn’t satisfy International Shoe or more recent personal jurisdiction precedents. Case tossed.
5. Palestinian student at Columbia University shows up for U.S. citizenship interview, but is instead arrested and ordered removed from the country. He immediately files a habeas petition and is ordered released. The feds appeal. Second Circuit: The district court had no jurisdiction. Congress requires these cases to go through the administrative process.
6. At a meth-trafficking trial, a marshal reports a gallery spectator was clicking his teeth and rocking in his pew, as if to brand the witness a liar. However, he “didn’t get the indication he was trying to intimidate him.” Judge partially closes the courtroom for the rest of the witness’s testimony. Fourth Circuit: Partial closures need only a “substantial reason,” and shielding a witness from intimidation qualifies. Affirmed. Dissent: The court found no facts, never asked the witness, and considered nothing short of closure (capped with an invocation of A Man for All Seasons on giving even the Devil the benefit of law).
7. Splitting with the Third Circuit, the Fourth Circuit says district courts have jurisdiction to hear habeas challenges to certain deportations. As the dissent explains in a footnote, this is a different kettle o’ fish from the whole can-you-get-a-bond rigmarole going on elsewhere.
8. Allegation: Godley, Tex. councilwoman asks pointed questions about city spending and is warned by police of “consequences” if she keeps it up. Her “crime”: adding proposed items to an emailed courtesy copy of a council agenda and asking the city secretary to post the updated version. The DA laughs off a felony forgery case, so—after being told by the mayor to “get it done”—officers take a misdemeanor tampering charge to a different prosecutor. She’s arrested outside city hall minutes before a meeting where she’d have voted against the mayor’s preferred appointees. Fifth Circuit: “Not every document that emerges from a government employee’s printer is so sanctified.” No probable cause and no dismissal of her Fourth Amendment and retaliation claims. (Déjà vu? Same statute as IJ’s Gonzalez v. Trevino.)
9. In as-applied challenges to federal felon-in-possession-charges news, the Fifth Circuit rules (with no majority opinion and over a dissent) for a guy who is only a felon because he damaged property, not people. Cries for an en banc doctrinal clean up are noticeably audible.
10. “Alien smuggling,” on the other hand, does not make for an as-applied Second Amendment challenge in the Fifth Circuit.
11. Nashville woman is arrested at gunpoint for felony evading; officer testifies she ignored his lights and sirens for ten minutes. The case is stayed for three years, during which the charges cost her her job and home and ruin her life. Tapes eventually reveal she was “driving normal speeds” and that the officer was “not in pursuit.” Charges are dropped within a week and she sues within a year. Sixth Circuit: In a split opinion, one judge says too late as the clock was triggered by her arrest, another—who admits having a “deeply troubled” deciding vote—by knowing she’d done nothing wrong. Either way, Brady is no help because these charges were dismissed before Dissent: This “makes a mockery of the law.”
12. Sixth Circuit: “[Officer] Willis responds that Steger has cited only cases involving the use of pepper spray, which he says would not warn him of the illegality of slamming Steger to the ground and punching him.”
13. Your summarist had never heard of the Almighty Vice Lord Nation before today, but—based on the information in this opinion of the Sixth Circuit—now hopes there will soon be a prestige television series about it in the near future.
14. In which the Seventh Circuit notes in passing that the plaintiff journalists seem to have accidentally stipulated that it would have been physically impossible for the defendant police officers to have shot them with foam-baton rounds but nonetheless goes on to hold that the officers did not violate the Constitution by shooting them with foam-baton rounds.
15. If you buy a foreclosed property in Chicago, you owe ten grand to each tenant who decides not to renew their lease, no matter why they choose to leave. Which seems maybe in tension with the cases recognizing the broad scope of the Takings Clause, says the Seventh Circuit, but is also a-okay under the cases saying rent control is a-okay.
16. University of Wisconsin freshman tells police and the University that she was sexually assaulted by another student. The University provides academic accommodations, imposes a no-contact order on the alleged rapist, and expels him from campus. After a jury acquits him, the University readmits him, citing new evidence, but keeps the no-contact order in place. The alleged victim sues the school under Title IX. Seventh Circuit (en banc): No jury could believe the school acted with deliberate indifference to known acts of sexual harassment. Concurrence (Easterbrook, J.): More to the point, there’s no allegation that the University is discriminating on the basis of sex.
17. Age obviously isn’t “immutable” because you, yourself, are older than you’ve ever been (and now you’re even older). But, says the Ninth Circuit, it’s still “immutable” in the sense that you can’t change it on purpose.
18. Ninth Circuit: The First Amendment doesn’t prevent a school district from disciplining a public-school education specialist for displaying the children’s book Johnny the Walrus (which is some sort of trans allegory) because schools can restrict the messages employees convey to children. Dissent: Displaying Johnny the Walrus in his own office is still his personal expression, even if it’s in a public school where kids can see it. (For a fun game, decide what you think about this case now, while you still don’t know whether Johnny the Walrus is allegedly a pro- or anti-trans allegory.)
19. Ninth Circuit: When a juror announces a bias before hearing evidence, a district court should take immediate action—even if the juror’s an alternate. That’s because, like happened here, sometimes the alternate ends up deliberating.
20. Santa Barbara, Cal. officers suspect a parolee is up to no good, visiting L.A. at odd hours. They find he’s in a trailer next to his girlfriend’s family’s house. They find him there and, without a warrant, search the trailer and a truck they believe is his and find ammo and lots of drugs. Ninth Circuit: Given the Fourth Amendment doesn’t do much for parolees, the searches were all fine. Dissent: But you at least need probable cause that the stuff was his. For all the cops knew he was just a trailer guest.
21. This Tenth Circuit case holds that a public library did not violate the First Amendment by suspending a patron who violated the library’s rule against displaying signs in the library by displaying signs protesting the library’s rule against displaying signs in the library.
22. Allegation: Florida federal prisoner finds out he has Hep C and repeatedly complains to prison authorities as it gets worse. Though treated for symptoms, he’s never given meds that could have saved him. He also never files a formal complaint under an unenforceable grievance program called the ARP. He dies. Eleventh Circuit: He has no Bivens claim because of that complaint-box thingy.
23. And in en banc news, the Fifth Circuit will reconsider its decision that the ban on felons possessing firearms is a constitutional exercise of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. One judge issued a rare dissent from the grant. (Yes, yes, people, we know it’s called a “disgrantle” in certain circles.)
24. And in additional en banc news, the Fifth Circuit issued a “published order” that, among other things, stayed a pair of district court judgments concerning whether denial of a bond hearing in certain deportation cases violates due process. As we reported last week, the merits of the appeals are pending with the en banc court.
25. And in further en banc news, the Tenth Circuit will not reconsider a decision on the applicability of the McDonnell Douglas burden shifting standard in certain Title VII cases. Four judges would have granted review.

New cert petition! A Massachusetts regulation forces parents to choose between sending their children to private school and receiving special education services that state law guarantees. The First Circuit said this was just fine because the “unconstitutional conditions” doctrine is merely a First Amendment thing—it doesn’t apply to the long-recognized right to send one’s child to a private school. Five other courts: oh really? Petition for cert: can you settle whether one of the oldest constitutional principles applies to one of the oldest constitutional rights?

The post Short Circuit: An inexhaustive weekly compendium of rulings from the federal courts of appeal appeared first on Reason.com.

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What does it take to reveal a contradiction? In at least one case, it is a deformed raccoon sashaying across Seattle, delightfully unbothered.

If you make your home somewhere deep under a rock, I am referring to Jimothy—who else?—the feral hunchback whose viral sightings have injected a ray of sunshine into the land of perpetual drizzle, and also across the globe. What is it about him? Or her? Or them? There may be multiple Jimothys, after all: other little trash pandas likely afflicted with short spine syndrome, giving her/him/them the rounded back that has captured the attention and affection of many.

But it need not matter, because Jimothy is an idea—a symbol of being unapologetically different and free, despite dealing with similar setbacks as, say, Quasimodo (who was, unfortunately, locked in a bell tower).

“I think he’s an example to all of us that you don’t have to be perfect to be loved,” said Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who also announced that the city would present a proclamation in his honor this weekend. “It is a dream of mine to encounter Jimothy in real life and then keep my measured distance from him so he can live his good little life.”

Ah, Seattle. A city most known for its lawmakers keeping their measured distance and letting their constituents live their good little lives.

Shall we walk—scamper, Jimothy-style—down memory lane? Let’s. In 2018, Seattle officially outlawed single-use plastic straws and utensils. That was a groundbreaking move at the time, and it was very expensive for businesses to comply. It also meant that many residents and visitors trying to live their good little lives across Seattle have felt straws disintegrate in their mouths as their drink transforms into a concoction of coffee and paper. Is that how we should honor the hometown of Starbucks?

And the rents. Oh, the rents. Seattle’s notoriously constrictive zoning rules prohibit anything but single-family homes from being built in the majority of the city. Which means to live your good little life there, you will probably pay a big, bad rent. Jimothy, thankfully, is living in many of our heads rent-free. I charge him nothing.

That’s not to say lawmakers aren’t trying to help. The city’s recent sky-high minimum wage for delivery drivers was, in theory, supposed to give a raise to some in the working class. Instead, driver earnings reportedly plunged as the increased expense associated with using delivery apps saw orders fall off a cliff. “I believe we created a problem, and it’s our responsibility to fix it,” conceded Sara Nelson, then the president of the Seattle City Council. The introspection is refreshing. But the government still has not fixed it after lawmakers decidedly did not keep their measured distance.

Hot Jimothy summer will come to an end. People’s attention spans are short. But it may be hard to forget him, at least for a time, when considering what he has already left behind: a raft of paintings, tattoos (a choice), mosaics, and more. So Jimothy will remain. He has become a mascot for freedom—for defiantly living a good little life—in a city too often hostile to that very thing.

The post What Jimothy the Raccoon Reveals About Seattle appeared first on Reason.com.

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As his war against Iran stretches into a fifth month, President Donald Trump is almost certainly looking for good news. A new report suggests his administration may be fudging the number of total casualties.

Earlier this week on Truth Social, Trump listed four previous American wars alongside the two military engagements he has launched in his second term: the January raid that ousted Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and the war with Iran.

While the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and the Korean Peninsula each lasted multiple years and cost thousands of American lives, Trump bragged that his incursions were much more efficient, with Venezuela lasting only one day with no casualties, and only 18 dead so far from the war with Iran.

But within days, even that total was revised down.

“On Wednesday, the Pentagon reported on its casualties website that a total of 18 American service members had been killed during the war in Iran,” The New York Times reported. “By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number, reporting that 14 American troops had been killed in the war.”

The Pentagon’s casualty tracker currently lists seven deaths as a result of hostilities and seven that were “non-hostile,” the result of accidents like the refueling aircraft that crashed in March, killing all six crewmembers onboard.

Four U.S. Army soldiers were killed in Jordan and Iraq last weekend; the Defense Department called the deaths “related to Iranian aggression.” And yet the Pentagon doesn’t include any of them as casualties of the conflict.

Why the revision? Acting Defense Department press secretary Joel Valdez told the Times it was the result of “temporary data disruptions” and would be fixed. But the paper, citing “three military officials,” said the administration scrubbed the four most recent casualties “because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”

“That ceasefire, however, didn’t last,” Peter Suderman wrote today in the Reason Roundup. “And earlier this month, Trump notified Congress that the United States was once again at war with Iran.” In fact, Trump called the ceasefire “over” on July 8, more than a week before those four soldiers died.

Such a blatant attempt to cover up the administration’s own war record is troubling.

It’s perhaps also not new: In a letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday, the 12 Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee requested “a comprehensive accounting of the number of service members who have been killed, wounded, or injured in support of the operation.” The lawmakers complained the Pentagon’s site “has reported inconsistent casualty figures, raising additional questions about the transparency and reliability of the Department’s public reporting and statements.”

But no matter what Trump says, American soldiers are still dead as a direct result of the conflict he helped instigate. And it’s not the first time he has used semantics to massage the truth about his war.

In March, just a month after hostilities began, Trump bragged that he purposely avoided using the word war to keep from triggering the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to end a conflict within 60 days or get Congress’ approval. (After 60 days, Trump ultimately just pretended the conflict was over as a result of the April ceasefire.)

He needn’t have bothered, of course: Despite taking numerous votes on what is clearly an unconstitutional war of choice, Congress has yet to successfully vote to end it. While the House voted this week on a (non-binding) resolution to end the war, an effort in the Senate failed the same day.

Ultimately, this is all just a game of semantics. However Trump and Hegseth choose to list them, it doesn’t change the fact that Americans are dead as a result of their choices.

The post Trump Can't Just Pretend Iran War Casualties Don't Count appeared first on Reason.com.

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The latest evolution of President Donald Trump’s trade war arrived on Thursday evening: New tariffs ranging from 10 percent to 12.5 percent, targeting most of America’s largest trading partners.

Those new tariffs replace the so-called “global tariff” of 10 percent that Trump implemented in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in February that struck down an earlier set of tariffs. That “global tariff” had been implemented under the auspices of a law that grants the president power to impose temporary tariffs that last no more than 150 days—in other words, that was always a stop-gap solution, and the tariffs announced Thursday are meant to be a more permanent arrangement.

But like the first round of tariffs and the second round of temporary tariffs, this third round of tariffs has some obvious legal and constitutional deficiencies. In levying these new tariffs, the Trump administration is once again ignoring limits that are written into the very law it is seeking to use. It is also disregarding the constitutional principle that the Supreme Court highlighted in its February ruling on the earlier tariffs.

In short: Trump’s new tariffs are likely illegal too. But it will probably require another lengthy court battle to overturn them.

Let’s take the two issues one by one, starting with the statutory shortcomings.

Trump is invoking Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose these new tariffs. Starting today, imports from 17 American trade partners (including Canada, Mexico, and the European Union) will be subject to 10 percent tariffs. Imports from another 43 trading partners will be subject to 12.5 percent tariffs.

Ostensibly, these tariffs are meant to combat “forced labor.” The Trump administration says the tariffs are the result of an investigation into 60 foreign economies that “fail to prohibit or to effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced wholly or in part with forced labor.”

Immediately, a logical problem emerges. The announcement says that the 10 percent tariff will apply even to countries that “impose a forced labor import prohibition,” as long as the administration believes that prohibition is not being adequately enforced. It is unclear what, exactly, a foreign country would have to do to get removed from that list. That makes it fairly obvious that combating forced labor is a pretext for what the Trump administration really wants to do: have more tariffs.

Before Section 301 can be invoked, the U.S. Trade Representative must make an “investigation” into whatever behavior is being used to justify the tariffs. In this case, those investigations were a “sham” meant to reach a predetermined conclusion, Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute, in The Dispatch. 

“The findings were clearly predetermined. The methodology is thin to the point of embarrassment. The remedy is both ridiculously blunt and wildly out of proportion to any measurable economic distortion,” Lincicome writes. “The action gives targeted countries no way to get the tariffs lifted by eliminating their supposedly bad behavior. And the whole thing establishes precedent for an ‘automatic tariff generator’ that Trump or a future president can deploy at will.”

Both U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters earlier this year that the Section 301 tariffs were meant to replace the tariffs that had been struck down by the Supreme Court. Greer has been quite clear that the timeline for the “investigations” would be sped up so the new tariffs could be ready when the 150-day window for Trump’s other tariffs closed.

Both in timing and in substance, the investigations underpinning these new tariffs look fabricated to reach a specific outcome.

The announced tariffs also seem to violate the law’s requirement that tariffs be “appropriate” to the harm caused. As Peter Harrell, an attorney and scholar at Georgetown University’s Institute of International Economic Law, explained in a June post at the Volokh Conspiracy, that’s not the case here.

“Rather than trying to quantify the harm that, for example, Italy or Japan’s alleged failure to adequately enforce a prohibition on imports made with forced labor does to the U.S. economy, USTR’s [the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative] investigation simply provides a few illustrative examples that attempt to show that a handful of individual products potentially made with forced labor, such as rice exported by Myanmar, might have displaced some quantum of U.S. exports in some markets,” Harrell wrote.

Then, there are the constitutional problems. When the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s earlier tariffs, Justice Neil Gorsuch spelled things out quite directly in his concurring opinion: “The Constitution lodges the Nation’s lawmaking powers in Congress alone, and the major questions doctrine safeguards that assignment against executive encroachment.”

What Trump is trying to do with these new Section 301 tariffs seems to go well beyond “executive encroachment.” He is again stretching some limited tariff powers granted by Congress and attempting to turn Section 301 into, as Lincicome put it, an “automatic tariff generator.”

That was clearly not Congress’s intention in passing Section 301. Even if it was, the major questions doctrine—which requires that matters of major economic and political significance be settled by Congress—and the related nondelegation doctrine would prohibit the legislature from handing over such broad power over trade policy.

“While the Supreme Court’s nondelegation precedent is far from completely clear, last year’s decision in FCC v. Consumers’ Research held that delegations of the power to impose taxes and other financial levies must have a clear ‘floor’ and ‘ceiling’ and that ‘[t]he guidance needed is greater when an agency action will affect the entire national economy than when it addresses a narrow, technical issue,'” explains Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and one of the attorneys who fought Trump’s earlier tariffs. “There is no meaningful floor or ceiling under the administration’s approach to Section 301. And the power claimed is clearly one that massively affects the ‘entire national economy.'”

Of course, there is a significant difference between an executive action being obviously illegal or unconstitutional, and the president being prevented from doing it. Every single time Trump’s tariffs have gone before a court, the administration has lost.

Despite that, it took nearly a year for the first set of tariffs (which were announced in April 2025) to be struck down by the Supreme Court (in February 2026). The second set of tariffs expired before they could get to the Supreme Court—but they had already been ruled unlawful by one lower court.

It will likely take a long time to get another tariff case challenging the Section 301 tariffs through the court system. In the meantime, American businesses and consumers will be burdened by the cost of these new tariffs—estimated to be about $100 billion annually—thanks to a president who is unwilling to recognize the flaws with his tariff plans or the limits of his executive powers.

If ever there was a time for Congress to make meaningful changes to American tariff laws, it is now.

The post Trump's Newest Tariffs Are Likely Illegal Too appeared first on Reason.com.

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