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

Group chats, monopolies, and corporate espionage.

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

Over at The Dispatch, IJ attorney John Wrench invokes General Slushington and makes the case that the White House's intimidation of law firms is an existential threat to the rule of law. Click here to read it.

1. In 2003, Accuracy in Media files a FOIA request with the CIA seeking records related to Vietnam-era POW/MIAs. In 2004, they filed suit after the CIA failed to respond to the request. And in 2025, the D.C. Circuit holds that the CIA still has not shown that it performed an adequate search for the records.
2. Iran provided material support for a Taliban attack that killed 30 Americans, including Navy SEAL Kraig Vickers. Vickers' family sues Iran under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act and all recover damages except for Vickers' youngest daughter, whom the district court regretfully holds is ineligible because she was not born until two months after Vickers' death. D.C. Circuit: That limitation isn't in the statute. Iran is on the hook for her damages, too.
3. Allegation: Per some investigative journalism, the Catholic Church used donations for people in dire need to instead fund real-estate investments, Hollywood films, etc. Fraud? Unjust enrichment? District court: Could be. Motion to dismiss denied. D.C. Circuit: Which is not a final decision that we can review. The church-autonomy doctrine isn't a grant immunity from trial and other burdens of litigation, and so says every other circuit to weigh in on this.
4. One of the most-read novellas of all time, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, clocks in at, depending on what edition you pick up, around 120 pages. Not to be outdone, the Fourth Circuit (en banc) provides 126 pages of non-precedential concurrences, plus one dissent, in addressing whether geofence warrants are unconstitutional. Oh, there is one precedential sentence in the per curium opinion affirming the district court. Sadly, no one referenced any horror.
5. Over the course of 10 years, Louisville, Ky. man is indicted and re-indicted six times on 34 charges including murder, rape, kidnapping—all over the same nexus of events that took place in 2004. (He spends over seven years in prison.) But wait! The state drops the murder charge in 2015 and then all the rest of the charges in 2016. Malicious prosecution? Sixth Circuit: Too late to sue over being framed for murder. You were supposed to file that before you were off the hook for the rest of the charges.
6. Allegation: In private group chat with the mayor and city manager, an Albion, Mich. city council member suggests firing another city official. Yikes! Instead, the council member is arrested and prosecuted for violating a city ordinance that prohibits council members from firing people. (She's acquitted.) Sixth Circuit: Yeah, well, there was probable cause to think she might have been secretly firing people. The ordinance applies to exactly six people on earth, so it's not like the fact that it had never been enforced before means her prosecution was retaliatory.
7. In a challenge to Hawaiʻi's ban on butterfly knives the district court ruled against the plaintiffs. But! At the Ninth Circuit (2023) a 3-judge panel reversed and ruled the law violated the Second Amendment. But! The case went en banc, which immediately vacated the 3-judge panel's judgment. Then, 20 months later, the en banc court ruled the case was moot because the legislature changed the law after the 3-judge panel ruled. So, can the plaintiffs get attorneys' fees, as they did kind of win at one point? Ninth Circuit (en banc) 2025: No, mootness is not a win. Concurrence: This is a dumb rule. Dissent: Like, really dumb.
8. Chinese state-owned company is indicted for corporate espionage for allegedly stealing trade secrets from DuPont concerning the manufacture of titanium dioxide. Company: We're entitled to foreign sovereign immunity because we're owned by the Chinese government and we stole the secrets using "sovereign techniques—namely, espionage." Ninth Circuit: Nice try.
9. Riverside, Calif. officers tase, handcuff mentally ill man who's high on meth. He stops moving, but they continue to pin him down for several minutes. He dies. Jury: Which was not a Fourth Amendment violation, but was negligent under state law. Officers: Both federal and state law hinge on whether we acted "reasonably," so this mixed verdict can't stand. Ninth Circuit: Nope, they are different standards. Pay the $1.5 mil judgment.
10. Allegation: San Diego police arrest mentally ill man who was, it turns out, not high on meth. (He dies in custody.) District court: The results of field sobriety tests were consistent with schizophrenia, not meth use. A jury should decide if the officers lacked probable cause to arrest. Ninth Circuit (unpublished, over a dissent): Reversed. The officers' mistake was not objectively unreasonable.
11. In which the Ninth Circuit (unpublished) reminds us that the Sherman Act only forbids privately created monopolies because monopolies created by state governments are totally super-cool, man.
12. Oklahoma cops seize a 24-year-old's iPhone when he surfaces with a missing 14-year-old and get a state warrant to search for anything on the phone that might be evidence of any crime. Yikes! They uncover child porn and hand the trove to federal officers, who apply for a federal warrant using that evidence. Tenth Circuit: State warrant authorized a pure 18th-century general search, so no good-faith exception; strike the poisoned paragraphs from the federal warrant application and probable cause disappears. Phone suppressed. Reversed, vacated, and remanded.
13. Lowell, Mass. officers cross into Nashua, N.H., pluck a home invasion suspect's phone from his hands mid-call-log-deletion, and return to Mass. where they get a warrant to search the phone. Mass. Supreme Judicial Court: No fresh-pursuit statute, no cross-border aid agreement, and N.H. citizen-arrest law lets you seize people, not property. Later Mass. warrant can't launder the Granite-State-grab, and "inevitable discovery" wasn't raised below. Phone suppressed. Affirmed.
14. And in amicus news, next month IJ will argue to the Indiana Supreme Court that modern zoning runs afoul of the state's rich tradition of protecting the quiet use and enjoyment of property. Not least in the present case, which involves a county zoning board rescinding a conditional-use permit granted to a local recycling facility after a competitor—a big shot national conglomerate—belatedly objected. (The county's belated reasoning: that since the recycling facility doesn't also handle regular trash, it's not allowed under the ordinance that authorizes recycling facilities. Yeah, right.)

First-round victory! IJ client UPSIDE Foods is a California-based startup that produces cultivated meat grown from cells, a process that is certifiably safe and that has been approved by federal health regulators. But last year, Florida imposed a first-in-the-nation ban on cultivated meat, and not because of any health-and-safety concerns. Rather, officials want to protect state agricultural interests from competition. This week, however, a federal judge said that just might violate the dormant Commerce Clause. "UPSIDE is not looking to replace conventional meat, which will always have a place at the table," says Dr. Uma Valeti, CEO of UPSIDE. "All we are asking for is the right to compete, so that Floridians can try our product and see that it is possible to have delicious meat without the need for slaughtering animals." Click here to learn more.