YOU WONT BELIEVE: 7 - You Need To See This

New York v. United States and Nance v. Ward

Section 1983 should not be read to impose obligations on state legislatures to enact legislation.

Reason · Jul 12, 2022

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions

Rare gems, neutral judges, and a blindsided referee.

Reason · Jul 1, 2022

Qualifying Qualified Immunity: Toward a Reasonably Foreseeable Liability Test

This is the fifth and final post in a series on The Fair Notice Rationale for Qualified Immunity. Thanks so much to Eugene and the other conspirators for letting me post, and to you for reading to the bitter end! Yesterday I said that there are some cases where the…

Reason · Jun 17, 2022

Eleventh Circuit Strikes Down Main Provisions of Florida Social Media Law

I'm still going through the decision, in Netchoice v. Attorney General, but I thought I'd note the result: The question at the core of this appeal is whether the Facebooks and Twitters of the world—indisputably "private actors" with First Amendment rights—are engaged in constitutionally protected expressive activity when they moderate…

Reason · May 23, 2022

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions

Plasma, prisons, and political parties

Reason · May 13, 2022

Precedent Supporting Constitutionality of Florida Legislature's Dissolving Disney Special Government District

As I suggested Friday and yesterday, Supreme Court precedent is unclear on whether Florida's dissolving the special government district that Florida had created for Disney in the 1960s violates the First Amendment. On one hand, the dissolution appears to be retaliation for Disney's prominent opposition to the Florida law that…

Reason · Apr 28, 2022

More on the Transportation Mask Mandate Litigation

Some implications of the government's decision not to seek a stay of the district court ruling. Plus, the low quality of the trial judge's opinion doesn't necessarily mean there are no good arguments against the mandate's legality.

Reason · Apr 24, 2022

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions

Flea collars, bachelors, and data scraping.

Reason · Apr 22, 2022

"Snowflakes All Around"?

From the Eleventh Circuit panel decision allowing a First Amendment claim based on Univ. of Central Florida's "bias-related incidents policy" to proceed: There is, we observe, a certain irony in the facts (1) that UCF created the JKRT [Just Knights Response Team] to address situations in which students felt intimidated…

Reason · Apr 21, 2022

Challenge to Univ. of Central Florida's "Bias-Related Incidents" Policy Can Go Forward

More from today's Eleventh Circuit decision in Speech First, Inc. v. Cartwright (written by Judge Kevin Newsom and joined by Judge Stanley Marcus and District Judge Richard Story); seems quite right to me: The bias-related-incidents policy creates a mechanism by which a UCF student can be anonymously accused of an…

Reason · Apr 21, 2022