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PODCAST

Short Circuit

Institute for Justice

The Supreme Court decides a few dozen cases every year; federal appellate courts decide thousands. So if you love constitutional law, the circuit courts are where it’s at. Join us as we break down some of the week’s most intriguing appellate decisions with a unique brand of insight, wit, and passion for judicial engagement and the rule of law. http://ij.org/short-circuit

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All Episodes

1:05:30

Short Circuit 391 | 7th Circuit Judicial Conference

Short Circuit ·

2025/08/29

Short Circuit traveled to Chicago for a live recording on the eve of the Seventh Circuit’s biannual Judicial Conference. In front of a crowd of Seventh Circuit enthusiasts your host spoke with some experts about some of the court’s recent opinions and how the circuit works. That included Sarah Konsky of the University of Chicago, appellate specialist Chris Keleher, and IJ’s own John Wrench. “Collective” (not class) actions, prisoner appeals and summary judgment, and Fourth Amendment overnight-guests

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49:11

Short Circuit 390 | Kangaroo Courts

Short Circuit ·

2025/08/22

The Constitution separates “the judicial power” from “executive power.” Well, that’s the theory at least. A mixing of these powers led to some massive fines against a family farm. But Robert Fellner of IJ is happy to report that the Third Circuit recently ruled that’s a problem. In a case that IJ itself litigated, the court ruled that Article III of the Constitution guaranteed an independent judge when the federal government took the farm to court. The ruling is an application of a recent Supreme

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1:06:58

Short Circuit 389 | On Walden Fourth Amendment

Short Circuit ·

2025/08/15

It’s Sixth Circuit week on Short Circuit with a couple Sixth Circuit lawyers who clerked on the Sixth Circuit and practice law in Michigan. (Which is where? That’s right, in the Sixth Circuit.) David Porter and Sean Dutton spin yarns about some recent Sixth Circuit opinions, including with a bit of an inside look on what the circuit’s judges think about dissenting from not going en banc. First we look at how “homely” a home needs to be to be a home. What even is a “home” for it to receive the

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45:59

Short Circuit 388 | Crazy Fast Speeds

Short Circuit ·

2025/08/08

Did you know the feds can send a subpoena to social media companies to find out stuff about your accounts and also order the same companies not to tell you? Turns out it happens all the time. But the law says that a court has to make an individualized assessment of each request. Some federal agents convinced a district court to just let them do all the paperwork and give a blanket gag order for a bunch of requests. Betsy Sanz of IJ joins us to explain why the DC Circuit said that’s just not good

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51:07

Short Circuit 387 | The Business of Baseball

Short Circuit ·

2025/08/01

On the heels of the trade deadline, Rob Johnson of IJ reports on some baseball news. But it doesn’t concern the latest in Major League Baseball. Instead, it’s about the business of baseball and how broad is the “business of baseball” exemption from the antitrust laws. There’s a baseball league in Puerto Rico that gave some pretty rough justice to an owner, who then took the league to court. Does the history and tradition of “baseball’s” exemption from antitrust laws apply to this league, or only to

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43:22

Short Circuit 386 | Lehto’s License Plates

Short Circuit ·

2025/07/25

Steve Lehto of Lehto’s Law rejoins Short Circuit—and for the first time on a YouTube episode—to spread the common sense he delivers daily on his own show. Steve shares a recent opinion from the Kansas Supreme Court about license plate covers. The police and lower courts had interpreted the law to make it a crime if a license plate cover blocked not just the actual license number but the name of the state. This basically turned a huge percentage of car owners into unknowing criminals. And gave the

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48:44

Short Circuit 385 | Pyramid Power

Short Circuit ·

2025/07/18

We look into the gray area between a multi-level-marketing venture, like Amway, and a “pyramid scheme.” Appellate attorney Kyle Singhal joins us to discuss a matter of his from the Sixth Circuit where the court examined whether prosecutors in a mail-fraud case got over their skis by repeatedly calling what the defendants did a pyramid scheme. “Pyramid schemes” are bad, obvs., but they’re not actually a federal crime. So was it OK to use that term when speaking to the jury? Kyle explains what the

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57:23

Short Circuit 384 | Metering Constitutional Rights

Short Circuit ·

2025/07/11

Can the government force you to only exercise a constitutional right once a month? Could it do that with speech? Or practicing religion? How about keeping and bearing arms? IJ’s Will Aronin asks that question when discussing a California law that restricted gun purchases to buying one gun a month. The Ninth Circuit recently found the law violated the Second Amendment. That’s something the Ninth Circuit doesn’t do very often, so we made sure to take a close look at this “unicorn” of a case. Plus,

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40:05

Short Circuit 383 | Rock ‘n’ Roll Yoga

Short Circuit ·

2025/07/04

Is speaking to a yoga class speech? The Ninth Circuit recently proclaimed that the answer to that question is actually “yes.” But before you turn away from this episode because it simply parrots Captain Obvious, please know that it was not so obvious to the district court. Or the city of San Diego, which tried to define the teaching of yoga—but not the teaching of anything else—in public parks as conduct, not speech. Teaching all kinds of other things was fine, but teaching yoga to four or more

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44:39

Short Circuit 382 | Beard Law

Short Circuit ·

2025/06/27

Who doesn’t love a nice beard? It seems the firefighters in Atlantic City. One of their employees wants to wear a beard because of his religion. He doesn’t actually fight fires as part of his job, but there’s a possibility he’d be told he needs to and therefore he supposedly can’t have a beard because his special air mask wouldn’t fit. Does this violate the First Amendment’s protection of free exercise? Matt Liles of IJ reports on this case from the Third Circuit that digs into how “generally

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1:11:08

Short Circuit 381 | Charo on the Tonight Show

Short Circuit ·

2025/06/20

We at the Institute for Justice are increasingly involved with combatting retaliation against free speech. Which is why we were highly interested to hear from Daniel Cragg and his recent win at the Eighth Circuit. Dan is a Minneapolis attorney who regularly sues the government for all kinds of things. This particular case was about a doctor who made a few remarks that weren’t very politically popular at her place of work—a public hospital—at the height of the pandemic and cultural ferment in 2020

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53:29

Short Circuit 380 | Homicide by Bath

Short Circuit ·

2025/06/13

Is making someone file a form “in the public interest”? The Fifth Circuit took a look at that age-old question in a recent case regarding the FCC and its gathering of demographic data. What might seem like a small issue opens the door to how the administrative state works, where agencies get their power, and how narrow the courts are reading those powers these days. IJ’s Bob Belden explains the twists and turns of this story that goes back several decades. Then Nick DeBenedetto of IJ walks us

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45:29

Short Circuit 379 | Tariff Bazookas

Short Circuit ·

2025/06/06

With the recent major tariff rulings we had to pull in a major tariff expert, Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute. Scott digs into the “shocking decision,” as even he puts it, from the Court of International Trade declaring many of the recent “emergency” tariffs unlawful. He takes a look at what’s behind the opinion and what’s next as the case goes on appeal to the Federal Circuit and perhaps also to the Supreme Court. The law the tariffs are justified under might not even allow for tariffs, but

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53:30

Short Circuit 378 | Come and Take It

Short Circuit ·

2025/05/30

Fans of truckers should enjoy this episode, although they may grow angry hearing about a truck stop that never was to be. Tahmineh Dehbozorgi of IJ tells us of a property owner in Georgia who wanted to turn his land by a highway into a truck stop. But the county was dead set against him, leading to a decades-long zoning battle. A gas station would be OK, but not if it looks more like a place where truckers can fuel their rigs and get a little rest. In the end, when the controversy finally reaches

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56:23

Short Circuit 377 | Zen and the Art of the...

Short Circuit ·

2025/05/23

Sometimes a short ride goes a long way. Casey Mattox of Stand Together comes on to tell us how a dirt biker in Nevada may end up making some constitutional history. Agents of the Bureau of Land Management gave the dirt biker a citation for riding without a license-plate light. His public defender argued the underlying law was unconstitutional because Congress hadn’t given the Bureau an “intelligible principle” to guide the underlying traffic regulation and thus violated the nondelegation doctrine

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46:56

Short Circuit 376 | Murder Mysteries

Short Circuit ·

2025/05/16

Two federal appellate opinions involving a murder and whether justice was served. First, IJ’s Dan Alban reports on a Sixth Circuit case where a man alleges he was wrongfully accused and spent seven years in jail waiting for trials on various false charges, including not just murder but others too—including sodomy—and where the trials never happened. All of this, the man claims, was because of a conspiracy directed toward getting him to testify—and lie—in another case. It’s a crazy story that the

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48:05

Short Circuit 375 | Unsympathetic Clients

Short Circuit ·

2025/05/09

Constitutional rights protect everyone, even people we might not be terribly fond of. This week we discuss two defendants who perhaps don’t deserve a lot of sympathy but nevertheless had their rights vindicated in a way that protects those rights more broadly. First, an IJ alumna, Anna Goodman Lucardi, rejoins Short Circuit to update us on goings on in the Fifth Circuit where the court applied last year’s SCOTUS case about jury trial rights, SEC v. Jarkesy, to a similar situation involving the FCC

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52:21

Short Circuit 374 | Content-Based Dancing

Short Circuit ·

2025/05/02

All kinds of constitutional goodies this week, from sovereign immunity to the First Amendment right to dance. But we begin with our annual Kentucky Derby preview from IJ’s Kentucky boy, Brian Morris. After that Brian keeps things local with a case from the Derby’s home circuit, the Sixth, which features another old favorite of the podcast, Ex parte Young. That precedent helps a pipeline company with some litigation against the governor of Michigan concerning an easement under the Straits of Mackinac

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43:41

Short Circuit 373 | Live from Denver Law!

Short Circuit ·

2025/04/25

Short Circuit went mile high for a live show before the students at Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver. The focus was qualified immunity. That’s because Colorado led the way with qualified immunity reform a few years ago when its legislature adopted SB 20-217, which created a cause of action for suing state and local officials when they violate rights protected by the state constitution and also made sure that qualified immunity wouldn’t get in the way. Our panel were three local

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55:29

Short Circuit 372 | VHS Privacy

Short Circuit ·

2025/04/18

An old friend returns to Short Circuit, but it’s not a guest. It’s a case, Villarreal v. City of Laredo, where police retaliated against a citizen journalist. We’ve talked about the matter a few times before, most recently last year when the Supreme Court was considering whether to take it. The thing is, the Court did take the case, reversed what the Fifth Circuit did on qualified immunity, and remanded for a do over based on IJ’s victory last year, Gonzalez v. Trevino. Which the Fifth Circuit now

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401 results

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