Seasons greetings from Short Circuit! While you’re enjoying your holiday week at the end of 2024 we’re giving you the content you need: Christmas sweaters. Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of legal stuff, but we start things off by delving into the mystery of where the Christmas sweater phenomenon came from. (Your host suspects it has something to do with Bridget Jones’s Diary the movie—but not, interestingly, the book.) If you’re on a non-YouTube platform, to give the episode full justice you might want to check out how the episode actually looks by peaking over at Short Circuit’s YouTube channel where you can see the panel’s fashion choices. As to the law, Bert Gall of IJ tell us of a Fourth Circuit case where some plaintiffs are trying to assert their voting rights by invoking Congress’s act readmitting Virginia to the Union after the Civil War. But that’s just in the background at this point as for now the court is just trying to figure out whether sovereign immunity prohibits the lawsuit. It turns out it does not. Then IJ’s Dan Knepper takes us into a mic-dropping DC Circuit case where the court declared void a slew of environmental regulations despite no party asking it to. Can judges do that? Reactions are mixed.

King v. Youngkin

Marin Audubon Society v. FAA

The untold story of Mr. Darcy’s sweater

Sweater scene from Bridget Jones‘s (movie)

Sweater description from Bridge Jones’s (book)