Prison phone calls, volcanic eruptions, and animal testing.

New podcast! Hear about the latest in legal history with “Law Office History,” IJ’s new legal history scholarship podcast. First episode features Will Baude on General Law & the 14th Amendment.

Live podcast! On Mon, Oct. 19, we’re heading to Cambridge, Mass. to rue the 100th anniversary of zoning—and to cheer the 98th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that a Cambridge, Mass. zoning rule was a bridge too far. Plus, how Cambridge has made some good zoning reforms in recent years. With Molly Brady of Harvard, Vice Mayor Burhan Azeem of Cambridge, and Ari Bargil, leader of IJ’s Zoning Justice Project. Space is limited so RSVP today!

• “James A. Trankle was writing, thinking, and making plans about how to stop charity fraud. In his mind, when charities solicited donations, they were dishonest with their patrons by failing to disclose what portion of their donations was used for operating expenses rather than to support the causes and people the charities purported to support. So Trankle decided to seek donations and serve the people himself.” D.C. Circuit: But then he just kept all the money for himself, which is, like, pretty illegal.
• Via the First Circuit, in which a volcanic eruption in Montserrat in 2007 sets off a chain of events culminating in … this decertified medical school successfully fending off a racketeering suit.  
• The FCC changed its approach to prison phone calls in 2024. One change banned site commissions, which is money the phone companies pay to lockups to win exclusive contracts. Another change is to allow phone companies to offer pricing plans other than the typical per-minute call. A group of states challenged the ban on site commissions, while a group of nonprofits challenged the alternate pricing plans as potentially worse for inmates than the old plan. The First Circuit rejects both of these challenges and leaves for another day challenges to other changes.
• Fourth Circuit: Mandamus granted! The FCC must immediate— Supreme Court: Stayed. (Ed.: The panel’s ruling features a very spicy dissent from Judge Wilkinson.)
• Why would your upstanding editor bore you with a hum-drum Fifth Circuit civil affirmance? So you, too, can audibly gasp at the concurrence’s quoting ex parte emails from the defendant to the judge presaging things to come if delays continued.
• “When you’re in debt, your obligation is usually straightforward: pay back what you owe. Yet when Denise Thompson faced a $3,000 tax debt, Allegan County didn’t just take what she owed. Instead, it foreclosed on her home, sold it, and kept the entire $23,500 in proceeds—turning Thompson’s small debt into a large profit for the County.” Sixth Circuit (unpublished): And her claims aren’t time-barred.
• Parents who have paid for Invisalign as an alternative to braces may be interested in this Ninth Circuit antitrust ruling, reversing summary judgment in favor of the orthodontic firm behind that product. However, those parents likely also need to be antitrust practitioners if they wish to understand what the court actually says. It’s something to do with how it can be an antitrust violation to not share information with a competitor? Which is perhaps why the concurrence doesn’t bite.
• Transgender Arizonans can amend their birth certificates if they undergo a sex change operation. They also can without an operation but then they need to get a court order. Does this violate the equal protection or due process right of non-operative transgender people? Ninth Circuit: Rational basis. (Dear reader, we believe you know what that means.)
• Clark County, Nev. enacts a short-term rental licensing scheme but then only allows license applications for a brief period and then just ceases accepting them. Coalition of property owners: Hey, that’s a due process violation. District court: Indeed. Here’s a P.I. which allows all y’all to rent out your homes without a license. Ninth Circuit (unpublished): Not accepting any applications sure is unconstitutional but we can’t just have a remedy allowing unlicensed rentals, for God’s sake, or injunctions benefiting the freedom of nonparties, can we? Remanded to narrow the P.I.
• Two-thirds of this (unpublished) Ninth Circuit panel says the plaintiffs have pled enough to show that hair-care product labels falsely denied testing on animals, but they haven’t shown enough to prove they can establish damages for a whole class of deceived animal lovers.
• Tenth Circuit: Adherents of the (somewhat recently founded) religion Singularism have a spiritual commitment to using psilocybin in violation of Utah law, but that’s nothing compared to the federal courts’ spiritual commitment to abstaining from lawsuits that try to enjoin an ongoing state prosecution.
• Before you click on this Tenth Circuit opinion, ask yourself whether you’re the sort of person who loves outlandish true-crime stories, allegations of witchcraft, and the like, or whether you’re the sort of person who hates reading about terrible things happening to small children.
• Wondering about the difference between a “determination” and a “decision or action”? Don’t fret, textualists: The Tenth Circuit has you covered.
• And in en banc news … there’s no en banc news.

If police destroyed your home while chasing a fugitive, would the government pay for the damage? All too often, the answer is no. A first-of-its-kind national study from the Institute for Justice set out to answer how often people ask for compensation when law enforcement damages their property, and how often the government says no. Want to know more? Check out IJ’s latest episode of the Beyond the Brief podcast!