The ruling is strictly limited to whether a private citizen can sue the federal government for money damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). It does not legalize the intentional withholding, theft, or destruction of mail, all of which remain federal crimes under 18 U.S.C. § 1703 and § 1709 and are subject to investigation and prosecution by the Postal Inspection Service. Additionally, the decision does not apply to constitutional challenges, which fall under different legal frameworks and can still be addressed through court injunctions or civil rights litigation (i.e., the right to vote or equal protection). Essentially, the Court held that the government is immune from being sued for cash in these specific civil instances, but it did not grant postal workers immunity from criminal law or constitutional oversight.
I actually think the law isn't terrible (at least not as far as state stalking laws go), but the argument that his lawyer (or the petitioner himself; it's not clear whether he was represented) strikes me as a little odd.
The stalking statute defines “Unconsented contact” as "any contact with another individual that is initiated or continued without that individual’s consent or in disregard of that individual’s expressed desire that the contact be avoided or discontinued." It then goes on to list seven things that constitute unconsented contact, with the caveat that the definition includes "but is not limited to, any of" those seven things. A little further down in the opinion the court explains "Petitioner contends that the light stemming from respondents’ flood lights constitutes unconsented contact under MCL 750.411h(1)(f)(vii)."
Perhaps the statute could use a little tightening, but it seems to me that hanging your hat on "light is an object" is a silly argument, when you could just as easily have argued that shining the lights is contact of the kind that isn't expressly included in the non-exhaustive list. If true, one might be able to show that it was done on purpose and with knowledge that it would annoy. That should be enough to constitute unconsented contact, especially when you compare it to the other kinds of things the statute lists (e.g., "Sending mail or electronic communications to that individual" with no requirement that they be opened or read).
It's also worth noting that the court didn't overrule the trial court on the other arguments the petitioner made because "there was no persuasive evidence showing that respondents were responsible for these incidents" and "given [the] lack of detail, the trial court did not clearly err." Moral of the story: if you think your neighbor is harassing you, make a note of dates and times.
Yes, even where there is no physical trespass, there very well may be other torts or crimes.
Obviously, if you set fire to your neighbor's house, you can't get out of an arson charge by arguing that you "only" did it with a laser. You could use a comically-large magnifying glass and still end up a convicted felon in that situation.
However, I don't think it's a weak analysis given the question the court had to answer.
They weren't asked "Can your neighbor get away with shining any light on you or your property, no matter how intense?" but rather "Does shining a light on a person's property count as 'Placing an object on, or delivering an object to, property owned, leased, or occupied by that individual' for purposes of this specific Michigan statute that defines 'unconsented contact' that would support a nondomestic PPO"?
In fact, Michigan state law and the Dearborn, Michigan local ordinances (like numerous other state and local laws) do separately prohibit the use of lasers to injure/harass (at least under certain circumstances): https://www.laserpointersafety.com/rules-general/uslaws/usla....
As long as there's probable cause for some crime, the subjective motivations of the officer are almost never going to enter the legal analysis. Whren v. United States[1] was a case about a pretextual traffic stop, but the core reasoning (unanimously) was about what the Fourth Amendment requires/allow. For example, if police have a "hunch" you're selling drugs but not probable cause, they can just wait for you to run a stop sign or something and then pull you over and see if you left something in plain view, or if you act nervous, or try to get consent to search. At that point, the fact that the initial reason they started focusing on you was a mere hunch doesn't matter legally speaking. If this sounds like it can be used to make life hard for people that law enforcement doesn't like, you're not wrong. In my job we really didn't see how challenges to search warrants turned out, but as far as I'm aware the Supreme Court has never said "Whren only applies to traffic stops and not search warrant affidavits."
>So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have.
I looked at a lot of search warrant affidavits in a previous job and there's really nothing all that unusual about this aspect (doing it to a member of the press or doing it on a pretext are separate issues that I'm not commenting on). Police execute search warrants at other locations all the time because the relevant question is whether there is probable cause to believe that there is evidence of the commission of the crime they are investigating at that location, not whether the person who lives or works there is guilty of that particular crime. Given that fact, of course, it's all the more reason that judicial officers should subject search warrant affidavits to careful scrutiny because when they come to look through your stuff they will just turn your house or business upside down and they don't get paid to help you clean up afterwards.
I think this (from near the end) is also noteworthy (based on the two quotes from the late Justice Scalia at the beginning of the article):
>Still another point illustrated by Justice Scalia’s reactions is the ubiquity of cultural cognition. The disposition to form perceptions of fact congenial to one’s values isn’t a pathological personality trait or a style of reasoning integral to a distinctive, and distinctively malign, ideology. (Indeed, the appeal of those sorts of surmises could themselves be seen as evidence of the disposition to form culturally congenial perceptions of how the world works.) Precisely because cultural cognition doesn’t discriminate on the basis of worldview, members of all groups can anticipate that as a result of it they, like Justice Scalia, will likely find themselves members of a disappointed minority in some empirical or factual debates and a member of the incredulous majority in others.
The kind of cultural cognition highlighted by the article/study is common to everyone, not to some groups that just are incapable of seeing it in themselves.
Questions, yes, but specifically questions about the facts in the video (not merely "what should happen to the protesters or police?").
"As one would expect, these differences in case-disposition judgments are mirrored in the subjects’ responses to the fact-perception items. Whereas only 39% of the hierarchical communitarians perceived that the protestors were blocking the pedestrians in the abortion clinic condition, for example, 74% of them saw blocking in the recruitment center condition. Only 45% of egalitarian individualists, in contrast, saw blocking in the recruitment center condition, whereas in the abortion clinic condition 76% of them did. Fully 83% of hierarchical individualists saw blocking in the recruitment center condition, up from 62% in the abortion clinic condition; a 56% majority of egalitarian communitarians saw blocking in that condition, yet only 35% saw such conduct in the recruitment center condition. Responses on other items--such as whether the protestors 'screamed in the face' of pedestrians--displayed similar patterns."
I don’t think Butterick is claiming SaaS doesn’t exist. He’s setting boundary cases for an economic argument about distributed software. SaaS isn’t an endpoint in that model; it sits in the middle, alongside subscriptions and licenses, where some form of leakage or unauthorized use still occurs.
Provocative title notwithstanding, it seems like the author's core argument is correct: "to the extent that it doesn’t influence economic choices, piracy does not exist."
"it's why books like Mein Kampf or Lolita don't also show up on these lists despite being very intentionally kept off the shelves by librarians."
It seems like they would count those books as being banned if they had a means for gathering the information.
"Since 2021, there have been numerous accounts of quiet removals of books in libraries and classrooms by teachers and librarians. School districts have started issuing preemptive bans through 'do not buy' lists, barring titles from ever entering their libraries. . . . Therefore, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans is best thought of as a minimum count of book banning trends. This is a similar conclusion to that of the American Library Association, which routinely estimates that its counts reflect only a portion of the true number of books banned in schools."
"Nonprofit hires woman, but she quits after a few days, asks for pay for that time; they refuse, and things get worse from there. But! They don’t turn off her email access to a board member’s email. She and a friend comb through the account, download internal documents, and then ask for a lot of money. Federal crime? Third Circuit: Not until they actually revoked her access."
Yes, Congress writes the laws, and the executive executes them. That’s certainly true in the general case. But when we talk about independent agencies like the FCC, the relevant question isn’t just the functional division of labor, but rather who holds the constitutional authority versus who exercises it under statutory constraints. In other words, even if Congress intends for the agency to act independently, the president’s Article II authority still provides the baseline for executive power. The pardon example illustrates the principle that some executive functions are exclusively presidential; independent agencies are essentially a statutory modification of that baseline, not a negation of it.
Of if one prefers to have it from directly from Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803):
"By the Constitution of the United States, the President is invested with certain important political powers, in the exercise of which he is to use his own discretion, and is accountable only to his country in his political character and to his own conscience. To aid him in the performance of these duties, he is authorized to appoint certain officers, who act by his authority and in conformity with his orders.
In such cases, their acts are his acts; and whatever opinion may be entertained of the manner in which executive discretion may be used, still there exists, and can exist, no power to control that discretion. The subjects are political. They respect the nation, not individual rights, and, being entrusted to the Executive, the decision of the Executive is conclusive. The application of this remark will be perceived by adverting to the act of Congress for establishing the Department of Foreign Affairs. This officer, as his duties were prescribed by that act, is to conform precisely to the will of the President. He is the mere organ by whom that will is communicated."
Well, yes, the office of president was created to be weak relative to the British monarchy. But the substance of executive power (i.e., what actions are authorized) isn't really the issue, but rather whether anyone other than the president has the constitutional authority to do those things.
Take, for instance, the executive power "to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States" (Art. 2, Sec. 2). There is a pardon attorney who advises the president, but it is solely the president who has the executive power to grant the pardon; in that sense the president exercises the pardon power exclusively (or phrased differently "to the absolute exclusion of others").
Article 2, Section 1 says: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."
Compare with Article 1, Section 1: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives" and with Article 3, Section 1: "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish."
Who holds legislative power? Congress.
Who holds judicial power? The Supreme Court (and other courts that Congress establishes).
Who holds executive power? The President.
I'm no advocate for the extreme unitary executive theories of folks like John Yoo, but the idea that all executive authority is vested in the president can't be written off as something that some crank came up with in just the last couple of decades.