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.
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....
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.
>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 appreciate the added nuance here and would like to hear your comments on the seperate issue of doing this to a member of the press, or better, the sepcific pretext presented by the reporting:
> The warrant, she said, was executed “at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars.”
> Bondi added: “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
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."
> For example, if police have a "hunch" you're selling drugs but not probable cause, they can just wait for you to ...
Whren doesn't seem to track in this case or am I missing something? In the example provided, the hunch directly ties the target to the crime ("drug selling"), which matches the stop's pretext. Natanson isn't accused of any crime, she's essentially writing about the "selling of drugs", not organizing or committing it.
Adjusting your example, if I'm simply friends (implying history of contact) with a known drug dealer, am I really at risk of my home being raided and communications seized solely because I might have evidence leading to their conviction?
Then extrapolating this to the implications on freedom of press... This doesn't sit well with me.
> Adjusting your example, if I'm simply friends (implying history of contact) with a known drug dealer, am I really at risk of my home being raided and communications seized solely because I might have evidence leading to their conviction?
If the police can convince a judge to give them a warrant for it, sure, but if they were targeting you specifically they probably wouldn't bother with the indirect route of your drug-dealing friend and would just harass you for j walking and not using your blinkers properly until you raised your voice at a cop and charge you with assaulting an officer.
They are not targeting Natanson at all from what I can tell. They're targeting a source she's writing from (to what extent isn't clear to me). This is precisely why I'm positing Whren doesn't apply here.
I get the idea of being 'papered' out of a system, but I'm trying to distinguish a pretext that can be justified (objective probable cause) from one that can't (abuse of process). My boss can easily provide reason relating me to fire me, however fantastic the reality, but those would be refused, for good reason, if they surfaced them through private channels outside the organization.
In the case of drugs, they probably wouldn't have any reason to raid you unless you were suspected of stashing drugs or money or some other evidence. The journalist is reasonably likely to be in contact with the leaker and so the cops have a somewhat valid pretext to seize things they thought contained evidence of the crime. Whether or not the cops should be able to do that is another thing, but the precedents have been long set.
The really strange thing here is the massive raid in the middle of the night rather than a more proportional response. That suggests that the journalist was being targeted specifically.
> In the case of drugs, they probably wouldn't have any reason to raid you unless you were suspected of stashing drugs or money or some other evidence.
To keep with the analogy: If I had a public history of contact with the dealer (and was a prolific writer on the inner workings of drug trafficking), police could claim "reasonable suspicion" that I have communications/evidence related to them. That would justify seizing my devices for investigation under the same logic.
I agree there's more context to evaluate, but even Bondi's provided framing troubles me. It seems broad enough to target any journalist with relevant sources to a provided crime.
You'd have to be able to read minds if you want to establish a pretext. There are perfectly valid reasons, such as evidence collection against the accused party, to perform the search/raid.
I do wish that the law provided for concepts of minimal damage and repair should there be actual damage (not just creating a mess) that doesn't result in evidence. ie: if you tear open drywall, there better be something behind drywall that was collected as evidence.
However, that's not the case, and even civilly it's hard to collect damages even when it's the "wrong house"... though thatt's one of the few exceptions I've seen... also, iirc, there's been some 4th amendment arguments to construe having to pay for use/damages, not sure where that has landed.
You can file a civil suit against the police department, but results are far from certain. Unless it was a case of the cops raiding the wrong home entirely and you managed to make the news the success rate is not great.
Unlikely. Similarly, if the fire department has to use an axe to chop your door open to respond to a fire call, it’s your responsibility to replace the door.
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.
> 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.
Yeah this seems political, and it is, but it's really about cognitive bias. Reframing the thing in terms of daily workplace dynamics is pretty easy: just convert "legally consequential facts" to "technically consequential facts" and convert "cultural outlook" to "preferred tech-stack". Now you're in a planning and architecture meeting which is theoretically easier to conduct but where everyone is still working hard to confirm their bias.
How to "fix" this in other people / society at large is a difficult question, but in principle you can imagine decision-systems (like data-driven policies and a kind of double-blind experimental politics) that's starting to chip away at the problem. Even assuming that was a tractable approach with a feasible transition plan, there's another question. What to do in the meanwhile?
IOW, assuming the existence of citizens/co-workers that have more persistent non-situational goals and stable values that are fairly unbothered by "group commitments".. how should they participate in group dynamics that are still going to basically be dominated by tribalism? There's really only a few strategies, including stuff like "check out completely", "become a single issue voter", or "give up all other goals and dedicate your entire life to educating others". All options seem quite bad for individuals and the whole. If group-commitment is fundamentally problematic, maybe a way to recognize a "good" faction is by looking for one that is implicitly dedicated to eliminating itself as well as the rival factions.
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 think you have to be careful with this as well, the word "blocking" in particular reminds me of a protest over the Israel/Gaza war that happened at my alma mater a couple years ago.
Protesters camped out at a central campus thoroughfare, and some protesters tried to stop people from walking through it. Not every protester did this and it wasn't done consistently by those who did, although some people avoided the area entirely just because they didn't want to deal with it. There were certainly other ways to travel from point A to point B on campus, just slightly longer and less convenient ones.
Were people "blocked" from walking through campus? Without disagreeing on any of the above facts, whether people agreed that someone was "blocked" largely came down to who was on each side. So you end up in this annoying semantic argument over what "blocked" means, where people are just using motivated reasoning based on who they want to be the bad actor.
Then you have another layer of disagreement - is it the responsibility of someone walking through campus to make a tiny effort to walk a few minutes out of their way and avoid instigating or escalating? Or do they have every right to walk through a public campus they're a student at, and anyone even slightly getting in their way is in the wrong? This feels closer to a principle people could have a consistent belief about, but again, people's opinions were 100% predictable based on which side of the protest they agreed with
I’m not sure what peoples feelings about have much to do with anything. A protest is not effective unless it impacts some kind of ‘violence against the state’. Usually, this is blocking roads at its lightest.
I hope that you’re young or something… impeding a citizen is violence against the state, as the state gets his power from the work of it, citizens.. which is basically in the western world this describes most protests. Being granted the right to protest by your government is meaningless because if you took away the right to protest, then your people would just protest. The states options to quell unrest are: violent repression or negotiation. over the last 5000 years. We’ve determined that the best way to keep people in their place and the rulers in power is a mix of the two, hegemony look it up.
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.
