Can a city require you to get a permit if you’re having a few people over to pray? In an Ohio town it was a little unclear. As IJ’s Suranjan Sen explains, an Orthodox Jewish man wanted to have enough people over that he could hold a proper service for the Sabbath. There was no worry about traffic and parking because Orthodox Jews don’t drive on the Sabbath. But that didn’t prevent a neighbor from complaining anyway. Things got confusing at city hall, though, where some officials weren’t even sure the man needed a “house of worship” permit. Even so, he went to federal court, ended up in the Sixth Circuit, and got dismissed because the case as not ripe. Along the way there’s a lot of talk about facial vs. as-applied claims and how land use is weird. Then we go to Tate Cooper of IJ with a couple subjects we’ve specialized in on Short Circuit over the years: drones and free speech. This time they’re together in a bit of a new way. A company provides a service to hunters for drones to help them find their prey after an animal has been shot. Michigan law forbids this. Is that a restriction on “speech” and a First Amendment violation because the drone is sending information to the hunter and the law only applies to the drone if it is “speaking”? The Sixth Circuit says no via some unclear reasoning. A lot of that is because of unclear Supreme Court cases which (perhaps?) might be cleared up a bit sometime soon.

Short Circuit 404 | A Permit to Pray?