Beyond the Brief

Deep Dive is now becoming Beyond the Brief.  We will still bring you the same great IJ-related content as before, but now in a studio setting.  Stay tuned.

Why so-called Terry stops are a threat to essential Fourth Amendment rights

In Ohio, wildlife inspectors think that the law gives them permission to come into private businesses without permission—no probable cause or warrant required

In Virginia, any one of 176 so-called barrier crimes can disqualify a person from work in certain occupations for life—no matter how old the conviction, how unrelated it is to the work the person desires to do, or how little it reflects the person’s fitness today. These laws kept IJ client Rudy Carey from fulfilling work as a substance abuse counselor for people he is uniquely fit to help. In today’s show, we talk about what happened to Rudy and how he is fighting against collateral consequences laws that are irrational and unjust. https://youtu.be/zjOqwT5M7Xw Click here for more Deep Dive episodes. Download the MP3 here.

In Wilmington, Delaware, any car with more than $200 in outstanding fines can be towed by private towing companies. Vehicle owners have no way to contest the tickets or seizure without first paying the city everything it demands in parking tickets, fines, fees, and penalties. If they can’t afford to pay in 30 days, the companies get to scrap their cars and keep their full value, returning nothing to the property owners and not even crediting part of the value of the car to the underlying fines. In exchange, the city gets a free impound program; property owners lose everything. In today’s episode, we will talk about all the ways that this system violates constitutional rights—and what two residents are doing to fight it.

Before he was IJ’s president, Scott Bullock spent 25 years as an IJ attorney. In this episode, he recounts his years in the trenches as a litigator, from the first case he litigated on behalf of African hairbraiders in Washington, D.C., to arguing at the 5th Circuit that Benedictine monks should be able to earn an honest living selling hand-crafted wooden caskets. Scott also discusses what went into launching IJ’s civil forfeiture initiative and the way that IJ client Russ Caswell helped set the standard for forfeiture cases.

Though Susette Kelo’s fight to save her home from her city’s efforts to take it for a private developer ended in 2005, the fight against eminent domain abuse has continued. In today’s show, we revisit that landmark decision and talk about the aftermath and where the biggest eminent domain battles are happening now, from pretextual takings to “common carrier” seizures. We also discuss Eychaner v. Chicago and other signals that the Supreme Court is ready to correct its Kelo errors.

In March 2021, FBI agents broke into private safe deposit boxes at the Southern California business U.S. Private Vaults and—though no individual box owner was suspected of wrongdoing—rifled through and cataloged owners’ belongings, then seized the contents. Property owners are fighting back, and in today’s episode, we talk about what happened, all the reasons that the government’s behavior was illegal and unconstitutional, and why protecting financial privacy is so crucially important for all Americans.

In Episode 30 of Deep Dive, we talked about how fines for harmless property code violations could snowball into six-figure debt. All too often, municipalities set up these “taxation by citation” schemes to bolster city budgets—not protect public health and safety. Schemes like this are rife with due process problems, and in today’s episode, we discuss the way Kafka-esqe code enforcement systems in many cities make it very easy to incur ever increasing amounts of fines and fees—while erecting barriers that make it very difficult to challenge them. We’ll also talk about what the Constitution means when it guarantees due process and IJ’s legal strategy for tackling abusive fines and fees regimes.

This term, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion in Caniglia v. Strom, a case about the “community caretaking” exception to the general principle that police need a warrant before entering a home. In today’s episode, we talk about what the government and the property owner argued in that case and what the Court ruled. We also dig into the history of the community caretaker doctrine and the biggest current threats to Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure.