Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice. New Case Alert! Before dawn, Cathy George awakes to a squad of heavily armed officers banging on the door to her Georgia home and aiming rifles at her.

They're looking for a fugitive. Yikes! Problem 1: The fugitive was arrested months earlier—in Indiana—and remains behind bars.

Problem 2: He had no connection to Cathy. Now, represented by IJ, Cathy is suing over the raid, because when officers screw up that badly, the Constitution promises more accountability than "oops, we made a mistake." Read more here.

New on the Bound By Oath podcast: A history of Rooker-Feldman, a slightly treasonous doctrine that we hope SCOTUS is going to blow to smithereens next week. D.C. Circuit (over a dissent): We have exclusive jurisdiction over challenges to final TSA decisions refusing to take somebody off the No Fly List, which means that the district court wasn't allowed to hear this guy's lawsuit demanding to be taken off of the Terrorist Watchlist, since taking him off the Terrorist Watchlist would necessarily take him off the No Fly List.

Instead, his only remedy is to file a petition asking us to overturn the TSA's final order and take him off the No Fly List. D.C. Circuit (same day): Also, we're denying that same guy's petition asking us to overturn the TSA's final order and take him off the No Fly List.

Many have been following the escalating tensions between the feds and courts about the former's efforts to remove members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador. Well, the D.C. Circuit has now mandamus-ed a second time.

The newest "extraordinary remedy" puts an end to the criminal contempt proceedings, deeming it unnecessary as the district court already knows who ordered the planes to depart (Kristi Noem) and the TRO language cannot support criminal contempt charges. Concurrence: Slicing and dicing the Saturday evening emergency hearing transcript and the subsequent order shows why the feds didn't violate the order in the first place. Dissent: "Contempt of court is a public offense, and the fate of our democratic republic will depend on whether we treat it as such."

Cops in Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, spy youths potentially dealing drugs. Upon confrontation, the youths flee. One cop shoots a 17-year-old in the back.

Another allegedly pistol whips him. Later the cops falsify reports. But word gets out, feds prosecute, and convictions follow.

First Circuit: The pistol-whipper should have been able to cross-examine the whippee. Vacated and remanded on that count (but not three others). Circuit split alert!

The First Circuit (splitting with the Tenth) holds that Maine's law requiring a firearm seller to wait at least 72 hours before delivering a purchased firearm doesn't infringe the right to "keep" or "bear" arms because the purchaser remains free to "keep" and "bear" them three days after buying them. Second Circuit (unpublished): The Supreme Court's decision in Bruen tells us the Second Amendment extends to weapons in common use for self-defense, but whether a weapon is in common use seems like the kind of thing you should have tried to prove at summary judgment, not the kind of thing you should be trying to prove by citing stuff to us in your appellate briefs.

The Fourth Circuit (en banc) vacates a preliminary injunction that had prevented DOGE staffers from accessing confidential Social Security data and in so doing manages to generate six different opinions fighting about everything from whether the Supreme Court's unexplained emergency-docket orders count as "precedent" to whether preliminary-injunction opinions should look more like word problems from your junior-high math class, all of which is really extremely fun reading for the really extremely small group of people who like that sort of thing. Plaintiff: Sure, the case law says school officials have leeway to search students' belongings, but you can't apply that pre-digital precedent to the much more intrusive search of a teenage student's cell phone (on which the assistant principal found an explicit photo of a different teenager).

Fourth Circuit: That's a real interesting argument you've got there; it's a shame you've waived it. Also, you're wrong. Before searching for the names of a Supreme Court justice in a hospital database and then posting the results online, you might want to read this tale of caution from the Fourth Circuit, which ends with a 24-month visit to federal prison.

Fairfax County, Va. police arrange a controlled drug buy in the parking lot of a shopping complex. Once the target arrives, he becomes suspicious and begins to drive away. A half dozen detectives pursue him in unmarked vehicles, ram his car, block him in it, and shoot him. (They feared that he was reaching for a gun; he was unarmed.) District court: reasonable response, no excessive force here.

Fourth Circuit: Not so fast. The man was driving s