Show Notes
In 1973, federal narcotics agents raided a pair of homes in Collinsville, Illinois by mistake. They didn’t find any drugs, but they did terrorize two innocent families. The incident sparked nationwide outrage, and in response Congress passed legislation crafting a legal remedy for victims of federal law enforcement abuses. Over the years, however, lower courts have chipped away at the law to the point where it has essentially been repealed: Last year, a federal appeals court rejected claims from an innocent family, the Martin family, who were held at gunpoint after the FBI mistakenly raided their home in Atlanta. Fortunately, next week, on April 29, 2025, the Supreme Court will hold oral argument in Martin v. United States, and IJ will urge the justices to reverse course.
On this episode, we explore the Federal Tort Claims Act, which was originally enacted in 1946 and then amended in 1974, to create a remedy for wrongful acts by government officials. We feature guests who worked on getting the 1974 amendment, called the law-enforcement proviso, passed into law.
Click here for episode transcript.
Martin v. United States (Eleventh Circuit opinion)
More from Bound By Oath by IJ
In 1966, Los Angeles officials tried to put a man in prison for handing out leaflets in protest of a fatal police shooting. Today, we know the case as Younger v. Harris, which kicked off the doctrine of Younger abstention, the bane of many a civil rights plaintiff. On this episode, we examine the origins, the impact, and the relentless expansion of the doctrine.
On this episode, we recover a lost part of the Fourth Amendment that the Supreme Court essentially erased in 1960. In the case of Jones v. United States, the Court ignored text, history, and tradition, and disfigured the Warrant Clause, allowing law enforcement to knock down doors based on mere hearsay and with scant consequences for lying or mistakes. Jones was wrong the day it was decided, and the Court should overturn it.
On this episode: the story of Pullman abstention, the first of several abstention doctrines the Supreme Court invented to let federal judges decline to decide cases that they have jurisdiction to decide.
Next week, the Supreme Court is going to hear a huge civil rights case that no one is talking about—because the legal issue before the Court is the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, an obscure and slightly treasonous doctrine that lets federal judges throw worthy cases out of court without reaching the merits.
In our final episode of the season, we head to Indian Country and survey several strands of Supreme Court precedent that prevent Native Americans from putting their property to peaceful and productive use.