Short Circuit 422 | My Name is Pastor Jennings
When the police ask you for an I.D., when do you have to hand it over? That depends on a lot of facts and a lot of law, including whether a state has a statute allowing an officer to make you hand the I.D. over. Mike Greenberg of IJ reports on a ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court where a cop demanded a man watering flowers tell him who he was. The man said he was “Pastor Jennings” and lived across the street. That wasn’t good enough for the cop and after some escalation Paster Jennings (who really did live across the street) was arrested. After a long march through the Eleventh Circuit the matter was certified to state court on the scope of the underlying statute. Along with that statute come Fourth Amendment issues. And whether the Erie doctrine is hogwash. Then IJ’s Betsy Sanz discusses a recent Sixth Circuit appeal involving a man serially suing his city. His claims, and their frivolity, are one matter but the more interesting part of the story is his lawyers’ use of AI in writing the briefs. The court is not happy with this, nor with the lawyers’ response to its attempt to investigate two dozen fake citations.
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