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.

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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.

After Sandy Martinez got a ticket from Lantana, Florida, for parking her car with its wheels slightly outside her driveway and on the grass in her yard, she didn’t know that she was being fined a whopping $250 per day by the town. Weeks later, when she learned about the fines, the bill had accrued to an eye-watering $101,750, and she realized that a harmless code violation had brought her to the brink of financial ruin. In today’s episode, we talk about how and why cities rely on fines and fees for revenue, the ways these systems are deeply problematic, and what courts can do to enforce constitutional protections for all Americans.

Download the transcript here.  This transcript was originally generated via AI, but lightly edited by an IJer. Please excuse the occasional typo.

When IJ client Abdallah Batayneh tried to open a resort shuttle service in rural Colorado, his application was denied by a state regulatory agency at the same time it assured him that he was “operationally, managerially, and financially fit” to run his company. In today’s episode, we discuss how Abdallah became the victim of an outrageous legal regime that many states erected to protect existing businesses at the expense of new start-ups and customers—and how and why these laws should be eliminated nationwide.

What does it mean when courts apply “strict scrutiny” in their review of a law? Why do property, economic, and other vital liberties get only “rational basis” review? And why do these things matter to a constitutional litigator? Learn all this and more in today’s Deep Dive with the Institute for Justice.  This episode originally aired October 29, 2019.