Dan Epps

And then you want to go sue the government actors involved and say, hey, you violated my constitutional rights.

Give me money.

Right.

And I was reading back through this one.

I hadn't looked at it in a long time.

And it also has a feel of something kind of made up, right?

It just says, you know, this civil rights statute, which is called Section 1983, just doesn't allow these kinds of claims.

But how the court gets there is a little fuzzy.

It's like, well, there used to be these old, you know, actions for malicious prosecution, and this is kind of like that.

So we think that this is in here somewhere.

Yeah, and this is an opinion by the late Justice Scalia, arch-formalist, and it has a feel of kind of one of the less successfully formalist opinions of his tenure.

Which is this provision where after you've been convicted, after you're done with your appeals, you can still go back to court and say, hey, let me out of prison.

And people who are in state prison can still go to federal court sometimes to do that.

Okay, so this rule is out there, and maybe there is a defense of some version of this rule, but I think what happens is this rule kind of expands in the lower courts in the kind of three decades since Humphrey, since Hack versus Humphrey.

I mean, the case, I think, originally is about when you can get money.

Yes.

Right?

And then it seems to expand to extend to other kinds of suits, right?

Yeah.

Okay.