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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

Friends, civil forfeiture turns cops into robbers. How else to explain the actions of FBI agents who misled a court to obtain a search warrant and then violated the express limitations in the warrant, seizing property they had no business taking from hundreds of people? Click here to learn more about the case. Or click here for the latest brief, which alert readers may notice is somewhat redacted . . . for now. This plot will thicken.

In 1982, when the Supreme Court created the modern version of its qualified immunity doctrine in Harlow v. Fitzgerald, the Court relied on the work of one and only one scholar, Yale Law professor Peter Schuck. And this week, Prof. Schuck filed an amicus brief urging the Court to grant cert to correct the Eighth Circuit's misapplication of the doctrine to shield from suit a county engineer who was playing at traffic cop. As spelled out in Harlow and reaffirmed regularly since, qualified immunity does not protect officials who are acting outside the scope of their authority, like a county engineer pulling people over without any legal authority to do so. The Star Tribune has the details.

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John Ross is a researcher and editor of Short Circuit for the Institute for Justice, and a former Reason intern.

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