Legal News

No-Fly? No Worries, You Can Sue in Trial Court

By Dan Slater

For those of you who’ve been nabbed coming home from Cuba, or have otherwise fallen into disrepute with U.S. travel authorities and found yourself on a no-fly list, there’s some good news out of the Ninth Circuit: You can challenge your no-fly status in federal court. Here’s a story from the San Fran Chron.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to reinstate a suit by Rahinah Ibrahim, an architecture student in Stanford’s graduate school who was detained and handcuffed in 2005 as she was about to board a plane to her native Malaysia.

A federal judge in San Francisco had dismissed the suit, citing a law that requires all challenges to Transportation Security Administration orders to be filed directly in an appeals court, with no right to present evidence or convene a jury. But Alex Kozinski, writing for a Ninth Circuit majority, said the no-fly list, though maintained by the TSA, is actually compiled by a branch of the FBI, which can be sued in a trial court like most other federal agencies.

Repping Ibrahim were Marwa Elzankaly, James McManis and Kevin Hammon from McManis Faulkner & Morgan.

Repping a long list of federal defendants that included the Department of Homeland Security’s Michael Chertoff (secretary) and Tom Ridge (former secretary) were the DOJ’s Joshua Waldman, Peter Keisler, Scott Schools and Doug Letter.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 19, 2008 (boomark / email).