MLFA proudly celebrates the Supreme Court’s ruling today, affirming the rights of individuals who were placed on the No-Fly list to challenge that placement in court. The Court today upheld the previous ruling in favor of allowing the plaintiff, a Muslim man who was previously on the No Fly list, to proceed with his lawsuit. The Court denied the government’s claim that there was no live dispute left to litigate because it had removed him from the No Fly list, and recognized instead the reality we and our clients long acknowledge: allowing the government to avoid litigation with removal every time someone challenges it contradicts the entire point of our judicial system. The government could, and has, repeated this “cycle” of suspending its challenged action, winning a dismissal, doing the same thing again, and continuing to win dismissal every time someone files a lawsuit. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Gorsuch observed that “a federal court’s constitutional authority cannot be so readily manipulated.”
We celebrate this victory and congratulate our colleagues at CAIR for a job well done. And we are honored to have been able to take a role in this case with our previously submitted amicus, or “friend of the court” brief, where we made exactly the same points of law the Supreme Court’s decision makes today.
We look forward to utilizing this decision in many of our active cases on behalf of our own clients, where we challenge government action in No Fly and Watchlist placements. And we commend the clarity of the Court’s opinion in assuring the rights to justice, and judicial challenges, of all Americans. No person and no government is above the law, and today’s decision validates that.
Read Supreme Court’s decision on FBI v. Fikre here.
