This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 19th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The feds put a man on the no-fly list,

without any due process, and he remained on that list for years.

Now that the FBI is being challenged, the agency would like the case to be rendered

moot.

Whether that mootness ought to prevail is now before the Supreme Court.

Cato's Tommy Berry evaluates the case following the oral argument.

There is a common facet of certain lawsuits that I've noticed and lawyers who do public

policy work, public interest policy driven work. I think my friend Dan Albin at the Institute for Justice has said this is pretty normal for him.

Somebody has money unconscionably taken from them for no good reason by the government under the

guise of civil forfeiture and the moment that that person retains a public interest litigator such as Dan at the

Institute for Justice or some other organization. The government says

very sorry. Entirely our fault. We obviously made an error, your money, sir.

And hand it back, and this is, I think, well understood to clearly be a case where the government would prefer

to avoid having a court make a determination on a policy that the government has that the government

would like to keep.

And if a court rules on it, then that's something other courts may refer to in the future, and that might

screw up the government's plans because they got a good thing going.

So not to taint the audience's impression of this issue here, but that's my general impression.

I can't agree with you more, especially from my own experience working at Pacific

Legal Foundation we would see this often as well where as soon as you bring a

...