Returning to the Fifth Circuit after the Supreme Court rejected the Circuit’s “moment-of-threat” doctrine, the panel in Barnes v. Felix now applied a totality-of-the-circumstances analysis.

The Court considered the events leading up to the shooting: the deputy stopped a vehicle for outstanding toll violations, and during the stop, the driver ignored commands, grabbed his keys, and attempted to flee by driving away on a busy freeway. The deputy, partially inside the moving vehicle, fired his weapon as the car accelerated. The Court held that the deputy’s use of deadly force did not violate the Fourth Amendment because his conduct was not objectively unreasonable given the immediate risks to himself and the public posed by the suspect’s sudden flight.

On that basis, the Court applied qualified immunity, concluding that “the plaintiffs have failed to satisfy the first step of the qualified-immunity analysis—raising a dispute of material fact on whether [the decedent’s] Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force was violated ….” No. 22-20519, Sep. 18, 2025.

The first two paragraphs elegantly place this dispute within many decades of the legal system’s interaction with the automobile:

“As advances of the genre of the Morse code, with its twenty-six letters and ten numerals, railroads, and flight challenged the social order and perforce its legal regime, today we repair to the horseless carriage with its then unimaginable role in daily life, and as with each of the past challenges to the essential task of policing its usage.

From a unanimous Supreme Court came pretextual stops, enabling police officers to stop an automobile upon probable cause that any traffic violation has occurred, even if the stop is in search of another violation. Even before that, the Court, aware of the “inordinate risk confronting an officer as he approaches a person seated in a vehicle,” had granted officers the right to order the driver out of the vehicle. The import of these decisions cannot be understated, as traffic stops are among the most common interactions the public has with police.” (citations omitted)

In State of Texas v. EPA, the Fifth Circuit upheld the EPA’s authority to substantively evaluate and disapprove a State Implementation Plan under the Clean Air Act’s Good Neighbor Provision. The court confirmed that EPA may require SIPs to address both “significant[] contribut[ion] to nonattainment” and independent “interfere[nce] with maintenance” in other states, including areas not formally designated nonattainment, and emphasized that “The text puts EPA in the driver’s seat for evaluating a SIP’s compliance with the CAA.”

The court also approved EPA’s reliance on up-to-date interstate transport modeling and a 2017 projection year as reasonable, reiterating that “nothing in the statute places the EPA under an obligation to provide specific metrics to States before they undertake to fulfill their good neighbor obligations.” Because Texas’s SIP lacked analysis quantifying downwind impacts and ignored maintenance receptors, EPA’s disapproval was neither arbitrary nor capricious. 16-60670; Sept. 22, 2025. A dissent would vacate the EPA’s action for missing the 12-month deadline established by a statute.

I&I Hair v. Beauty Plus The Fifth Circuit rejected a takings claim against the City of Mesquite when that claim arose from the “alleged ‘thwarting of [plaintiffs’] previously approved development and reimbursement rights” governed by their contracts with the City and the Management District.”

The plaintiffs argued that the City had to have acted in its sovereign capacity because “only a governmental entity acting in its governmental or sovereign capacity can change the regulations and rules mid-stream ….”

The Court disagreed: “Although only government entities can alter a regulatory scheme, any party to a contract may attempt—or refuse—to renegotiate the terms of an
agreement midstream. In such circumstances, any resulting dispute is contractual. That conclusion does not change merely because the party is a governmental entity.”

Mesquite Asset Recovery Group v. City of Mesquite, No. 24-11025 (Sept. 23, 2025).

In WorldVue Connect Global, LLC v. Szuch, the Fifth Circuit largely upheld a preliminary injunction enforcing one-year non-solicitation and confidentiality covenants arising from a business sale, whille narrowing the confidentiality restraint. It addressed these specific matters:

• Geographic scope: The non-solicitation covenant applies to recruiting employees and contractors who perform work in the Restricted Area, even if they live and work abroad, aligning the covenant with contact language about “supporting … networks in the Restricted Area.”
• Covered personnel: Workers supplied through staffing agencies can still be “independent contractors” of the buyer and are within the covenant’s protection.
• Specific hires: Barring the hiring of eleven named contractors was proper given evidence they had already been solicited and to prevent the breaching party from reaping the benefit of the breach.
• Confidential information: The court modified the injunction to exclude the seller’s pre-existing personal knowledge of worker identities: “The term ‘confidential information’ … does not include the Szuch Group’s personal knowledge regarding the identity of personnel who worked for or with WorldVue.” Company-developed information (e.g., assessments of skills and value created after the 2022/2024 transactions) remains protected.

The Court also affirmed as to the trial court’s assessment of other equitable factors related to injunctive relief. No. 24-20571, Sept. 16, 2025

This contract provision is not a clear and unequivocal waiver of the right to remove a case to federal court:

Gulf Coast Pharmaceuticals Plus v. RFT Consulting, No. 24-60480 (Sept. 10, 2025).

The Fifth Circuit waived goodbye (for now) to the long-lived dispute of Abraham Watkins v. Festeryga, concluding that the defendant did not waiver his right to remove to federal court. The Court concluded that “the district court committed two legal errors in concluding that Festeryga waived removal.”

First, the district court erred in reading Circuit precedent to establish “a supposed bright line rule: filing any motion to dismiss automatically invokes state-court jurisdiction.” The TCPA motion filed by Festeyga was never set for hearing, or ruled upon, and the filing of the motion had collateral effects (a discovery stay).

Second, the discovery stay created by filing the TCPA motion was not a waiver: “Halting discovery is the quintessential act of preserving the status quo until a new forum takes over.” No. 23-20337 (Sept. 11, 2025).

McRaney v. N. Am. Mission Board arises from a contentious dispute between the North American Mission Board, a Baptist organization, and the former executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware (“BACM”). He alleged that the Board interfered with his employment relationship with BACM; the Board argued that it was protected by ecclesiastical immunity.

The case produced two difficult and intertwined legal issues: (1) the application of ecclesiastical immunity to the sprawling, decentralized structure of the various affiliates of the Southern Baptist Convention, and (2) the application of facially neutral tort principles to a job position with both secular and religious responsibilities (put another way, the plaintiff had to render unto both God and Caesar to do his job effectively). The panel majority presents some examples of the difficulty with the second issue:

“When a secular court considers the SPA, how should it determine if McRaney succeeded in ‘penetrating lostness,’ ‘making disciples,’ and ‘church planting’? Can a secular court determine whether NAMB’s conduct was the ‘proximate cause’ of BCMD’s decision to terminate McRaney, without unlawfully intruding on a religious organization’s internal management decisions? And can a secular court decide it was ‘false’ that McRaney’s leadership lacked Christ-like character?”

(citation omitted).

Echoing a close en banc vote after the denial of a motion to dismiss earlier in this litigation, the panel split 2-1, with the majority resolving the above issues in favor of the Board, and a dissent, in favor of the former director. No. 23-60494 (Sept. 9, 2025).

Attorneys who represent religious organizations should treat the majority opinion as a “compliance guide” to ensure that their organizations’ practices receive the full protection to which they may be entitled.

Fugedi v. Initram, Inc., addresses whether a litigant can create diversity jurisdiction by purporting to convey title to property in an out-of-state trustee. The Fifth Circuit concluded that 28 U.S.C. § 1359 bars this maneuver, holding that the statute’s prohibition on parties “improperly or collusively made or joined to invoke the jurisdiction of such court” applies with equal force to trusts.

The panel emphasized that limiting language—“by assignment or otherwise”—sweeps broadly enough to reach trusteeship arrangement. “Nothing in those words excludes the use of a trust,” observed the Court, and permitting such a tactic would sanction precisely the “manufacture of Federal jurisdiction” Congress meant to foreclose.

Applying that reading, the Court held that this trustee was a “sham” selected solely because his non-Texas citizenship would create complete diversity in a purely local real-property dispute. The record showed that the trustee had no meaningful role beyond litigation, lacked relevant expertise, and was installed mere weeks before suit. No. 24-40283, Sept. 9, 2025.

The Fifth Circuit reinstated a jury verdict, set aside by the trial court as unsupported by sufficient evidence, in I&I Hair v. Beauty Plus. The case involved unfair-competition claims about synthetic hair braids.

The district court opinion identified, inter alia, problems with (1) whether the plaintiff presented adequate evidence of its own lost-profit damages (i.e., evidence about business expenses and overhead, to avoid overreliance on informatoin about gross revenue and profit margin), and (2) whether the plaintiff inappropriately asked the jury to equate defendants’ profits with the plaintiff’s lost profits, without sufficient evidence that I&I would have captured all those sales.

The Fifth Circuit held that the jury had a sufficient foundation for its damages award, reminding generally that “[plainitff] had to provide evidence that would permit an award; it does not have to substantiate the specific figure the jury awarded.” No. 24-10374 (Sept. 5, 2025).

In La Union del Pueblo Entero v. Abbott, the Fifth Circuit examined organizational standing as to three sets of claims about Texas Senate Bill 1’s voter-assistance rules.

1. No plaintiff organization had standing to challenge the statute’s new disclosure requirements for ballot-assistors. Fears that volunteers might be prosecuted for filling out the form incorrectly were “speculative” and “depend on a ‘highly attenuated chain of possibilities.’” Because there was no credible threat of enforcement, the court said the alleged chill on recruitment, the reallocation of staff time, and the need to educate volunteers were all self-inflicted setbacks that “do not suffice to establish injury in fact.”
2. The same held true for a challenge to the revised oath assistors must swear. The organizations argued the additional “penalty of perjury” language scared off helpers. The court was unpersuaded, emphasizing that the oath merely clarified duties that were already on the books and repeating that “[p]laintiffs ‘cannot manufacture standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending.’”
3. The court found osome rganizational standing for SB 1’s two compensation bans. One provision criminalizes paying—or being paid—for helping a voter complete a mail ballot. Another criminalizes compensated “vote harvesting” in the presence of a ballot. Two groups showed that their staff are routinely paid to provide exactly the kind of assistance the statute forbids and that they intend to keep doing so. Because the State had not disavowed prosecutions, the threat of enforcement was sufficiently concrete, imminent, and traceable to the defendants to confer standing.

No. 24-50826 (Aug. 29, 2025).