Victory for falconer at the Ninth Circuit

Good news for property rights, individual liberty, and the sport of falconry: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals says falconers’ lawsuit against a California regulation can proceed.

Five years ago, master falconer Peter Stavrianoudakis and several others filed a lawsuit challenging the regulation, which requires falconers to sign an agreement allowing warrantless searches of their homes and private properties. Pacific Legal Foundation represents the falconers pro bono. The Fourth Amendment protects against warrantless searches, the lawsuit argues. 

In response, the government argued the falconers didn’t even have the right to sue because their injury was “too speculative”—meaning, they hadn’t yet been subjected to a warrantless search; they’d only been forced to agree to allow a hypothetical search. The district court sided with the government. 

The falconers appealed. Finally, on July 24, the Ninth Circuit overruled the district court and gave the lawsuit a green light. The government can’t make you surrender your constitutional rights and then deny you the right to sue over it, the court said. The decision continues: 

[T]he idea that the Falconers surrender nothing unless and until an unlawful inspection occurs—that California extracts a blanket waiver that is, in fact, entirely superfluous—defies logic. Rather, we take the regulation to mean what it says, and agreeing to unannounced, warrantless inspections without any consideration of the reasonableness of such inspections implicates Fourth Amendment rights.

“After years of litigation, Peter and his co-plaintiffs will finally have their day in court,” PLF attorney Daniel Woislaw said in response to the victory. He continued: 

Peter and PLF will continue the fight in the district court, where they will argue that falconers, like other Americans, have a constitutional right against warrantless searches of their homes. The regulations they challenge treat falconers like criminals on parole rather than practitioners of an ancient recreational tradition. If the government wants to enter their homes, it will have to do it the constitutional way: with a warrant.

When PLF started working with Peter and the other falconers five years ago, we produced a short documentary about his fight for his constitutional rights. Watch the film below.