Anya Bidwell

She had spent her childhood in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. In 2004, at sixteen, she came to the United States alone on a university scholarship and transferred to Hawaii Pacific University to keep studying journalism. At the University of Texas she earned a master's degree in global policy with a thesis on asymmetric warfare, and in 2008 she co-authored a study of whether Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz in a conflict with the United States. When she ran out of classes, she went to the law school across the street and realized she had been pursuing the wrong profession. The common law's “case-based approach,” she has said, “was very attractive to me.”

After law school she practiced in trial and appellate courts at a national law firm, and in 2017 she joined the Institute for Justice. In January 2019 she second-chaired Tennessee Wine & Spirits Retailers Association v. Thomas in the Supreme Court; that June the Court struck down Tennessee's requirement that anyone seeking a license to open a retail liquor store have lived in the state for the previous two years. She is a senior attorney at the Institute and leads its Project on Immunity and Accountability from California. She has said she is familiar with “that kind of attitude that we can just punish our critics.”

A Petition in a Binder

In May 2019 Sylvia Gonzalez, a retiree, was elected to the city council of Castle Hills, Texas. She helped lead a petition calling for the removal of the city manager, Ryan Rapelye, and more than three hundred residents signed it.

At the end of the second day of a council meeting, Mayor Edward Trevino II asked her for the petition. It was in her binder. Gonzalez has said she did not put it there intentionally and was surprised to find it.

Trevino reported the matter to the police. Within a month a private attorney leading the investigation as a special detective concluded that she had likely violated a Texas anti-tampering statute, which makes it a crime to intentionally remove a governmental record, and at his request a magistrate issued a warrant for her arrest. Gonzalez turned herself in and spent an evening in jail. The district attorney dismissed the charges.

The Comparator Problem

Gonzalez sued Trevino, the police chief and the private attorney, alleging that they had arrested her in retaliation for her speech. The officials invoked Nieves v. Bartlett, a 2019 decision in which the Supreme Court held that probable cause generally defeats a retaliatory-arrest claim. The Court had left a narrow exception for circumstances in which officers have probable cause but typically exercise their discretion not to arrest, shown by objective evidence that otherwise similarly situated people who had not engaged in the same protected speech had not been arrested.

The district court denied the officials' motion to dismiss. The Fifth Circuit read the exception to require comparators: people who had engaged in the same criminal conduct and had not been arrested. Gonzalez had a decade of Bexar County misdemeanor and felony data instead. The anti-tampering statute had never been used in the county to charge anyone for trying to steal a nonbinding or expressive document. Of the 215 felony indictments her search turned up, the typical one involved using or making fake government identification documents; the misdemeanors involved fake Social Security numbers, driver's licenses and green cards.

That survey, ten years of charges in which nothing like her conduct appeared, was the evidence Bidwell took to the Supreme Court.

March 20, 2024

Bidwell argued Gonzalez v. Trevino in the Supreme Court on March 20, 2024. On June 20 the Court decided the case in an unsigned opinion. “We agree with Gonzalez that the Fifth Circuit took an overly cramped view of Nieves,” the Court wrote. The exception was slim, but “the demand for virtually identical and identifiable comparators goes too far.” Her survey was a permissible type of evidence, because “the fact that no one has ever been arrested for engaging in a certain kind of conduct” makes it more likely that officers have declined to arrest people for that conduct, especially when the prohibition is longstanding and the conduct is not novel. The Court vacated the judgment and sent the case back.

In October 2024 the Court sent another case back for reconsideration in light of Gonzalez. In May 2021 Mason Murphy had been walking on the shoulder of a highway in Camden County, Missouri, when Michael Schmitt, a Sunrise Beach police officer, stopped him and demanded identification. Murphy refused and asked why he was being detained. After about nine minutes Schmitt handcuffed him and drove him to the sheriff's department. There Schmitt called a superior officer and asked, “What can I charge him with?” Murphy spent two hours in a cell and was never charged. On July 9, 2025, in an opinion by Judge L. Steven Grasz, the Eighth Circuit reversed the dismissal of his retaliatory-arrest claim, holding that he had plausibly alleged that officers rarely arrest people for walking on the wrong side of the road when they do not protest.

3756 Denville Trace

Before dawn on October 18, 2017, a six-member FBI SWAT team led by Special Agent Lawrence Guerra breached the front door of 3756 Denville Trace, an Atlanta family's home, and set off a flash-bang grenade. The warrant was for 3741 Landau Lane, a suspected gang hideout a few houses away. Guerra said later that his personal GPS had taken him to the wrong house. The team had missed the Denville Trace street sign and the number on the mailbox, and Guerra threw the GPS away not long after the raid.

Trina Martin's instinct was to run to her son's room. Her partner, Toi Cliatt, pulled her into a walk-in closet, and Gabe, who was seven, cowered under his covers as agents came into his room. An agent pulled Cliatt out of the closet, handcuffed him and threw him to the floor, and an officer aimed a weapon at Martin. When Cliatt shouted his address, the room went silent. A piece of mail confirmed the mistake. The team left to raid the right house, and Guerra came back later to apologize and leave a business card for his supervisor.

The family sued the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act, the 1946 statute under which the government can be sued for torts committed by federal employees. The case reached the Supreme Court on two questions: whether the Supremacy Clause barred the claims, and whether the act's discretionary-function exception did. Bidwell second-chaired it with Patrick Jaicomo, who argued on April 29, 2025; Jared McClain and Dylan Moore were on the team. On June 12, 2025, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for a unanimous Court that the United States cannot use the Supremacy Clause as a defense in suits under the act, and the Court sent the discretionary-function question back, saying it “would benefit from the Eleventh Circuit's careful reexamination of this case.”

On October 7, 2026, the Eleventh Circuit reversed the decision that had given Guerra immunity from the family's constitutional claims. “Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs,” the panel wrote, “a reasonable jury could fairly conclude” that he “failed to engage in reasonable efforts to avoid error.”

The Loophole

A person whose constitutional rights are violated by a state or local officer can sue under Section 1983, a statute that dates to 1871. Congress has written no equivalent for violations by federal officers; what remains is a narrow body of judge-made remedies and the Federal Tort Claims Act's limited waiver of sovereign immunity.

Holding federal officials to the same accountability as state and local ones is Bidwell's stated priority. She litigates the question in federal court and works with Congress and legislatures on a statutory remedy. Her cases turn on threshold rules: which government is answerable, what cause of action reaches the conduct, what remedy a court can grant.

She is an adviser to the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Law, Constitutional Torts. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. She hosts live recordings of the Short Circuit podcast and co-produces Bound by Oath, the Institute's documentary podcast.

The People Who Come After

In October 2025 the Castle Hills City Council ratified a settlement of Gonzalez's suit. The city would pay her $500,000 and work with the Texas Municipal League on a statewide training on First Amendment retaliation, based on her case and offered to more than 1,100 Texas municipalities. Castle Hills officials must complete it.

“The First Amendment doesn't come with handcuffs,” Bidwell said after the vote.

“I did it for myself obviously, but also for the people that come after me,” Gonzalez said. “I just don't want it to happen to anyone else.”