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There is a serious legal issue surrounding Tippecanoe County’s practice of requiring people arrested for certain offenses to sign a 10-day no-contact order before they can be released from jail. The issue is whether Tippecanoe County can make those orders automatic by local rule. Ind. Code § 35-33-8-3.6 authorizes a 10-day no-contact condition when a defendant has been charged with a violent crime resulting in bodily injury and is released on bail without an open-court bail hearing. Tippecanoe County’s local rule is broader. It applies based on an arrest, covers a broader group of offenses, and requires the person to sign the no-contact order as a condition of release. Under the current rule, the person “shall not be released” without signing it. That creates a problem. Local court rules are supposed to regulate local court procedure. They are not supposed to create substantive authority that the General Assembly has not granted. Ind. Code § 34-8-1-4 requires local rules to be supplementary to, and not conflicting with, Indiana statutes or Supreme Court rules. Indiana courts have repeatedly recognized that local rules cannot override or expand statewide law. There is also a question about who is actually imposing the order. Indiana law gives courts authority to impose conditions of pretrial release. But Tippecanoe County’s practice has involved the jail administering these no-contact orders pursuant to standing orders incorporated into the local rules. That raises a separate question of whether judicial authority to impose release conditions can be exercised automatically through a standing local rule rather than through an individualized judicial determination. Ind. Code § 35-33-8-3.2 and Indiana Criminal Rule 2.6 give judges broad authority over release conditions, including no-contact restrictions. But that authority belongs to the court and is tied to the circumstances of the individual case. Broad judicial discretion is not the same thing as an automatic local rule. That distinction matters because violating one of these orders can result in bond revocation and even a new criminal charge for Invasion of Privacy. In my opinion, Tippecanoe County’s local rule is invalid to the extent it automatically imposes a 10-day no-contact order beyond the circumstances authorized by state law.