Patrick Wright is the vice president for legal affairs at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in Janus v. American Federation. Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31 is the fourth...
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is rescinding an Obama-era Justice Department letter that asked local courts across the U.S. to be wary of slapping poor defendants with fines and fees to fill their jurisdictions’ coffers. The action is part of a broad rollback of guidance that...
One of the main ways that administrative agencies exercise non-executive power is through their extensive rulemaking authority. Agencies exercise quasi-legislative (or simply legislative) power by enacting rules on the basis of often vague statutory requirements, such as “promoting the public.” The best solution to this...
The Trump administration is considering a plan to separate parents from their children when families are caught entering the U.S. illegally. The forceful move is meant to discourage border crossings, but immigrant groups have denounced it as draconian and inhumane, the New York Times reports....
The drug-overdose epidemic, sometimes viewed as a largely white rural problem, made striking inroads among black Americans last year, particularly in urban counties where fentanyl has become widespread, reports the New York Times. The first numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to...
As the adoption of legal tech among law firms shows no sign of slowing down, a new business model is on the rise. This new model makes legal software applications directly available to clients over the internet. The business model shares many similarities with the...
Some historical figures maintain their reputation, whatever our contemporary concerns. George Washington has remained one of our most admired Presidents for the entire history of the Republic. James Buchanan settled in the doghouse as soon as he left office and has stayed there ever since....
Law enforcement agencies are getting more reports of package theft as more consumers shop online, says Anthony Giorgianni of Consumer Reports. A survey by the California-based home security company Ring found nearly 20 percent of homeowners reported having a package stolen in the past year,...
Briefly: At The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Steven Mazie notes that a study of “more than 3,000 hours of audio recordings of Supreme Court oral arguments between 1982 and 2014” suggests that “[t]he pitch of judges’ voices conveys more about their eventual votes than ‘legal,...
The word “uncompromising” is often attached to creative artists who defy convention. It is usually reserved for those who break taboos about violence or sex, particularly in motion pictures. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) is “uncompromising,” as is Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), Marlon...