The Docket: September 4, 2026
The Docket is PLF’s weekly newsletter covering the cases, clients, and policy battles shaping the future of liberty in America. You can catch up on last week’s Docket here and subscribe below to receive future editions in your inbox.
A North Carolina nurse practitioner challenges the State’s “collaborative practice agreement” scheme; a California farmer shares his experience battling agency overreach; and PLF’s Brittany Hunter pays homage to John Locke and his contributions to the American experiment.
I supported PLF for years. Then I experienced injustice firsthand.
Two weeks ago, we shared an update on California farmer Spencer Defty’s resounding free-speech victory over the Yolo-Solano Air Quality Management District.
In a bizarre turn of events, the District attempted to silence Spencer earlier this year, arguing that the State’s anti-SLAPP statute could be used to prevent him from bringing good-faith claims against it—reasoning that fundamentally undermined the very protections the statute was written to provide.
Now, Spencer has taken the opportunity to share, in his own words, what that experience and PLF’s support mean to him and his family.
North Carolina nurse practitioner sues for the right to work without a physician’s permission
Jamie Gallagher is a Doctor of Nursing Practice and a board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner with nearly 32 years of experience as a registered nurse and 17 years as an advanced practice provider. Still, despite her qualifications and extensive experience, North Carolina requires her to obtain a costly collaborative practice agreement (CPA) with a licensed physician to operate her own independent practice.
The State’s CPA mandate does nothing to advance patient safety, but it is effective at driving up costs and restricting the supply of care, particularly in rural areas already short on physicians. With PLF’s help, Jamie filed a lawsuit earlier this week challenging the State’s mandate.
Her lawsuit is the latest in a line of cases PLF has taken to secure Full Practice Authority for advanced practice nurses and other healthcare professionals, ensuring they can provide care to the full extent of their training without unnecessary regulatory burdens.
The government owns 28% of America—and has no clue what’s underneath it
New PLF research reveals that despite owning more than a quarter of the country’s land, federal agencies are largely ignorant about the resources those lands contain.
As PLF’s Mitchell Scacchi and Tobias Russell argue, making major land-use decisions without the most relevant information at hand is like betting the house without even looking at your cards.
Policymaking from the bench has harmed servicemembers for more than 75 years
If you’re injured by the negligence of a federal employee—through medical malpractice, a car accident, or some other careless mistake—you generally have the right to sue the United States for compensation.
But if you’re a member of the Armed Forces, that right disappears, thanks to a 1950 Supreme Court decision in Feres v. United States, which Justice Clarence Thomas has described as “indefensible as a matter of law, and senseless as a matter of policy.”
The making of John Locke—and the ideas that made America
On August 29, 1632, John Locke was born in Somerset, England. Although he died fourteen months before Ben Franklin, the oldest of the Founding Fathers, took his first breath, it is impossible when reading the Declaration of Independence to determine where Locke’s ideas end and the American cause begins.
In her latest on the PLF blog, Brittany Hunter pays homage to the man whose perpetual quest for truth and knowledge would help to justify revolution and articulate the principles of the American experiment—fueling PLF’s work in courtrooms across the country centuries later.
Quick Hits
- Austin American-Statesman: Yes to women in sports. No to rigid quotas in Title IX enforcement
- Governing Magazine: States can impose more environmental regulations. That doesn’t mean they should.
- The Wall Street Journal: Don’t write Plymouth’s history by ancestry
- Reason: SCOTUS said you can’t lose gun rights for smoking pot. But you could still lose a government license to work.
