Articles

According to the Supreme Court, home equity theft — the practice of governments or investors taking more than they are owed when collecting delinquent taxes — is unconstitutional. Unfortunately, it seems California didn’t get the memo. On May 25, the Court ruled unanimously in Tyler vs. Hennepin County that when the government takes more ...

Patricia Miller lost her childhood home in 2010 over only $808 in unpaid property taxes. The mortgage had been paid off many years before, when Patricia’s father, Devoe Poleeson, owned the small Phoenix home. But less than a thousand dollars of unpaid property taxes was all the government needed to sell the tax debt — … ...

In a unanimous decision last week, the Supreme Court ruled home equity theft unconstitutional, securing an individual’s right to just compensation when their property is seized. For years, Pacific Legal Foundation has argued that home equity theft—when governments satisfy property tax debt by taking a person’s home, selling it, and ke ...

***Editor’s note: Wil Wilkins won his case at the Supreme Court in March 2023. The Court’s decision in Wilkins v. United States affirms that two property owners in Montana will have their day in court to prove that the U.S. Forest Service illegally encroached on their land. It reversed lower courts that accepted the agency’s R ...

Not many cases involving speeding and littering end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Fewer still involve shooting a cat. Hardly any will set national policy for property rights disputes involving 620 million acres of federal lands. On Nov. 30, the Supreme Court heard arguments in just such a case. At issue in Wilkins v. … ...

Three years ago this month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed California Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) into law, essentially outlawing freelance journalism and most other independent contracting. … ...

Free speech is all around us, even in ways that might not be immediately obvious. We talk a lot about the First Amendment’s free speech protections during campaign season, when individuals want to express a deeply held idea, when they want to refrain from speaking, and when an idea is deemed “unacceptable” by certain groups. R ...

When California’s controversial AB 5 law took effect Jan. 1, independent contractors suddenly found their ability to make a living in the Golden State in jeopardy. The public outcry from entrepreneurial freelancers and gig workers, who faced lost work opportunities and declining incomes, was powerful. Their protest intensified a couple of mon ...

The California Legislature has been busy tinkering with AB 5—the disastrous ban on independent contracting it enacted last year that has crippled freelance journalism and driven Uber and Lyft to the brink of abandoning the Golden State. AB 2257—the “fix it” bill just passed to address the many practical problems created by AB 5—re ...