Articles

The Supreme Court ended its term with a highly consequential 6-3 decision in West Virginia v. EPA. The court repudiated the Environmental Protection Agency’s claim that Congress had delegated sweeping powers for the agency to pursue a regulatory agenda of its own creation that would force energy companies to adopt alternative energy sources. ...

In March 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide public health emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing him to issue lockdown orders and close businesses however he saw fit. That was 744 days ago. Yet after so long — and even as the COVID cases drop — Newsom’s emergency order remains in … ...

When President Biden announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would impose a national vaccine mandate on employers, he said his “patience was wearing thin” with those Americans who had opted against vaccination. Of course, Biden is entitled to his views on the benefits of vaccination, just as everyone else ...

The government really doesn’t like losing in court. But instead of accepting and enforcing the court’s decision, it often tries to justify ignoring the broader implications of a ruling, by applying it only to the case at hand. Back in March, Pacific Legal Foundation struck a major blow to the Centers for Disease Control and … ...

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in Alabama Association of Realtors v. Department of Health and Human Services, affirming what Pacific Legal Foundation has argued on behalf of landowners for nearly a year—that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lacked the constitutional authority to enforce its nationwide eviction mo ...

The Biden administration was in a box in late July. They desperately wanted to extend the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s controversial eviction moratorium. But the judicial writing was on the wall. They had suffered an embarrassing string of losses in the federal courts and had received a warning from the U.S. Supr ...

Newton’s third law of physics is that for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That rule also seems to apply in the business world when it comes to regulations like an eviction moratorium. That is to say that regulation always has unintended consequences—some predictable, others less obvious. And that rule ̷ ...

Reasonable minds may disagree on how to respond to COVID-19, but we can all agree that states should be enabled to protect public health and safety during an emergency. We should also be able to agree that the states’ responses must conform to the U.S. Constitution. But the current crisis raises serious questions about who … ...

Even in a public health emergency, the constitution still matters. That’s one lesson we can take from the restraining order issued by a California judge on June 12 halting one of Governor Gavin Newsom’s emergency orders. The ruling argued that Newsom’s order overstepped his office’s authority, infringing upon the legislature ...