Articles

The First Amendment right to speak includes the oft-forgotten right to listen. Few know it, but this right to receive information hides in the shadow of a controversial case now before the Supreme Court called Chiles v. Salazar. How the Court resolves Chiles will affect the rights of millions of patients to seek and receive medical advice. In Ch ...

The Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause forbids the government from using immutable characteristics—like race—to discriminate against individuals. Even so, governments have taken to using sneaky tactics that, while avoiding explicit racial classifications, are no less than discrimination by proxy. Nowhere is this seen more than in th ...

Illinois needs teachers. Earlier this year, the State Board of Education published a report on the state's teacher shortage, estimating that Illinois schools have nearly 4,000 vacancies. And 87% of education leaders say that teacher shortages are a problem. Meanwhile, a poll conducted last year for the Illinois Education Association found that 60% ...

Americans are generous with their time—coaching youth sports, feeding the hungry, cleaning parks, and serving their communities in countless ways. Many also volunteer on state boards and commissions, helping shape policies that affect us all. But what if your chance to serve depended not on your skills or dedication, but on your race or sex? Unti ...

Law schools are desperately changing hiring and admissions policies to increase diversity—not because of their own internal objectives, but because of pressure from accrediting agencies. New research from Pacific Legal Foundation reveals how the American Bar Association (ABA) pressures public law schools to adopt race- and sex-based hiring and ...

The Wyoming Supreme Court sided with Pacific Legal Foundation client Tom Hamann on Friday, sending a clear message that government agencies can't damage private property without consequences. The opinion also reaffirms that agencies cannot evade their constitutional obligation to compensate property owners when their officials—acting within the s ...

Lawmakers across the country are proposing reparations to black Americans for slavery and America's history of racial discrimination. Proposals have included direct cash payments, grants, formal apologies from the government, and government programs with race-based eligibility. Because certain reparations proposals would inevitably advantage and ...

"This wolf comes as a wolf." Almost 40 years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia warned of the rise of a "fourth branch" of government: an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy wielding power once reserved for the president. He was the lone dissenter in Morrison v. Olson, a 1988 Supreme Court case that upheld the creation of "independent counsels." The ...

On the evening of July 8, as the last item in a grueling seven-hour meeting, the Laguna Beach City Council voted to grant a coastal development permit (CDP) to Pacific Legal Foundation clients Steve and Karen Reinecke—a hard-won victory that allows the Reineckes to finally build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) on their property. ADUs are seco ...