Articles

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit handed down a decision in favor of several students challenging speech codes at the University of Texas at Austin. The court held that students were deterred from speaking by UT’s restrictive speech codes, and that deterrence was a serious-enough injury to their First Amendment ̷ ...

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is contemplating issuing new rules regulating the health and safety of birds kept as pets. This rule-making is the result of a lawsuit brought by several animal rights groups that sued the USDA by arguing that it had failed to issue regulations required by the Animal Welfare Act. … ...

In the pandemic’s early days, the American judiciary largely gave governors wide leeway in issuing unprecedented business-closure and stay-at-home orders in order to dampen the spread of the disease. More recently, some judges, concerned by the scope and duration of those orders, have taken steps to enforce constitutional limits on executive ...

Amateur radio operators are enjoying a moment in the pop culture spotlight, with ham radio featuring prominently in popular TV series like Last Man Standing, Frequency, and Stranger Things. As the public learns more about ham radio, they’re likely to appreciate amateur radio’s importance as a form of emergency communication and as an al ...

The scope and duration of the stay-at-home orders issued by state governors this year are unlike any past pandemic orders in American history. So it is not surprising that several hundred lawsuits have been filed around the country to challenge their application in various contexts. A few of those cases have made their way to … ...

Too often, government makes bad situations worse. States have broad powers to protect the health and safety of their citizens—especially during emergencies like the COVID-19 outbreak, but many overreaching and arbitrary government policies having little to do with public safety have made the situation more painful and destructive than necessary. ...

As the COVID-19 lockdowns continues to grind on in most states, President Trump has signaled an intense desire for state governors to reopen their respective states. This pressure has ranged from the subtle to the overt. In one particularly alarming development, the president even went so far as to declare that the decision to lift … ...

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the continued spread of COVID-19 in California could necessitate the imposition of martial law. “We have the ability to do martial law … if we feel the necessity,” Newsom stated at a news conference on March 17. But Newsom is mistaken. While the current pandemic presents a public health crisis  ...

Throughout American history, people’s views on what should or should not count as protected speech under the First Amendment has waxed and waned along with cultural trends and changing political ideologies. But rarely do we see the viewpoint on certain fundamental rights shift so dramatically. Progressives used to champion the freedom of spee ...