Bloomberg Law : Supreme Court Gets Another Chance to End Government Home Theft
A decade ago, the Pung family of Isabella County, Mich., was hit with an improper property tax bill totaling $2,240, which included interest and fees. Rather than own up to its mistake, the government foreclosed on the Pungs' property, confiscating the whole home for a tax that never should have been due. What followed was a bureaucratic torture ...
PLF returns to the Supreme Court to defend Michigan family’s property rights
I have big news: Pacific Legal Foundation is going back to the U.S. Supreme Court to defend a Michigan family against an outrageous injustice. We've joined as co-counsel in the case Pung v. Isabella County, which will be argued at the Court this term. (You can hear directly from the attorneys litigating the case if you join our online discussion on ...
John Harris, farmer and horse racer
John Harris, longtime Pacific Legal Foundation trustee and former board chair, passed away this summer at the age of 81. This article is reprinted here from PLF's quarterly magazine Sword&Scales. Midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, off I-5 on the Western edge of the San Joaquin Valley, sits Harris Farms and Harris Ranch—a spread ...
The American dream is built on property rights- why have we forgotten that?
Several years ago, an author defended looting in an NPR interview by arguing, "It's just property. It's not actually hurting any people." That justification stayed with me. How many Americans have forgotten that private property is how human beings implement their freedom in the world? Liberty is not just the freedom to think but also to do – ...
SCOTUS will not hear PLF case on discrimination in K-12. What happens now?
Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it will not hear our Thomas Jefferson High School case, a fight to determine whether public school students should be treated as individuals—on merit—or as members of racial groups. This is disappointing news for Pacific Legal Foundation and our clients, the Coalition for TJ: a group of par ...
Bloomberg profiled PLF’s successes at the Supreme Court. Here’s what they got right and wrong.
Bloomberg just published a feature on Pacific Legal Foundation—quoting me—that has me split. On one hand, I love that Bloomberg is talking about "PLF's mastery of the long game." But the article got only half the story right. The article is a dual-profile of PLF and Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group. Both PLF and ...
Supreme Court announces big PLF victories in Sackett and Tyler
I'm going to remember today for a long time. This morning—at around 7 a.m. where I am in California—the Supreme Court announced unanimous decisions in two Pacific Legal Foundation cases. Both are stunning victories. In Sackett v. EPA, which PLF senior attorney Damien Schiff argued on the first day of the term in October, the C ...
50 years of fighting — PLF looks back at our beginning
It was 50 years ago today, on March 5, 1973, that Pacific Legal Foundation was born. Afterward newspaper Human Events said the date "may go down in history as the day the worm began to turn." For those of us who came of age with a vibrant, growing liberty movement, it's hard to remember how different things were in 1973. There was no Cato Inst ...
Property rights start with the home
This article is featured in the fall edition of our quarterly magazine Sword&Scales. To read the full edition visit: swordandscales.pacificlegal.org ~~~ When I first began in the libertarian public-interest legal movement—17 years ago!—my work focused exclusively on property rights. In fact, it was my interest in that issue that led me ...