Articles

Does adherence to the separation of powers risk nuclear war? The federal government seems to think so. Fortunately, the U.S. Court of International Trade last week struck down President Donald Trump's tariffs as unlawful in companion cases brought by small businesses and 12 states. But the litigation will continue, likely up to the U.S. Supre ...

On Tuesday, March 18, 2025, President Donald Trump summarily fired two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission. This would be an unremarkable occurrence at the start of a new presidential administration, except Congress restricted the president's ability to fire commissioners to instances of "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance ...

Two federal district courts determined in a single week that the Office of Management and Budget's federal funding freeze had to be put on hold while the claims were resolved. The courts showed no hesitation in wading into a political dispute between Congress and the president. Yet every day, individual US citizens and small businesses are denie ...

In their Feb. 19 op-ed "Precedents for the Eric Adams Case," James Copland and Rafael Mangual detail the Justice Department's decadeslong practice of extracting behavior-altering agreements from defendants in exchange for deferring or declining prosecution. But their examples are exclusively of private citizens or corporations. When the defenda ...

The Trump administration is racking up injunctions from federal courts, halting its efforts to shrink the federal government. From the funding freeze to the federal worker buyout, judges have put many of the administration's early executive actions on hold. For example, on February 10, 2025, a federal court found that the Trump administration had ...

The firing of federal workers has been a controversial topic since President Donald Trump began his second term in January. That controversy is warranted. The loss of a job is a difficult event for anyone who faces it. But there is a second reason these firings of government workers have caught everyone's attention. Firing employees and officers of ...

If you're accused of a crime in the United States, Article III of the U.S. Constitution guarantees that you will receive a trial by jury. The Sixth Amendment expanded that right to also guarantee "a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury," in which you are "confronted with the witnesses against you," can compel witnesses in your favor, and " ...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) thinks it knows how to run small businesses better than their owners. That is the message the FTC sent the millions of small business owners across the country with its ban on non-compete agreements, set to take effect on September 4.    By some estimates, 48% of small business owners use non-compete agreeme ...

The law finally caught up to James Bond — or at least the actor who used to play him. On March 14, 2024, former 007 actor Pierce Brosnan pleaded guilty in federal court in Wyoming to a single count of straying from a footpath in a thermal area of Yellowstone National Park. Brosnan was cited for allegedly standing off the path at Mammoth Hot Sp ...