Religious liberty, farming, & climate change coming to the Court
We're back, baby! How was your summer? Sacramento is squeezing in its last gorgeous days of warm weather. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has had enough of a vacation. Time to get back to work saving the Constitution! The October 2026 term began today with the first oral arguments. We also got three new grants out of the Court's "long conference" ...
The Dispatch : Florence Allen Was More Than a First
Florence Allen's decision to become a lawyer came to her "like a flash out of the blue," a "revelation on high." It was an inconvenient one. When Allen entered law school in 1909, women could not vote, many schools would not admit them, and only about 1 percent of American lawyers were women. Her own undergraduate alma mater, Case Western Univer ...
Wall Street Journal : Don’t Write Plymouth’s History by Ancestry
Millions visit Plymouth, Mass., to see the birthplace of American self-government. Yet today the town decides who participates in that government based on their ancestry. Plymouth occupies a singular place in the American story, with a rich history of the Pilgrims, the Wampanoag people and their complicated relationship. The town has chosen to p ...
The Hill : It’s not ‘just’ to erase someone’s home equity
In 2019, Isabella County, Mich., seized Timothy Pung's family home over a disputed tax debt of roughly $2,000. The county sold the house — worth nearly $200,000 — for just $76,000. Months later, the buyer resold it for $195,000. The result was that the Pung family walked away with less than half the market value of their home, due to a small ta ...
Big decisions at the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court has started releasing the blockbuster opinions everyone's been waiting for. This week brought major decisions on property rights, religious liberty, immigration, and the Second Amendment. Here's what stood out to me. The Pungs live to fight another day The Supreme Court handed down its decision in Pung v. Isabella County, Pacifi ...
The Calm Before the Avalanche
The Calm Before the Avalanche But first… Guys, your new favorite podcast is out! I love a good Supreme Court dissent—so I created a podcast about them. In the first season, we get meta; we talk about America's first great dissent—The Declaration of Independence—through the lens of Supreme Court dissents. We trace the Declaration's pr ...
Let the big cases begin!
Last night I talked with Jesse Weber of NewsNation about the Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which significantly shifted how courts will consider certain claims under the Voting Rights Act. Watch it here. The last oral argument of the term! The Court heard the last oral argument of the term yesterday in M ...
Tariffs, Takings, and Les Mis
Two quick, but important scoops. First, the Court released its opinion in the highly anticipated tariffs case. Second, PLF is back at SCOTUS (baby!). The Tariffs Case: 170 Pages, Six Opinions, One Historic Result Last week the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the tariffs case, and wow. Historic. Nuanced. A 170-page opinion in all, even tho ...
New year, new SCOTUS opinions
The Supreme Court has issued its first handful (or scoop, if you will) of opinions. And it heard oral arguments in one of the most closely watched cases of the term. But first, the bad news. On Monday, the Court rejected six PLF petitions for review: Hierholzer (challenging racial preferences in federal contracting), Lincinio (asking the Court t ...