Articles

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Sheetz v. County of El Dorado. It is the fourth in a series of cases since 1987 involving the application of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine to the Takings Clause and land-use permits, namely, Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987), Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994), and Koontz v. St ...

Ursula Newell-Davis has been a social worker in New Orleans for more than 20 years with a particular passion for special needs children (including her own), so she knows special needs families are often desperate for affordable and reliable respite care. It allows parents time to work, run errands, or just attend to themselves, confident that their ...

Last July, two climate change activists, glued their hands to the 540-year-old Botticelli painting Primavera at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. The painting, which depicts mythical figures in a green garden, is one of the most studied and praised in Western Civilization. It is thought to be an allegory about the abundance of nature. A thi ...

Nearly everyone today recognizes that housing costs are too high in California. With a median home price over one million dollars in Orange County, even upper-middle-class families face the reality of their kids and grandkids moving on mass to states where housing costs don't eclipse every other need. The past few years of price increases (both hom ...

There is agreement today across the ideological spectrum that the cost of housing is too high. The share of all Americans paying more than 30, 40, or even 50 percent of their monthly income on housing has been growing for a very long time, and the cost of housing nearly everywhere has outpaced income growth year-over-year for decades. One can ma ...

On March 22, PLF will argue at the Supreme Court of the United States what has become the most contentious property rights dispute in the nation, Cedar Point Nursery v Hassid. This case centers around a controversial California regulation that allows union organizers to enter (without permission) private farms for up to 3 hours a day, 120 days a ye ...

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2017 issue of Pacific Legal Foundation's quarterly magazine Sword&Scales. PLF exists to establish a rule of law under which all Americans may live free in their pursuit of happiness. We fight to preserve and advance the American ideals of individualism and liberty, and our mission has never been mor ...

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have been asking questions like "are lockdowns constitutional?" "What is the government's role in a pandemic?" This week, Pacific Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit in Connecticut challenging unconstitutional policies enacted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Until today, PLF has not filed lawsuits ...

The longer the lockdowns last and the less necessary that they seem, the more scrutiny courts will apply. State governors from coast to coast issued coronavirus-related lockdown orders about two months ago, closing businesses and restricting people's movements. Government officials have taken unprecedented steps, seemingly without much calculati ...