Issues

The COVID-19 pandemic was hard for small businesses everywhere. But when Massachusetts issued orders for “non-essential” businesses to close their doors, the owners of its small businesses could at least apply for a grant to help offset their losses. Or, more accurately, some of them could apply. Brian Dalton is a single father who has ...

PLF clients Tom and Amy Villegas have reason to celebrate after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) backed down from its outrageous claim that the couple violated the Clean Water Act (CWA). An oasis in Nebraska Tom and Amy Villegas love the outdoors. While the couple calls Colorado home, they have a deep connection with the … ...

Even before the Supreme Court’s landmark June ruling that Harvard and the University of North Carolina were guilty of discriminating against Asian-Americans, some were confident schools would find a way to keep doing it. Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is now showing how. When the high court decided to ...

To hear almost anyone tell it, racial preferences in university admissions are dead. But this pervasive sense of finality belies a curious silence in the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions. The Court never expressly overrules the line of precedent that has allowed universities to discriminate for the last 50 years. Witho ...

When most people talk about free speech violations, they mean censorship—the prohibition of certain speech. And while that’s certainly the version that gets more attention in the media, there’s another kind of free speech violation that is possibly even more insidious: the compelling of certain speech. Dr. Azadeh Khatibi is an ophthal ...

When we think of the origins of the country’s most brilliant tech entrepreneurs, the mind naturally gravitates toward places like Silicon Valley—not the Amish Country of Holmes County, Ohio. Mike Yoder, the CEO of Drone Deer Recovery, isn’t like other entrepreneurs. For starters, he didn’t grow up with the internet in his home. ...

An Arizona mother unjustly accused of child neglect has reason to celebrate, after a trial judge allowed the state’s Department of Child Safety to drop their charges against her.  In 2021, Pacific Legal Foundation client Sarra L* was unjustly accused of child neglect after she let her son play alone at a safe neighborhood park … ...

The California Reparations Task Force hopes that its final report and recommendations will be “an example for not only other states but this nation as a whole…” Berkeley Unified School District is among those hoping to take its cues from the state task force. But because the state task force’s recommendations advantage or di ...

To safeguard the American people against tyranny, the Framers of our Constitution created a political system with three distinct branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—each tasked with its own unique and specific powers. To ensure that no one branch could usurp the role of another, a system of checks and balances was instit ...