Equality and Opportunity

New York State has fewer legal cannabis dispensaries than Maryland despite having three times the population. If New Yorkers want the vibrant, booming cannabis market other states are enjoying, the state needs to fix its messy licensing process for cannabis businesses. To understand what’s broken, look at the case of William and Emmett Purcel ...

Pacific Legal Foundation is deeply saddened to announce the passing of Dr. Marilyn Singleton, a trailblazer whose remarkable career spanned both the legal and medical fields. Dr. Singleton, a dedicated advocate for justice and equality, passed away unexpectedly this week. Our heartfelt condolences go out to her family, friends, and colleagues who a ...

Lawmakers across the country are proposing reparations to black Americans for slavery and America’s history of racial discrimination. Proposals have included direct cash payments, grants, formal apologies from the government, and government programs with race-based eligibility. There are those who believe, as Ibram X. Kendi wrote, that “ ...

Five months after Minnesota farmer Lance Nistler filed a federal lawsuit with Pacific Legal Foundation’s help, Minnesota removed race- and sex-based preferences from its Down Payment Assistance Grant Program.   PLF’s participation in Lance’s case raised eyebrows among Minnesota progressives: Writing in the Minnesota Reformer, Si ...

American women gained the right to vote on August 18, 1920. Despite some hyperbolic handwringing and predictions of doom—But who will watch the children? Their fathers??—the world did not end with the passing of the 19th Amendment. In fact, women’s suffrage was the most significant legal paradigm shift for gender equality of the 20th cent ...

In September 1999, then-Governor of Texas George W. Bush gave a speech to the Latin Business Association about education. America needed to adopt the mindset that every child can learn, he said. “It does not matter if they grow up in foster care or a two-parent family. These circumstances are challenges, but they are not … ...

Ask most people to name five Supreme Court decisions, and Brown v. Board of Education will make their list. Its pronouncement that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” is so widely known and so well-respected that people of many ideological backgrounds quote it and try to claim its mantle, even when they have vastly ...

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a majority of the Supreme Court in last summer’s Students for Fair Admissions opinions, which held that affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Constitution. While colleges can no ...

The federal government asserts most of its modern regulatory power over the individual ostensibly under the Commerce Clause, and therefore, it’s important for anyone who loves liberty to understand its true scope. This article looks at the clause’s background and then the two main powers that it gives the federal government. Background ...