Separation of Powers

Board game companies Stonemaier Games, XYZ Game Labs, Spielcraft Games, Rookie Mage, and Tinkerhouse Games are suing the Trump administration over its tariffs, which President Donald Trump set at 145% for most products manufactured in China. Nearly 70% of board games are made in China, making the China tariff an "existential" threat to the American ...

"We the People" are among the most recognizable words in human history. They begin the preamble to the United States Constitution: the mission statement, to borrow modern corporate lingo. The preamble tells us who was acting and, more importantly, why:  "in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide ...

Last week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration would be slapping tariffs on an enormous share of the things Americans buy. Tariffs have a long history in the United States. But the president does not possess the constitutional authority to create tariffs unilaterally. This power is vested solely in Congress and cannot be delega ...

There's so much interesting stuff happening at the Court that you get not one, but two scoops of SCOTUS this week. In Part I, I'll discuss all of the opinions that were released over the past two weeks. In Part II, we'll recap some of the wild oral arguments. Let's dig in! Even after the demise of Chevron deference, the government is gonna win som ...

Note: The photo above is of the Sacketts' Idaho property (marked by dotted line), which the EPA claimed was regulable as "navigable water." It's been nearly two years since the Supreme Court ruled for our clients, Chantell and Mike Sackett, in the landmark Clean Water Act case Sackett v. EPA. Yet the government still isn't complying with the jus ...

The Supreme Court heard oral argument on Wednesday in the case of FCC v. Consumers' Research, which involves a nondelegation challenge to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. PLF filed an amicus brief in the case—because the nondelegation doctrine, which says Congress cannot delegate its lawmaking responsibilities, is key to PLF's fight for the cons ...

The Supreme Court's ghost guns decision in Bondi v. Vanderstok centers on a fundamental question of American law: What happens when federal agencies reinterpret decades-old statutes to expand their own power? The justices considered whether, under the Gun Control Act of 1968, Congress authorized ATF to regulate gun parts kits—often called "ghost gu ...

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 ...

This week, the Arizona Court of Appeals closed the loop on the state's recent legislative mandate for de novo review of agency decisions, officially ending substantial-evidence deference to agency-found facts. In doing so, the court followed Pacific Legal Foundation's constitutional avoidance argument presented in our amicus brief and noted that bo ...