Articles

Rose Knick thought the pinnacle of her case would be on October 3, 2018, when eight Supreme Court justices spent an hour hearing legal arguments arising from her attempt to hold Scott Township accountable for taking her property without paying for it. But now Rose will do something few people who make it to the Supreme Court do: she will be returni ...

Today, we received a favorable, published decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Garrett v. City of New Orleans.   This case challenges the City's demolition of a town home a couple (the Garretts) purchased from the City. The City destroyed the home without any notice, hearing or compensation to the Garretts.  When the Garr ...

In late May, PLF attorneys filed this brief on the merits in the case of Knick v. Township of Scott, Pennsylvania, which is currently before the United States Supreme Court. The Knick case is a property rights dispute arising from a Town's efforts to force Ms. Rose Mary Knick to allow the public to enter and walk on her private property seven days ...

For decades, a federal agency had forbidden people in southwestern Utah from doing things that most of us take for granted in our own communities, like building homes, starting businesses, or protecting their airport, playgrounds, and cemetery from disruption, all ostensibly to protect the Utah prairie dog. Thanks to a lawsuit PLF filed on behalf o ...

Anyone who has tried to quit smoking knows that it's one of the hardest things you can do. But when everything else has failed, thousands of Americans have found success turning to vaping. This new technology allows users to inhale vapor from heated nicotine-infused liquids, without the harmful tar released by burning tobacco. Because it offers one ...

caption id="attachment_51597" align="alignright" width="300" Would you like a bureaucrat tinkering inside here?/caption If government can strip you of choice just because unconscious bias might influence that choice, its power would have no bounds. But that is precisely what Seattle is doing to its landlords. In Yim v. City of Seattle, PLF is ch ...

Last Friday, the Arizona Supreme Court issued its decision in Biggs v. Betlach, a case brought by a group of Arizona legislators challenging the imposition of a hospital charge to pay for state Medicaid expansion. The charge at issue, which was passed by a simple majority of the Arizona Legislature, requires hospitals to pay an "assessment" on hosp ...

Today, PLF submitted comments to the California State Lands Commission on its Draft Public Access Guide to California's Navigable Waters. The Guide purports to restate the law related to public use of waterways within the state, but it leaves much to be desired – especially for property owners. Specifically, the Guide implies that California has mu ...

One of the things that makes Washington's legal landscape so unique is that the state constitution was drafted by people who, having just witnessed the Civil War, were wary of state and federal government. As a result, our constitution provides many protections rarely found elsewhere in the country, such as a provision prohibiting the government fr ...