Articles

Diversity quandry : Woman or African-American?

May 04, 2010 | By PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION

Author: Joshua Thompson New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is drawing some heat for failing to re-appoint Justice John Wallace to New Jersey's Supreme Court.  You see, Justice Wallace is an African-American, so Governor Christie's decision is receiving criticism "because Wallace would at least diversify the bench." Of course ...

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Are you paying attention Jerry Brown?

January 05, 2011 | By PACIFIC LEGAL FOUNDATION

Author: Joshua Thompson PLF friend, Roger Clegg, reports that New Jersey Gov. Christie, has "quietly dismantled" New Jersey's Division of Minority and Women Business Development.  From their website, it is clear that the program was set up to provide race- and sex-based preferences for New Jersey contracting.  So kudos to ...

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Courts must protect the politically powerless from having their property rights abused

December 19, 2013 | By JONATHAN WOOD

Pacific Legal Foundation has filed an amici brief in the Supreme Court of New Jersey on behalf of itself, the National Federation of Independent Business, Institute for Justice and Ilya Somin arguing that New Jersey courts must take seriously their obligation to enforce the limits of the state constitution. Like many states, New Jersey only allows ...

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Can Congress grant a state a monopoly over an industry at the expense of the rest of the nation?

March 17, 2014 | By JONATHAN WOOD

Today, PLF and the Cato Institute filed this brief supporting New Jersey’s cert. petition in its challenge to the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA)’s grant to Nevada of a monopoly on sports-gambling. This federal statute was adopted in 1992 and forbids any state that didn’t already have legalized sports-gamb ...

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Why buy the land when you can get it for free?

April 22, 2014 | By MARK MILLER

Why local governments fail to understand the Fifth Amendment takings clause, I will never know. It’s only been the law for 220 years or so, after all. It is rare that I can open the paper – or read a news site – and not discover a new example of an old problem: the government … ...

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What are the odds that SCOTUS will have to decide the constitutionality of Nevada’s monopoly on sports gambling?

November 03, 2014 | By JONATHAN WOOD

Last term, the Supreme Court considered a petition to hear New Jersey’s challenge to a federal law that forbids any state from liberalizing its sports gambling laws except Nevada. PLF and Cato submitted an amicus brief asking the Court to take up the case to decide an important constitutional question: can Congress arbitrarily discriminate am ...

Articles

NY and NJ courts both reject property rights

January 22, 2015 | By MARK MILLER

Property owners in New York and New Jersey learned again this week that their state courts often reject property rights in favor of creative ways to take private property in a manner that violates the Fifth Amendment. In New York, the court upended a centuries-old settled question of law in the case of Friends of Thayer Lake, LLC v. Phil Brow ...

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NJ Supreme Court on arbitration : tougher than the rest?

April 09, 2015 | By MARK MILLER

  PLF went racing in the streets this week up to the swamps of Jersey to file an amicus brief in an arbitration case pending at the New Jersey Supreme Court. In Morgan v. Sanford Brown, we argue that the Court should uphold a lower court decision to enforce an arbitration agreement and send the parties to arbitration. PLF has reason to ...

Articles

A winning hand for the Fifth Amendment

September 11, 2015 | By MARK MILLER

Last month, the Constitution won a hand in an Atlantic City Court. That’s a victory for all Americans. The New Jersey Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA), a state agency, sought to take the Atlantic City family home of Charlie Birnbaum. Birnbaum’s family had owned the home for decades, but that didn’t matter to state ...