Articles

This morning the Ninth Circuit released this opinion in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Becerra, a case about whether California can demand confidential donor forms from nonprofit organizations operating within the state. Twice the district court has found that the law violates  donors’ First Amendment rights of free speech and associ ...

Yesterday the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) Board decided against adopting a creepy rule which would have required craft breweries to record the names, phone numbers, addresses, and birthdays of anyone who purchases craft beer for carryout.  As I detailed in this comment letter and this Forbes piece, the proposed rule was a burdensome a ...

Today, Judge Beth Andrus ruled that Seattle cannot hunt through its residents’ garbage in search of prohibited food waste. Our lawsuit, Bonesteel v. City of Seattle, challenged a Seattle law that says garbage collectors must search through trash cans along their routes each week to determine whether more than ten percent of the volume of yo ...

Seattle punishes people who throw food in the garbage bin. To enforce this mandate, the City has deputized garbage collectors to poke through each garbage can on their routes, hunting for taboo pizza crusts or red velvet cakes. PLF sued on behalf of eight Seattle residents to challenge this privacy invasion in court. We will present our case, B ...

Our lawsuit against Seattle’s illegal surveillance program received more national media attention yesterday (click here). Seattle bureaucrats monitor everyone’s trash cans to make sure no one throws out food. Government shouldn’t meddle in the minutia of our everyday lives. And it should honor our privacy. For more on this ...

An op-ed on PLF’s lawsuit against the City of Seattle for unconstitutional trash surveillance appeared today on Townhall.com. The op-ed explains how the City’s composting mandate is enforced through weekly searches of the trash cans of every resident and business in the City. This kind of intrusion into private affairs does not compor ...

The City of Seattle is lost in the deep dark forest of its progressive ideals—and yet it just can’t seem to see the forest for the tress. As you may recall, PLF attorneys filed a lawsuit last week arguing that a city law authorizing trash collectors to inspect the contents of residential garbage cans for … ...

WOTUS WOTUS every where, nor a drop to drink We filed this challenge in Minnesota District Court on behalf of a variety of landowners and organizations to EPA’s new Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule,  This rule, like the stuff of the alchemists of old, creates water from dry ditches and federal jurisdiction from whole cloth.  R ...

PLF sued the City of Seattle this morning in Bonesteel v. City of Seattle to challenge sweeping surveillance of residents and businesses. The City’s zeal for bumping its recycling rate bypassed constitutional boundaries when Seattle decided to have trash collectors and inspectors poke around for compostable contraband, such as pizza ...