Articles

Markle Interests’ brief filed with High Court in Weyerhaeuser v. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service This week we filed our merits brief in the Supreme Court supporting the landowers in Weyerhaeuser Co. v. United States Fish & Wildlife Service. Earlier this year, the Court granted review and we expect to hear soon from the Court … ...

The First Amendment doesn’t just protect your right to speak, it also protects your right not to speak. So imagine if your municipal government required you to devote 20% of your shirt to “Smith for City Council” or plaster 20% of your car with “remember to recycle” stickers. No matter how laudable (or sinister) the & ...

Last week we announced that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected San Francisco’s attempt to undo PLF’s victory on behalf of San Francisco landlords in the Levin case. In that case, landlords who wished to remove their property from the rental market under California’s Ellis Act were subject to a San Francisco ordinance ...

If you liked my most recent blog posts, you’ll love today’s episode of the Andy Caldwell Show. I’ll be joining Andy at 4:30 to discuss two of the hottest issues in constitutional law. First, I’ll be talking about the First Amendment implications of San Francisco’s soda warnings. Second, I’ll discuss PLF’s e ...

San Francisco wants to be the City that takes down big soda. San Francisco’s “war on soda” is not itself problematic for free speech rights. Rather, it is the City’s tactics that has given rise to all sorts of First Amendment problems. Specifically, San Francisco did not use its own channels to broadcast its disdain … ...

It should come as no surprise that governments struggle to regulate the disruptive nature of the “sharing economy.” Lately, this struggle has resulted in increasingly burdensome regulations on property owners renting their property short-term, and on the websites like Airbnb and VRBO that provide a platform to list those properties for ...

In 2014 PLF successfully asked a federal court to strike down a San Francisco ordinance that required landlords to pay their tenants the difference between the rent they charged (often low due to rent control policies) and the current market rent for two years if the landlord removed their property from the rental market under … ...

“Two-tiered public transportation” — that’s the punchline to this report I heard on NPR this morning. The report covers a recent increase in private luxury buses catering to San Francisco residents.  This is a problem according to the San Francisco Transit Riders Union — yes this is actually a thing — beca ...

I’ll be talking with Armstrong and Getty at 7am Pacific about our victory in the Levin case. You can listen online here. Update: You can listen to the podcast here. … ...