Articles

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 ...

The Sixth Circuit today dismissed Wayside Church v. Van Buren County, a case challenging Michigan's unconstitutional tax foreclosure scheme. Judge Kethledge who dissented from the panel's decision, summed up the case this way: In this case the defendant Van Buren County took property worth $206,000 to satisfy a $16,750 debt, and then refused to ref ...

Does the Constitution protect you from the government taking your equity in your home, land, or business? That's the question Andrew Ohanessian and Rafaeli,LLC are asking the Michigan Court of Appeals in Rafaeli v. Oakland County. Rafaeli owed the County $8 for overdue taxes, which amassed to $285 in taxes, interest, and fees when the County forecl ...

Last year I posted a blog about Bain v. California Teachers Association, a case where several California teachers argued that they should not have to pay the portion of union dues that support political candidates and initiatives favored by the teachers' unions.  The California Teachers Association (CTA) spends millions of dollars on political camp ...

On November 15, The Washington Post ran an essay that Todd Gaziano and I wrote, urging the District of Columbia to do the right thing and pay for the property it took from DC's most vulnerable citizens.  As I explained last week on the Liberty Blog, until recently, DC used an outrageous tax foreclosure law to take homes over relatively small debts. ...

Are you paying hidden taxes through your electric utility bill?  The residents of Redding are, and a lawsuit to stop it has reached the California Supreme Court.  PLF attorneys filed a brief last week challenging those taxes in Citizens for Fair REU Rates v. Redding. When the Redding City Council approved the city's budgets for fiscal years 2009 a ...

People support school choice for many reasons. Most support it because it's the last best hope for their children to get a decent education. Some hope that it is a means to mitigate the impacts of racial and income segregation. Still others support it as an alternative to the highly-politicized resolution of sensitive religious and philosophical co ...

The Arizona Supreme Court said goodbye to outgoing governor Jan Brewer by upholding the right of legislators to challenge her illegal Medicaid expansion efforts. Last year, Brewer and her supporters engineered an expansion of the state's Medicaid program pursuant to Obamacare—bizarrely, the very same Medicaid expansion she successfully challenged i ...

In the latest episode of the Obamacare saga, hundreds of thousands of insured individuals have begun receiving cancellation letters—which inform recipients that they will not be able to keep their health insurance policy.  These letters fly in the face of the promises President Obama made just a few years ago, when he famously insisted that "if you ...