The Docket: May 1, 2026
The Docket is PLF’s weekly newsletter covering the cases and clients shaping the future of liberty in America. Subscribe today to follow along.
PLF asks FWS to restore protections for California fishermen; Los Angeles property owners challenge City’s public monument declaration as a Fifth Amendment taking; and PLF’s Amy Peikoff highlights the implications of Chatrie v. United States—heard earlier this week at the Supreme Court.
Los Angeles can’t force homeowners to foot the bill for public monuments
In mid-April, PLF joined a federal lawsuit over a home once owned by Marilyn Monroe. The lawsuit aims to prevent the government from forcing individual property owners—like our clients—to shoulder the financial burden of public historic monuments.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees all Americans the right to just compensation when the government takes their property. If the government wants a museum, it must pay for it. The City of Los Angeles is no exception.
The Supreme Court’s last best chance to stop the surveillance state
When you text your doctor, share your location with a rideshare app, or use your credit card at checkout, you aren’t broadcasting your private life to the world. You’re sharing specific information, for a specific purpose, with a specific party you’ve chosen to trust—usually under terms of service that promise to keep it confidential.
You know this. Your service provider knows this. The only institution in America that pretends not to know this is the federal government, armed with a legal doctrine the Supreme Court erroneously expanded almost 50 years ago. That doctrine is the third-party doctrine.
As PLF attorney Amy Peikoff explains, the Court now has a chance—possibly its last best chance—to return it to its original and proper scope in a case heard earlier this week: Chatrie v. United States.
It’s time for the Fish & Wildlife Service to restore protections for California fishermen
In 1986, Congress enacted a statute that struck a careful balance between the needs of California fishermen and conservation goals for the southern sea otter. For several decades, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) largely enforced the law as Congress passed it. Fishermen continued working and the southern sea otter population grew steadily, eventually achieving the delisting threshold the agency set out in its recovery plan.
But in 2012, FWS veered from that course—in direct defiance of Congress’ clear instructions. Last week, PLF attorneys filed two petitions urging FWS to restore protections for California fishermen and, in light of the species’ recovery, to delist the southern sea otter from the Endangered Species Act.
Federal lawsuit challenges New Jersey’s discriminatory hiring mandates and forced union speech requirements
The State of New Jersey requires every contractor and subcontractor on public construction projects to meet “targeted [hiring] goals” for racial minorities and women across certain trades. Contractors who do not meet the hiring goals must either enter a referral agreement with a union—obtaining assurances that the union will supply the required minority workers—or complete more than two dozen separate compliance actions.
Now, Earle Asphalt Company—a Monmouth County-based non-union “open shop”—is fighting to end these unconstitutional conditions and restore equal access to public contracting.
PLF asks the Supreme Court to affirm that licensure shouldn’t come at the expense of free speech
In 2019, California passed AB 241, requiring that all continuing medical education courses involving direct patient care include instruction on “implicit bias.” As PLF senior attorney Caleb Trotter explains, this training “tells doctors that their colleagues harbor hidden racial prejudices… and it tells minority patients that a white physician is likely to damage their health.”
In 2023, PLF filed a lawsuit on behalf of two California doctors and Do No Harm, a national medical advocacy organization, challenging the State’s implicit bias requirements. The Ninth Circuit ruled against them. PLF is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case.
Two years after Jarkesy, the sky hasn’t fallen
In 2024, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in SEC v. Jarkesy and held that when federal agencies seek to punish Americans, those Americans have the right to have their case heard by a real judge and jury—not the agency’s own in-house tribunal.
Some legal commentators predicted catastrophe. One widely read analysis even warned of “generational upheaval.” But as PLF’s Mitchell Scacchi and Alessandra Caruso point out, “two years later, the sky hasn’t fallen”—and new PLF research proves it.
