The U.S. Constitution

Trump’s Yemen Strikes and the War Powers Question

A naval blockade sounds like a Cold War era phrase, but constitutionally it raises a very modern question: how far can a president go, on their own, before the United States is effectively at war? This question lands differently when the news is not hypothetical. President Donald Trump has ordered...

Resignations, Not Expulsions

The House of Representatives is not a courtroom. It is not a human resources department, either. But it is a constitutional body with one glaring obligation that rarely gets tested in earnest: the duty to discipline its own members. This week, that duty collided with political reality. Rep. Tony...

Virginia Gun Sales Spike Ahead of New Controls

One of the easiest ways to see how law influences everyday behavior is to watch what happens right before a rule changes, or might. In Virginia, gun retailers say that is exactly what is happening now: as a slate of proposed gun controls moves through the legislative process, customers are rushing...

When the government locks someone up, our constitutional tradition expects more than a label. Recent detention litigation in multiple jurisdictions has drawn fresh attention to a recurring issue in immigration law: when, if ever, the government can require detention automatically under certain...

Can a Court Order OpenAI to Cut Off ChatGPT to One User?

In the AI age, some of our oldest constitutional questions are returning in unfamiliar clothing. A plaintiff has asked a court to order OpenAI to cut off a particular person from ChatGPT, prevent him from creating new accounts, and notify her if he tries to get back on. The allegations behind the...

Massachusetts and the Quiet Squeeze on Section 230

Section 230 is famous for what it says in plain English: if you run a website that hosts user content, you usually are not treated as the “publisher or speaker” of what your users post. That protection is not a courtesy. It is the legal architecture that made comment sections, reviews, social...

Birthright Citizenship and the Sovereignty Question

Every generation finds a new way to ask an old question: who is an American ? Sometimes the question comes dressed as a moral argument. Sometimes it shows up as a budget argument. Lately, it shows up in court as a sovereignty argument, the claim that the United States can only remain a nation if it...

Trump’s DOJ Keeps a Biden Gun Rule

Presidents campaign like they can flip Washington like a light switch. New team in, old rules out. That story sells. It is also often false. On April 10, the Trump Justice Department kept a Biden-era gun rule in place. Whatever people expected from a change in administration, the immediate result...

Can the Government Unmask Anonymous Critics?

Anonymous speech is not a loophole in the First Amendment. It is one of its oldest habits. That is why a recent effort to force Reddit to identify a user who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not just a platform privacy story. It is a stress test for a constitutional principle:...

WATCH: Rex Heuermann Pleads Guilty to Killing 8 Women

Rex Heuermann admitted in court that he killed eight women as he changed his plea to guilty on April 9, 2026, in the Gilgo Beach murders case in New York. For many people following a case like this, a guilty plea can feel like the end of the story. In reality, it is more like a hinge in the...

FISA 702 and Warrants for Americans’ Data

Every few years, Congress faces the same uncomfortable question: how much surveillance power should the federal government have in the name of foreign intelligence, and what protections do Americans get when their messages get caught in the net? That question is back because Section 702 of the...

Congressional Review Act Explained

Most federal regulations do not die dramatic deaths. They fade out in committee hearings, get revised in the Federal Register, or get whittled down in court. The Congressional Review Act , or CRA, is different. It is a statutory trapdoor. If Congress and the President agree, they can wipe out a...

Bivens Actions Explained

You can sue state and local officials for constitutional violations under a statute most lawyers know by heart: 42 U.S.C. § 1983 . But what if the person who violated your rights works for the federal government? That is where people often hear the phrase “Bivens action” , usually said with a...

The USA PATRIOT Act and the Constitution

“The PATRIOT Act” has become shorthand for a single idea: the government can listen to your calls, read your messages, and raid your bank account because Congress moved quickly in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The reality is more bureaucratic, more specific, and in a way, more...

FISA and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

You can tell how confusing FISA is by the way people talk about it. Some treat a “FISA warrant” like a cheat code that lets the government spy without rules. Others treat it like a normal warrant with a different label. Neither is quite right. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978...

Section 1983 Lawsuits Explained

When people say they are “suing the police for violating my rights,” they are usually talking about one statute: 42 U.S.C. § 1983 , commonly called Section 1983 . It is not a constitutional amendment. It is a Reconstruction-era law that creates a civil lawsuit when a state or local official...

The Public Charge Rule Explained

In American immigration law, few phrases cause more confusion than “public charge.” People hear it and assume it means: if you ever used a public benefit, you can be deported. Or: if you are poor, you cannot immigrate. Or: if you apply for a green card, you have to prove you will never need...

The Espionage Act Explained

You can think of the Espionage Act as a law built for wartime, then left on the books for peacetime. It was born in World War I, designed to protect military operations and national defense information. A century later, it is still one of the government’s main tools for prosecuting the...

Alien Tort Statute Explained

The Alien Tort Statute is one of the strangest power tools in American law. It is a single sentence written in 1789, largely dormant for almost two centuries, then suddenly revived as a way for foreign plaintiffs to bring human rights cases in U.S. federal courts. And then the Supreme Court spent...

Military Commissions and the Constitution

When Americans picture “a trial,” they picture a federal judge in a black robe, a jury box, and a courtroom where the Constitution is the rulebook and the referee is independent of the political branches. Military commissions are what happens when the government argues that picture does not fit...