Articles by Eleanor Stratton

Many immigration categories are anchored in work, family, or a fear of persecution. The T nonimmigrant visa is anchored in something else: what it means to survive human trafficking, and then try to rebuild a life while the criminal justice system moves forward. Congress created T status in the...

U Visa Explained: Immigration Relief for Crime Victims

You can be the victim of a serious crime in the United States and still be treated, in practice, like you are the problem. The U visa was created to change that. It is a humanitarian immigration status for certain crime victims who have suffered substantial harm and who are willing to help law...

Primary Elections vs. General Elections

In American politics, we talk about “the election” like it is a single moment. It is not. It is a process, and in many places it has two big gates. The first gate is often a primary election or caucus . In the classic partisan model, this is where Democrats, Republicans, and other parties...

Six Primary Night Signals That Could Shape the Midterms

Primary nights are supposed to be about nominees. In reality, they are stress tests for political narratives. They reveal which candidates can survive scrutiny, which factions can coordinate, and which signals still move voters when the rubber meets the ballot box. The latest round of midterm...

Appeals Court Blocks Pentagon From Removing Trans Troops

The Constitution does not contain a “military fairness” clause. It does not mention the armed forces at all, except to give Congress and the President overlapping powers to create them, fund them, and command them. And yet, some of the most consequential questions about equal protection, due...

In immigration court, “removal” is the formal word for deportation. “Cancellation of removal” is exactly what it sounds like: a judge can cancel the removal case and let a person stay in the United States. But here is the catch that confuses people. Cancellation is not a constitutional...

Monell Liability Explained

You can sue a police officer for violating the Constitution. That part is familiar. Suing the city is where people get blindsided. Most of us assume the government “owns” what its employees do. In everyday life, employers are often responsible for employees under a doctrine called respondeat...

SpeechNow.org v. FEC Explained

Super PACs did not appear out of nowhere in 2010. They grew out of a specific legal conclusion: if a group is making independent expenditures , meaning it is not coordinating its spending with a candidate, then limiting how much people can give to that group starts to look less like corruption...

You can legally buy an entire season of courtside tickets and no one calls it speech. But give money to politics and the Supreme Court treats it as a First Amendment problem. McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014) is a major campaign finance case, not because it invented a new right, but...

Midterm elections are a product of the Constitution’s staggered election cycles: the United States does not hand one election a four-year blank check. The House of Representatives turns over every two years. The Senate turns over in thirds. Put together, midterms force the national government to...

You can tell a lot about a democracy by what it counts and what it ignores. After each federal census, Tennessee had fresh population numbers in hand, then largely ignored what the new figures meant for representation. District lines for the state legislature had not been meaningfully updated since...

Justice Thomas, Criminal Procedure, and the Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights was written for the ordinary moment: the knock at the door, the traffic stop, the search you did not expect, the courtroom you never planned to enter. Most constitutional rights are not exercised in marble hallways. They are tested in fluorescent-lit rooms by people who cannot...

The Courts vs. a Transgender Troop Ban

Americans tend to talk about “the military” like it is a separate country with separate rules. In one sense, that instinct is right. The Constitution gives the political branches extraordinary control over national defense, and courts traditionally hesitate before telling commanders how to run...

Los Angeles is the kind of city that can turn anything into a spectacle, including a municipal election. But the spectacle is not the story. The story is that Spencer Pratt, a reality TV figure turned online influencer turned mayoral candidate, is gaining real traction in the race, powered by a...

New Hampshire’s Proof-of-Citizenship Voting Rule Blocked

New Hampshire tried to add a simple checkpoint to one specific voting scenario: if you show up on Election Day not yet registered and you want to register and vote that day, you must prove you are a U.S. citizen. Late Thursday, U.S. District Judge Samantha Elliott blocked that requirement, ruling...

Judge Orders Kennedy Center to Drop Trump Name

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is not just another cultural venue. Its name is fixed by federal statute, not by branding instincts or board votes. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered that President Donald Trump’s name be removed from the Kennedy Center,...

Fusion Voting Explained

Most American ballots force a simple story: you pick a candidate, and that choice also picks a party. Fusion voting scrambles that script. It lets multiple parties nominate the same candidate so that candidate appears on more than one party line on the ballot. Voters can support the candidate and...

IEEPA Explained: Presidential Emergency Economic Powers

When Americans hear the words national emergency , they tend to picture troops, disaster zones, and urgent speeches. But a huge share of modern emergency power is quieter and more technical. It runs through banks, shipping insurers, payment rails, export licenses, and corporate compliance...

Proof-of-Citizenship Voting Requirements Explained

Most election rules you hear about are framed as a simple question: can you vote or can you not? Proof-of-citizenship requirements sit in a more procedural lane. They are not mainly about how you identify yourself at the polls. They are about how election officials decide whether a person is...

What Does a District Attorney Do?

The words district attorney sound straightforward: an attorney for a district. In real life, the job is both narrower and more powerful than that. A district attorney, often called a DA or, in some states, a state’s attorney , is the chief local prosecutor for a county or prosecutorial district....