Articles by Eleanor Stratton

Federal Target Letters

You open the mail and see it: a letter from the Department of Justice. It uses a word that sounds like it belongs in a spy novel, not your life: target . A federal target letter is not a conviction. It is not even an indictment. It is something more unsettling and, in many cases, more urgent: a...

Sealed Indictments in Federal Cases

You hear it in breaking news like it is a magic phrase: a sealed indictment . It sounds like a locked box with a name on it, waiting for the moment prosecutors decide to open it. That image is not far off. In federal court, an indictment is a formal set of criminal charges approved by a grand jury....

Trump Fires the National Science Board

American science policy does not usually arrive like a thunderclap. It arrives as a budget line, a grant cycle, a committee vote, a quiet board meeting that decides which fields are “strategic” and which can wait. That is why reports from multiple sources that President Donald Trump has...

Maine’s Criminal-Record Sealing Veto, Explained

Maine Governor Janet Mills has vetoed a sweeping criminal-record sealing bill that would have changed what the public can learn from the state’s court dockets, and what employers and landlords can discover with a quick search. The veto is not just a criminal justice story. It is a civics story...

The Geofence Warrant Case

You can lock your front door. You can shred your mail. You can refuse to answer questions. But your phone can still leave a trail. Depending on your settings and the services you use, location-related data can be created when you open a map, allow an app to check your whereabouts, or turn on...

A Justice Department Shift Makes DACA Deportations Easier

DACA has always lived in a strange legal space: powerful enough to change lives, fragile enough to be narrowed by a single administrative decision. Last week, that fragility got new reinforcement from inside the executive branch itself. The Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA)...

Brandenburg v. Ohio and the Imminent Lawless Action Test

You can say a lot in America, including things most people find ugly, reckless, or flat-out dangerous. The First Amendment does not exist to protect only polite opinions. It exists to protect speech that would be easiest for the government to suppress when public fear runs high. But the protection...

Carpenter v. United States: CSLI and the Fourth Amendment

You carry your phone. Your phone talks to cell towers. Your carrier keeps the logs. For years, that basic infrastructure quietly reshaped Fourth Amendment law. Not because the Constitution changed, but because the most revealing “search” in modern life often looks like paperwork. A request. A...

Boumediene v. Bush: Habeas Corpus and Guantánamo

Guantánamo Bay is one of those constitutional stress tests that feels like it was designed to force a hard question: Can the government keep someone in U.S. custody, for years, and still block a judge from asking whether the detention is lawful? In Boumediene v. Bush (2008), the Supreme Court...

Janus v. AFSCME (2018): Agency Fees and the First Amendment

You can support a union without joining it. You can also reject it entirely. The hard constitutional question is whether the government can still require you to help pay for it. In Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) (2018), the Supreme Court answered...

Tinker v. Des Moines (1969): Student Speech and the First Amendment

Public schools are where America teaches civic life in real time. We learn the Pledge. We learn elections. We learn what it means to disagree without tearing the place down. So when students use school as the stage for a political message, the question becomes painfully direct: is a school a...

Dobbs v. Jackson Explained

The name is long, but the question the Supreme Court answered in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was simple: can a state ban most abortions before viability, and if it can, what happens to Roe v. Wade ? In 2022, the Court said yes to a pre-viability ban, and it went further. The...

United States v. Lopez and the Commerce Clause

You can tell a lot about a Constitution by the arguments people make when it feels like a problem needs solving fast. In the early 1990s, gun violence near schools was not an abstract policy debate. Congress responded with a broad federal ban on gun possession in designated school zones, subject to...

Shelby County v. Holder and the End of Preclearance

For nearly half a century, part of the Voting Rights Act worked like a constitutional alarm system. Certain states and local governments could not change their election rules until the federal government checked the change first. That requirement was called preclearance , and it did not apply...

Buckley v. Valeo

In American politics, money is not just fuel. It is also a form of communication. Buying a television ad is a way to speak to voters at scale. Hiring staff is a way to organize. Printing signs is a way to persuade. That basic reality collided with post-Watergate reform in Buckley v. Valeo (1976),...

Section 230 Explained

You can understand Section 230 in one sentence: it often means a website is not legally liable for what its users say, and it can still moderate without automatically becoming responsible for everything it did not remove, subject to important exceptions. That can sound like a special deal for Big...

Congressional Earmarks Explained

People talk about earmarks the way they talk about a bad habit. Congress swore it off, avoided them for a while, then quietly reached for them again when the budget got complicated. But an earmark is not a synonym for corruption. It is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used transparently or used to...

Declaratory Judgment Lawsuits

You do not always have to wait for the penalty to be imposed before you ask a judge whether the penalty would be lawful. That is the basic promise of a declaratory judgment . Instead of suing to collect money or to force someone to stop doing something, a party asks the court to declare what the...

Motion to Dismiss in Federal Court: Rule 12(b) Defenses Explained

Most lawsuits do not begin with a dramatic trial moment. They begin with paperwork, strategy, and a question that sounds almost too simple: Should this case even be in court? In federal court, one of the earliest and most powerful ways to ask that question is a motion to dismiss under Federal Rule...

Interlocutory Appeals and the Final Judgment Rule

Federal lawsuits rarely move in a straight line. A judge denies a motion to dismiss. Orders a party to turn over sensitive documents. Grants or blocks an injunction that changes policy overnight. The losing side wants the next court up to step in now, not later. But the American appellate system is...