Bill of Rights

What Is FISA Section 702?

You can tell a surveillance power matters when it shows up in places that do not look like surveillance debates at all, like a fight over confirming a Director of National Intelligence or a Senate logjam that leaves an intelligence authority in limbo. That authority is FISA Section 702 , and it...

Answering the Door Armed: The Fourth Amendment Trap

There are constitutional questions that live comfortably in textbooks, and then there are constitutional questions that show up on your porch, under a flashing blue light, when your heart rate is already climbing. Here is one of those questions: Can you put on a holstered handgun before you answer...

A $95,000 Plane for a 6-Pack: The Supreme Court Takes an Eighth Amendment Forfeiture Case

It is hard to teach the Bill of Rights as a set of living limits on power, and then watch a case like this drift across the legal landscape for more than a decade. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the challenge of Ken Jouppi, a retired 82-year-old Alaska bush pilot whose $95,000 Cessna...

Can ICE Use Traffic Stops?

When a political figure calls the traffic stop one of ICE’s “most important” tools, it turns a practical tactic into a constitutional question. Can ICE use traffic stops? Sometimes, yes. But in the United States, a “stop” is not a casual conversation. It is a Fourth Amendment seizure ,...

The Vanishing Jury Trial

The Sixth Amendment promises what sounds like a civic birthright: the accused can demand a “speedy and public trial” before an “impartial jury.” Article III backs it up. The Declaration of Independence even lists the loss of jury trials as a hallmark of tyranny. So here is the question I...

How DOJ Lawsuits Try to Knock Out State Gun Laws

When most people picture a Second Amendment fight, they picture a gun owner suing a state. But gun-law litigation can also run the other direction: the federal government, through the Department of Justice, asking federal courts to block a state restriction it believes violates the U.S....

Restoring Second Amendment Rights After Mental Commitment

The Constitution is full of rights that sound absolute until you read the fine print we have built around them. The Second Amendment is one of them. The modern Court says an individual has a right to keep and bear arms, but it also repeats a familiar caveat: some categories of people can be...

Is the “86/47” Flag Protected Speech?

When a short slogan becomes a national controversy, the constitutional question is rarely about the slogan itself. It is about who gets to decide what it means , and what the government is allowed to do when it believes a political message sounds like danger. The “86/47” flag has become that...

Can a Protest Flag Be Banned?

Here is the uncomfortable truth we keep rediscovering in American life: political speech is often ugly, ambiguous, and deliberately provocative. A protest flag is not designed to be soothing. It is designed to be seen. So the constitutional question is not whether a protest flag is in good taste....

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...

Ineffective Assistance of Counsel Explained

The Sixth Amendment guarantees the “Assistance of Counsel” for the accused in criminal prosecutions. Most people hear that and picture a simple promise: if the state is trying to take your liberty, you get a lawyer. But the real promise is sharper than that. A lawyer who shows up and does...

Good Faith Exception and Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

The exclusionary rule sounds simple: if the police break the Fourth Amendment, the evidence gets thrown out. As a baseline in criminal cases, that is often the idea. In practice, it is much messier. Courts have built in pressure-release valves. Some evidence stays in even if the search was...

Federal cooperation deals have a reputation: a quiet conference room, a stack of exhibits, and a person trying to talk their way out of the worst day of their life. What actually happens is less cinematic and more contractual. “Cooperating” in a federal case usually means the government wants...

ICE Detainers and Immigration Holds Explained

In immigration debates, one phrase shows up again and again: ICE detainer . It sounds like a formal order. It often functions like a hold. But in most places, it begins as something much more modest in legal terms: a request . That gap between how a detainer feels on the ground and what it is on...

Stop-and-Identify Laws by State

You can feel it in the first five seconds of a police interaction: the subtle shift from “conversation” to “compliance.” And the most common pressure point is a deceptively simple demand: “What’s your name?” or “Let me see your ID.” Whether you must answer depends on three moving...

Federal Witness Immunity: Use vs. Transactional

You can refuse to testify if your answer could incriminate you. That is the Fifth Amendment in its most familiar form. But in federal court, that refusal is not always the end of the story. A prosecutor can ask a judge to order you to testify anyway, as long as the government gives you a specific...

Preventive Pretrial Detention

In American civics, we teach a clean sequence: you get arrested, you post bail, you go home, you come back for court. Then real life interrupts the lesson plan. Sometimes a judge does not set bail at any price, or orders someone held without bail. Whether a court has that authority depends on the...

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...

Motions to Suppress Evidence

In movies, the dramatic moment is the verdict. In real criminal cases, the most decisive moment can happen earlier, in a quieter room, in front of a judge who is not deciding guilt at all. That moment can be a motion to suppress , the legal request that certain evidence never reach the jury because...