Constitutional Topics

Administrative Procedure Act (APA) Explained

The federal government writes rules that touch everyday life: what counts as “overtime,” what a “clean” tailpipe means, which medicines can be marketed, and how student loans can be collected. Most of those rules are not written by Congress line-by-line. They are written by agencies. The...

The Logan Act Explained

The Logan Act is one of those laws that feels like it should be in bold type across the front of a civics textbook. It criminalizes a private citizen attempting to conduct unauthorized diplomacy with a foreign government in a way meant to affect a dispute with the United States. Yet most Americans...

Federal Court Jurisdiction 101

Most people think “federal court” means “big case” or “important case.” In reality, federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction . They cannot hear everything, even if the dispute feels national, emotional, or high-stakes. The threshold issue is subject-matter jurisdiction , which...

The Nondelegation Doctrine Explained

The federal government runs on delegation. Congress passes statutes that set goals, create agencies, authorize programs, and then require someone to fill in the operational details. Those details become regulations that shape everything from workplace safety to environmental standards to...

Supreme Court Original Jurisdiction

Most Supreme Court stories begin the same way: a case climbs a ladder. Trial court, appeal, another appeal, and finally a petition asking nine justices to take a look. But a tiny slice of cases do not climb at all. They begin at the top. That is what original jurisdiction means, and it is one of...

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...

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...

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...

State Secrets Privilege Explained

Some lawsuits die without a jury ever hearing the central facts, not because the plaintiff lacks evidence, but because the government says the evidence is too dangerous to discuss. That is the basic tension behind the state secrets privilege , a judge-made, federal common-law doctrine that can...

Federal Tort Claims Act Explained

You cannot sue the federal government just because it harmed you. That is the baseline rule, and it has a name: sovereign immunity . In plain terms, the United States does not get hauled into court unless it has agreed to be. (And it has agreed in more than one way, depending on what you are suing...

The Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket

Most people picture Supreme Court decisions arriving the same way: months of briefs, a packed courtroom, oral argument, and a long opinion signed in June. That is the Court’s merits docket , and it is the version of the judiciary we teach in civics class. But some of the Court’s most...