News

Springfield’s Haitian Community Faces TPS Shock, Finds Strength in Each Other

There are Supreme Court decisions that arrive like weather. You see the clouds gathering, you hear the distant thunder of oral argument, you brace for impact, and then the storm still manages to flatten the house. That is what it felt like in Springfield, Ohio, after the Court ruled Mullin v. Doe...

Supreme Court Opens the Door to Ending TPS for 1.3 Million People

Temporary Protected Status, usually called TPS, is one of those immigration programs that can sound technical until you realize what it does in everyday terms. It lets people already in the United States remain here and work legally when their home country is too dangerous for safe return, often...

The Supreme Court’s Asylum Ruling and the Executive Power Shift

Immigration law is full of gray areas. Not moral gray areas. Jurisdictional ones. Who decides whether a person has actually “entered” the United States? Who gets to decide which immigrants keep a lawful foothold after years inside the country? And perhaps most consequentially, when agencies...

Birthright Citizenship and the 14th Amendment

Most constitutional fights are about the meaning of a power. This one is about the meaning of a word. Birthright citizenship lives in a single sentence of the 14th Amendment. For more than a century, Americans have treated that sentence as a bright line: if you are born here, you are one of us. Now...

Wolford v. Lopez Explained: Where It Stands

Wolford v. Lopez is a closely watched post- Bruen challenge to Hawaii’s new public-carry regime. But it is important to be clear about what it is and what it is not: it is a lower-court case in the Ninth Circuit, and the Supreme Court has not issued a merits decision in Wolford . Even without a...

Supreme Court Lets Exxon Sue Cuba Over 1960 Seizures

The Supreme Court has given Exxon Mobil a green light to continue a lawsuit against state-owned oil companies in Cuba, tied to property the Cuban government took in 1960 after Fidel Castro’s revolution. It is a striking reminder that, in the United States, events that happened generations ago can...

Judge Blocks Citizenship Database Checks for Voter Rolls

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from using a streamlined method to check citizenship status through a federal database as part of voter eligibility efforts. The dispute centers on a long-running tension in election administration: how to keep voter rolls accurate...

SCOTUS: Marijuana Use Alone Can’t Void the Second Amendment

For decades, the American legal system has treated “drugs” as a kind of constitutional solvent. Invoke them, and suddenly ordinary rules soften. Searches get easier. Property gets taken. Sentences get longer. Rights get treated less like rights and more like privileges granted to the well...

Supreme Court Cert Denial in Police Stop Case: What the Fourth Amendment Says

The Supreme Court declined to take up a case that presents a question many Americans assume has a simple answer. If a police officer’s actions during a stop are allegedly driven by a person’s race, does that turn the encounter into an unconstitutional seizure? That question was presented in...

Trump’s Truth Social Polls

Over a Saturday morning on Truth Social, Trump posted two surveys for his followers: one workshopping a derogatory nickname for Democrats, and another floating a rebrand of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On the surface, it is politics-as-entertainment. Underneath, it is also a live...

A Judge, Some Tapes, and the Limits of Executive Secrecy

Americans have an instinctive belief that the presidency comes with a kind of permanent curtain. Not just during a term, but forever. A sense that some conversations, some records, some embarrassing details are simply not for the rest of us. That instinct is understandable. It is also incomplete....

Ninth Circuit Blocks California’s School Secrecy Law

California tried to settle a culture-war question with a statute: when a student adopts a new gender identity at school, what exactly can educators tell mom and dad? On June 19, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an injunction blocking enforcement of key parts of...

Ninth Circuit Blocks California School Secrecy Law on Gender Transitions

California’s ongoing fight over what public schools may, must, or may not tell parents just took a sharp turn in federal court. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an injunction blocking enforcement of parts of California’s AB 1955, a state law that...

Can Veterans Sue First? The Supreme Court Takes Up VA Gatekeeping

For decades, veterans have been told some version of the same thing: Start with the VA . File the paperwork. Take your place in the line. If you lose, appeal. If you lose again, appeal again. And only at the far end of that long hallway does a real judge eventually appear. Now the Supreme Court is...

Supreme Court to Decide If Veterans Can Skip the VA Appeals Track

Every civics student learns the comforting phrase: you can take your case to court. Then real life walks in and asks a harder question: which court, when , and on whose timeline ? Next term, the Supreme Court will confront that question in a case that sits at the intersection of two American...

Supreme Court and Guns: Can Illegal Drug Users Possess Firearms?

The question people are asking today is simple: Can illegal drug users own firearms under federal law? The Supreme Court’s new unanimous decision makes the honest answer more complicated, but also clearer. The Court did not erase the federal ban on gun possession by “unlawful users” of...

SCOTUS Could Overturn 91-Year Precedent

There are Supreme Court cases that feel like legal housekeeping, a quiet tightening of bolts in the machinery of government. And then there are cases that threaten to move the engine itself. In the Court’s final stretch this term, the justices are staring down a set of disputes tied to President...

Short Circuit: The Constitution in the Small

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The White House Octagon and the Limits of Presidential Spectacle

A cage on the White House South Lawn is not the kind of sentence most of us expect to read in a civics lesson. And yet, this weekend, an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight night is scheduled with “The Octagon” built on the South Lawn, timed to President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and...

The Fifth Circuit’s Horse Racing Fight Is Back, and SCOTUS Gets the Cleanup

There is a particular kind of legal mess that doesn’t come from the Constitution itself. It comes from a lower court deciding, repeatedly, that it knows better than everyone else, including the Supreme Court. That is where we are again with federal regulation of horse racing. A deeply...