The U.S. Constitution

Ex Post Facto Laws and Bills of Attainder

Some constitutional limits are famous because they get quoted in speeches. Others do their work quietly, like load-bearing beams you only notice when they crack. The bans on ex post facto laws and bills of attainder are in that second category. Both are aimed at the same temptation: when a...

Civil Rights Act of 1964: Titles, Rights, and Constitutional Backing

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is often remembered as a moral turning point, and it was. But it is also a piece of legal engineering: a statute built to do something the Constitution, standing alone, did not clearly require private businesses to do in 1964. The Fourteenth Amendment limits what states...

How Class Action Lawsuits Work in Federal Court

When people talk about a class action, they usually mean one thing: a lot of people, one lawsuit, one big check at the end. Federal court treats it as something more specific and more constrained. A class action is a procedural device, a way to bundle many similar claims into a single case so that...

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...

Harvard Sues Over International Student Ban

The federal government has significant power over the people and institutions it regulates. Often, that power shows up as forms, compliance checks, and rules that can change over time. Occasionally, it shows up as a ban. Harvard is suing the Trump administration after it banned the school from...

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...

Resignations, Not Expulsions

The House of Representatives is not a courtroom. It is not a human resources department, either. But it is a constitutional body with one glaring obligation that rarely gets tested in earnest: the duty to discipline its own members. This week, that duty collided with political reality. Rep. Tony...

Virginia Gun Sales Spike Ahead of New Controls

One of the easiest ways to see how law influences everyday behavior is to watch what happens right before a rule changes, or might. In Virginia, gun retailers say that is exactly what is happening now: as a slate of proposed gun controls moves through the legislative process, customers are rushing...

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...

Massachusetts and the Quiet Squeeze on Section 230

Section 230 is famous for what it says in plain English: if you run a website that hosts user content, you usually are not treated as the “publisher or speaker” of what your users post. That protection is not a courtesy. It is the legal architecture that made comment sections, reviews, social...

Birthright Citizenship and the Sovereignty Question

Every generation finds a new way to ask an old question: who is an American ? Sometimes the question comes dressed as a moral argument. Sometimes it shows up as a budget argument. Lately, it shows up in court as a sovereignty argument, the claim that the United States can only remain a nation if it...

Trump’s DOJ Keeps a Biden Gun Rule

Presidents campaign like they can flip Washington like a light switch. New team in, old rules out. That story sells. It is also often false. On April 10, the Trump Justice Department kept a Biden-era gun rule in place. Whatever people expected from a change in administration, the immediate result...

Can the Government Unmask Anonymous Critics?

Anonymous speech is not a loophole in the First Amendment. It is one of its oldest habits. That is why a recent effort to force Reddit to identify a user who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not just a platform privacy story. It is a stress test for a constitutional principle:...

WATCH: Rex Heuermann Pleads Guilty to Killing 8 Women

Rex Heuermann admitted in court that he killed eight women as he changed his plea to guilty on April 9, 2026, in the Gilgo Beach murders case in New York. For many people following a case like this, a guilty plea can feel like the end of the story. In reality, it is more like a hinge in the...

FISA 702 and Warrants for Americans’ Data

Every few years, Congress faces the same uncomfortable question: how much surveillance power should the federal government have in the name of foreign intelligence, and what protections do Americans get when their messages get caught in the net? That question is back because Section 702 of the...