The U.S. Constitution

Exhausting Administrative Remedies

You can lose a lawsuit against a federal agency without ever arguing the facts, the Constitution, or even whether the agency was wrong. The reason is often painfully simple: you sued too soon. Administrative law has a set of gatekeeping rules that sound procedural but act like a bouncer at the...

Probation and Parole Revocation: Due Process

Probation and parole can feel like they blur into everyday life. You report. You test. You keep curfews. You ask permission before you travel. It is supervision, not a court proceeding. Revocation is different. Revocation is the moment the system stops monitoring and starts deciding whether you...

Competency to Stand Trial

We talk about criminal trials like they are a machine. Arrest, arraignment, motions, trial, verdict. Feed in a defendant, turn the crank, justice comes out the other side. But the Constitution requires something more basic before the machine is allowed to run: the person facing prosecution has to...

Material Witness Warrants and Federal Custody

You can be taken into federal custody without being charged with a crime. That sentence sounds like a constitutional glitch. In reality, it is a narrow tool Congress wrote into federal law: the material witness warrant . The idea is simple. Sometimes the government cannot prove a case without a...

The STOCK Act, Explained

You are allowed to buy stocks if you serve in Congress. That is not the scandal. The scandal is what happens when the people writing laws that move markets also trade like ordinary investors, while having access to information that ordinary investors do not. That tension is why the STOCK Act...

Consent Decrees and Police Reform

You can sue a city after a rights violation. You can vote out a mayor. You can hire a new chief, pass a new policy, and promise things will be different. And then, a year later, the same complaints return with the same familiar details: the same stops, the same uses of force, the same failures to...

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....

When the State Wants to Look Inside Your Home

The Fourth Amendment was written with a simple instinct: a person’s home should not be treated like a public hallway. The recurring question in state and local policymaking is how far government should be able to go in peering into the home, and how easily private spaces can be treated as close...

The Supreme Court Reopens Texas’ Mid-Cycle Map Fight

The Supreme Court just handed Texas Republicans a win with a move that was both simple and deeply consequential: it summarily reversed a lower-court ruling that had blocked Texas’ mid-cycle congressional redistricting plan. In other words, the Court struck down the block and left the new map...

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...

DOJ Adds Firing Squads to Federal Execution Options

The Justice Department has moved to expand the methods available for federal executions by adding firing squads to the federal toolkit, alongside a renewed embrace of a single-drug lethal injection protocol using pentobarbital. The change is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to...

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 Conspiracy Surge After the Dinner Attack

When a violent incident erupts in a public place, we expect fear. What we do not always expect is the second blast, the one that hits your phone. No sooner had a gunman tried to storm the ballroom of the Washington Hilton, where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was taking place Saturday...

Mississippi’s Special Session on Redistricting, Explained

Mississippi is preparing for a fast-moving, high-stakes civic moment: Gov. Tate Reeves says he will call a special legislative session to redraw district lines after the U.S. Supreme Court issues its decision in Louisiana v. Callais . He has said the session will happen 21 days after the Court...

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...