Here is the context. In recent years, the European Union (EU)’s laws and regulations have pressured multinational corporations to embrace “environmental, social, and corporate governance” (ESG) objectives. ESG philosophy counsels corporations to eschew competition and instead prioritize the left’s favored public policy choices, such as minimizing so-called hate speech or promoting non-nuclear renewable energy. When the EU’s market-shaping regulation is imposed in the global securities market, it inevitably regulates Texas just as it regulates Germany and France.

The Texas government is the caretaker of seven mandatory pension plans, meaning it must engage in the open market by buying and selling corporate securities. In 2021, the Texas Legislature enacted a statute requiring that its pensions’ funds be divested from companies that engage in the boycott of the fossil fuel industry. The American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC), a powerful trade association, sued, asking the judiciary to mandate that Texas continue to invest taxpayer dollars in anti-fossil fuel companies.

Astoundingly, the district court agreed. In a dangerously extreme ruling, the court found that Texas choosing not to subsidize corporations practicing ESG was a violation of the First Amendment. Texas state officials rapidly appealed to the Fifth Circuit, and the Liberty Justice Center filed an amicus in support of their position.

The district court’s position is untenable. History and precedent, from the Founding to today, show there has never been a First Amendment right to government subsidies.

ASBC’s claim that pulling government subsidies is somehow a form of censorship seems not to have even been broached in court until the mid-20th century. When it was, it met an immediate frosty reception at the Supreme Court, which declared in Maher v. Roe that “[t]here is a basic difference between direct state interference with a protected activity and state encouragement of an alternative activity consonant with legislative policy.” Since then, the Court has repeatedly and without fail held that a state is not discriminating on the basis of viewpoint when it chooses “to fund one activity to the exclusion of another.”

As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in Ysursa v. Pocatello Educational Association: “the First Amendment prohibits government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech’; it does not confer an affirmative right to use government [resources] for the purpose of obtaining funds for expression.”

The district court’s ruling is particularly dangerous because, if allowed to stand, it would imperil actual First Amendment rights and empower foreign governments to silence American speech.

Under the Digital Services Act, the EU requires tech platforms to censor speech based on nebulous, subjective categories such as “hate,” “disinformation,” and “cyber violence.” European authorities have boasted about taking down content not just in their countries, but across the globe. Platforms that resist this censorship face draconian penalties, such as the €120 million fine imposed on X. In accordance with ESG-principles, many companies have joined European authorities and (in likely violation of antitrust laws) coordinated their advertising spending to pressure platforms to follow EU censorship codes.

There are very few ways by which American states can stand up to this attack on our sovereignty. One of the few tools they have left is to not use their citizens’ pension funds to finance these censorship efforts. It would be the most twisted of ironies that judicial activists are using the First Amendment, of all things, to prevent states from combatting foreign censorship.

It is now up to the Fifth Circuit to decide whether the world’s largest corporations have a perpetual right to be subsidized by your tax dollars, even as they pursue ruinous ESG policies. Hopefully, the Circuit listens to the Liberty Justice Center and says “NO!”

Meet Tim!

Tim Kilcullen serves as a staff attorney at the Liberty Justice Center. He has a deep passion for protecting Americans’ fundamental liberties, particularly their right to free speech.

Tim is a member of the District of Columbia bar and a graduate of the Antonin Scalia Law School, where his focus was antitrust law. Prior to joining LJC, he was Senior Counsel for Investigations at the Media Research Center, where he uncovered collusion between Big Tech and Big Government and fought to stop the enactment of federal censorship laws.

Prior to becoming an attorney, Tim was a field director for the Massachusetts GOP and the Republican nominee for the 49th District of the Virginia Assembly. He also worked at the campaign finance compliance firm State & Federal Communications, where he maintained a database documenting censorship laws across the nation. He received his undergraduate degree in Economics & English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Tim lives with his wife, Jennifer, in Alexandria, Virginia. When not doing legal work, Tim’s hobbies include going to the movies, following current events, and spending time with family in the Shenandoah.

Imagine receiving a speeding ticket on a road where the speed limit isn’t posted on a sign but is listed instead in a private manual that costs $100. Most Americans would find that absurd and unjust. But this is exactly how many of the regulations affecting our lives work. State, county, and municipal legislatures, instead of printing the full text of a law in the public record, often point to copyrighted standards, usually developed by nonprofit organizations like the American Society for Testing and Materials (“ASTM”). This “incorporation by reference” puts legal standards—like building codes—behind a paywall because bodies like ASTM charge significant fees for access to their standards. A recent Third Circuit case highlighted this practice.

UpCodes is a startup that keeps a searchable online library of building codes, including technical standards that have been incorporated into those codes. In 2024, UpCodes began publishing—without a license—copyrighted ASTM standards that had been incorporated into the International Building Code, which has been adopted by lawmakers across the country. ASTM sued for copyright and trademark infringement and moved for a preliminary injunction to stop UpCodes from posting its copyrighted material on its website. The district court denied the motion, and ASTM appealed.

In April, the Third Circuit affirmed the lower court’s decision on the theory that UpCodes’ publication of the ASTM standards was likely fair use.[1] Fair use is an exception that protects the use of copyrighted work “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching . . ., scholarship, or research.”[2] The Copyright Act looks at factors like the purpose of the work, its nature, how much was copied, and the impact on the owner’s market to determine whether a particular use is “fair.”[3]

Because UpCodes’ publication was for the purpose of conveying “only what the law is,” the court found this to be transformative enough to distinguish it from ASTM’s purpose of informing industry professionals of best practices.[4] Once the standards were incorporated into actual laws, the court reasoned that they “moved even further to the periphery of copyright’s protection.”[5] Although ASTM might lose some revenue, the public benefit of free access to the law is substantial. UpCodes did not republish standards as technical guidance, it published them as the law.

The Third Circuit’s decision builds on growing judicial skepticism of commodifying the law. In 2020, the Supreme Court denied Georgia copyright protections over its annotated state code.[6] The Court held that under the government edicts doctrine, legislators cannot be “authors” for copyright purposes of works they produce in the course of their official duties.[7] “The animating principle behind this rule is that no one can own the law. Every citizen is presumed to know the law, and it needs no argument to show that all should have free access to its contents.”[8]

Being denied access to the law violates due process. In Lambert v. California, the Supreme Court stressed that notice is essential to due process before someone can be subjected to a fine, penalty, or prosecution.[9] It follows that hiding the law a person is subject to behind a private paywall denies exactly that notice.

The Georgia case dealt with lawmakers directly trying to copyright their work; it did not curb the practice of incorporation by reference. The Third Circuit has finally begun to close this loophole.

While the Third Circuit got it right, we shouldn’t have to rely on copyright litigation to guarantee access to the law. This case highlights a systemic failure—governments are addicted to the convenience of outsourcing the law to private groups without accounting for the public’s need for access.

If a standard is important enough to be made mandatory by a legislative body, that body has a moral and civic duty to ensure that its citizens can read it. The law must be a public resource, not a private commodity. We should be able to read the rules we live by—no subscription required.

[1] Am. Soc’y for Testing & Materials v. UpCodes, Inc., 172 F.4th 253 (3d Cir. 2026).

[2] 17 U.S.C. § 107.

[3] Id.

[4] Upcodes, 172 F.4th.

[5] Id.

[6] Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020).

[7] Id. at 263.

[8] Id. at 265 (cleaned up).

[9] Lambert v. California, 335 U.S. 225, 228 (1957).

Meet Jesse!

Jesse Leon is a Litigation Fellow at the Liberty Justice Center.

Jesse is a 2024 graduate of the Seton Hall University School of Law. After graduating, Jesse clerked in the New Jersey Superior Court, Chancery Division, for the Hon. Frank Covello, P.J.Ch. In law school, Jesse worked as a student attorney at the Seton Hall Law Center for Social Justice’s Equal Justice Clinic, where he helped challenge arbitrary and capricious decision-making by the New Jersey State Parole Board, and co-edited a legal primer for incarcerated people. Jesse served as an articles editor for the Seton Hall Journal of Legislation and Public Policy. Jesse interned at the Institute for Justice and the Renzulli Law Firm, LLP. In his free time, Jesse successfully led a grassroots campaign in his town to end an over 85-year-old prohibition on backyard chicken keeping. Jesse is admitted to practice in New Jersey.

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Read more from our Monday Merits series featuring concise takes on the week’s most compelling legal developments from the attorneys and staff here at the Liberty Justice Center!

Thirty years before the Fourth Amendment was ratified, colonists began to speak out against British “writs of assistance” which granted crown officers the unchecked authority to board any vessel or enter any building to search for smuggled goods. The writs operated with no limits to scope or duration of the search. In 1761, attorney James Otis, Jr. stood in a Boston courtroom and denounced the writs so vehemently that a young John Adams in the audience later described the speech as “the first scene of the first act of opposition” to England. He stated that “then and there the Child Independence was born” and in fifteen years—1776—“grew up to manhood and declared himself free.”[1] The Supreme Court has recognized Otis’s outcry as “perhaps the most prominent event which inaugurated the resistance of the colonies to the oppressions of the mother country” and has deemed the writs as the “principal grievance” the Fourth Amendment was designed to eliminate.[2]

Since its ratification, the Supreme Court has never lost sight of “founding-era understandings” of “what was deemed an unreasonable search and seizure when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.” Accordingly, the Supreme Court has carved out narrow exceptions to the warrant requirement, consistently emphasizing the protection of personal privacy—even when doing so limits the government’s objectives.[3] Even well-intentioned governmental goals must proceed only when individual liberties remain intact. Yet today, the government often seeks to curtail our right to privacy in the name of protection. Modern efforts—perhaps aimed at crime control or wildlife conservation—risk eroding constitutional rights in the process. These rights once lost are not easily recovered. Preserving them requires vigilance, and a keen a recognition of the nuance that noble intent does not justify tyrannical means.

[1] John Adams, Letter from John Adams to William Tudor, Sr.,(Mar. 29, 1817), in Nat’l Archives: Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6735.

[2] Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 623 (1886); Brower v. Cnty. Of Inyo, 489 U.S. 593, 596 (1989).

[3] Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296, 305 (2018).

Meet Katie!

Katie Cosgrove serves as counsel for Liberty Justice Center.

She believes strongly that Americans should be aware of, and willing to stand up for, the constitutional protections we have been afforded. She is grateful to serve LJC’s mission to safeguard individual rights from the government overreach our founders so rightly feared.

Katie received her bachelor’s degree in History – specializing in Early American – from the University of California, Davis in 2012. She graduated from Regent University School of Law in Virginia in May 2016 where she was the only student in her class to serve as a member of both the Trial Advocacy Board and the Moot Court Board. For her 3L year, she was elected Chair of the Trial Advocacy Board. She moved back to the West Coast and was sworn into the California Bar in December 2016.

In her first two years of practice, she spent her days in the courtroom as a Deputy District Attorney and a family law associate. Prior to working for LJC, Katie served as a Senior Staff Attorney for the Superior Court of California for seven years – providing legal research, analysis, and recommended rulings to judges in the area of criminal law.

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Read more from our Monday Merits series featuring concise takes on the week’s most compelling legal developments from the attorneys and staff here at the Liberty Justice Center!

In Milbeck v. George et al., the plaintiff, Ryan Milbeck, sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violations of his civil rights. According to the Seventh Circuit’s opinion, Milbeck claimed “the defendants violated his federal constitutional rights by entering his home and arresting him without a warrant or probable cause,” among other allegations. The district court had dismissed all of Milbeck’s claims, but the Seventh Circuit found Milbeck had:

In Wisconsin, the criminal justice information system—called TIME—can alert law enforcement to warrants issued for individuals with whom they may interact. According to a training manual for TIME, this system can also contain “temporary felony wants.” These are created when there is “[k]nowledge by police that a felony was committed and who the person was that committed the felony, but no warrant has been issued yet.” These “temporary felony wants” can exist in the system for up to 48 hours, during which time “[t]he entering agency must actively pursue obtaining a warrant.” The idea behind the “want” category seems to be to alert law enforcement that someone could be dangerous, given the belief they have committed a felony, in the time between the suspect being identified and the warrant being obtained. In theory, this is a reasonable idea.

In practice, it seems this may have gone awry in Milbeck’s case. Milbeck alleges law enforcement entered his home to arrest him based on a “temporary felony want,” and did not have a warrant for his arrest. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, particularly inside one’s home. As the Seventh Circuit explained, warrantless searches and seizures inside a home, including arrests, are therefore presumed to be unreasonable (Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 1971). And a valid warrant can only be issued by a “neutral and detached magistrate” upon a showing of probable cause, not by an “officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime” (Johnson v. United States, 1948). Therefore, if law enforcement entered Milbeck’s home and arrested him without a warrant, they likely violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The Seventh Circuit remanded the case to allow discovery to see whether Milbeck’s allegations could be supported by the evidence.

It appears the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) federal database has a similar “wanted person” feature called “temporary felon.” Generally, to be listed as a “wanted person” in NCIC, law enforcement “must have a warrant (electronic or hard copy) on file.” But a “temporary felon” can be added “when a law enforcement agency needs to take prompt action to apprehend a person (including a juvenile) who has committed, or the officer has reasonable grounds to believe has committed, a felony.” Explaining further, “[t]his individual may seek refuge by fleeing across jurisdictional boundaries while circumstances prevent the immediate acquisition of a warrant.” Like the Wisconsin feature, “[a] warrant for the arrest of the individual must be obtained as soon as possible,” and the record expires after 48 hours.

The “temporary felony want” or “temporary felon” features are likely valid informational tools to make law enforcement aware of potential risks they could face on the job. If law enforcement believes someone has committed a felony, it is reasonable for them to want to warn others while they wait for the paperwork to apprehend them. The issue is if these “temporary” features are used to circumvent or replace constitutional requirements. Police “knowing” or having “reasonable grounds to believe” someone did something is not sufficient under the Fourth Amendment for an arrest or search warrant. A neutral and detached magistrate must determine whether there is sufficient probable cause to issue a warrant, providing a layer of objectivity and a standard of proof. While this can slow the process of law enforcement down some, with the advent of digital technologies the warrant process is now quicker than ever. Such checks by the judicial branch help prevent abuses, as well as mistakes, by executive law enforcement officers.

This tradeoff is the balance the Founders believed would best protect the civil liberties of Americans and must be respected by law enforcement. You should not have to fear police entering your home because they “want” you—they should get a warrant.

Meet Jessica!

Jessica Craine is a Staff Attorney at Liberty Justice Center. She is committed to protecting Americans’ civil liberties and ensuring the government adheres to the Constitution. She’s particularly interested in upholding First and Fourth Amendment protections and litigating instances of law enforcement violations of Americans’ rights.

Jessica graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, where she served as an Articles Editor for The Legal Forum. Before joining Liberty Justice Center, she worked as a law clerk for defense attorney Thomas Durkin on federal criminal cases. She was also a summer clerk for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, where she assisted on administrative law cases addressing issues of government overreach.

Prior to attending law school, Jessica was a Supervisory Intelligence Analyst for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She worked primarily on national security matters and developed organizational policy and strategy. Jessica received her M.A. in Intelligence & Security Studies from The Citadel and her B.A. in Chinese from the University of Mississippi.

Jessica is licensed to practice law in the District of Columbia.

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Read more from our Monday Merits series featuring concise takes on the week’s most compelling legal developments from the attorneys and staff here at the Liberty Justice Center!

The street preacher the Fifth Circuit tried to shut out

Gabriel Olivier is a street preacher in Brandon, Mississippi. He did something the First Amendment plainly protects: he shared his faith on a public sidewalk near a city amphitheater. Brandon officials responded with an ordinance that forced First Amendment protected activity into a remote, out‑of‑the‑way protest zone where speakers couldn’t reach their audience. When Olivier continued preaching on the public sidewalk near the amphitheater, police arrested him. He pled no contest, paid a small fine, and completed probation.

But Olivier wanted to keep preaching. Olivier did not want to get arrested again. So, he went to federal court. Relying on § 1983, he asked for two things: a declaration that the ordinance violates the First Amendment and an injunction barring Brandon from enforcing it against him going forward. He did not ask to overturn his conviction. He did not ask for damages. He wanted only to preach again, this time without the threat of handcuffs.

The Fifth Circuit said no. It held that Heck barred his suit because winning would “necessarily imply” that his prior conviction was unconstitutional. On that theory, once the government has convicted you under an unconstitutional ordinance, that conviction itself becomes a barrier to ever getting prospective relief in federal court. In our amicus brief, we showed how that reading of Heck turns § 1983 on its head and leaves people like Olivier with no meaningful path to challenge unconstitutional laws in federal court. If they challenge a law too early, they will be turned away for lack of standing. If they challenge a law while being prosecuted, they will be turned away under Younger abstention. And if they challenge a law after conviction and payment of a fine, they will be turned away under the Fifth Circuit’s misapplication of Heck.

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected that approach and held that “Olivier’s suit seeking purely prospective relief - an injunction stopping officials from enforcing an ordinance in the future - can proceed, notwithstanding his prior conviction.” Put simply: Heck does not bar § 1983 suits that ask only for forward‑looking relief.

That holding lines up with the arguments Liberty Justice Center made:

• We argued that Heck is about blocking § 1983 damages actions that function as backdoor attacks on still‑valid convictions—not about prospective suits that leave the past judgment in place. The Court agreed, stressing that Olivier’s claim “requests only forward‑looking relief—nothing to do with Olivier’s prior conviction.”

• We emphasized that the Fifth Circuit’s reading would create a perverse incentive: the more quickly a city prosecutes under a bad law, the easier it is to shield that law from federal review. The Court illustrates exactly that problem with a hypothetical preacher, “Laurence,” who has never been prosecuted. Under the City of Brandon’s logic, even Laurence could not seek an injunction because success in his case would also imply that Olivier’s conviction was unconstitutional.

• We warned that if Heck barred Olivier’s suit, the federal courthouse doors would effectively be bolted for many constitutional plaintiffs: before prosecution, they’re told to wait; during prosecution, courts abstain; after conviction, Heck supposedly bars claims. By the time habeas relief is available, short sentences are over. The Court responds by refusing to force Olivier into the Sophie’s Choice of either surrendering his speech or repeatedly breaking the law.

In other words, the Court adopted the narrow, text‑focused reading of Heck we urged and squarely rejected the Fifth Circuit’s expansive, government‑friendly version.

Re‑anchoring § 1983 in its core purpose

§ 1983 was designed to interpose the federal courts between the States and the people when state actors violate federal rights. The law is written in sweeping language because Congress wanted an open federal forum, not a minefield of judge‑made hurdles. The Court’s opinion reflects that understanding. Olivier’s case lies in the “heartland” of § 1983: a citizen under a real threat of future enforcement challenging a local ordinance on constitutional grounds and seeking to prevent its future enforcement.

By holding that Heck “has no bearing” on this kind of claim, the Court safeguards § 1983’s core function: providing a federal remedy when local law and local courts fail to respect federal rights. And by recognizing that past enforcement often makes a plaintiff a better candidate for prospective relief, the Court keeps promise alive for modern civil‑rights plaintiffs.

Why this matters for free speech and beyond

Olivier is a major win for the First Amendment. Street preachers, sidewalk counselors, political activists, and ordinary citizens who have taken pleas under questionable laws now have clear Supreme Court confirmation that they can still go to federal court to stop future enforcement. A prior conviction is not a permanent speech gag.

But the decision also reaches well beyond speech. Any plaintiff who wants to challenge an unconstitutional law or policy—but has previously been prosecuted—can now rely on Olivier to fend off over‑reading of Heck. That includes cases about religious liberty, due process, property rights, and more. So long as the relief sought is truly prospective, the courthouse doors remain open.

For liberty‑minded readers, that is the real headline: the Supreme Court affirmed that § 1983 is a tool for people, not a shield for governments. Heck still does what it was meant to do: stop disguised collateral attacks on convictions. But it cannot be stretched to shut down forward‑looking constitutional challenges like Gabriel Olivier’s.

This is exactly the outcome Liberty Justice Center urged. It is a powerful reminder that when we show up - through strategic litigation and amicus advocacy - we can help move the law back toward the Constitution’s promise.

Meet Brendan!

Brendan Philbin is Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center with 15+ years of litigation and advisory experience.

He began as a Navy JAG in 2009 and in 2011, he led a team of Afghan prosecutors that secured 110 convictions in Afghanistan’s nascent national security court. He continues to serve in the U.S. Navy Reserve. In civilian roles, he has advised on consumer financial regulation at Bank of America, prosecuted public-nuisance and code-enforcement cases for the City of Philadelphia while defending the city in constitutional challenges, and served as a legal advisor to DHS’s Federal Protective Service on federal facility protection and counter-drone policy. He earned his J.D. from Temple University Beasley School of Law, holds a B.B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Accountancy from The George Washington University, and lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

Read more from our Monday Merits series featuring concise takes on the week’s most compelling legal developments from the attorneys and staff here at the Liberty Justice Center!

Most people in the liberty movement are familiar with the progression of Big Tech’s censorship. Originally, the internet was a free and unregulated space where people could share ideas and perspectives without restrictions. After a few years, social media platforms began removing obviously pirated work and banning accounts that willfully engaged in copyright infringement. Then the platforms began removing works based on far sketchier accusations, generally deferring to what their media partners said was copyright infringement. Next, they were removing posts for hate speech, or at least what over-sensitive tech bros thought was hateful. Then they worked to silence so-called “misinformation.” By the 2020s, State Department-funded activist groups were working with Microsoft to block access to conservative news publications such as The Daily Wire and The Federalist.

One bright spot in the digital landscape has been ISPs. Bound by California law from censoring access to specific websites, the big ISPs like AT&T and Verizon have generally refrained from banning customers, even when those customers use their account to access divisive content. Unlike Big Tech, the ISPs don’t really care what news sources you like to read, so long as you pay your bill on time.

Sony Music, the Japanese media Goliath that owns Columbia Records, set out to fundamentally change ISPs’ role. And instead of lobbying Congress to reform the law, it turned to the courts.

Sony filed suit against Cox Communications, alleging the ISP was liable for massive copyright infringement. Had Cox stolen Sony’s intellectual property? No. But it had provided internet service to people who had, so Sony argued the court should treat Cox as if it was the pirate itself.

To support its claim, Sony pointed to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Congress enacted the DMCA to address frustrations at how easy the internet makes it to steal other people’s copyrighted work. Whereas traditionally the victim of IP infringement would have had to show the actual monetary harm he or she suffered (a near-impossible task in the digital age), the DMCA provided massive statutory penalties for violations of copyright law. To balance out making it far, far easier to get six and seven figure judgments, the DMCA created an additional safe harbor from liability for certain tech platforms that implemented a process by which alleged victims of copyright infringement could report infringing content.

The DMCA stated clearly that declining to utilize the safe harbor option “shall not bear adversely upon . . . a defense by the service provider that the service provider’s conduct is not infringing.” In other words, the DMCA created a new defense to alleged infringement: it did not get rid of the old defenses.

Sony, though, turned this formula on its head. Since Cox had opted out of the DMCA’s safe harbor format, Sony argued, this meant that Cox could no longer avail itself of the more obvious defense that it was not responsible for what users of its services chose to do. Astoundingly, both the district court and the Richmond-based Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, saddling Cox with over $1 billion in damages.

At the Supreme Court, Cox warned of the disastrous consequences of letting the Fourth Circuit’s judicial activism stand. Cox explained that complaints are “notoriously unreliable,” and ISPs have no easy way of distinguishing actually malicious users from the wrongfully accused. Furthermore, even if an ISP determined that copyright infringement occurred, it could not determine who did the infringing. Some of Cox’s IP addresses belonged to public libraries, university campuses, hospitals, and military bases, meaning there could be thousands of potential suspects.

Most dangerously, though, Sony’s preposterous theory of liability was not limited to copyright claims. Cox explained that the Fourth Circuit’s “holding would mean that ISPs can be held responsible for literally everything bad that happens on the internet—bullying, harassment, libel, racketeering, unlawful gun sales … everything.” Cox warned that if this ruling was upheld, “ISPs will have no choice but to err in favor of termination” of user accounts, even if the accusation was most likely baseless.

Fortunately, everyone on the Supreme Court agreed. Both the majority opinion, by Republican-appointed Justice Clarence Thomas, and the concurrence, by Democrat-appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor, rejected the Fourth Circuit’s sweeping theory of liability and held that Cox could not be blamed for the poor choices made by its customers. In the words of Thomas: “mere knowledge that a service will be used to infringe is insufficient to establish the required intent to infringe.”

This high court unanimity is a sobering reminder of just how far the lower courts have departed from reasonable interpretations of the law. At the same time, though, one can celebrate that—on this issue, at least—the Supreme Court stepped in. ISPs will not be forced to act as America’s speech police.

Meet Tim!

Tim Kilcullen serves as a staff attorney at the Liberty Justice Center. He has a deep passion for protecting Americans’ fundamental liberties, particularly their right to free speech.

Tim is a member of the District of Columbia bar and a graduate of the Antonin Scalia Law School, where his focus was antitrust law. Prior to joining LJC, he was Senior Counsel for Investigations at the Media Research Center, where he uncovered collusion between Big Tech and Big Government and fought to stop the enactment of federal censorship laws.

Prior to becoming an attorney, Tim was a field director for the Massachusetts GOP and the Republican nominee for the 49th District of the Virginia Assembly. He also worked at the campaign finance compliance firm State & Federal Communications, where he maintained a database documenting censorship laws across the nation. He received his undergraduate degree in Economics & English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Tim lives with his wife, Jennifer, in Alexandria, Virginia. When not doing legal work, Tim’s hobbies include going to the movies, following current events, and spending time with family in the Shenandoah.

This case revolves around the Ex Post Facto Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which has long been a guardian of our right against arbitrary legislation that creates or increases punishment after the fact. The formal question before the Court was if this clause protects Holsey Ellingburg, Jr. from a law effectively designed to increase his punishment after he committed a robbery. All Nine Justices agreed that it does, writing a brief five pages to justify their decision based on previous precedent.

But only two Justices addressed the larger question the others preferred hidden: Has the Court truly been protecting our right against laws made after the fact?

The answer? No.

People have always understood that changing the rules after the fact is unjust. The Athenians brought Timocrates and his law to trial for altering the punishment for all public debtors, both future and past. The Romans and Byzantines made it clear that retroactive laws were disfavored. Sir William Blackstone of England declared ex post facto laws to be “cruel and unjust” because its retrospective nature makes it so a person “had therefore no cause to abstain from it.” And still today the Supreme Court strikes down criminal retroactive laws. What they have yet to do, however, is extend this same justice to civil laws.

What prevents the government from passing a law that retroactively decreases a speed limit from 60 mph to 50 mph, ticketing all those who once drove 60 mph? What prevents the government from making you liable to a lawsuit for something that was perfectly legal at the time you did it? What prevents the government from seizing your property for violating a regulation ten years ago when the regulation was just created today? According to Supreme Court precedent, nothing. Justice Kavanaugh has stated that “civil retroactivity is something that’s antithetical to basic rule-of-law notions,” however, it’s still permitted so long as the Legislature makes it explicit.

This is far removed from what the Founding Fathers intended when they prohibited ex post facto laws. James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention show that the delegates had originally agreed to a clause prohibiting “bills of attainder” and “retrospective laws” [emphasis added]. The term “retrospective laws” has always applied to both criminal and civil legislation, reflecting the debates of the delegates immediately prior to this vote. That phrase was later changed by the Committee of Style, which included Madison himself, to simply say “ex post facto Laws.” It is clear that “ex post facto Laws” was seen to be an equivalent phrase to “retrospective laws,” and so was meant to prohibit both criminal and civil laws made after the fact.

Some members of the Convention, including James Wilson, objected to its inclusion entirely. This wasn’t because he thought such laws were good or just; rather, Wilson argued that it is unnecessary as everybody already understood that retroactive laws are void and against “the first principles of Legislation.” He continued by stating that such a clause would “bring [reflections] on the Constitution-and proclaim that we are ignorant of the first principles of Legislation, or are constituting a Government which will be so.” What was so plain and obvious to the Founding Fathers has seemingly become lost to the memory of time.

Yet there still remains a shining beacon of hope emanating from the decision in Ellingburg v. United States. In a concurring opinion nearly four times longer than the majority opinion, Justices Thomas and Gorsuch discuss the Constitutional history of the term “ex post facto Law.” Through an analysis of the words on the page, the statements made by the Founding Fathers, the principles of Natural Law, and the precedent of Calder v. Bull (1798), these Justices determined that the Ex Post Facto Clause clearly prevents the government from retroactively creating or increasing punishment for “public wrongs.”

During the time of Calder, “crimes” referred to “public wrongs.” More than just acts such as robbery, theft, murder, and more, “public wrongs” are “injuries to the sovereign” as the Justices put it. We the people are the sovereign, and so public wrongs are injuries to the community. This includes many regulations, fines, standings for lawsuits, and other civil laws which serve to protect the community rather than just an individual. There are also “private wrongs” which are injuries to individuals. These are usually dealt with in court through lawsuits. Many private wrongs are also public wrongs, such as kidnapping, assault, murder, theft, and more. Therefore, when the Court in Calder determined that the Ex Post Facto Clause prohibits the retroactive creation or increase of punishment for crimes, they were including a wide variety of civil legislation rather than excluding it entirely.

The Judiciary since then has misconstrued this meaning. They have meticulously separated crimes from public wrongs and criminal laws from civil laws until arriving where we are today. How are criminal laws now defined, then? Rather than make their own definition, the two Justices note that the courts have increasingly relied on Legislators to make this determination for them. Law makers, knowing that retroactive laws are prohibited in the criminal context and permitted in the civil context, are incentivized to label them civil, even when they’re truly criminal.

Under this revived framework, Justice Thomas and Justice Gorsuch agree that the retroactive law levied against Mr. Ellingburg is unconstitutional. But their framework demands more of the Court than any other Justice is willing to do. It requires analyzing what the law is rather than what some lawmakers claim it is. It needs active and forceful engagement rather than passive and deferential tests. And above all, it takes Justices who care about our rights rather than Justices who are willing to sacrifice them.

Meet Bradley!

Bradley is a Communications Intern for the Liberty Justice Center. He is pursuing his Master’s Degree in Political Science at the University of Illinois, Springfield, where he is currently writing his Master’s Thesis on the Ex Post Facto Clause. Bradley is passionate about understanding the Constitution and the Natural Rights it protects.

And that’s the point.

Guns make people nervous. But the Supreme Court has held that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of ordinary, law-abiding citizens to carry a firearm in public for self-defense. Some states ensure that gun owners are law-abiding by requiring them to obtain a firearm license, which includes a criminal background check. So, the right to bear arms operates like President Reagan’s approach to arms control–trust but verify. And this should make everyone less nervous about guns and more confident about public safety.

A society filled with armed, ordinary, law-abiding citizens is a safer society. John R. Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, writes in the third edition of the book that the data on the relationship between right-to-carry laws and crime rates continues to back up his original thesis that more armed, ordinary, law-abiding citizens reduce crime.

Licensed gun owners are less dangerous than the general public. From 1990 to July 2008, each year averaged only one murder by someone with a gun license. Specifically, in 2007 the murder rate for licensed gun owners was 0.017 homicides per 100,000 permit holders as compared to 4.47 murder arrests per 100,000 people from the general public. This means that non-license holders are 262.9 times more likely to shoot someone than an ordinary, law-abiding citizen carrying a gun for self-defense.

Lott stated in a 2016 interview with the Wall Street Journal that every country in the world that has attempted to ban firearms has had an increase in the overall murder rate. And in a 2022 column in the Wall Street Journal, Lott explained how legal gun use lowered Brazil’s crime rate, and, specifically, decreased its murder rate by 34%.

Lott notes in his book that, “The gun-control debate largely focuses on what might go wrong, rather than evidence on what actually happens.” The Liberty Justice Center is seeing this play out in a Second Amendment case filed in Minnesota.

Our client is a long-haul truck driver that has two firearm licenses from the most recent states he has lived in. He travels all over the country. But when he enters Minnesota, state law forces him to unload his weapon and place it in a secure container because his firearm licenses are not from states on Minnesota’s reciprocity list. Indeed, there are fifteen state firearm licenses that Minnesota refuses to recognize because their firearm license laws are not “similar” to Minnesota’s license laws. What does “similar” mean? Minnesota does not know or at least refuses to tell us or the court. But all these states require criminal background checks, and most require a training course, just like Minnesota. In fact, Minnesota has states on its list, Texas for example, that are less “similar” to Minnesota than the unrecognized states.

Minnesota complains that if it must recognize firearm licenses from every state, then it may have to acknowledge a state with low standards. But this argument is based on what might go wrong. All states that issue firearm licenses currently have the same basic requirements. Some require training and some do not. Some require applicants to be 18 and some 21. And some inquire into the person’s substance abuse and mental health history. But all of them make sure no one gets a license if they are forbidden to own a gun by state or federal law. And if states did lower their standards, those state legislatures will have to answer to their own constituencies and become a pariah with their neighboring states.

People should celebrate the Second Amendment because it makes all of us safer. Once everyone learns what has and is happening, instead of letting their imaginations get the best of them, then they will be less anxious and sleep more securely at night.

Meet Ryan!

Ryan Morrison joined the Liberty Justice Center as Senior Counsel in May 2025 to protect the right of free speech, defend the right to keep and bear arms, and stop government overreach.

Ryan began his career as a prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. through the Attorney General’s Honors Program. He also worked as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Subsequently, Ryan accepted an appointment from President George W. Bush to be Special Counsel and Special Assistant to the General Counsel of the U.S. Air Force at the Pentagon. Then, at the end of the Bush administration, Ryan joined the U.S. Department of Defense General Counsel’s office to represent America’s interests in the Guantanamo Bay habeas corpus litigation. Later, Ryan clerked for the Honorable Eugene E. Siler, Jr. for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and then entered private practice at the Louisville, Kentucky office of Dinsmore & Shohl LLP. He was subsequently appointed by the Governor of Kentucky to serve in multiple roles in state government and then joined the Institute for Free Speech to defend First Amendment political speech rights across the country.

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Read more from our Monday Merits series featuring concise takes on the week’s most compelling legal developments from the attorneys and staff here at the Liberty Justice Center!

These were terms of art to the founding generation, implementing a basic theory of the powers of government: “legislative powers” are law-making powers. The laws that govern each of us are meant to be made by Congress, the branch made up of representatives each accountable to constituents from a particular region of the country. “The Executive Power” is the power to execute and enforce those laws—Article II in fact includes an admonition that the President “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The “Judicial power” is to resolve disputes about the interpretation and enforcement of such laws, and to provide a forum for the assertion of legal rights; it is therefore limited to “Cases” and “Controversies,” by the terms of Article III; the courts are there to resolve specific legal disputes between specific parties, not to sit in judgment of legislative policies or executive priorities.

If it sounds like these three scopes of authority are in some tension with one another, that was intended as a feature, not a bug: the framers placed these authorities in different hands on the theory that “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Each branch therefore serves as a check on the others. Congress must generally get its legislation approved by the President, while courts have the power to review laws and executive actions for violations of the Constitution—but they do not hold the power to prosecute a defendant the President declines to—all while Congress holds the purse strings that fund the activities of the other two. In theory, the dynamic tension between these institutions serves as a check on each, with the jealous ambitions of each counterbalancing the excesses of the others.

Unfortunately, we have encountered a contingency James Madison could not foresee: an utter lack of ambition on the part of Congress. It turns out that, for any individual legislator, ambition carries with it the risk of accountability. What was intended as our most deliberative body has overtime become disincentivized to deliberate. Most significant legislation now is largely an enabling act, simply providing that “the secretary shall…” make whatever decisions there are to be made; better for the EPA or HUD to take the heat if a policy turns out to have unintended consequences. The last century or so has, therefore, been a continuing story of congressional delegations of discretion to the executive, with regards to rules and regulations about our work, our environment, our finances, and our health (among other things the federal government has decided to take an interest in).

Transferring these policy choices to the executive, or more accurately to the administrative apparatus that he oversees, works a series of mischiefs. For one, removing legislators from the chain of accountability cuts off the main avenue for citizens to object—what good will it do to call your congressman, when the decision is to be made by the bureaucracy? For another, it has rendered vast and consequential federal regulatory regimes inherently unstable, because they shift and flip from administration to administration, as Republican and Democratic presidents trade these discretions back and forth.

At its worst, this normalization of presidential discretion has led successive administrations to ever greater powers from ever vaguer congressional enactments. Obama vastly expanded the understanding of “prosecutorial discretion,” from an ad hoc determination that a particular defendant was not worth the effort to prosecute, to a general policy of abeyance for certain categories of illegal immigrants (because Congress had declined to pass legislation actually improving their legal status). President Biden asserted power to pause evictions nationwide, forgive student loans en masse, and impose national vaccination mandates. The Supreme Court struck each of those down (the Liberty Justice Center brought one of the successful consolidated cases against the OSHA vaccine mandate). President Trump has made his own claims of unprecedented executive authority in a number of areas, including immigration, broadcast licensing, the renaming of federal agencies, and perhaps most prominently his imposition of new tariffs on large swaths of imports from most of the world.

Last month, the Supreme Court continued its trend of striking down excessive claims of presidential authority—in this case it rejected the bulk of the current administrations tariff regime, which had been imposed under the supposed authority granted to him by Congress under the International Emergencies Economic Powers Act. But that Act doesn’t even include the word “tariff,” or any equivalent—the administration instead had to fall back on vague language in the act empowering him to “regulate…importation” in the face of a crisis. In a case brought by myself and my colleagues here at the Liberty Justice Center, the Supreme Court thought better of it, finding that the power to impose new taxes—an important question for a founding generation that had declared its independence largely as a tax revolt—was reserved by the constitution to Congress, and the President could not invent such authority for himself out of whole cloth.

The subtext of the Supreme Court’s decision is directed at Congress: reminding them that it is in fact their role to make the sort of policy choices presidents keep attempting to accrue to themselves. One can only hope they take the note. In the meantime, it remains necessary to remain vigilant against metastasizing federal power—which threatens to undermine the promise the framers left us with, that this be a government of laws, and not of men.

Meet Reilly!

Reilly Stephens serves as Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, litigating cases in state and federal courts around the country covering a wide range of expertise including free speech and association, campaign finance, labor law, search and seizure, property rights, educational freedom, federalism, equal protection, due process, and separation of powers.

After joining LJC as a Staff Attorney in 2018, Reilly filed more than a dozen cases around the country to enforce the First Amendment rights of public employees across the country, building on the Center’s landmark Supreme Court victory in Janus v. AFSCME. Along the way, he developed a litigation strategy to revive the nondelegation doctrine, eventually winning only the second appellate nondelegation victory in 80 years. Reilly also serves as one of the lead attorneys for LJC’s amicus practice, contributing to important constitutional cases before the Supreme Court and lower appellate courts throughout the country.

Over the course of the pandemic, Reilly contributed to a number of legal challenges to the excesses of government COVID rules, including a key role in defeating the OSHA vaccine mandate. However, the most important one to Reilly was personal: representing his own bride against the District of Columbia to win the First Amendment right to dance at his own wedding—in the end, the first song inviting guests to the dance floor was “Footloose.” Most recently, he successfully represented a pair of California doctors in challenging the State’s threat to take the licenses of anyone disagreeing with California’s official views about pandemic science.

A 2023-2024 Antonin Scalia Fellow, Reilly has contributed scholarship and commentary on important constitutional issues to many outlets, including National Review, The Federalist, the Washington Examiner, Real Clear Policy, and Gray Television.

Prior to joining LJC, Reilly served as a legal associate in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, where he drafted amicus briefs, and provided research, commentary, and other scholarship important to Cato’s mission. During law school, Reilly served as a law clerk at the Institute for Justice and for the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Class Action Fairness.

Reilly holds a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he served as Senior Articles Editor of the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, which selected his student note for publication—an examination of the potential challenges to drug prohibition from the development of 3D-Printing. He received a M.A. in International Relations, Upper Second Class, from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he played defense for the Men’s Lacrosse Team. A native of Baltimore, he now lives in our nation’s capital with the aforementioned bride, their daughter, and a very, very spoiled rescue mutt.

Read more from our Monday Merits series featuring concise takes on the week’s most compelling legal developments from the attorneys and staff here at the Liberty Justice Center!

Doorbell Cameras

If you were watching the Super Bowl, or just checked out the commercials, you might have seen an ad marketing technology to help you and your neighbors find your lost puppies. The advertisement was for a feature available with Ring video doorbell cameras called Search Party. The feature allows individuals to upload a photo of their missing pet and then Ring will check whether the pet was seen on other cameras in the community, and if so, share the footage and location with the pet’s owner. According to Ring’s marketing, this feature “extends the existing community spirit” and allows you to “be a hero in your own neighborhood.”

But the technology could also be viewed very differently. The same technology that could find a dog could be used to track a person. And how would you feel if your neighbors could be tracking your movements throughout the day—when you left for work, when you came home, who came to visit you, and where you were during the day?

Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs)

Unfortunately, video doorbell cameras aren’t the only technology that poses a surveillance risk to you. Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are cameras that specifically track vehicle license plates and also track vehicles themselves. They can track where you drive and go throughout your day. The Liberty Justice Center has challenged their use by government, arguing in Scholl v. Illinois State Police that it violates Americans’ Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches.

https://www.flocksafety.com/ebooks/license-plate-reader-cameras-overview (photo source)

One of the major ALPR companies is Flock Safety, whose cameras you may have seen popping up in your community on poles with solar panels. Ring had planned to share its doorbell camera data with Flock Safety, which in turn could share it with government agencies. But Ring just announced that the partnership has been cancelled. While Ring claims they canceled because “integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” some have questioned whether pushback from their commercial is the actual cause. If Americans are concerned about Ring’s plans to track dogs, they would probably be even more concerned about a partnership with a company that tracks cars and allows for tracking data to be shared with the government.

Live Facial Recognition

Even more concerning, some cameras also specifically track people. For example, in New Orleans, Project NOLA provides individuals and businesses subsidized crime cameras, the data from which is shared with law enforcement. Instead of a private company, like Ring or Flock Safety, Project NOLA is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Some of its cameras use live facial recognition technology to track individuals. The addition of that technology to the program led the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) to pause its cooperation with the group, as a local ordinance prohibits use of live facial recognition from a third party entity.

Controlling Surveillance

Last year Project NOLA changed how it shared data with the NOPD because of its concerns about their use of camera video. The NOPD allegedly shared some crime camera footage with a television production company filming a show in the city. The footage showed a victim of a shooting, and, understandably, the family of the victim was offended by the video being used for entertainment purposes. Project NOLA therefore restricted NOPD access to crime camera footage to try to protect the privacy interests of individuals.

While having a third-party intermediary—whether a private company or non-profit—control data that can track people might pose less concerns than having the government directly do so, it also poses its own risks. How are they protecting the data? What limits do they have on who can access it or how it can be used? Who watches the purported watchmen? Government actors can be removed through elections or impeachment if they abuse such technologies, but private companies or organizations cannot. And while people can refuse to cooperate with them, such groups may still control data about you taken from cameras whose data those groups control.

Are You Being Surveilled?

There are a couple of sources of information about surveillance technologies that may be tracking you. The Electronic Freedom Foundation has compiled a map documenting information about the various surveillance technologies being used by governments across the United States. A few years ago, Gizmodo put together a map of many Ring camera locations. To see if your local government uses Ring’s Neighbors app to request Ring camera footage, you can check the Ring Active Agency Map. To check where ALPR cameras are near you, an open-source website called DeFlock maps where Flock, other companies’, and governments’ license plate readers are located, so you can see where you might be tracked in your neighborhood. And to see if you’ve actually been tracked, the website Have I been Flocked? pulls data from publicly released government audits logs that reflects only a sub-set of the actual searches conducted by government entities.

What You Can Do

If you have a Ring camera, you can check and change your privacy settings. If you are concerned about being surveilled in your own community by your own neighbors, you should make your concerns known. You can express your concerns to private companies who use surveillance technology—such concerns seem to possibly have forced Ring to change its approach in response. You can also reach out to your local and state representatives to pass legislation to limit the use of such technologies—such regulation seems to have impacted technology use in New Orleans. The Institute for Justice has model legislation you might consider proposing. And if you’ve been harmed by the use of surveillance technologies, you may be able to bring a legal challenge and the Liberty Justice Center may be able to assist. We are fighting to protect Americans’ constitutional rights and will continue that fight in whatever form it may take or technology may be used.

Meet Jessica!

Jessica Craine is a Staff Attorney at the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public-interest litigation law firm.

Read more from our Monday Merits series featuring concise takes on the week’s most compelling legal developments from the attorneys and staff here at the Liberty Justice Center!

In February 2021, Brian Hussey, a Cambridge police officer of 22 years, posted his opinion to his personal Facebook account regarding the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that was then being debated in Congress. Officer Hussey lamented that the bill honored Mr. Floyd, whom Officer Hussey labeled a “career criminal, a thief, and druggie.” Officer Hussey felt that “attaching the name of a violent career criminal to a reform bill aimed at the betterment of policing [was] a disservice to the bill.” The post only generated two comments, so Officer Hussey removed it only a few hours after he posted it. Despite posting his opinion to his restricted personal Facebook account, on his own time, from his own phone, and for just a few hours, he was suspended from the Cambridge police force. Officer Hussey subsequently sued to protect his First Amendment right to free speech.

Discussing pending legislation is protected by the First Amendment right to speak on matters of public concern. While government employees do not lose that right by nature of their employment, they are held to a higher standard than private citizens even when the employees speak in their private capacity. In examining speech of public employees, courts, in part, balance the First Amendment interests of the employee against the government’s interest in efficient operation. The more likely speech will disrupt government operations, the less protection it is afforded. This is known as the Pickering balancing test. In applying the Pickering balancing test, the First Circuit gave less weight to language it considers “mocking, derogatory, and disparaging.”

In its decision, the court correctly acknowledged that Hussey’s post addressed a matter of public concern. The post criticized the naming of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and thus spoke about pending federal legislation, policing, and racial justice. The court also acknowledged that, as a police officer, Officer Hussey could contribute valuable insights into police reform. Therefore, Officer Hussey’s public‑employee expertise applied to contested legislative reform would ordinarily deserve the highest level of First Amendment protection.

But the court immediately undercut that protection by finding Officer Hussey’s post was mocking, derogatory, and disparaging speech. The opinion categorized Hussey’s one‑sentence post calling Floyd a “career criminal, a thief and a druggie” as inflammatory and insulting and thus not entitled to special protection. This categorization is fatal: once the court ratcheted down the weight of Officer Hussey’s speech, it became far easier for the government’s speculative prediction of disruption to carry the day. The entire Pickering analysis was front‑loaded with a subjective judgment about the tone and politeness of Officer Hussey’s post. This is precisely the sort of content‑based policing of speech that should be most suspect in a First Amendment framework.

The Hussey majority insists it is simply applying existing precedent, but it stretches that precedent beyond recognition. Officer Hussey wrote a single Facebook comment from home to a restricted friends list and he deleted the post after a couple of hours. The post did not threaten anyone or advocate any change in policing practice, only a change in the symbolic naming of a piece of legislation. The dissent rightly notes that his post is “nowhere near so vulgar as to merit any less than the maximum weight” in the Pickering balancing test. The very examples of vulgarity offered by the majority, racial epithets and hate‑laden memes targeting specific individuals, highlight why the majority was wrong. There is no social consensus that “career criminal,” “thief,” or “druggie” rise to the same level of vulgarity as racist epithets and hate speech. Sadly, Officer Hussey’s post seems rather insipid in today’s discourse.

Decisions like Hussey will inevitably chill public‑employee speech on controversial issues. The decision’s message to government workers is clear: do not criticize high‑profile figures in harsh terms, do not question the symbolic choices of reform movements too bluntly, and do not adopt language that your employer might later persuade a court is derogatory. This chill on speech is made colder by the timing of Officer Hussey’s post. The court explicitly faulted Officer Hussey for speaking “during a period of intense scrutiny of and protest against law enforcement” and suggested that this contentious context heightened the Cambridge Police Department’s interest in suppressing his speech. But times of heightened public concern are precisely when robust debate is most valuable. To tell public employees to wait until the controversy has cooled is, as the dissent puts it, like “waiting to warn a patient of a drug’s side effects until after the patient has already taken the drug.”

The Hussey decision also invites selective enforcement. In a polarized environment, one side’s rhetoric will nearly always be labeled as derogatory and disparaging by opponents. The court’s willingness to treat that characterization as a Constitutional reason to lower the weight of speech invites government employers to exercise viewpoint discrimination and erode employees’ free speech liberties.

The First Amendment’s basic promise is that the government cannot punish speech simply because it disapproves of the message, ideas, or tone. Public‑employee doctrine necessarily tempers that promise to account for operational needs of government. But the Supreme Court’s Pickering decision and its progeny was never meant to enable judicial grading of the politeness of political expression and adjust constitutional weight accordingly. By endorsing a vulgarity penalty for speech that is merely caustic and unpopular, the First Circuit’s opinion in Hussey moved dangerously close to that line. If not reversed, it will discourage public employees from voicing dissenting views on the very issues where their informed perspectives are most needed.

Meet Brendan!

Brendan Philbin is Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center with 15+ years of litigation and advisory experience.

He began as a Navy JAG in 2009 and in 2011, he led a team of Afghan prosecutors that secured 110 convictions in Afghanistan’s nascent national security court. He continues to serve in the U.S. Navy Reserve. In civilian roles, he has advised on consumer financial regulation at Bank of America, prosecuted public-nuisance and code-enforcement cases for the City of Philadelphia while defending the city in constitutional challenges, and served as a legal advisor to DHS’s Federal Protective Service on federal facility protection and counter-drone policy. He earned his J.D. from Temple University Beasley School of Law, holds a B.B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Accountancy from The George Washington University, and lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

Read more from our Monday Merits series featuring concise takes on the week’s most compelling legal developments from the attorneys and staff here at the Liberty Justice Center!

The first piece, “My Tariffs Have Brought America Back,” presents the President’s defense of his tariff agenda: that tariffs strengthened American industry, forced foreign competitors to the negotiating table, generated federal revenue, and helped fuel economic growth.

The second editorial steps back from the political framing and evaluates those claims against economic data, academic research, and market outcomes.

Taken together, the two essays do something valuable: they illuminate the difference between political narrative and economic reality—and, more importantly for our work, they underscore why the courts must ultimately resolve the constitutional questions surrounding tariff authority.

Below is a myth-versus-fact breakdown drawn from the competing arguments.

Myth #1: Foreign Countries Pay Tariffs

In his op-ed, President Trump argues that tariffs shift the financial burden onto foreign exporters, effectively forcing other nations to finance U.S. economic policy.

Fact:

Tariffs are paid at the U.S. border by American importers. Economic research consistently finds that most tariff costs are passed through to U.S. businesses and consumers—either through higher prices, reduced wages, or lower margins.

This distinction matters legally. If tariffs function as domestic taxes, then they implicate the Constitution’s allocation of taxing power to Congress—not unilateral executive authority.

Myth #2: Tariffs Do Not Raise Consumer Prices

The pro-tariff argument maintains that tariffs can be imposed without materially affecting American households.

Fact:

The economic evidence suggests otherwise. Studies examining tariff “pass-through” rates show measurable price increases across a range of consumer goods. Even domestically produced products often rise in price when tariffs shield industries from foreign competition.

In other words, tariffs rarely remain confined to trade flows—they ripple through the entire domestic economy.

Myth #3: Tariffs Produced Broad Economic Growth

President Trump’s essay points to strong GDP growth, market performance, and industrial expansion as proof that tariffs worked.

Fact:

While economic growth did occur, causation is contested. Economists attribute macroeconomic performance to multiple factors: fiscal stimulus, monetary policy, technological investment, and post-pandemic recovery dynamics.

Tariffs may have coincided with growth—but coincidence is not proof of causation.

Myth #4: Tariffs Revived American Manufacturing

The op-ed highlights steel production, factory announcements, and reshoring narratives as evidence of industrial revival.

Fact:

The data are mixed.

Some protected sectors saw investment gains. But retaliatory tariffs, higher input costs, and global supply-chain shifts offset many of those benefits. Manufacturing employment growth lagged expectations, and much import substitution simply shifted sourcing from one foreign country to another rather than returning production to the United States.

Protection can help specific industries. It does not automatically transform the entire manufacturing base.

Myth #5: Tariffs Reduce Trade Deficits

The political argument suggests tariffs shrink reliance on foreign imports and rebalance trade.

Fact:

Imports from targeted countries often fall—but are replaced by imports from other nations. Supply chains reroute rather than disappear. The aggregate trade deficit frequently remains unchanged.

Tariffs reshape trade patterns; they do not necessarily eliminate trade imbalances.

Myth #6: Tariffs Meaningfully Reduce the Federal Deficit

President Trump’s essay emphasizes tariff revenue as a fiscal achievement.

Fact:

Tariffs do generate federal revenue. But because Americans pay the tariffs, this revenue functions economically like a domestic tax increase. Any deficit impact must also account for slower growth, retaliation, or subsidy offsets.

Revenue alone does not equal net fiscal benefit.

Myth #7: Tariffs Come Without Retaliation

Pro-tariff arguments often frame tariffs as one-sided leverage.

Fact:

Trading partners routinely respond with counter-tariffs targeting politically sensitive U.S. industries—particularly agriculture and manufacturing exports.

Trade wars, by definition, impose bilateral costs.

Where the Debate Misses the Point

Reasonable people can disagree about whether tariffs are good policy.

They can debate:

• Industrial strategy

• National security supply chains

• Trade leverage

• Domestic employment effects

But our litigation does not hinge on whether tariffs are wise. It hinges on whether they are lawful.

The Constitutional Question Beneath the Economic Debate

Tariffs are not merely regulatory tools. They are taxes imposed on goods entering the United States.

And the Constitution is explicit: The power to levy taxes resides with Congress.

Over time, Congress has delegated certain tariff authorities to the Executive Branch—often tied to emergencies, national security findings, or temporary trade imbalances.

At the Liberty Justice Center, our cases challenge the outer limits of those delegations.

Key questions include:

• Can Congress delegate effectively unlimited tariff authority?

• What limiting principles constrain executive discretion?

• Can “emergency” statutes justify long-term industrial tariffs?

• When does delegation become unconstitutional abdication?

These are not academic questions. They shape trillions in global trade and determine whether core fiscal powers remain legislative.

Why the WSJ Debate Matters for the Courts

The dueling op-eds highlight an important judicial reality: If tariffs impose real domestic costs—higher prices, reduced wages, supply-chain disruption—then they function as exercises of taxing power, not merely foreign policy tools.

Courts have historically been more skeptical of open-ended delegations in areas touching taxation and revenue.

In short: The more tariffs look like taxes, the stronger the constitutional case for congressional control.

Litigation Stakes Going Forward

The Liberty Justice Center’s tariff litigation seeks to restore the structural safeguards the Framers designed:

• Congress writes tax policy.

• The Executive enforces it.

• Emergencies remain temporary.

• Delegations remain bounded.

If those lines blur in trade policy, they can blur elsewhere—energy, finance, technology, and beyond.

Final Thought

The economic debate over tariffs will continue in op-ed pages and campaign speeches. But the constitutional debate will be decided in courtrooms. And regardless of whether one believes tariffs help or hurt the economy, the structural principle remains: In a constitutional republic, taxation authority cannot rest on unilateral executive will.

That question—not price levels, not trade deficits—is the one our litigation is designed to answer.

Meet Sara!

Sara Albrecht’s background in investment management led to the formation of Swan Capital in 2007. Her career began as an analyst at Harris Associates L.P., and from there she became a founding partner of the equity team at PPM America. In addition to practicing investment management, she also taught International Finance at St. Xavier University Graham School of Management as well as CFA prep courses after receiving her CFA in 1995. In 2000, she purchased the retail chain Ultimo and operated it until 2011.

An entrepreneur and philanthropist, Sara serves on the boards of Illinois Policy Institute, Government Accountability Alliance, Empower Illinois, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Economic Club of Chicago. In addition, she is the Finance Chair of Harris Theater for Music and Dance and previously served as Chair of Hubbard Street Dance.

Albrecht graduated with a B.S. in Finance and Accounting from DePaul University and received an M.M. from Northwestern Kellogg School of Management.

Meet Orlando Méndez López, José Cotto Meléndez, José Ramos, and Ciprián Centeno Rodriguez. You can consider these guys the ones that keep UPR’s facilities running like a fine-tuned machine: maintenance workers, a plumber, and an automotive technician. They keep the lights on, the floors squeaky-clean, the pipes flowing, and the university fleet moving.

They also happen to be non-union members.

In the world of public-sector employment, that should be a boring and inconsequential detail. Since the Supreme Court’s landmark 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME, it has been settled law that public employees have a First Amendment right to choose whether or not to financially support a labor union, as should be the case in any free country.

But last year, the University of Puerto Rico and the UPR Workers’ Union decided “free” was a relative term.

The “Members-Only” Raise

The scheme was as simple as it was brazen. On Christmas Eve 2024, while most people were thinking about coquito (a rum-infused and coconut-rich version of eggnog that you could sip at one of those high-end beach clubs) and family, the Union published a bulletin announcing a “hard-won victory” for employees. After “long and intense negotiations” with the University, the Union had secured a $3,000 pay increase. What a thoughtful Christmas gift for employees, or so it seemed.

But there was just one catch: The plan was hatched to play favorites because the money was only for union members.

So, if you were a dues-paying member of the Union, you got a $2,000 check in January 2025 and another $1,000 a few months later that July. If you were a non-member—like Orlando, José, and Ciprián—you got a front-row seat to watch your colleagues get a taxpayer-funded raise for making the “correct” associational choices.

Same job. Same campus. But a $3,000 gap in the paycheck based solely on whether you paid tribute and professed your fealty to a private organization.

The First Amendment Tax

When the government tells you that you can have your constitutional rights or you can have $3,000, but you can’t have both, that’s not an incentive. It’s a tax. It’s the government putting a price tag on dissent.

But the government cannot cut a check to its favorites and leave the heretics behind.

In fact, the federal district court in Puerto Rico has seen this movie before. In a 2024 case called Carbonell v. Lopez-Figueroa, the court made it clear: a public employer cannot deprive employees of a monetary benefit just because they exercised their First Amendment right not to associate with a union.

But it looks like UPR didn’t get the memo or simply does not care about the law. Perhaps UPR decided $3,000 was a small price to pay to see if they could break the holdouts.

The Pressure Cooker

This wasn’t just a quiet accounting error. The Union took to social media to unblushingly brag about the $3,000 as an exclusive “benefit” of union membership. It was a high-definition pressure tactic designed to do one thing: make life so expensive for non-members that they eventually cave and agree to join the union rolls.

When Orlando and José first complained in writing to their superiors, demanding equal treatment, the University didn’t even bother responding. They just went ahead and cut the checks to the union loyalists.

If UPR somehow manages to get away with this insanity, every public-sector union in the United States will have a new blueprint. They won’t bother charging the non-member forced fees that the U.S. Supreme Court already struck down in Janus. Now they’ll just negotiate “members-only” pay raises. Unions will turn the public fisc into a private slush fund to reward their friends and punish their critics.

The Merit of the Case

At Liberty Justice Center, we believe employees’ right to speak goes hand in hand with the right not to speak. And that shouldn’t depend on the size of your disposable income.

LJC’s lawsuit, Méndez López v. University of Puerto Rico, seeks to end this discriminatory pay structure once and for all by asking the court to declare this scheme unconstitutional, to enjoin UPR from withholding the money, and to make non-member employees whole.

The First Amendment shouldn’t come with a “First Amendment Prime” option you can pay extra for.

The University of Puerto Rico thinks they can charge a $3,000 cover fee for the Bill of Rights. It is getting away with it, but not for long. We’re headed to court to show them that the Constitution is already paid in full.

Meet Ángel!

Ángel J. Valencia is an attorney at the Liberty Justice Center. He represents the plaintiffs in Méndez López v. University of Puerto Rico

He began his legal career as an Assistant Attorney General in the Federal Litigation Division of the Puerto Rico Department of Justice. In that role, he represented government officials in a wide range of federal civil matters, including First Amendment claims, employment discrimination, and intellectual property disputes. As his first litigation role, it provided him with valuable experience in complex civil litigation, including serving as first chair in three civil trials.

Ángel later transitioned to private practice as a Litigation Associate at Cancio, Nadal, Rivera & Díaz PSC. He then joined the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation as a Staff Attorney, where he spent seven years developing a nationwide litigation practice. There, he represented public and private sector employees in constitutional and labor law claims against unions and employers, focusing on First Amendment violations and unfair labor practices.

Ángel earned his LL.M. in International Business and Trade Law from Fordham University School of Law. He holds a J.D. from the Inter-American University of Puerto Rico School of Law, where he co-founded the school’s Federalist Society chapter and completed a study abroad program at King’s College School of Law in London, England. He received his B.B.A. in Accounting from The George Washington University.

He is licensed to practice law in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Puerto Rico, and is admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court; the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the First and Ninth Circuits; the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals; and the U.S. District Courts for the District of Columbia and the District of Puerto Rico.

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In Bruen, the Court held that states violate the Second Amendment when they only grant carry permits to gun owners if they demonstrate a special need for self-defense. The Court struck down New York’s licensing regime, and name checked six other “may issue” states, including Hawaii. Before Bruen, these states granted very few carry permits. The other forty-three states were “shall issue” states, meaning that licenses were issued if an applicant meets a set of objective criteria, regardless of any subjective special need.

In response, Hawaii passed a law requiring permit holders to obtain explicit permission from property owners before they can carry on private property. This “vampire rule” flipped the longstanding presumption that you can carry on private property unless the property owner explicitly revokes that permission and made public carry much more complicated. Now, a person carrying a firearm would need to know that every place he went affirmatively permits him to carry there. Permit holders naturally sued to overturn the law, ultimately bringing Wolford to the Court.

Bruen didn’t just overturn may issue permit regimes; it also set the standard for analyzing Second Amendment challenges. Now, a state defending a Second Amendment challenge would have to show that its burden on the right protected by the Second Amendment conforms with the nation’s historical tradition of gun regulation. To do this, states would have to find historical analogues that are relevantly similar to the challenged law. But what historical laws count towards that tradition?

To defend its vampire rule, Hawaii presented as a “dead ringer” an 1865 Louisiana law passed as part of the black codes, meant to discriminate against newly freed slaves. Justice Neal M. Gorsuch raised the question of whether these intentionally discriminatory laws should be considered relevant to the Bruen framework.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned whether that presents a defect in the Bruen analysis. Justice Jackson proposed that failing to take racist laws into account because the country has moved away from them is a problem with Bruen, and “that all of history should be on the table.”

Alan Beck, counsel for the permit-holders challenging the law, tried cabin the black codes because they were not laws of general applicability, but laws meant to discriminate against African Americans.

Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris, supporting Beck’s clients, was more direct. “It is 2026 and it is somewhat astonishing that black codes, which are unconstitutional, are being offered as evidence of what our tradition of constitutionally permissible firearm regulation looks like.” Harris argued that the black codes were outliers, representing an obvious departure from the founding-era law.

In her Bruen concurrence, Justice Amy Coney Barrett pointed out the problem of what history counts. She wrote:

In answer to the Justices’ questions about what history counts, it is fair to say that it is a stretch to propose that laws and practices meant to curtail the rights of individuals based on their skin color should inform the extent of the rights for the general public more than a century and a half later. How rights applied to someone perceived as a member of the political community should define the scope of those rights, not the abhorrent history of how we curtailed individual’s rights in the name of slavery and racial discrimination. In the infamous Dredd Scott case, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney worried that if Blacks were considered citizens:

Today, we would not regard the black codes’ speech or assembly restrictions as informative of the breadth of the First Amendment. While Justice Jackson is right that the codes are a part of our history that we cannot forget or ignore, they are outliers in our nation’s project of liberty. While the limits of historical analysis may still be unclear, the black codes are exactly the kind of outliers that Bruen warned against. We should ensure that everyone has as much freedom as Chief Justice Taney was scared to grant to African Americans and not use their oppression as a tool to curb the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.

[1] N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1, 82 (2022) (Barrett, J., concurring).

[2] Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393, 417 (1857).

Meet Jesse!

Jesse Leon is a Litigation Fellow at the Liberty Justice Center.

Jesse is a 2024 graduate of the Seton Hall University School of Law. After graduating, Jesse clerked in the New Jersey Superior Court, Chancery Division, for the Hon. Frank Covello, P.J.Ch. In law school, Jesse worked as a student attorney at the Seton Hall Law Center for Social Justice’s Equal Justice Clinic, where he helped challenge arbitrary and capricious decision-making by the New Jersey State Parole Board, and co-edited a legal primer for incarcerated people. Jesse served as an articles editor for the Seton Hall Journal of Legislation and Public Policy. Jesse interned at the Institute for Justice and the Renzulli Law Firm, LLP. In his free time, Jesse successfully led a grassroots campaign in his town to end an over 85-year-old prohibition on backyard chicken keeping. Jesse is admitted to practice in New Jersey.

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This new threat to American expression comes from one of the dullest places: minutiae in the Monetary Control Act of 1980. The Act, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, regulates one of the Fed’s key duties: recording the credits and debits between banks in a single “master account” for each financial institution. These master accounts are a requirement to access all financial payment systems: without one, a bank cannot function as a bank. Under the Act, master accounts “shall be available to” private depository institutions.

For the first thirty years of its existence, the Fed took “shall be available” literally and gave master accounts to all the financial institutions that met the basic specifications laid out in the Act. Beginning in 2015, though, the Fed began rejecting otherwise eligible would-be banks based on its own subjective determinations. One such example was Custodia Bank.

Custodia Bank is a Wyoming-based depository institution that wishes to be a bank. The Fed had initially told Custodia its application for a master account would likely be approved swiftly. However, under controversial Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, the Fed then decided to slow-walk and, ultimately, deny Custodia’s application. Its stated reason was that Custodia was too closely linked to the crypto industry, which the Fed viewed with suspicion.

Unfortunately, in Custodia Bank v. Federal Reserve Board of Governors, a three-judge panel agreed that the Fed had the discretionary power to deny Custodia’s application. It is doubtful this massive expansion of Fed power will end with efforts to regulate crypto.

Under the Custodia precedent, the existence of each bank in America is now dependent on it satisfying bureaucrats at the Fed. The First Amendment implications are enormous. No bank is going to want to risk the Fed’s ire: the mere possibility of losing one’s master account would be devastating to the bank’s business. As a result, it seems natural that banks will begin to run their businesses not to maximize profits, as the free market would dictate, but to maximize the approval of government bureaucrats. The debanking of controversial individuals, groups, and industries seems like a foregone conclusion.

There are already far too many examples of the State pressuring banks into banning their critics. In Operation Chokepoint, an Obama Administration scandal, the Federal Deposit Insurance Company (FDIC) pressured banks to blacklist firearms dealers and payday lenders. The administration of then-Governor Andrew Cuomo reportedly strongarmed both banks and insurance companies into debanking the National Rifle Association (NRA). Under the Biden Administration, the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) pressured banks to cut off crypto-based institutions like Andreessen Horowitz and Debt Box.

Even if the Fed refrains from such misconduct, censorship could still occur. The very fact that bureaucrats have the power to arbitrarily deny master accounts could easily inspire banks to preemptively debank political dissidents simply because they believe doing so would allow them to remain in the Fed’s good graces.

In his dissent in Custodia, Judge Timothy Tymkovich wrote that “[b]y claiming unreviewable discretion over access to the nation’s financial system, the Fed has gone too far.” By condoning the Fed’s actions, his fellow judges went too far as well.

Under the major questions doctrine, courts are not supposed to rule that the executive branch possesses vast new powers unless those powers were explicitly enumerated in a statute. That doctrine is why the Supreme Court ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s efforts to impose a nationwide cap-and-trade scheme, and against the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA)’s efforts to impose a nationwide vaccine mandate. It is also what the Liberty Justice Center is currently arguing in its challenge to the Trump Administration’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs.

The major questions doctrine is especially relevant when other constitutional concerns are implicated. Here, the First Amendment implications are obvious. If Congress was going to give the Fed, an unelected body mostly composed of economists, a power that would allow them to consign critics to financial oblivion, wouldn’t they have made it obvious? Remember, the Monetary Control Act existed for thirty years before the Fed first claimed it had the discretionary power to deny master accounts.

Fortunately, Custodia Bank is appealing the Custodia ruling to an en banc (all judges) panel of the Tenth Circuit. Hopefully, either the Circuit or the Supreme Court acts swiftly to protect Americans’ freedom of expression. The Fed should not be policing the nation’s speech.

Sources:

Custodia Bank, Inc. v. Fed. Rsrv. Bd. of Governors, 157 F.4th 1235, 1264 (10th Cir. 2025) (Tymkovich, J. dissenting).

12 U.S.C. § 248a(c)(2).

Custodia Bank, 157 F.4th at 1264 (Tymkovich, J. dissenting).

Custodia Bank, Inc. v. Fed. Rsrv. Bd. of Governors, 157 F.4th 1235, 1241 (10th Cir. 2025).

“Operation Chokepoint is Over. But Without Major Reforms, It Could Happen Again.” John-Michael Siebler, The Daily Signal (Aug. 17, 2017), Operation Choke Point Is Over. But Without Major Reforms, It Could Happen Again. | The Heritage Foundation.

NRA of Am. v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 181-85 (2024).

“Biden Admin Waged Censorship War Against Crypto.” Tim Kilcullen, MRC Free Speech America (March 7, 2025), Biden Admin Engaged in Censorship When Targeting Crypto.

NFIB v. OSHA, 595 U.S. 109, 122 (2022) (Gorsuch, J. concurring).

West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. 697, 724 (2022).

Transcript of Oral Argument at 97, V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump, No. 25-250 (U.S. Nov. 5, 2025).

Meet Tim!

Tim Kilcullen serves as a staff attorney at the Liberty Justice Center. He has a deep passion for protecting Americans’ fundamental liberties, particularly their right to free speech and a free press.

Tim is a member of the D.C. Bar and a graduate of the Antonin Scalia Law School, where he focused on antitrust law. Prior to joining the Liberty Justice Center, he was Senior Counsel for Investigations at the Media Research Center, where he uncovered collusion between Big Tech and government and fought to stop the enactment of federal censorship laws.

Prior to becoming an attorney, Tim was a field director for the Massachusetts GOP and the Republican nominee for the 49th District of the Virginia Assembly. He also worked at campaign finance compliance firm State & Federal Communications. He received his undergraduate degree in Economics & English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Much like my younger self, society has struggled to grapple with determining at what point children transform into adults capable of making decisions independent of their parents and being held responsible for those decisions. The research shows that, at least biologically speaking, that capability most likely comes later than graduation from high school and even college. Contrary to legal adulthood standards, the prefrontal cortex of the human brain – the part responsible for decision-making, impulse control, and risk assessment – finishes maturing around age 25, or even later.1

Prior to working for Liberty Justice Center, I spent nine years immersed in California criminal law. I often dealt with cases of “youth offenders,” reading and analyzing case facts and psychologists’ reports to determine whether age-related factors in mitigation might warrant less severe sentencing or early release from prison. Youth Offender Parole Hearings began in California in 2014, for persons who committed their controlling offenses before reaching age 18. California recognized that “the younger a person is, the more susceptible they are to negative influences and outside pressures, including peer pressure.”2 By 2018, and in acknowledgment to the most recent science, the law had expanded to include “youth” who were under the age of 26 at the time of committing their crime. As the Supreme Court has recognized:

The relevance of youth as a mitigating factor derives from the fact that the signature qualities of youth are transient; as individuals mature, the impetuousness and recklessness that may dominate in younger years can subside.3

In the case of youth offenders, the Legislature was able to provide compelling evidence that, indeed, in some situations, a young person may have foolishly acted while relying on a less-than-fully-formed prefrontal cortex.4 The conclusions, and resulting laws, were based on science, not sentimentality and societal fads.

However, the California Legislature has since taken an illogical and unscientific approach to the issue of children’s maturity in the passing of the “SAFETY Act,” or AB 1955 (“Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth Act”). A year ago, AB 1955 was enacted. California was the first state in the nation to make “forced outings” to the parents of public-school students illegal. The law:

…prohibit[s] school districts . . . from enacting or enforcing any policy, rule, or administrative regulation that requires an employee or a contractor to disclosure any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent unless otherwise required by law, as provided.5

The law cites students’ “constitutional right to privacy when it comes to sensitive information about them” and espouses that “courts have affirmed that young people have a right to keep personal information private.” (This fails to recognize how such information is in fact “private” if the student has shared it with some or all of the staff/students at their school, but that’s another issue entirely.)6

As a California lawyer transitioning from the world of criminal to constitutional, it is staggering to consider the inherent contradiction in the law when it comes to the standing of our youth. Are children in California capable or incapable of sound decision-making? Is our government’s position really that a 25-year-old man may not be able to fully comprehend what it means to kill someone, but that a 4-year-old boy can reasonably determine that he is actually a she without parental guidance? Do the Legislature’s findings about brain development, decision-making abilities, and susceptibility to peer pressure only apply in the criminal context, but go out the window when it comes to a child’s mental health and wellbeing? Does the mental gymnastics required to come to these contrary conclusions give Californians confidence that their elected representatives actually want what is best for their children? If the answer to rehabilitating the “youth offender” is access to mental health counseling and considerations of precipitating factors that led to the drastic decision made by the wayward child, why do the gender incongruent youth of our public schools deserve less? These children, still trying to figure out their place in the world, confused and operating with less-than-fully-formed brains, should not be given free rein. To allow the child to assume the mantle of life-altering decision-making without their parents and trained mental health professionals is contrary to reason and science, as the government has blithely ignored. Because “most children, even in adolescence, simply are not able to make sound judgments concerning many decisions.”7

To follow along with LJC’s fight for the children and parents of California, read more about our case litigating the constitutionality of AB 1955, Chino Valley Unified School District v. Newsom.

7

Parham v. J.R. (1979) 442 U.S. 584, 603.

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Meet Katie!

Katie Cosgrove serves as counsel for Liberty Justice Center. She believes strongly that Americans should be aware of, and willing to stand up for, the constitutional protections we have been afforded. She is grateful to serve LJC’s mission to safeguard individual rights from the government overreach our founders so rightly feared.

Katie received her bachelor’s degree in History – specializing in Early American – from the University of California, Davis in 2012. She graduated from Regent University School of Law in Virginia in May 2016 where she was the only student in her class to serve as a member of both the Trial Advocacy Board and the Moot Court Board. For her 3L year, she was elected Chair of the Trial Advocacy Board. She moved back to the West Coast and was sworn into the California Bar in December 2016.

In her first two years of practice, she spent her days in the courtroom as a Deputy District Attorney and a family law associate. Prior to working for LJC, Katie served as a Senior Staff Attorney for the Superior Court of California for seven years – providing legal research, analysis, and recommended rulings to judges in the area of criminal law.

Outside of work, Katie enjoys spending time with her husband and three children, going to museums, tending to her small flock of chickens, and exploring nature.

Illinois law sets contribution limits for most donors. Their stated purpose is to prevent quid‑pro‑quo corruption or its appearance, which the Supreme Court has held is the only legitimate justification of these limits. But those limits vanish once a candidate (or an allied independent group) crosses a “self‑funding” or independent‑expenditure threshold—$250,000 in statewide races and $100,000 in other races. At that point, all candidates in that race can accept unlimited contributions from almost anyone.

Since this provision went into effect, every Illinois gubernatorial race has had at least one candidate self-fund over the threshold to lift the contribution limits. And it is no coincidence that Illinois’ last two governors were a multimillionaire (Bruce Rauner) and a billionaire (JB Pritzker).

Legislative leaders frequently self-fund to remove the contribution caps so they can raise unlimited cash—even when they have no opponent or aren’t even running for office. Why raise that money if it won’t be used in their own races? Because these leaders strategically use it to contribute to their political party, to special committees available only to legislative leaders, and to specific candidates in contested races—buying support for their leadership positions and policy agendas.

Former Illinois Speaker Madigan—convicted of using his office to obtain personal financial rewards and now serving a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence—triggered the provision lifting contribution limits by self-funding in his race in 2018. He transferred nearly $6 million to the Democratic Party of Illinois and the Democratic Majority committees—committees he controlled—then redistributed the money to other candidates.

Not only do legislative leaders use this self-funding mechanism to buy support for their positions and agendas, but even when they violate the law, there are few consequences.

Senate President Don Harmon, who helped write the campaign finance law including the self-funding provision, used it in January 2023 by contributing $100,001 to his Senate campaign fund. He then proceeded to collect unlimited contributions through the November 2024 election cycle. And he wasn’t even up for election in the March 2024 primary or November 2024 general elections, and he has run unopposed in most his races.

The problem for Harmon was that the lift on contributions limits only applies during an election cycle. The relevant election cycle in January 2023 was the March 2024 primary. Contributions after that primary are part of the November 2024 election cycle. But Harmon’s committee accepted more than $4 million in contributions above the legal limits during the November 2024 election cycle, when the contribution caps were not lifted.

The Illinois State Board of Elections’ staff found that Harmon had violated the law, and a hearing officer affirmed that decision. However, when the Board itself heard the case, it deadlocked 4–4 along partisan lines. No fine. No real accountability. Worse, Chicago Tribune later reported that two members who voted against holding Harmon accountable have ties to his donors. The Board has no formal conflict-of-interest policy for its members.

By law, the Board is composed of eight members: four Republicans and four Democrats. That setup guarantees that politically connected candidates or incumbents from either party will rarely be found to have violated campaign finance law.

That’s why the Liberty Justice Center filed a citizen‑initiated complaint against Harmon’s committee on behalf of an Illinois voter. Even if the Board again splits 4–4, a citizen can appeal an adverse Board vote to the Illinois Appellate Courts—something the Board’s own staff cannot do.

The Liberty Justice Center previously represented a citizen who filed a complaint against now former-Illinois Auditor General, Frank Mautino for violating campaign finance law during his years as a state representative. Mautino’s campaign committee spent more than $225,000 over 15 years on gas and car repairs at a local service station for vehicles the committee did not own or lease. That violated state law. But the Board deadlocked at 4–4. The Liberty Justice Center appealed, and the Illinois Supreme Court ultimately held that this spending violated state law.

Yet there was effectively no penalty. Mautino had dissolved his committee after becoming Auditor General—the state’s chief fiscal watchdog—and had no intention of running for elected office again. The Board can only fine committees, not officeholders personally. A dissolved committee with no assets can’t pay. And afterwards the General Assembly changed the statute to make similar spending legal going forward.

That’s the way things work in Illinois.

This doesn’t mean the Board of Elections always deadlocks at 4–4 or never issues fines for campaign finance violations. Many campaign committees that violate the law are found liable and fined. Usually these are in local races, often involving first‑time or under‑resourced candidates who miss a deadline or misunderstand a reporting rule. Those cases rarely make the news, but for the people involved—teachers, small‑business owners, neighborhood activists—a fine, or just having to defend themselves before the Board, can be enough to discourage them from ever running for office again.

Still, we should be skeptical of proposals for reform that add even more restrictions and regulations to campaign finance law. Complicated rules make it harder for first-time candidates and for those who aren’t wealthy or well-connected. They can’t hire election attorneys to help navigate the regulations, like the rich, entrenched incumbents can.

The problem is that an already‑complicated code is selectively enforced and structurally tilted toward those in power. Layering on new limits will only multiply loopholes and give political insiders more tools to weaponize the law against their opponents.

And as long as people act in a partisan way—excusing the bad behavior of their preferred candidates or political parties while fiercely attacking opponents for speculative or minor violations—the campaign finance laws will not be fairly enforced.

That’s not to say that it’s hopeless. Citizens still have tools they can use to keep elections fair. That’s why the Liberty Justice Center has represented citizens who bring complaints before Board of Elections. We should put principle over partisanship and advocate for campaign finance regulations that are simple, clear, fair, evenly enforced, and respectful of constitutional limits.

Image Credit: See page for author, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Meet Jeffrey!

Jeffrey Schwab serves as Senior Counsel and Interim Director of Litigation at the Liberty Justice Center, where he litigates cases to protect civil liberties and constitutional rights. Jeff has a particular interest in protecting the right of free speech and enforcing constitutional and other legal limits on government.

He served as counsel for Mark Janus in Janus v. AFSCME, the landmark case in which the United States Supreme Court found that public employees could not be compelled to pay money to a union without their consent. He currently leads Liberty Justice Center’s efforts to enforce the Janus decision and protect public employees’ rights not to be forced to join or pay a union.

Jeff also has served as lead counsel in Liberty Justice Center cases challenging restrictions on ride-share vehicles and home-sharing hosts, the implementation of a tax on Internet streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify on Chicago residents, and campaign finance laws that seek to benefit certain political contributors over others. Additionally, Jeff challenged an Illinois law limiting which courts people who seek to vindicate their constitutional rights against the state can file.

Prior to joining the Liberty Justice Center in September 2014, Jeffrey practiced law at a boutique firm in downtown Chicago, where he litigated religious liberty cases under the First Amendment and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). His practice also included real estate and zoning, contract disputes, small business litigation, consumer litigation, and bankruptcy.

Jeff received his B.S. in Business Management from Grove City College and his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.

He is admitted to practice in Illinois and is licensed in the U.S. Supreme Court, the First, Second, Third, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as federal district courts in Illinois.

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A family member came to visit earlier this year, and after running some errands asked me, in complete confusion, why there was so much grey hair on the median by the shopping mall.

“Oh, you mean the ‘Due Process’ people? There’s an assisted living place near that intersection, a whole crew of them come out most days now waiving those signs.” My explanation was apparently insufficient: “why are they protesting about Due Process next to the shopping mall?”

Why indeed?

Our discourse treats “Due Process” as a compound word. Most of us hear the syllables together, invoking some concept of legal rights—and that’s befitting of a concept so fundamental to our society. Constitutional law has a bunch of these—but most of them people actually understand, at least incorrectly: “Free Speech”; “Unreasonable Searches”; “the right to bare arms”—but each of those interacts with daily life in a way that normal people understand, if imperfectly.

But “Due Process” is technical—that comes, inevitably with the “process” part—and if you had the good sense not to go to law school, you may never even have realized that this phrase they staccato on Law & Order is actually made up of two different independent concepts, that make more sense when you say it in reverse: what, exactly, is the “process” that is “due”?

It turns out this matters, which is why the Fifth Amendment provides that “no person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”—and the Fourteenth Amendment doubles down on that (there are separate purposes each version of the clause fulfills—but we’ll save that for next semester). And the retirees guarding the gates of my local shopping mall seem to agree, spending their golden years protesting some lack of it.

The trick is, again: what “process” is “due”

“Process” is what lawyers charge you so much money for understanding—but there are only a few examples of such that were intended simply to enrich my profession (there are a few). Mostly, each hoop a litigant must jump through is a tiny Chesterton Fence, which was put in because before we did…we ended up like characters in a Charles Dickens Novel—and it turned out no one liked that. And each time we didn’t like something, we made a rule to make sure it definitely never happened to anyone again like that…until a hundred years later it turned out that solution screwed over a whole other group of people, etc. That’s the short version (for the long version, I recommend Bleak House). And, as the Dinosaurs turned into birds, over the centuries those injustices and annoyances piled up, page after page, into the Rules of Procedure that, well, give you the Process you’re Due.

And what are you due? The most important things are easy, because we make a point to spell them out in constitutions and statutes: a right to counsel if you’re on trial for a crime, a right to a speedy and public trial if you are to be subject to one, the right to notice before the government takes your property. We put those provisions in constitutions and statutes and regulations just because eventually some government official will need to be reminded of them.

You are due legal process in all sorts of ways, at all sorts of times—but what process you are due depends on what you are proceeding for or towards, and the ultimate consequences you face. Our strictest procedural requirements are reserved for criminal defendants—a free lawyer if they can’t afford one, a full jury trial, rights of appeal, to confront witnesses against them, etc.; convictions must be “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the highest standard we ask juries to apply, which places the burden of proof on the government.

In a civil case by contrast—typically about money, or about getting a court order to prevent some violation of the law—you have a right to your day in court, and to a jury if you’d like one, but the public need not cover your lawyer, and the legal standard is typically one of “preponderance,” which means the jury decides which side is more likely than not to be in the right. We treat disputes about dollars and cents less strictly than efforts by the state to lock people away in cages.

And so on down the line. Where government action risks depriving people of their property, courts often require the government observe legal process such as a right to notice, and a right to a hearing to dispute the governments claims. In Goldberg v. Kelly, the Supreme Court held that this extended to the denial of government welfare benefits. Goldberg is controversial, with the more conservative justices of the contemporary Supreme Court questioning its underlying premise that recipients of government welfare have the equivalent of a property right in the benefits they’ve been relying on.

The Supreme Court’s traditional test comes from Mathews v. Eldridge, which found certain procedures for terminating social security disability benefits sufficient. Under Mathews, courts are supposed to compare the interest of the individual in not being deprived of their property, to the interest of the government in carrying out the relevant policy and burden on the government of additional process. Basically: how big a deal is this really to you, and is that a big enough deal to make the government jump through extra hoops?

Each interaction with the state therefore presents its own question of the extent and nature of process due. I have not stopped to ask the older protesters in my neighborhood about their signs, but I suspect they’re echoing common objections to the current program of immigration enforcement, which has attempted to bypass the backlog of immigration hearings by, well, in many casing skipping the hearings entirely. Immigration is actually a good example, however, of the sliding scale of process due: since a noncitizen has, by definition, no pre-existing right to be in the country at all, their presence in the country is subject to the regulatory regime establish by Congress—and the regime we have has significant limits. Immigration courts, for instance, are not independent courts in the traditional sense. Rather, they are internal administrative bodies of the Executive branch, which is a fancy way of saying they’re the employees of the President and subject to his oversight in deciding the immigration cases that come before them. Unlike a traditional federal court, which is independent of the President, in immigration cases the Attorney General actually has unilateral authority to overrule the “judges” who work for her.

The process you’re due therefore depends on context, and is subject to debate. Over the past decade, universities (under pressure from the Obama and Biden administrations) implemented increasingly draconian tribunals for students accused of sexually assaulting other students. Serious crimes became the subject of kangaroo courts, where the accused are denied any reasonable chance of rebutting the charges. The assessment of these initiatives by actual courts has been withering, finding repeated violations of the due process rights of students.

But it took a great deal of litigation just to hold those universities to account—and most people don’t have lawyers to navigate this for them. Denials of basic process abound—the Liberty Justice Center recently filed an amicus brief in another benefits case, where the government has found yet new ways to deny citizens basic process when depriving them of property. The right to legal process is in fact the foundation of all other rights, because it is how you enforce all those other rights. It is not the case that the government cannot take our property, or is barred from depriving us of our life or liberty. It can do all those things, but only after affording each of us the process we’re due, which is what makes our republic a government of laws, and not of men.

Meet Reilly!

Reilly Stephens serves as Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, litigating cases in state and federal courts around the country covering a wide range of expertise including free speech and association, campaign finance, labor law, search and seizure, property rights, educational freedom, federalism, equal protection, due process, and separation of powers.

After joining LJC as a Staff Attorney in 2018, Reilly filed more than a dozen cases around the country to enforce the First Amendment rights of public employees across the country, building on the Center’s landmark Supreme Court victory in Janus v. AFSCME. Along the way, he developed a litigation strategy to revive the nondelegation doctrine, eventually winning only the second appellate nondelegation victory in 80 years. Reilly also serves as one of the lead attorneys for LJC’s amicus practice, contributing to important constitutional cases before the Supreme Court and lower appellate courts throughout the country.

Over the course of the pandemic, Reilly contributed to a number of legal challenges to the excesses of government COVID rules, including a key role in defeating the OSHA vaccine mandate. However, the most important one to Reilly was personal: representing his own bride against the District of Columbia to win the First Amendment right to dance at his own wedding—in the end, the first song inviting guests to the dance floor was “Footloose.” Most recently, he successfully represented a pair of California doctors in challenging the State’s threat to take the licenses of anyone disagreeing with California’s official views about pandemic science.

A 2023-2024 Antonin Scalia Fellow, Reilly has contributed scholarship and commentary on important constitutional issues to many outlets, including National Review, The Federalist, the Washington Examiner, Real Clear Policy, and Gray Television.

Prior to joining LJC, Reilly served as a legal associate in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, where he drafted amicus briefs, and provided research, commentary, and other scholarship important to Cato’s mission. During law school, Reilly served as a law clerk at the Institute for Justice and for the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Class Action Fairness.

Reilly holds a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he served as Senior Articles Editor of the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, which selected his student note for publication—an examination of the potential challenges to drug prohibition from the development of 3D-Printing. He received a M.A. in International Relations, Upper Second Class, from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he played defense for the Men’s Lacrosse Team. A native of Baltimore, he now lives in our nation’s capital with the aforementioned bride, their daughter, and a very, very spoiled rescue mutt.

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The Chicago Teachers’ Union can’t make this story go away. The union, a major player in Illinois politics, is used to getting its way. So maybe it didn’t think that spending only 18% of its budget on “representational activities” was that big a deal. Maybe it figured nobody would notice if it spent $173,000 on a New Mexico recording studio (?) with a swimming pool (?!). Maybe it even figured it could hide all of this from its own members by publishing extremely watered-down financial reports.

Maybe? That’s exactly what CTU did.

CTU’s own bylaws require it to furnish its members with an audited report, annually. Yet it hasn’t done so since September 2020. That was the last time CTU published a full, independent financial audit, prepared by certified public accountants and adhering to generally accepted accounting principles; and that audit only covered the union’s finances through the first half of 2019. Since then, CTU has (belatedly) offered self-prepared, summary reports that aren’t as detailed – and whose authors certainly aren’t independent.

“Belatedly?” Oh, yes. Liberty Justice Center represents a group of CTU members who sued the union, seeking the union’s full audits since 2019. In response, CTU tried to moot the case by publishing those summary reports – and it also deleted its previously-available full audits, the type it had published prior to 2020, to try to hide the ball.

Oh, they also personally retaliated against the lead plaintiff. What lovely people.

In the ensuing litigation, CTU has suggested that their obligation to produce an “audited report” is ambiguous, and that their self-serving, self-prepared summaries suffice. But CTU’s own prior behavior – releasing proper audits up to 2020 – belies that argument. CTU has not offered any compelling explanation for why it abandoned its previous auditing standards. Their real reason is fairly self-evident: they don’t want their own members to see how the union is spending their money.

CTU’s obfuscation goes back years, so why did it only become a story now? My guess is that it has something to do with the fact that in addition to being a union, CTU is also an extremely powerful political entity. During the 2023-24 election cycle, it handed out over $11 million in campaign contributions to politicians and labor PACs. So it’s not terribly surprising that Illinois doesn’t consider this story too important.

But when the Liberty Justice Center filed its lawsuit a year ago, and that lawsuit survived a motion to dismiss in March, CTU’s obfuscation became a larger story. Now the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee is demanding five years of audits. In a letter to CTU’s president, the Committee has expressed a belief that “CTU leadership has actively sought to keep complete financial information from its own members.” The letter further intimates that Congress may amend the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act to prevent CTU from continuing to hide its true financial reports from its members.

Seven years ago, Liberty Justice Center won a tremendous victory for worker rights in Janus v. AFSCME, which held that public employee unions cannot extract agency fees from nonconsenting employees. Public sector unions lost the overwhelming majority of nonmember agency fee payers as a result of that ruling, although membership rates were largely unaffected. If union members are okay with how unions are spending their money, that’s fine; but unions cannot hide the ball like this, and it’s nice to see Congress taking notice.

In October, the Supreme Court heard arguments for Ellingburg v. United States. The case revolves around the Ex Post Facto Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which Calder v. Bull (1798) ruled prohibits legislation that creates or increases criminal punishment after the fact. Holsey Ellingburg Jr. robbed a bank in 1995 and was given a federal criminal restitution to pay until 2015. However, in 1996, Congress passed the Mandatory Victim Restitution Act. This retroactively extended criminal restitution to 20 additional years after being released from prison, including interest. Within the span of a year, Mr. Ellingburg went from owing $7,567.25, to owing $13,476.01 and counting.

Mr. Ellingburg filed suit. An appeals court upheld this legislation, finding that criminal restitution is a civil remedy, not a criminal punishment. Precedent from Calder v. Bull also holds that the Ex Post Facto Clause does not apply to civil issues. He now asks the Supreme Court to decide whether retroactive criminal restitution is a criminal punishment or a civil remedy.

But I believe that is the wrong question to answer. The Court should not spend any time deciding if criminal restitution is criminal or civil—that misses the point. As originally understood, the Ex Post Facto Clause applies to all retrospective legislation, civil or criminal. The Court will no doubt cite numerous cases, statements, and more in their decision. However, I hope they take time to address the history of ex post facto legislation that Calder v. Bull missed.

The record on ex post facto laws in the Constitutional Convention is considerable. Almost every delegate agreed on their wrongness, so the main debate was if the term includes civil legislation. Madison, hailed to be the “father of the Constitution”, made it clear that he believed it does include civil matters—and many others present agreed. Following this, the Convention voted 7-3 in favor of inserting a clause prohibiting “retrospective laws.” “Retrospective laws” were, and still are, known to apply to both criminal and civil matters. The Committee of Style, which included Madison, later changed this clause to say “ex post facto Law.” This committee was tasked with “revising the [style] and arrangement” of the proposed Constitution, not substituting its will for that of the Convention, indicating that these terms are interchangeable.

British law contemporary to the Founders reaffirms this connection. In Wilkinson v. Meyer (1724), the high court ruled that a law retroactively harming civil contract rights was “an ex post facto act.” Nearly 70 years later, the Acts of Parliament (Commencement) Act of 1793 eliminated the “great and manifest injustice” of having all laws be considered enacted on the opening day of the Parliamentary session, not when the bill was actually passed.

Natural Rights theory further explains the Founders’ thoughts. According to the natural law tradition, force is only justifiable as a response to wrongdoing. An individual cannot do wrong when there was no law declaring it so, resulting in retroactive legislation punishing existence itself. Thomas Jefferson himself made it clear “that ex post facto laws are against natural right.”

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s mistake in Calder v. Bull has governed for such a long time that the phrase “ex post facto Law” itself has become synonymous with criminal retroactive legislation. Oral arguments in Ellingburg reflect how ingrained this idea is by not questioning it once. The federal government, state governments, and even governments from around the world have laws, customs, and expectations based on this interpretation. Is it right to effectively change the meaning of “ex post facto Law” after 227 years of precedent?

Yes.

As Justice Kavanaugh acknowledged in oral arguments: “civil retroactivity is something that’s antithetical to basic rule-of-law notions.” No precedent can override the fundamental rights the Ex Post Facto Clause was designed to protect, nor can it erase history. By recognizing this, the Supreme Court has the opportunity to reawaken the Ex Post Facto Clause through Ellingburg v. United States.

Now is the time to say it plainly: All legislation made after the fact is not law at all.

Meet Bradley!

Bradley is the Communications Intern for the Liberty Justice Center. He is pursuing his Master’s Degree in Political Science at the University of Illinois, Springfield. After earning his Political Science B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, Bradley has worked on the communications team of several non-profits. He is passionate about understanding the Constitution and the Natural Rights it protects.

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Read more from our Monday Merits series featuring concise takes on the week’s most compelling legal developments from the attorneys and staff here at the Liberty Justice Center!