lawgovernment
Last Friday, activist Shannon Watts took to social media to respond to the Supreme Court's 8–1 ruling in U.S. v. Rahimi, in which the justices ruled it is legal for the government to temporarily disarm someone whom a court has found poses a safety threat to others. "The Rahimi case should never have been taken up by SCOTUS," she said in a now-deleted post on X, formerly Twitter. "To even question whether domestic abusers should have access to guns shows just how extreme this court has become." It was an odd thing to say, for a few reasons. For one, the decision, by pretty much all accounts, wa...
Reason
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration is once again trying to carve out broad new exemptions to the state's celebrated government transparency law. This time, lawyers for DeSantis are arguing that call logs from a high-ranking staffer's phone aren't public record, even though the staffer was conducting government business, because it was a private phone. The Tampa Bay Times first reported Thursday that lawyers for the DeSantis administration argued in court this week before a Leon County judge that the governor's office shouldn't be compelled to turn over call logs from DeSantis...
Reason
A new proposal in the New York Legislature would prohibit insurance companies from doing business in the state if they insure businesses that make over 10 percent of their money from fossil fuels. The bill, however, could backfire, encouraging insurers to vacate New York entirely rather than leave the lucrative industry. "Within five years of the effective date of this article," the bill mandates, the "superintendent shall require any insurer doing business in the state to certify that they have divested" from "any company that derives ten percent or more of revenue from exploration, extractio...
Reason
Though still on the books, Arizona's near-total ban on abortion was buried deep in the state's history—until recently. An April decision from the state's Supreme Court breathed new life into this long-dormant law. The ban in question—first passed by the territory of Arizona in 1864 and later codified into Arizona state law—mandated two to five years' prison time for intentionally acting "to procure the miscarriage" of a pregnant woman "unless it is necessary to save her life." This law became unenforceable in 1973 when Roe v. Wade recognized a federal right to an abortion. Since then, the stat...
Reason
A federal judge late last month handed down the final sentence in a string of high-profile prosecutions related to a protest at an abortion provider in Washington, D.C. That defendant, Paulette Harlow, 75, received two years in prison for helping block an entrance to a clinic in October 2020. She joins nine other defendants who received sentences from 10 to 57 months' incarceration. That the group broke the law is basically beyond debate. Whether or not the law under which they were prosecuted should be a law at all, however, is not—a question worth interrogating regardless of where you fall o...
Reason
Can state police track drivers everywhere they go via hundreds of license plate cameras? A new lawsuit says that Illinois' widespread use of such cameras—called automatic license plate readers (ALPRs)—violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches because it breaches citizens' reasonable expectations of privacy. The complaint—filed by two residents of Cook County, Stephanie Scholl and Frank Bednarz, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on May 30—names the Illinois State Police (ISP), ISP Director Brendan F. Kelly, Illinois Attorney General...
Reason
Argentine President Javier Milei's comprehensive reform package was narrowly approved in the Senate late on Wednesday, as protests against his measures turned violent in Buenos Aires. Following an 11-hour debate, senators voted 37–36 in favor of Milei's tax reforms and an omnibus bill. The motion was initially tied 36–36, but Vice President Victoria Villarruel, the head of the chamber, cast the decisive vote. "For those Argentines who suffer, who wait, who do not want to see their children leave the country…my vote is affirmative," Villarruel said. Last December, Milei introduced his extensive...
Reason
In a welcome development for people who care about liberty, Australia's government suspended its efforts to censor the planet. The country's officials suffered pushback from X (formerly Twitter) and condemnation by free speech advocates after attempting to block anybody, anywhere from seeing video of an attack at a Sydney church. At least for the moment, they've conceded defeat based, in part, on recognition that X is protected by American law, making censorship efforts unenforceable. A Censor Throws In the Towel"I have decided to discontinue the proceedings in the Federal Court against X Corp...
Reason
It was impossible to avoid the "strange bedfellows" cliché when reading about the criminal justice reform movement in the 2010s. Conservatives and evangelicals worked alongside bleeding-heart liberals and civil libertarians to fix what they all (at the time) agreed were unjust prison sentences and punitive policies. Fast-forward a decade, and the bipartisan sleepovers are over. Most of the same advocate groups are still lobbying for reform—and notching victories in some states—but the broad-based path for criminal justice reform bills has narrowed or altogether disappeared in other places. Cla...
Reason
The United States doesn't fully meet the definition of a banana republic—we don't have an economy dependent on resources, like bananas. But in terms of unstable politics in which government officials misuse powers and the courts to punish foes, the U.S. resembles that term more every day. The concluded hush-money trial of former (future?) President Donald Trump is a case in point. A Convoluted Case With Political Ramifications"President Donald Trump was convicted yesterday of allegedly altering business records to conceal his alleged payment of money to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, in order to...
Reason
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