Judiciary
The 1859 Oberlin Trial: A Victory for the Higher Law
Months prior to John Brown’s infamous 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry, a trial took place rooted in the same issues of slavery and federal enforcement that, while ultimately inconsequential in shaping future debate, is a historical event worth remembering. The incident...
Indian Child Welfare Act: Another case of Congress’s overreach goes to the Supreme Court
The federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) is a classic instance of congressional overreach: It imposes sweeping child adoption rules on the states and has caused extreme hardship for Native children and the non-Native families who have opened their hearts and homes...
How the Supreme Court Rewrote the Constitution Part VII: Concentration Camps and the End
This is the last installment in a series on the nadir, or low point, of the U.S. Supreme Court. This was the period from 1937 to 1944, when the court stopped protecting the Constitution’s limits on the federal government. Our Constitution has never fully recovered....
Yet Another Federal Court Fail
Conservatives and libertarians often count on the federal courts to “protect their rights.” This is a bad strategy. Most of the time it fails. Instead of protecting rights, federal courts hand down bad precedents that end up applying to the entire United States. Yet...