Amicus Brief Commentary

Government employs a veritable army of teachers, professors, graduate students, undergraduate work-study students, as well as coaches, teachers’ aides, tutors, and administrators. To what degree can government, as an employer, punish the people it hires for their own personal expression? That’s a live question. The First Amendment protects citizens from the government. The government doesn’t…

Public accommodations laws “help ensure a free and open economy.” Traditionally, public accommodations laws have been applied to, well, public accommodations, such as hotels, or “what the old common law promised to any member of the public wanting a meal at the inn, that accepting the usual terms of service, they will not be turned…

Should a child’s opportunity for education turn on the religious perspective of the child? Should it turn on the religious perspective of the school? What if the school is just a little bit religious? Or too religious? Would that matter? It would if the child lives in an area of Maine with no public school.…

One of the biggest student free speech cases in the last half century started with a high school cheerleader and a profanity-laced Snapchat. The implications of that terse, ephemeral message extend well beyond the original hundred-plus friends with whom the freshman student shared her post. In a decision today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1…

Today, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in an opinion delivered by Justice Breyer that the Federal Trade Commission must comply with the law and end its ultra vires pursuit of money damages. The opinion presents a straightforward statutory interpretation of the scope of FTC enforcement power under Section 13(b) of the FTC Act, which allows…