Due Process

There are some statistics you force yourself to forget...

David Wulf was days away from starting production on a new movie—a romantic comedy set on a farm—when he got a voicemail from a Teamsters representative.

It can show up in your mail one day:...

There’s something quintessentially American about a lone man driving...

This was now Adams’ quandary: Would he—a patriot who railed against British oppression, and whose cousin Samuel Adams ran the Sons of Liberty—defend the British soldiers?

Imagine you are a young child living in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. You are brought into a crowded meetinghouse where two magistrates—both commanding older men who serve on the council of Massachusetts Bay Colony—are waiting to interrogate you in front of an angry audience.

Three days earlier, Sarah, a Ph.D. student in Waltham, Massachusetts, had taken her three-month-old baby, Cal, to the emergency room after his fever spiked to 103.6 degrees. At the hospital, doctors ordered x-rays to rule out bronchiolitis and discovered Cal had two partially healed rib fractures. Neither Sarah nor Josh had any idea how the rib fractures happened. When the hospital social worker talked to Sarah about the injury, Sarah was more concerned about Cal’s fever—he did have bronchiolitis, it turned out. The social worker probed the family’s home life, asking Sarah if her husband “often ignored” their children. She didn’t like Sarah’s response.

They were trapped. David Tibbitts’ debilitating stroke in 2018 left him confined to a wheelchair. Stephanie, his wife, was having trouble moving David around the narrow hallways of their cramped 1930s-era home on the California coast.

Occasionally, Theresa Vondra gets a client who has the wrong idea about her massage business.

This year, we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Fourteenth Amendment’s adoption. That amendment fulfilled the Declaration of Independence’s promise of inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and government dedicated to the protection of those rights. It did so by guaranteeing our rights against the states, not just the federal government.

Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Bill of Rights checked only the abuses of individual rights by the federal government, and even after the Civil War there were few federal restraints on state powers. Individuals could look only to state courts and their constitutions to check abuses by state legislatures.

Ask any child navigating the world of playground politics and they’ll tell you there are few things worse than a bully. A bully can take away your free- dom and dignity to dictate their will or get you to fall in line.

The struggle for liberty is old, yet it must be continually renewed—because the struggle is never-ending. As the world moves slowly, fitfully, and yet inexorably toward a state of increased liberty, we must always recall Ronald Reagan’s words: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”  Different generations have had to employ different means of creating and defending liberty. Great philosophers like John Locke provided the intellectual ammunition to the warriors for liberty in the 17th century. The Revolutionary generation set down stirring principles and a constitutional framework. The generation that followed the Civil War extended those principles to even more Americans, especially through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

One of America's most cherished constitutional guarantees is the promise that no one may be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Many people know of the due process protections for people accused of a crime, such as the presumption of innocence and the right to counsel. But adjudication processes by regulatory agencies are different, and sometimes result in property owners being treated worse than criminals.