Equality & Opportunity

The Protestors wouldn’t leave the field. Football players from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Southern California watched, confused. Their game—a nationally televised rivalry matchup—was supposed to begin. But just after the coin toss, 15 protestors stormed the 50-yard-line and ran to the center of the field.This was Saturday, October 28, 2023. Viewers watching on TV assumed the protest was about Gaza, where Israel was retaliating for Hamas’s October 7 attacks. The protestors on the Berkeley football field certainly looked like they were protesting war: They shouted wildly, hooking their arms tightly together, ignoring the police. One young man appeared to be in tears.

Yiatin Chiu's 26-year-old daughter isn’t thrilled her mother is suing the New York State Department of Education.

Dr. Azadeh Khatibi grew up in Tehran in the early 1980s. Her father wanted sons; he got two daughters. “He was like, ‘What is their future going to be like?’” she says.

Hung Cao and Marty Hierholzer both live in Virginia, only a few hours from each other. They have different backgrounds: Hung is of Vietnamese descent; Marty is white.

“I walked into Stuyvesant High School and I thought I was in Chinatown,” Milady Baez, then-deputy chancellor of the Department of Education in New York City, complained to colleagues at a 2018 meeting.

It was the late 1860s, and the city of New Orleans had a gruesome problem: Animal intestines clogged the city’s water pipes.

Beloved American Chef Julia Child learned to cook in France, where butter is indispensable. When she taught her recipes to American audiences in the 1960s, she had a favorite mantra: “With enough butter, anything is good.”

On days when Mark Shirley serves lunch at his food truck, Ole Time Smokehouse, he wakes up at 3:30 a.m. By the time most people in Farmville, North Carolina, are just getting out of bed, Mark’s barbeque has already been cooking for hours.

When the Supreme Court blocked President Biden’s OSHA vaccine mandate in January, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor joined together in a firmly worded dissent. At issue, they said, was a “single, simple question”

In the past few decades as the country has evolved toward equality, moves from universities like crafting admissions policies to admit only so many students of one race or shaping a company boardroom based on the sex of its members would’ve been thought reprehensible.

Our clients never asked the elites to come save them, but the elites came anyway. From coast to coast, minorities’ unwelcome champions have been working hard to bake racial discrimination back into the law, ironically, in the name of equality.

In recent years, Americans are paying renewed attention and having new discussions on race, racism, and discrimination.

Thumbing through my third-grade son’s school materials for a lesson on voting and democracy, I was struck by something that years, maybe even months, earlier would have shocked me, but now seems unfortunately a sign of the times. This booklet—remember, for elementary school students—wasn’t trying to evoke good feelings about how voting gives every American the right to direct how their government works. Instead, the booklet focused almost entirely on what populations didn’t initially have the vote in America. (And, strangely, it threw in a section on César Chávez’ unionization of farm workers.)

It's hard to imagine what life was like back in January. I was planning a spring full of travel for work, and then a summer vacation in Italy. But that was a very different world than the one we live in now.

When I was a child, my home was my courtroom.

My cousin could never speak about his addiction without speaking about the lack of meaning in his life. His last text to me was three days before he overdosed on April 9, 2018: “I believe in God a hundred percent. I love him and he does me right. We have our own relationship. But he didn’t give me that compass.” Mikey and I grew up together in a family of scallopers in Massachusetts, where fishing is as much a lifestyle as it is a career. As a child, Mikey taught me to tie nautical knots in my shoelaces. As a teenager, he sent videos of scallop-shucking races between him and my other cousins. For our family, work and meaning weave together like a tapestry and it’s impossible to untangle one from the other. But as a young adult, Mikey’s opportunities dried up and he, like many others, struggled to keep a job. Without it, he lost his sense of direction.

As soon as she heard that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio had appointed Richard Carranza as the city’s new chancellor of education, Wai Wah Chin was worried.

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.

PLF exist to establish a rule of law under which all Americans may live free in their pursuit of happiness. We fight to preserve and advance the American ideals of individualism and liberty, and our mission has never been more vital. Individualism is the animating moral principle of our Constitution. It is the idea that each person is an end in himself, endowed by nature with rights to think and act according to his own conscience and interests. Government is a servant, on this view, and it is good to the extent that it protects individuals’ rights to life, liberty, and property.