When environmentalists celebrate the 50-year impact of the Clean Water Act, they talk about what the law means for animals and plant life. The CWA, they say, has helped fish, birds, and turtles thrive in America’s waterways.
“We're just following the science.” That simple and seemingly unobjectionable statement has been used over the past year to justify every policy, regulation, and law related to COVID-19, no matter their scope or the length they’re in place.
What are we really fighting? PLF brings the fight to government across several battlegrounds. We fight for your right to use your property however you see fit; to earn a living in whatever vocation calls you; to speak or display what’s on your mind; and to enjoy equal protection before the law, regardless of your gender or race. All without fear that you’ll be made an example of by the State. These battlegrounds bring us into disputes with many different arms of government. Consider just four of PLF’s roughly 100 active lawsuits, where we are suing: The California Coastal Commission (CCC), The Fairfax County School Board, The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and The U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
In 2013, Andy Johnson built a stock pond on his Wyoming property to provide safer, more reliable access to water for his small herd of cattle. The pro-liberty public interest law movement was born out of a need to combat the escalating creep of government into people’s lives.
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.
Frederick Winslow Taylor was a business consultant obsessed with scientific precision in everything he did, whether it was a friendly game of tennis or the operation of a steel lathe.
Federal Laws can be valuable tools for protecting the environment. But as a result, environmental laws also limit the ability of property owners to protect public resources.
On Christmas Eve I lost a friend, PLF lost a star attorney, and the nation lost a great advocate for freedom. With the passing of Reed Hopper, we have much to mourn but at the same time much to celebrate in having been blessed to share Reed’s passion for the law and liberty. But even more than that, Reed had an unerring sense of right and wrong, and the innate ability to choose the higher path in everything he did.
A unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22 vindicated 11 PLF clients like John Duarte and Kevin Pierce who simply wanted to challenge the Environmental Protection Agency in federal court. PLF’s victory ensures that future challengers to the Clean Water Act and regulatory malfeasance will have plenty of time to take the EPA to court.
After the husband passed away from lung cancer, Kimberly Manor decided that she wanted to help other longtime smokers quit and hoped to prevent others from going through the pain she experienced. Kimberly owns and operates Moose Jooce in Lake, Michigan, a store that sells vaping products. These devices, sometimes known more generally as “electronic nicotine delivery” products, provide Kimberly’s customers with a real alternative to smoking, one that many studies and testimonials have suggested could be a much safer alternative.
The English Historian Lord Acton told us that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” As those who have been battling government agencies for many years know, it can be added that administrative power corrupts both the governing and the governed just the same. As bureaucracies grow, so too does their reach. As their reach grows, freedoms diminish. And as freedoms wither, people are tempted to compromise their rights in order to survive.
The regulatory state began last century during the New Deal, inspired by earlier Progressives who believed that individualism, capitalism, and the Constitution were obstacles to prosperity.
In 1876, Kudzu was introduced into the United States as an attractive and seemingly harmless vine; however, the invasive species has strangled vast territories. A similar invasive species has sprawled throughout the United States federal government: the mass of federal regulatory agencies that we refer to as “the regulatory state.” And— through a sophisticated and com- prehensive litigation, research, and education plan—PLF is taking proverbial shears to this unconstitutional mass of government entanglement and dismantling the regulatory state.