Supreme Court

In January, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s chief diversity officer sent an email announcing the “Diversity Word of the Month”—privilege.

Dana’s son displayed concerning behavior from a very young age. It was a lot for Dana to handle—and she also had two other children. She reached out to services that provide “respite care”: part-time help for parents and other caregivers who need occasional breaks. Respite care is a game changer for parents of special needs children. A good respite caregiver can make a struggling mom feel like she’s not alone.

When CODA won Best Picture at the 2022 Academy Awards, viewers were surprised. CODA is a quiet film about a deaf fishing family in Massachusetts. It stars an unknown lead actress and was made for under $10 million—a paltry budget, by Hollywood standards. Yet it beat out slick, star-studded movies like Dune, The Power of the Dog, and Don’t Look Up.

Jackson had been a U.S. Supreme Court Justice since 1941. But at the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman asked Jackson to take a leave of absence from the Court to serve as chief U.S. prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders

Shouting could be heard just outside the Supreme Court one Thursday afternoon in June, as two groups of protestors gathered in response to the Justices’ latest ruling.

The morning after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Mike and Chantell Sackett—Pacific Legal Foundation clients who battled the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for 16 years over their half-acre property—NPR’s Morning Edition said the Sackett ruling seemed “different, more lasting” than other rulings.

When the county seized and sold the Minneapolis condo of Geraldine Tyler, an elderly grandmother, to settle her property tax debt, it should have refunded Geraldine the excess profit from the sale above the amount of her debt. Instead, it kept everything.

On a yellow couch in North Carolina. That’s exactly where I was seven years ago when my life changed forever. I was visiting my in-laws for our oldest child’s spring break, and I was doing what every parent does when their kids are napping—I checked my work emails. One was an unsolicited message from a recruiter asking—in true headhunter-speak—if I knew anyone that might be interested in leading a long-established public interest law firm. I was already at a long-established public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, and had I not been at spring break, I’d have deleted the email straight away. I wasn’t looking for a job and was quite content where I was. But I happened to mention it to my wife, Lyndsay, who was sitting next to me, chuckling that I’d received another one of those emails, which I routinely sent to the trash. Her response was a surprise—what would it hurt to explore the possibility?

Mountain lions are solitary animals. They don’t move in packs; they prefer to be left alone. A mountain lion will stick to his territory. He’ll generally avoid human beings. But sometimes, hunters go looking for mountain lions. Here’s how a mountain lion hunt works in Montana: Tourists pay thousands of dollars to guides, who wait until a fresh snow blankets the ground. That makes the lion’s prints easy to track. Once the guides find a lion’s trail, they let loose a pack of hounds that chase the lion up a tree, pinning him in place.

Geraldine Tyler, the 94-year-old Minneapolis woman at the center of next month’s argument before the Supreme Court.

The first spectator arrived at midnight. He brought a sleeping bag and an umbrella, then waited outside the Supreme Court all night while it drizzled on and offOther spectators arrived between 2 and 6 a.m. By the time I arrived at the Supreme Court around 9:00 a.m., there was a line of people down the block, waiting in the cold.

“Somebody must have slandered Josef K.,” Franz Kafka writes in the opening line of The Trial, “for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” Josef K. spends the novel in a futile (and ultimately fatal) quest to learn from a mindless bureaucracy what his supposed crime is and how he can prove his innocence. At one point, a priest tells Josef K., “It is not necessary to accept everything as true. One must only accept it as necessary.” The Environmental Protection Agency has adopted this same stance in the case of Sackett v. EPA, which has now spanned 15 years and gone to the Supreme Court twice, most recently in October.

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

Andy Cilek woke up on November 2, 2010, got dressed, and headed to the polls to cast his vote. He’d gotten dressed thousands of times in his life. He never imagined that his T-shirt would take him all the way to the Supreme Court.

But the Environmental Protection Agency says your small plot of land contains wetlands. Even though it’s in a subdivision surrounded by other houses, the EPA says you can’t continue construction—and they’re threatening to fine you tens of thousands of dollars a day.

In 2012, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared Edward Poitevent’s Louisiana land—which had been in his family since the end of the Civil War—a critical habitat of the dusky gopher frog, a species that hadn’t been seen in Louisiana for 50 years.

America is suffering through a crisis for which there is no easy fix. The president is frustrated: The Supreme Court keeps knocking down his initiatives, dismissing them as unconstitutional expansions of federal power.

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”

Born in 1739 to an Irish immigrant doctor and a blue blood South Carolinian mother, Rutledge was strong-willed and proud.

The day after the Supreme Court delivered a victory for Pacific Legal Foundation in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, Elie Mystal, justice correspondent at The Nation, published a column under this blistering, eye-catching headline: “Yesterday’s Union-Busting Supreme Court Decision Was a Segregationist Throwback.” Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision, Mystal wrote, used arguments “effectively repurposed from arguments segregationists used against civil rights activists.” We shouldn’t even be surprised by the decision, he scoffed, because “[t]he court’s conservatives have done everything they can think of to de-unionize America in service of mega-corporate interests.” By siding with Cedar Point Nursery, the Court “not only opened the door to continued union-busting” but also “reinvigorated long-discredited views of how property owners might use that property as an excuse to deny civil rights across the spectrum,”

Peyman Pakdel and his wife, Sima are the kind of neighbors most people want. Peyman is an engineer who worked his way up to become part-owner of a small manufacturing company, Sima is a dentist with a family practice.

In 1902, William Warley was getting ready to graduate from Central High School in Louisville, Kentucky. Warley, as one of the top students at Central and a leader of his class, was a bright, charismatic young Black man looking to make his mark on a country that didn’t yet value your intellect—or your rights—if you were the wrong color.

It has been six years since a crowd of activist United Farm Workers stormed Cedar Point farms, disrupting more than 500 employees hard at work preparing strawberry plants to ship throughout the country. It has been five years since Mike Fahner, owner of Cedar Point Nursery, launched a lawsuit with PLF against California for giving special interest groups permission to invade farms. And it’s been six months since the Supreme Court agreed to hear Mike’s case, with the potential to protect the property rights of owners everywhere. Why is Mike so willing to swan-dive into a long, laborious fight that would put him under the scrutiny of national media, the public, and the most important judges in the country? Well, this is not Mike’s first fight with the government. Mike’s story did not begin in those early-morning hours in 2015 or even with the creation of Cedar Point Nursery 20 years ago. It began with the birth of overreaching environmental regulations and the family farm he was forced to abandon.

Woodrow Wilson spent most of his life in academia penning books about public administration.

On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia, which ruled unanimously that state laws prohibiting interracial marriage violated the promise of equal protection before the law.

Mike Fahner has farming in his blood. He was born to a potato farming family in Northern California, and in the late 1990s he founded Cedar Point Nursery—a strawberry plant farm—in Butte Valley, California. Today, Cedar Point Nursery thrives as one of the country’s biggest strawberry nurseries.

Dave Breemer is a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation who surfs in his free time and greets you with a cheerful “what’s up dude.”

Fighting legal battles against the government can feel like David versus Goliath.

What is actually like to deliver a Supreme Court oral argument?

In politics, ambition is like water: you need some to survive, but too much and you’ll drown.

When Peter Douglas, longtime chair of the California Coastal Commission (CCC), died in 2012, the accolades flowed like wine. Though a state-level official, he was prestigious enough to land a New York Times obituary lauding him as a “sentry of California’s coast.” The same obit quoted a colleague who dubbed Douglas “the world’s greatest bureaucratic street fighter.” That was intended as a compliment, but the description also suggested something less savory about Douglas’ approach: Like a street fighter, he was willing to fight dirty if he thought it was the way to win.

Americal culture is made up of ideas and institutions that are passed down and accepted from one generation to the next, making up our distinctive way of life.

On February 5, 2017, Tom Brady marched the New England Patriots down the field in overtime, scored the game-winning touchdown, overcame a 25-point deficit, and won Super Bowl LI. That day proved one thing: Great offense wins games. In public interest law, going on offense means winning the right cases to establish important legal precedent on your issues. But winning those cases doesn’t happen by accident. It takes organizational strategy, dedicated attorneys and clients, and an ability to adapt and adjust when the plan falls apart.

Peace and quiet. That’s all Rose Knick—heroine of our 12th and most recent victory at the U.S. Supreme Court—wanted when she purchased her homestead in Eastern Pennsylvania nearly five decades ago.

On October 2, 2018, Rose Knick called PLF with an important question: How many quarters should she bring for the coin-operated lockers at the U.S. Supreme Court building? 

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a major victory for PLF client Edward Poitevent on November 27 in the case of Weyerhaeuser v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the infamous “phan- tom frog” case, involving the feds’ abuse of the Endangered Species Act through critical habitat designations. But the decision is more than just a win for one client; it’s a big win for private property rights and government accountability.

In June, The U.S. Supreme Court came down 5–4 on the side of free speech in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra. While PLF was not involved, it is noteworthy that the Court’s holding supports PLF’s view of professional speech—that the First Amendment protects the rights of individuals—regardless of their profession—to speak or not speak their minds without government retribution.

In June, PLF scored one of the big- gest First Amendment wins in recent years with our victory in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky (MVA). In MVA, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a broad ban on political apparel at the polling place. The Minnesota law at issue prohibited voters from wearing t-shirts featuring the logo of groups with “recognizable political views”—including groups like PLF, the ACLU, and even Ben and Jerry’s. PLF, representing a voter who was censured for wearing a Tea Party t-shirt, secured a sweeping victory for free speech.

“You have the right to remain silent.” Fans of cop shows are familiar with those words that remind criminal suspects of their constitutional right to avoid incriminating themselves. While this guarantee comes from the Fifth Amendment, the First Amendment freedom of speech also protects the right to remain silent—a right that PLF has unswervingly defended for our entire history.

PLF has always been an effective and eager advocate for First Amendment freedoms. Our most recently argued U.S. Supreme Court case, Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, upheld the right of voters to wear t-shirts and other apparel that peacefully expresses political views at a polling place. One of our first Supreme Court cases, Keller v. State Bar of California, struck down a law that forced lawyers to contribute money to support bar association lobbying for political positions they oppose.

Margaret Hatcher once said, “You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.” PLF attorney Dave Breemer knows this full well, having fought the same property rights battle for the past 15 years. And sometimes one everyday person makes the difference.

At the end of the last term, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court. Although his considerable power as the Court’s “swing justice” occasionally made him a controversial figure, Kennedy’s place in the Court’s history should be defined by his deep appreciation for the role of free speech in our Constitution and society. Hopefully our next Justice will continue his commitment to a strong First Amendment.

When Andy Cilek, executive director of Minnesota Voters Alliance, went to the polls in 2010, he was kept from voting for five hours because a poll worker decided that his clothing violated Minnesota’s “voting dress code.” Eventually, he was allowed to cast his vote, but poll workers took down his name for possible prosecution. All because of a t-shirt.

PLF has been a consistent presence before the U.S. Supreme Court since opening our doors in 1973—we have a record unmatched among our peers. Importantly, we are increasing our presence at the Court: the justices have ruled on the merits in five of our cases since 2012, and we have filed a remarkable nine petitions asking the Court to hear new cases so far this term. Add to that the dozens of friend-of-the-court briefs filed in support of individual liberty and the principles of limited government in others’ cases during the past few years alone.

Attending a United States Supreme Court hearing was never on Bob Pepper’s bucket list.

PLF is going to the U.S. Supreme Court once again, making this our 14th time we’ve been before the high court. This time, we are fighting for the First Amendment rights of voters nation- wide. In Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, we’re representing Minnesota voters in their challenge to a state- wide ban on political buttons, badges, and t-shirts at the polling place.

Nollan Outcome • In 1987, PLF won the Nollan case at the Supreme Court of the United States. That decision holds that when a property owner seeks a government permit, the government may not condition the permit on the uncompensated surrender of a public easement, unless it is necessary to mitigate harm caused by the property use.

Government cannot steal. That was the essence of Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in Nollan v. California Coastal Commission. If government demands someone’s property in exchange for a permit, then the taking of the property must reduce a serious harm caused by the permitted development. It’s not enough that the government might want the property for “the public good.” Instead, the taking must directly reverse a harm that would otherwise be caused by the development.