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The 1859 Oberlin Trial: A Victory for the Higher Law

By: TJ Martinell Months prior to John Brown’s infamous 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry, a trial took place rooted in the same issues of slavery and federal enforcement that, while ultimately ...

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Indian Child Welfare Act: Another case of Congress’s overreach goes to the Supreme Court

By: Rob Natelson The federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) is a classic instance of congressional overreach: It imposes sweeping child adoption rules on the states and has caused extreme hardship ...

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How the Supreme Court Rewrote the Constitution Part VII: Concentration Camps and the End

By: Rob Natelson This is the last installment in a series on the nadir, or low point, of the U.S. Supreme Court. This was the period from 1937 to 1944, when ...

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Yet Another Federal Court Fail

By: Mike Maharrey Conservatives and libertarians often count on the federal courts to “protect their rights.” This is a bad strategy. Most of the time it fails. Instead of protecting rights, ...

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How the Supreme Court Rewrote the Constitution Part VI: Crushing Civil Liberties

March 17, 2022 Court Cases / History / Judiciary 0

By: Rob Natelson The first, second, third, fourth and fifth installments  in this series traced how the Supreme Court responded to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to break constitutional limits and create a powerful federal government. After trying ...

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How the Supreme Court Rewrote the Constitution Part V: Killing Economic Freedom

By: Rob Natelson The first, second, third, and fourth installments in this series described how the Constitution established a relatively small federal government with limited powers and how President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal challenged that ...

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Record Shows Supreme Court Overwhelmingly Protects Federal Power

By: TJ Martinell One of the most prevalent political strategies is to sue and hope federal courts rein in unconstitutional federal overreach. But evidence shows it almost never turns out ...

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Federal Judges Protect and Defend Precedent

A nominee for a seat on a U.S. Court of Appeals revealed exactly why we can’t count on federal judges to “protect and defend” the Constitution. Their commitment is to ...

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Neither Necessary nor Proper

It was sixteen years ago last month that the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Gonzales v. Raich (2005), ruled that the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 801) did not exceed ...

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How One Landmark Case Shaped the Commerce Clause

November 30, 2020 Commerce Clause / Court Cases 0

By: Bob Fiedler In some ways, John Marshall’s opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden expanded federal power using expansive definitions of various words in the Commerce Clause. But future courts ignored an important limiting ...

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