We have held that “[p]rotection against excessive punitive economic sanctions” is “‘fundamental'” and “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.'” And all that would mean little if the government could evade constitutional scrutiny under the Clause’s terms by the simple expedient of fixing a “civil” label on the fines it imposes and declining to pursue any related “criminal” case.
Category: Civil Liberty
How the CDC Became the Speech Police
Secret internal Facebook emails reveal the feds’ campaign to pressure social media companies into banning COVID “misinformation.”
The platforms may have thought they had little choice but to please the CDC, given the tremendous pressure to stamp out misinformation. This pressure came from no less an authority than President Joe Biden himself, who famously accused social media companies of “killing people” in a July 2021 speech.
https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-police/
Supreme Court Decides to Hear Case Challenging State Law Empowering Government to Seize Entire Value of a House to Pay Much Smaller Property Tax Debt
Minnesota law allowed Hennepin County to seize a $40,000 home owned by a 93-year-old widow to pay off a $15,000 tax debt.
Freedom Denied Part 1: How the Culture of Detention Created a Federal Jailing Crisis
In 1987… just 29% of people charged with federal crimes were jailed before trial; the rest were released back to their families. But today, pretrial jailing has become the norm, and we conclude that “the culture of detention” is to blame:
New Jersey Town That Sued a Woman for Public Records Requests Now Wants Lawyer Prosecuted for Same Thing
Irvington made national headlines last year when it filed a lawsuit against an 82-year-old woman for filing too many public records requests. Now it says a lawyer for FIRE should be prosecuted.
Doing Pickering Balancing Right
It is not a workplace “disruption” that co-workers objected to a MAGA hat
The court here correctly, I believe, worked from the assumption that a government school was constitutionally required to be institutionally neutral about political values. The school as such could not prefer Black Lives Matter posters to MAGA hats, and could not base employment decisions on such preferences. It is evident that many university professors, administrators and leaders, at both public and private institutions, would not work from that same assumption.
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/12/29/doing-pickering-balancing-right/
DEA Seizes Record Amounts of Fentanyl in 2022
The iron law of prohibition states that, all things being equal, as enforcement ramps up, smugglers prefer higher potency forms of a drug for the same reason those who sneak alcohol into a football game prefer hard alcohol in flasks to 12‐packs of beer. The lethal logic of the iron law of prohibition means that we cannot enforce our way out of the opioid crisis. And if fentanyl smugglers become somehow easy to catch, there’s always carfentanil, which is about 100 times more potent than fentanyl and has already been showing up in America’s drug supply.
https://www.cato.org/blog/dea-seizes-record-amounts-fentanyl-2022
“I HAVE A DREAM,” 50 YEARS LATER [2013]
“Free markets,” “equality,” “liberty,”: three concepts that form the core of libertarianism… What is a free market when you can’t even sit at the lunch counter…? What is equality when all your schools… are substandard? What is liberty when you’re harassed by a police officer…?
https://www.libertarianism.org/blog/i-have-dream-50-years-later
Privacy in the Digital Era: Who Controls Private Data?
Solutions should focus on undercutting the incentives that merge corporate and government interests. To preserve freedom for posterity, liberty-minded policymakers should be working to stymie the government’s ability to capture and control data in the digital commons. This means preventing public-private partnerships that give government control over private data.