Too often, national security and personal liberties are portrayed as inversely related. This is simplistic, and also clearly wrong. After all, in the absence of security, it would be impossible to enjoy our freedoms at all. Nevertheless, some of the hardest national security choices are inevitably those that involve tradeoffs with civil liberties. The need to gather information on our enemies rubs up against expectations of privacy. The eroding line between war and law enforcement endangers principles of due process. And the need to keep secrets increasingly leads to tension with a robust free press.
Latest in Civil Liberties and Constitutional Rights
As judicial elections become competitive, the impartiality and independence of state courts will wane—chipping away at the rule of law and the foundational support it provides to economic stability and national security.
Two significant developments concerning DHS’s intelligence reporting on journalists.
A recently released report from the Office of Intelligence and Analysis with revised redactions reveals deficiencies in the Department of Homeland Security’s 2020 operations in Portland, Oregon.
The government just made a weird admission in my lawsuit about those intelligence reports DHS filed about me.
In a 6-3 decision released on June 8, the Supreme Court ruled that claims filed by individuals under Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics against federal agents do not extend to Fourth Amendment claims of excessive force or First Amendment claims of retaliation.
A group of writers on the right contend that the United States has become dominated by “totalitarian” liberalism. They are wrong.
Democrats in Congress should not let their overlooking of existing federal-court authority, or their displeasure with the result in Bush v. Gore, impede the current effort at bipartisan ECA reform.
The governor of Oklahoma recently asserted the right to exempt the National Guard of his state from receiving the coronavirus vaccine, raising unique legal questions in the process.
Pre-pandemic precedents provide important—but incomplete—guidance to courts as they grapple with challenges to a rapidly rising wave of coronavirus vaccination mandates.
On June 21, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed several claims in the overlapping suits filed by Black Lives Matter, the American Civil Liberties Union and others against former President Donald Trump, former Attorney General William Barr and a number of federal and local officers and agencies for the forcible clearing of protestors in Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020.