Last week, PLF partnered with Do No Harm—an association of more than 14,000 physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers—to file a federal lawsuit challenging the race-based membership requirements of Minnesota’s Health Equity Advisory and Leadership (HEAL) Council.

As a nation, we’ve come too far to allow government discrimination under any circumstances—whether on public boards or elsewhere. People should be treated as individuals, not as members of a group they didn’t choose. 

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Jason Murchison and his team have helped thousands of clients learn to surf over the years. As a former Navy diver, he’s taken great pains to ensure that safety is his team’s number one priority. 

Still, local bureaucrats effectively outlawed Jason’s business—requiring special permits for anyone offering paid private instruction on public beaches. After the City arbitrarily denied Jason’s applications—multiple times—he decided to fight back. 

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The Constitution explicitly grants Congress—not the president—the power to impose tariffs. So what exactly happened at the turn of the 20th century that caused Congress to relinquish its power? Is there a chance that the Framers’ original intent might be restored? Does the Supreme Court have a role to play? 

PLF attorney Molly Nixon joined The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast earlier this week to explore these questions and more. 

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Last week, we introduced you to Tom and Ayda Hamann—a Wyoming ranching family whose dispute with a local irrigation district led to $10,000 in property damage and a traumatic brain injury. 

Now Tom is speaking out about what the government did to him. “I may wake up,” he told us, “and because of [the] deterioration of the scar tissue in my brain, I may not even recognize my son, or who I’m laying next to in bed, my wife. People just don’t understand what they’re doing. It’s the biggest overreach you can imagine.” 

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In 2011, regulation added $65,000 to the cost of a single-family home in the United States. By 2021, the additional cost had ballooned to nearly $94,000. Permit approval timelines and environmental regulatory disputes often add to the headache, making it even more difficult to build. 

As PLF attorney David Deerson points out, “A recent report by the Little Hoover Commission observed that the California Environmental Quality Act, better known as CEQA, often turns ‘housing development into something akin to urban warfare—contested block by block, building by building.’” 

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The federal government owns almost 70% of the land in Utah, including 18.5 million “unappropriated” acres—land that does not include national parks, national monuments, lands held in trust for Native American reservations, or military bases. 

PLF senior legal fellow Stephen Davis discusses Utah’s recent efforts to challenge the federal government’s retention of these unused lands—which the Supreme Court refused to hear—in his latest piece for the FedSoc Blog.  

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PLF’s Jim Burling was recently published in National Review, sharing a sobering insight into what it truly means to fight for justice:  

“In the real world, lawyers are expensive, and few can afford them. In the real world, it takes years, sometimes decades, to achieve a just result from a court. And in the real world, government actors try every trick possible to evade an unfavorable judgment. This is the world that Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) and its clients operate in.” 

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