Ian Millhiser

The conservative philosopher GK Chesterton is known for a parable about two lawmakers who encounter a fence. One, brash and overeager, announces that he can’t see the point of the fence so it should be removed. The other, who Chesterton […]

Federal law seeks to make communications technology like telephones and the internet, in the words of one older statute, “available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States.” A longstanding federal program that seeks to implement

Louisiana v. Callais, a case about whether Louisiana’s congressional maps are an illegal racial gerrymander, should be one of the easiest cases the justices have heard in many years. That’s because less than two years ago, the Supreme Court decided

The question of what happens if the Trump administration openly defies a federal court order has hung over the United States since President Donald Trump’s second term began. If that happens, it will trigger a constitutional crisis. Now, that long-awaited

A Vox reader asks: If we have “separation of church and state,” why do we give religious schools tax exemption? How come religious schools get government funding? Why was Trump allowed to campaign on religion and publicly sell Bibles? Why

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear Chiles v. Salazar, a challenge to a Colorado law preventing most mental health professionals from offering “conversion therapy” — a discredited method of counseling that attempts to turn LGBTQ patients

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court handed down a very brief order that effectively requires the government to pay foreign aid contractors as much as $2 billion for work they’ve already completed. The Court’s order is quite narrow and is

The nation of Mexico’s lawsuit against several major US gun manufacturers, known as Smith & Wesson Brands v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, was cursed long before it reached the Supreme Court. Tuesday’s oral argument in the case only confirmed that. It

On Wednesday night, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily halted a lower court order, which would have required the Trump administration to make approximately $2 billion in foreign aid payments that it had stopped as part of a broader attack on

The proper term for a Supreme Court session where the justices hear verbal presentations by lawyers is an “oral argument,” but Wednesday’s hearing in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services hardly qualified as an argument. Everyone, on every side