How democratic institutions actually work—and for whom. We investigate Supreme Court doctrine, voting rights litigation, municipal rebellion, participatory budgeting, judicial activism, executive immunity, and the administrative state. From Chevron deference to bilingual governance, legal architecture shapes daily life.
16 articles
After the Guns, the Gravity: Where Gaza Talks Stand—and How Trump Rewrote the Leverage
As of October 14, 2025, an American-brokered ceasefire is in effect. Phase 1 is happening; final status is not. The ceasefire is a door ajar, not a house built. This analysis examines what Trump delivered, what he left out, and what a reality-based settlement must do next.
October 9, 2025
The Politics of a Name: What Trump's Columbus Day Proclamation Actually Teaches
A presidential proclamation does not rename a federal holiday; it performs it. Trump's 2025 Columbus Day proclamation rejects the dual-recognition posture of 2021–2024. Let's be precise about what changed, what didn't, and what a grown-up republic should do instead.
October 6, 2025
When Courts Erase the Spanish Map
In recent years, the Supreme Court has asked judges to test certain rights and regulations against 'history and tradition.' The words feel neutral, even comforting—like walking the family farm before making a will. But methods make worlds. A jurisprudence that privileges a particular.
October 2, 2025
The Bench of Mirrors: Conservative Judicial Activism and the Roberts Court
In American law, 'activist' is the powdered sugar we throw on the bench when we want to make someone else's footprints more visible than our own. Since the 1980s, the conservative legal movement has acted with strategic purpose—first under 'New Federalism,' then through the Roberts Court's project.
September 15, 2025
How 'Originalism' Became a Power Grab
Call it the constitutionalist's promise: decide by text, history, and structure rather than by vibe or partisan appetite. In principle, that's healthy. In practice, on the current Supreme Court, the methods deliver outcomes that lean the same direction over and over—and create a new vision of the.
September 1, 2025
The Constitutional Shell Game
When the Court abandoned tiered scrutiny in Bruen and demanded that gun regulations match the Nation's historical tradition, it turned constitutional litigation into an antiquarian contest. This detailed analysis examines how specific doctrinal moves reshape the balance of constitutional power.
August 28, 2025
The Other Official Language Is Reality
Why a bilingual republic is good law, good engineering, and the cheapest reform we haven't finished. Walk the United States with your ears open and you'll hear what the Census writes in ledgers: nearly one in five people speaks a language other than English at home—Spanish by far the most.
July 24, 2025
The Lost Commons, Found
Land grants, acequias, and the quiet path to Spanish-American co-stewardship. Every country carries an official fiction about who first drew the lines. In the American Southwest, the neatest fiction says the United States arrived to find a blank ledger, then wrote order into wilderness.
July 21, 2025
The Law Beneath the Law
How Spain and France still shape American rights—if you know where to look. Every legal system keeps a diary and a dream. Ours files the diary under 'common law' and the dream under 'the Constitution.' But across the South and West there is a third ledger—stamped in Spanish and French—that still.
July 17, 2025
The Court That Rewrote America
The Roberts Court before and after 2020—how a jurisprudence of 'tradition' remapped power, rights, and the administrative state. Historians will draw a clean fold in the timeline of the Roberts Court. On one side (2005–2019): incrementalism with sharp elbows.
July 14, 2025