You have a right to know your rights

For six years, Mike Jackson was forced to pay approximately $600 a year to the Teamsters union. Mike—an employee at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)—doesn’t agree with the union, doesn’t want to support it, and doesn’t think he receives enough value from membership.

Luckily for Mike, the 2018 landmark Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME recognized that it’s unconstitutional to force public workers to pay money to a union against their will.

Unluckily for Mike, he works in California, which enacted Gag Rule legislation the exact same day as the Janus ruling that keeps workers in the dark about the rights confirmed by the Supreme Court.

As Erin Wilcox writes, Mike’s had enough. He and Tory Smith have joined forces with PLF and the Liberty Justice Center, the law firm that represented Mark Janus in his Supreme Court fight, and this week asked a federal court to strike down the Gag Rules.

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When the Supreme Court is right to overturn precedent

Supreme Court Justices need a healthy respect for past precedents. But sometimes, precedent is so bad it simply has to be overturned.
 
The court did just that last month in the case of Knick v. Township of Scott. The court delivered a victory for champions of property rights by overturning a 1985 precedent that had blocked property rights cases from federal courts.
 
But as Dave Breemer tells us in his op-ed for The Daily Signal, overturning this older decision sparked a vigorous public debate between Justices Elena Kagan and Clarence Thomas.

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States and municipalities should be debating facial recognition tech and privacy

Last month, San Francisco became the first major city to ban facial ID technology by a government agency.

In his op-ed for the Daily Journal, Dan Woislaw explains why all local governments—and liberty advocates—should consider the same questions about the use of such technology and its potential effects on civil liberties as those raised by San Francisco’s leaders.

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