Happy (belated) Independence Day! The Supreme Court has given two PLF clients a new shot after a landmark ruling; the media is mischaracterizing two recent decisions (unsurprisingly); and a New Mexico rancher is suing over state-sanctioned trespassing.

Here’s what’s on The Docket. 

Supreme Court gives farmers, truckers a new shot at challenging regulations 

Last week the Supreme Court overruled Chevron deference, the forty-year-old doctrine requiring courts to defer to government agencies. If you’re unsure of the implications of that decision, what happened next should clear things up: On Tuesday, the Supreme Court vacated lower court rulings against two Pacific Legal Foundation clients—a South Dakota farmer and a West Virginia trucking company—and asked the courts to reconsider their cases without deferring to the government. “The cases were the first of what is expected to be a wave of rulings reassessing the power of federal regulators,” Reuters reported. 

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Who’s afraid of due process?

The Supreme Court’s end-of-term decisions weren’t popular with everyone: Progressive commentators have been near-hysterical over the Court’s decision to end judicial deference in Loper Bright Enterprises/Relentless. They’re also panicking over the Court’s decision in SEC v. Jarkesy, which said that government agencies must allow defendants a jury trial before imposing civil penalties. The Atlantic accused the Court of putting “much of the basic work of the executive branch at risk.”

But these two decisions are far from radical, PLF attorney Anastasia Boden says. They’re bedrock principles of the Constitution: Individuals are entitled to a jury trial, and, when they get there, they are entitled to a neutral judge. “Ultimately, Jarkesy and Loper Bright merely extend uncontroversial due-process rights for the accused to the behemoth administrative state,” Anastasia writes. 

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New Mexico landowners defend property rights from state-sanctioned trespassing 

Lucia Sanchez is a rancher in rural New Mexico. She and her brother—a sheriff's deputy—own land where they raise a few dozen cattle. The land has been in their family since 1942; they should feel comfortable there. But in 2022, the New Mexico Supreme Court invalidated the Sanchezes’ right to stop strangers from trespassing in the streambeds on their private property.  Lucia and her brother can only watch as trespassers take fish from their stream and leave their trash behind. Even when their cattle got sick eating trash left on their land, the Sanchezes were left with no recourse. Now they and other property owners have filed a federal lawsuit, challenging New Mexico’s illegal taking of their right to exclude trespassers from their private streambeds.  

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The Declaration of Independence connects equality, freedom, and opportunity 

In recent years, the page on Pacific Legal Foundation’s website that has drawn the most visitors isn’t about any of our Supreme Court cases. It’s a six-year-old blog post by a former PLF attorney titled “The Declaration of Independence (made easy)” that translates the Declaration into plain, modern English. Americans are clearly eager to understand our founding document. 

There’s one key point that PLF attorney Anastasia Boden hopes people get about the Declaration: that it establishes equality, freedom, and opportunity as the DNA strands of our country.  

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Fishing on an ocean ‘antiquity’ 

In New Bedford, Massachusetts, sits an old chapel: the Seamen’s Bethel, built in 1832 for sailors to visit and pray before heading out to sea. The Bethel is included on the National Register of Historic Places, but it’s not a federally protected National Monument. You know what is considered a National Monument? Over three million acres of nearby ocean, which were bizarrely designated a monument by President Barack Obama under the Antiquities Act—preventing fishermen from fishing there. 

PLF editorial director Nicole Yeatman talks to Jimmy Kearney, a New Bedford fisherman, about the many indignities dealt to fishermen by the government as they work to make a hard living at sea. 

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