Clark Neily On February 10, Cato filed an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit supporting a challenge to Texas’s “Right to Examine” statute, which grants the state attorney general authority to demand immediate access to any corporate records without a warrant or prior judicial review. The brief argues that the statute is facially unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment based on ...
Clark Neily In his new book examining the “explosion” of freedom-restricting laws over the past few decades, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, Justice Neil Gorsuch advances a thesis that will resonate with many: America is suffering from an excess of legal rules and regulations that increasingly constrain individual liberty while defying common sense. Through vivid examples ...
Jennifer Huddleston On February 20, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a request for information (RFI) on “Technology Platform Censorship.” The last section of the RFI asks, “Were platforms’ adverse actions made possible by a lack of competition? Did the practices and policies affect competition?” Such questions indicate that, once again, the connection between antitrust and concerns about content moderation ...
David Inserra The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently announced that it was requesting comments about “technology platform censorship.” The FTC letter suggests that social media content moderation may somehow be an unfair or deceptive trade practice or anti-competitive to justify the FTCs meddling in content moderation. But this framing of content moderation as censorship and the FTC as somehow protecting ...
Matt Mittelsteadt At the recent AI Action Summit, Vice President JD Vance delivered a barnburner debut on the international policy stage. In his fifteen-minute address, the vice president distilled Trump-era AI policy: colored by optimism for AI potential, a dismissal of AI safety regulation, a muscular resistance to European rules, pro-worker policy, and the explicit sense that AI will be ...
Walter Olson If you expected a second Trump term to usher in some sort of new era of free speech, you might by now be feeling some rueful secondthoughts. In the latest development, Trump’s pick for federal prosecutor in Washington, DC, Edward R. Martin Jr., has sent a threat/investigation letter to Rep. Robert Garcia (D‑CA) over comments that Garcia made ...
Clark Packard In early February, the ever-protectionist Trump administration announced it would immediately eliminate the “de minimis exemption” for low-value shipments arriving from China, effectively raising taxes on American consumers and dramatically increasing shipping times. Within days, US ports of entry were overwhelmed with a backlog of packages. Realizing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was unprepared to deal with the deluge of ...
Colin Grabow Citing alleged unfairness in the current trading system, President Donald Trump appears to be laying the groundwork for the adoption of a tariff policy based on reciprocity. Whatever tariffs other countries levy on US imports will be the tariff charged by the United States on their same products. It’s not a new position for Trump, who also enthused ...
Chris Edwards and Yasmeen Kallash-Kyler In a seeming reversal, the Trump administration is rumored to be considering ending the US Postal Service’s quasi-independence and absorbing the company into the federal bureaucracy. The Washington Post reported yesterday, “Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as this week to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and ...
Thomas A. Berry and Ethan Yang Civil forfeiture allows the government to seize assets allegedly connected to a crime, even without a criminal conviction. This process was originally intended to be a tool for law enforcement to target the profits of criminal activity, such as stolen property. However, the lack of due process protections surrounding forfeiture proceedings has allowed the ...