Law/Crime

REGARDLESS:

The Supreme Court’s Tariff Ruling Shows Conservativism at Work: Chief Justice John Roberts’s long campaign against unilateral executive control of the economy continues—regardless of who’s in the White House. (Judge Glock, Feb 20 2026, City Journal)

For the past year, the liberal commentariat has decried the Supreme Court for being just an adjunct of the Trump administration. The Brennan Center for Justice argued that, despite the nation’s “democratic backsliding” under Trump, the Court “keeps ruling in Trump’s favor.” Noted legal scholar Kate Shaw said on a New York Times podcast that the Court’s conservatives “really are just partisan justices in support of Donald Trump.” Shaw and others on the Left have advocated for radical court reform, which for some included court-packing, to force it to support their version of American democracy.

The argument that the Supreme Court kowtowed to whatever President Trump wanted was foolish before, and became insupportable after, Friday’s announcement of the decision in Learning Resources v. Trump, which overturned the most important part of Trump’s tariffs policy.

MORE THAN A FEELING:

How New York City Got Safe: A historical reconstruction of the Big Apple’s crime decline, told from inside the institutions responsible for public safety. (Michael Javen Fortner, January 1, 2026, Washington Monthly)

Bill Bratton—who, as transit police chief, launched a “broken windows” strategy on the subway in 1990—told Moskos that he embraced the approach because whenever he went into communities, he “heard people complaining about broken windows.” “Even in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods—they used to complain about crime, certainly—but what I came to understand was that everyday people were seeing this crazy city and what a mess that was,” Bratton said.

It is tempting to dismiss statements like this as self-serving, post hoc justification. But the survey evidence tells a strikingly similar story. A 1979 survey of residents in Harlem and the South Bronx underscores just how central quality-of-life concerns—both physical decay and behavioral disorder—were to the city’s most marginalized communities. The single most frequently cited problem was bad or slum housing (29 percent), followed closely by drugs (25 percent) and crime and criminals (22 percent). In Harlem, these anxieties were sharper still: 32 percent identified bad housing as the top concern, 29 percent pointed to drugs, and 23 percent referred to crime. Beneath these headline categories sat a dense layer of everyday disorder. Robberies and muggings were cited by 12 percent of respondents citywide (15 percent in the Bronx), abandoned or burned-out housing by 11 percent overall (15 percent in the Bronx), and juvenile delinquency by 7 percent. Smaller but still telling shares pointed to littered streets (6 percent), vandalism (4 percent), lack of sanitation (4 percent), public drunkenness (2 percent), and fires (3 percent overall, rising to 6 percent in the Bronx)—the very conditions that made public space feel unstable and threatening.

Nearly a decade later, these concerns had not abated. Even as homicide rates continued to climb, a 1988 survey of New York State residents commissioned by the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services revealed the persistence—and salience—of quality-of-life anxieties. Nearly three-fifths of residents reported that their neighborhoods suffered from at least one “quality of life” problem: rowdy youth, homeless people, or crumbling buildings. Almost half complained about disorderly teenagers; nearly a third cited problems with homeless people; another third pointed to physical decay. As these problems accumulated, fear spiked. Only about one in 10 residents of trouble-free neighborhoods reported feeling unsafe out alone at night; among those living amid two or three major problems, that figure rose to nearly 60 percent.

Taken together, these numbers tell a story that crime rates alone cannot. Residents did not draw neat distinctions between “serious crime” and “minor disorder”; they experienced both as part of a single moral and environmental unraveling. The persistence of concerns about dirty streets, abandoned buildings, vandalism, and insufficient police protection—often registering in double-digit shares in the hardest-hit neighborhoods—helps explain why order maintenance policing resonated so deeply with the public. Fear was not produced by violence alone, but by the steady accumulation of visible signals that no one was in charge and by unwanted encounters with “disreputable,” “obstreperous,” or “unpredictable” individuals, including “rowdy teenagers,” drug users, and the homeless. In this view, “safety”—or at least the perception of it—was secured as much through the removal of these perceived threats as through declining crime rates. That, at least, is a key claim Moskos’s book presses with unusual force.

One of Moskos’s interviewees, Steve Hill, a transit cop, gets to the heart of the matter with disarming clarity. Order maintenance, he explains, was “more about acknowledging the things that made people feel unsafe,” even if “the violent predators are still going to be out there shooting and killing people.” It sounds like a concession, but it is the opposite. Hill is insisting that reducing fear, reclaiming public space, and pushing back disorder matter in their own right—not because they shave a few points off homicide rates, but because they reshape how ordinary New Yorkers experience the city.

Hill’s stories make that point concrete. He recalls a morning train disrupted by a homeless man “pissing,” shouting, and driving passengers “crazy,” until an officer seized the moment—“‘This is your stop, buddy.’ Boom!”—and threw him onto the platform. “No paperwork,” Hill notes, and as the doors closed “the entire train applauded.” The applause is key. It captures a public worn down by daily disorder and viscerally grateful when someone finally intervened. Elsewhere, Hill recalls how riders at Utica Avenue during rush hour were “happy to see” an officer in uniform. For every person who cursed or spit, he observed, “ten others will appreciate you being here.” What people valued was not abstract crime control, but the simple assurance that they could sit on a train without worrying about “somebody crazy walking up on them, spitting or littering or urinating or defecating.”

AWKWARD:

The Anatomy of Constitutional Despair: a review of We the People by Jill Lepore (Paul Moreno, 9/29/25, Law & Liberty)

FDR’s New Deal seized up in 1937, after his attack on the Supreme Court, his own recession, and his attempt to “purge” his own party. But for a while—from the 1940s through the 1960s—liberals espied a solution: get control of the Supreme Court, which had become a “continual constitutional convention.” But the route of judicial advancement of liberal goals stalled and even reversed sometimes (though it occasionally advanced) after 1969, and the Trump-packing of the Court has caused them to add “judicial supremacy” to their litany of complaints about the dysfunction of the Constitution.

Live by the gavel…

BREAKING THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE IS PROGRESS:

Abundance Liberalism versus Adversarial Legalism (Thomas F. Burke & Jeb Barnes, Fall 2025, National Affairs)

For decades, liberals embraced lawsuits, legal rights, and judicial policymaking as means of driving social change and holding powerful interests to account. But recent years have seen second thoughts proliferate, especially among proponents of abundance liberalism, the movement to unleash the power of both government and the private sector to supply essential goods and services. Abundance liberals from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson to Jennifer Pahlka have embraced law professor Nicholas Bagley’s argument from a 2019 article, “The Procedural Fetish,” that liberal-backed rules intended to make executive-branch policymaking more open, transparent, and accountable have become a major barrier to progressive change.

Bagley’s widely cited article showed how liberals’ unexamined dedication to “proceduralism” has handicapped state capacity. His examples come mostly from his specialty, administrative law, where major new initiatives must run a gauntlet of procedural hurdles, many of them erected by the left, before they can take effect. As Bagley noted, a long tradition of research in law and political science has examined and critiqued the effects of those hurdles, but this work is “absent entirely from the political conversation and relegated to the sidelines of the academic debate.”

We are all Gorsuchian now.

“WOMB-TO-TOMB” (profanity alert):

The Return of Superfly (Mark Jacobson, 8/14/2000, New York)

It was a matter of control, and trust. As the leader of the heroin-dealing ring called the Country Boys, Lucas, older brother to Ezell, Vernon Lee, John Paul, Larry, and Leevan Lucas, was known for restricting his operation to blood relatives and others from his rural North Carolina area hometown. This was because, Lucas says, in his down-home creak of a voice, “a country boy, he ain’t hip … he’s not used to big cars, fancy ladies, and diamond rings. He’ll be loyal to you. A country boy, you can give him any amount of money. His wife and kids might be hungry, and he’ll never touch your stuff until he checks with you. City boys ain’t like that. A city boy will take your last dime, look you in the face, and swear he ain’t got it … You don’t want a city boy — the sonofabitch is just no good.”

ALL THINGS IN MODERATION:

Mission Accomplished for the Roberts Court? (The Law & Liberty Podcast, 7/15/25)

The Roberts Court delivered a number of wins for conservatives in its recent term, and Professor John O. McGinnis thinks it may mark the maturation of the Court’s administrative state jurisprudence. Host and contributing editor James Patterson is joined by Professor McGinnis, who explains both the broader trends of the Supreme Court, and some of this year’s major cases, including Mahmoud v. Taylor, US v. Skrmetti, and Trump v. CASA.

A good look at how consrvative–in every sense of the word–the current Court is.

AND NO ONE JUDGE SHOPS MORE THAN THE rIGHT:

Supreme Court rolls back (finally!) politically motivated judge-shopping (Ted Diadiun, 7/07/25, cleveland.com)

Under the archaic policy that had become the norm, a ruling from any one district judge, who hears a specific lawsuit and believes a presidential order to be unconstitutional, immediately becomes the ruling for the entire country – unless and until it is successfully appealed to the Supreme Court.

The process is called “universal injunction.” Once rarely employed, it has been used with increasing frequency over the last three presidential administrations – primarily in opposition to Trump’s orders.

It’s generally considered that universal injunctions became accepted practice in 1963, although the Harvard Law Review dug up an injunction issued in 1913. Either way, according to research gathered by the Baker Hostetler law firm, only 27 such injunctions occurred in the entire 20th century. Contrast that with the 64 issued in Trump’s first term alone, and the 30 that have stopped him in just the first three months of his current term.

REINING THEIR BRANCH IN:

Why Now? The Timing of the Universal Injunction Ruling (William Baude, Jul 01, 2025, Divided Argument)

Indeed, I sometimes think about the briefing in Summers v. Earth Island Institute back in October Term 2008. Summers turned out to be a moderately important Article III standing case, but one of the other questions presented by the government — this was the George W. Bush administration — was “Whether the court of appeals erred in affirming the nationwide injunctions issued by the district court.”

The argument against the nationwide injunction was not as fully developed at the time, was not as categorical, and relied more heavily on the issue preclusion precedent of US v. Mendoza. But it was there, accompanied by a warning that this practice was just starting to grow in district courts in the Ninth Circuit.

I sometimes wonder what the past two decades of public law litigation would look like if the Court had chosen to resolve the case on nationwide injunction grounds rather than the Article III standing ground it chose. Much better, I think! But for whatever reason, the Court did not do that.

The nationwide injunction also became prominent during the last few years of the Obama administration when a Texas district court issued a nationwide injunction against the DAPA program. But this time, when the Obama administration petitioned for cert. they did not ask the Court to review the nationwide injunction issue. That turned out to be especially fateful when Justice Scalia died while the case was pending resulting in the injunction being affirmed by an equally divided court. But again I wonder what would have happened if the United States had petitioned on the issue and gotten five or more votes to limit the scope of the injunction even while affirming on the merits.