Free Republic

The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority is asking a federal judge to reverse a decision by the Biden administration to cancel oil and drilling leases in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge area. The leases were approved by the Trump administration in January 2021 and canceled by the Biden administration last month. The AIDEA said in its lawsuit the cancellation of the seven leases is unlawful for several reasons. The leases are legal and Congressionally mandated, the agency said. The lawsuit said the Department of Interior did not allow AIDEA to correct any issues to keep the leases. "DOI’s unilateral...

The president knows what he ordered the CDC to do is illegal. He did it anyway to appease the left wing of his party.An astonishing thing happened this week in Washington that didn’t get much critical coverage from a media establishment loath to criticize President Biden. At the behest of congressional Democrats, Biden flouted the Constitution and broke his oath of office by issuing a ban on evictions that he and his advisers know to be illegal.By “ban on evictions” I mean the president issued a blatantly unconstitutional decree that renters all across America don’t have to pay rent. If...

An Indiana judge has taken an unusual step and temporarily barred Starbucks from closing 77 failing Teavana stores in Simon Property Group malls because the real estate giant was less able to handle the financial pain. Starbucks said in July it planned to shutter its 379-store Teavana operation — but Simon rushed to court to block 77 stores in its malls from going dark — claiming such a move by a high-profile tenant could spark other stores in its malls to close. Starbucks, after trying to turn around its stumbling tea chain, said last August it was pulling the plug...

The looney Left is after Rush Limbaugh again. They have a maniacal fixation with trying to destroy him because they don’t like what he says. The Left has always believed that freedom of speech applies only to them. Over the past sixty years the media has coddled and supported the Left by encouraging the belief that they are not subject to the rules and laws the rest of us have to live under. This delusion could be brought to a dead stop with one simple move. A recent case in point involves a group of ten Leftist loons who have...

TOPEKA, Kan. -- A sperm donor in Kansas is fighting a state effort to force him to pay child support for a child conceived through artificial insemination by a lesbian couple. William Marotta, 46, of Topeka said he is "a little scared about where this is going to go, primarily for financial reasons," The Topeka Capital-Journal (http://bit.ly/132b7Ji) reported Monday. When he donated sperm to Angela Bauer and Jennifer Schreiner in 2009, Marotta relinquished all parental rights, as well as financial responsibility for the child. When Bauer and Schreiner filed for state assistance this year, the state demanded the donor's name...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – How would you like to not pay your rent, year after year, and get away with it? A Brooklyn woman has done just that for the past six years. Artist Margaret Maugenest, 60, stopped paying rent for several years, but instead of getting evicted, the state’s highest court said she was justified, CBS 2′s John Slattery reported. “Yeah, I feel very good about that, John. I feel very relieved,” Maugenest told Slattery. Since 1984, Maugenest has lived in a loft — a converted manufacturing building on Nevins Street in Gowanus – with rent of less than...

Centuries of legal precedent might intervene to save the American people from Barack Hussein Obama’s attempt to force individuals and employers into the legislative enslavement of ObamaCare. Constitutional law professor Elizabeth Price Foley, in conjunction with the Institute of Justice, has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court concerning the upcoming Court review of the Affordable Care Act—ObamaCare. In the brief, Foley makes the point that forcing an individual or company to sign a contract for the purchase of a product—health insurance included—would violate one of the centuries old underpinnings of contract law which states that to be enforceable,...

A panel of federal judges on Monday ruled that Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss can't back out of the settlement deal they made in a lawsuit charging that Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea for Facebook. Twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss claim they enlisted Zuckerberg to finish software code for their ConnectU social-networking website while they were all students at Harvard in 2003. Zuckerberg, a second year student at the time, took their code and their idea and launched Facebook in February 2004 instead of holding up his end of the deal, according to the brothers. Facebook rejects that account. Hollywood...

A Florida judge is defending his controversial decision to apply Islamic law instead of state or federal statutes in determining whether an arbitration award was correct, the St. Petersburg Times reports. The case in question involves former trustees of a local Tampa mosque, the Islamic Education Center of Tampa, who are suing because they claim they were unfairly removed as trustees. Hillsborough Circuit Judge Richard Nielsen said that the two parties can seek guidance from the Koran to resolve their dispute, according to MyFoxOrlando.com. Nielsen said that based on testimony, "under ecclesiastical law," and pursuant to the Koran, "Islamic brothers...

What was that Hamas-linked CAIR and other Islamic supremacist groups were saying about how it was utterly fanciful that Sharia would ever be used to judge cases in American courts?

Law school students may not only be getting an incomplete view of American history but a misleading notion of the Law of the Land, a dissident professor shows in a new book. “Modern scholars also refer to the early 20th Century as the ‘era of laissez-faire constitutionalism’ because they see it as a time when judges injected a radical libertarian, or laissez-faire, philosophy into their constitutional decisions,” David N. Mayer writes in Liberty of Contract: Rediscovering a Lost Constitutional Right. “Indeed, the stereotypical view sees the Lochner era as a time when American judges, motivated by the desire to further...

Comes a HorsemanFrom the Sep. 20, 2010, issue of NR. Franklin Roosevelt’s clash with the Supreme Court is one of history’s greatest legal dramas, but it has generated an unfair and misleading mythology. In this legend, the Court greeted the New Deal with a blast of reactionary decisions in 1935 and 1936 — invalidating, among other things, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) — to which Roosevelt retaliated by threatening to pack the Court with a new, more loyal majority of justices. The judiciary avoided the embarrassment of an expanded, politically neutered Court when...

WASHINGTON—After months of criticism that it hasn't done enough to prevent foreclosures, the Obama administration is announcing a plan to reduce the amount some troubled borrowers owe on their home loans. Discuss COMMENTS (86) The multifaceted effort will let people who owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth get new loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration, a government agency that insures home loans against default. That would be funded by $14 billion from the administration's existing $75 billion foreclosure-prevention program. But it could spark criticism that the government is shouldering too much risk by taking on...

The Obama administration plans to overhaul how it's tackling the foreclosure crisis, in part by requiring lenders to temporarily slash or eliminate monthly mortgage payments for many borrowers who are unemployed, senior officials said Thursday. Banks and other lenders would have to reduce the payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower's income, which would typically be their unemployment insurance, for up to six months. In some cases, administration officials said, a lender could allow a borrower to make no payments at all. The new push, which the White House is scheduled to announce Friday, takes direct aim...

"Crony capitalism” is a term often applied to foreign nations where government interference circumvents market forces. The practice is widely associated with tin-pot dictators and second-rate economies. In such a system, support for the ruling regime is the best and only path to economic success. Who you know supersedes what you know, and favoritism trumps the rule of law. Unfortunately, this week’s events demonstrate that the phrase now more aptly describes our own country. On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from Chrysler’s secured creditors based on the government’s argument that the needs of other stakeholders outweighed...

I don’t agree with Douglas Kmiec often, but this may be the exception … maybe. With all of the various legal and legislative challenges to the definition of marriage in states across the nation, Kmiec tells Catholic News Agency that government should restrict itself to enforcing contract law and leave the question of marriage to the churches. Robert George, a highly respected Constitutional scholar and fellow Catholic, vehemently disagrees (via The Corner): Doug Kmiec, a prominent Catholic who backed Barack Obama’s presidential bid, has endorsed replacing marriage with a neutral “civil license,” a proposal law professor Robert P. George called...

Palm Harbor, Florida - Andrea Weiler of Palm Harbor knows what it's like to have her homeowners insurance policy dropped by Nationwide Insurance. She got her notice in March. Andrea Weiler, Former Nationwide Insurance Customer:“I was angry because I had been a customer with them so long, had my auto with them for 16 years.” Weiler says she never filed a claim and always paid on time, but that didn't matter. She got the non-renewal notice shortly after legislators announced they had fixed the insurance crisis in a special session. Andrea Weiler:“It’s worse than it was now in my opinion,...

...I will suggest to my colleagues at the summit a program called "Seven Chances for the Internal Market." • First, all EU consumers must be able, by mid-2007, to freely choose their electricity and energy providers, as is the case in Germany since 1998. This will intensify cross-border competition, benefit consumers and industries by providing cheaper energy and stimulate economic activity across the board. • Second, we must continue to ensure the stability and growth of European financial markets. We also have to increase the global competitiveness of EU financial institutions. The supervision of the financial sector should be practical...

LAS VEGAS – Amy Donaldson was drumming up support for legalizing medical marijuana. The Rev. Mike Robinson was out recruiting on behalf of Jesus Christ. The casinos and the cops would have none of either. Both have been arrested in the past at a Las Vegas mall known as the Fremont Street Experience, a public- private partnership in which the city contributed $27 million. The area, once an ordinary city street, is now a pedestrian walkway with a canopy partially enclosing a strip of casinos on either side. In that new realm built to amuse, the city and the casinos...