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Democracy & Elections

25 articles

Justice in the Dark: How the Supreme Court's Shadow Docket Is Rewriting American Law Without a Single Public Hearing

Justice in the Dark: How the Supreme Court's Shadow Docket Is Rewriting American Law Without a Single Public Hearing

The Supreme Court's conservative supermajority has discovered a mechanism for reshaping immigration enforcement, abortion access, and executive authority without oral arguments, detailed reasoning, or meaningful public scrutiny. Legal scholars across the ideological spectrum are raising alarms about the shadow docket — an emergency procedural channel that has quietly become one of the most consequential venues for constitutional law in America. What is happening in the dark deserves to be examin

Sealed But Not Forgotten: How America's Broken Expungement System Keeps Punishing People for Who They Were as Children

Sealed But Not Forgotten: How America's Broken Expungement System Keeps Punishing People for Who They Were as Children

Millions of Americans who committed minor offenses as teenagers continue to have those records surface in background checks for jobs, housing, and college admissions — despite laws theoretically designed to seal them. The problem is not merely legal loopholes; it is a system structurally engineered to perpetuate punishment long after courts have declared the slate clean. Until automatic, universal expungement becomes the national standard and background check data brokers are brought to heel, th

Democracy Doesn't Teach Itself: How the Systematic Gutting of Civics Education Left a Generation Vulnerable to Autocracy

Democracy Doesn't Teach Itself: How the Systematic Gutting of Civics Education Left a Generation Vulnerable to Autocracy

For more than four decades, civics instruction in American public schools has been crowded out by standardized testing regimes, budget cuts, and an education policy culture that values measurable outputs over democratic formation. The result is a generation of Americans who cannot name the three branches of government, do not understand how legislation becomes law, and are functionally unequipped to recognize — let alone resist — the erosion of democratic norms. The failure is not accidental, an

Injured and Ignored: How America's Vaccine Compensation System Betrays the Families It Was Built to Protect

Injured and Ignored: How America's Vaccine Compensation System Betrays the Families It Was Built to Protect

The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 was intended to create a swift, fair, no-fault pathway for families whose children suffered rare but genuine vaccine-related injuries. Nearly four decades later, that system has become a bureaucratic obstacle course that denies most claims, drags cases out for years, and leaves injured families without meaningful support — while doing almost nothing to address the legitimate grievances that anti-vaccine advocates have weaponized to undermine publ

Seized in the Public Interest: How Corporate America Hijacked Eminent Domain to Take Your Land for Private Gain

Seized in the Public Interest: How Corporate America Hijacked Eminent Domain to Take Your Land for Private Gain

Eminent domain — the constitutional power to take private property for public use — was designed as a last resort for governments building roads, schools, and public utilities. Today, that power has been handed to pipeline companies, data center developers, and private infrastructure firms who use it to seize family farms and Indigenous lands for shareholder returns. The 'public use' doctrine has been stretched so far it barely resembles its original meaning.

Corporate Capture of Environmental Policy: How Industry Lobbyists Rewrote the Rules While America Wasn't Looking

Corporate Capture of Environmental Policy: How Industry Lobbyists Rewrote the Rules While America Wasn't Looking

The Environmental Protection Agency was designed to protect public health from corporate pollution. Instead, a decades-long campaign of regulatory capture has transformed it into a compliant partner for the very industries it was meant to regulate. The result is a quiet dismantling of environmental protections that disproportionately harms communities of color and the working class.