Chance Weldon is an attorney with the Center for the American Future at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Before joining the Foundation, Chance served as a fellow at the Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento, California and the Institute for Justice in Austin, Texas. As a fellow, he worked on cutting-edge litigation involving economic liberty, free speech, school choice, and private property rights.
“I’m sorry, officer, I didn’t see the speed limit,” has never been a legitimate legal defense. We might say it when we get pulled over, hoping for leniency, but it’s never been a real excuse. Ignorantia juris non excusat: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. That’s a doctrine almost as old as laws themselves....
There is always an incentive to break the law. Speeding saves time, Ponzi schemes make money, and ripping the tag off a mattress in violation of California regulations is eminently satisfying. But an existing incentive to break the law isn’t a reason for courts to excuse unlawfulness. Federal law stipulates that universities cannot charge illegal...
When the Sons of Liberty stormed ships docked in Boston to throw taxed tea into the harbor, they had a simple animating principle guiding their actions: no taxation without representation. Decades later, similar resistance to an unrepresentative and far away government propelled Texans to fight the Mexican dictator Santa Ana. In both cases, the core...
When conservative students challenged the constitutionality of some practices at the University of North Texas, school officials responded with a demand for the name and contact info of every member of the Young Conservatives of Texas’ North Texas Chapter. Judge Sean Jordan of the Eastern District of Texas said no. Judge Jordan recently issued a...
Property rights matter to Texans. For more than a century, the Texas Supreme Court has held that the Texas Constitution protects each individual’s right to use and develop his or her property in any way that doesn’t cause a nuisance or harm the neighbors. While other states and federal courts have taken an increasingly narrow...
Four Justices on the Texas Supreme Court just fired a shot across the bow of government officials continuing draconian COVID-19 restrictions in Texas. In a concurring opinion, Justices Blacklock, Guzman, Boyd, and Devine reminded everyone that the “Constitution is not suspended when the government declares a state of disaster.” “As more becomes known about the...
It’s a curious contrast; the city of Austin is cracking down on short-term rental operators—ostensibly over nuisance and livability issues—while at the same time legalizing camping by the homeless throughout the city (with the exception of City Hall). The city is outlawing STRs because they might be “detrimental to the character of Austin neighborhoods.” But...
When your favorite tool is a hammer, every project looks like a nail, and apparently, a similar rule holds true for local government. When said government’s favorite tool to get its way is threatening residents with ruinous, unconstitutional fines, its response to every problem is to threaten them with even larger, more ruinous—and more unconstitutional—fines....
Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation filed a second lawsuit on behalf of Michigan clients who are in trouble with the township of Canton for clearing a 16-acred lot—their own land—of brush, dead trees and undergrowth so they could start a Christmas tree farm. The township said they violated a tree ordinance and initially sought...
Who owns the trees on your property? That’s the question at the heart of a pair of lawsuits in Michigan. The township of Canton, Michigan makes it a crime to remove any tree (defined as anything with a 3-inch wooded stem) without a permit. But under the Township’s tree ordinance, the township will not grant...
The Founding Fathers included the Eighth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution to ensure the Federal Government does not perform “cruel and unusual punishment” on U.S. citizens or force them to pay “excessive fines” or bail. Fast forward a couple of centuries: problems that concern this rather vague (but important) clause are rearing their ugly head....
In the Trump administration’s response to the lawsuit brought by Texas and the Texas Public Policy Foundation challenging the current constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Department of Justice agreed that several key portions of the ACA were unconstitutional. Immediately, several commentators reported that the Justice Department’s failure to defend the law in...