Christian Townsend is an attorney with the Center for the American Future where he defends property rights and the structure of our Constitutional system through litigation. Prior to joining the Foundation, Christian was a legal associate with the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies.
Dismissed—with prejudice, yet without explanation. This was the order Shana Elliott and Larry Kalke received from a Texas court after four hard-fought months of litigation. Shana and Larry dared to challenge College Station’s restrictions on properties outside city limits, arguing the city’s failure to afford them representation in city council rendered the restrictions unconstitutional. The...
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...
The Supreme Court provided a massive win for religious freedom on Tuesday, ruling that Maine cannot discriminate against religious schools when it provides money to parents for children to attend private schools. This is just the latest win for empowering parents—and not the state—to decide the type of education that their children will receive. But...
This week, the nation woke to the news that the U.S. Supreme Court was considering overturning the controversial 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade. Despite the leaked opinion only being a draft and not final, the left is apoplectic, arguing that this is an assault on women’s rights and the end of democracy. Of all...
In Shel Silverstein’s bestselling book, “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” readers journey through a dizzying fictional tale in which boys are turned into television sets and diamonds grow in gardens. But for Nashville residents Jim Knight and Jason Mayes, their dizzying bureaucratic journey of attempting to develop their property was terrifyingly real. The story begins with...
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...