Jacob Sullum
Latest Articles
Trump makes the right call on cannabis — after a 40-year wait
The federal government has been exaggerating marijuana's hazards and ignoring its potential benefits for more than half a century.
Federal 'civil-forfeiture' racket outright robs innocents
While profit-motivated law-enforcement agencies tend to portray it as inherently suspicious, there is nothing illegal about traveling with large sums of cash.
Big Brother is watching you — how one homeowner fought back
Automated license-plate readers enable routine surveillance of a sort that would have troubled the Fourth Amendment's framers.
TSA can't admit its stupid shoe rule was always a sham
It's the ratchet effect: Even the most dubious safeguards stick around because eliminating them looks like a compromise that might endanger public safety.
Trump strikes a righteous blow at feds' rabid criminal code
A new Trump executive order will slash federal regulations carrying criminal penalties — a category so vast and obscure that not even the government knows how many there are.
Now Elon tells us: Congress, not DOGE, must slash spending
At first Elon Musk breezily promised that DOGE would cut federal spending by $1 trillion or more. But lately he's been singing a different tune.
Trump and FDR agree: presidents can fire fed workers at will
Despite the flurry of leftist lawsuits, Trump's claim to fire federal workers as he wishes is grounded in legitimate concerns that presidents of both parties have raised for a century.
New York land grab could reopen key Supreme Court ruling
The case offers the justices chance to revisit a widely criticized decision that trampled property rights by letting government officials reassign private land to politically favored businesses.
How pols and cops blamed victims and passed the buck in 2024
Who, me? Here are the year's most outrageous official attempts to evade responsibility, from a president with "diminished faculties" to a cop who claimed to mistake a falling acorn for...
Trump's pardons of Jan. 6 rioters will reverse true judicial abuse
Donald Trump raises some valid points about prosecutorial power, which can lead to unjust results that might be remedied by the prudent use of presidential clemency.
Justice Neil Gorsuch mourns over-regulation: 'Too much law'
"Criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something," Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch observed in...
Chevron overturn is a SCOTUS victory for the little guy
People with little wealth or power have been forced to contend with overweening bureaucrats who invent their own authority and play by their own rules, but the Supreme Court is...
Man arrested for a COVID joke gives a much-needed lesson on free speech
Back in March 2020, Waylon Bailey's home was raided by police because of a Facebook post in which Bailey had made a zombie-themed joke about COVID-19.
Netflix's 'Painkiller' tells only half the OxyContin story
Netflix’s six-part miniseries "Painkiller" vividly portrays Purdue Pharma’s reckless marketing of OxyContin. But it dismisses the caveat.
Gorsuch rightly slams freedom-crushing 'rule by indefinite emergency edict'
Cornell law professor Michael Dorf urged Congress to impose a nationwide lockdown and suspend the writ of habeas corpus.
Malinformation: Censors' excuse to suppress 'inconvenient truths'
According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations and federal officials that journalist Michael Shellenberger calls the "censorship-industrial complex," "malinformation."
Surprise: The CDC grossly exaggerated the evidence for mask mandates
A new review of the evidence suggests the CDC had it right the first time.
Turns out Russian election meddling's main impact was on the gullible journos who hyped it
A widely cited list of Twitter users who were described as “Russian bots” included “a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts,” according to an internal 2018 email from Yoel Roth.
California's perilous bid to censor your doctor's advice
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which Columbia legal scholar Philip Hamburger founded in 2017, cheekily describes itself as “a civil libertarian alternative to the ACLU
Biden's sneaky censors: How officials pressured social media to suppress disfavored speech
This exercise in censorship by proxy is especially troubling because it targets not only demonstrably false claims but also speech that the government considers "misleading" or contrary to the prevailing...