Amid growing revelations about government involvement in social-media censorship, it’s no longer enough to talk simply about tech censorship. The problem should be understood as gov-tech censorship. The Biden White House has threatened tech companies and federal agencies have pressed them to censor disfavored opinions and users. So it’s time to ask about accountability. Will…

Questioning a government lawyer earlier this month, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts referenced “a series of cases that are a constellation around some fairly basic propositions” concerning agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission.[1]  One such proposition is that agencies should do the jobs that Congress has assigned to them.…

The ever-expanding administrative state has become a fourth branch of government. Unelected, unaccountable and tenure-protected bureaucrats enact most rules governing Americans’ lives—thousands of new ones every year. Seeking to aid this swelling administrative state, Congress has created in-house courts, which have taken over most regulatory enforcement cases from the judiciary. These administrative-law judges are employed…

One warm weekend in October of 2020, three impeccably credentialed epidemiologists—Jayanta Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff, of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Universities respectively—gathered with a few journalists, writers, and economists at an estate in the Berkshires where the American Institute for Economic Research had brought together critics of lockdowns and other COVID-related government restrictions.…

“Agencies that combine enforcement and adjudication—as many do—are unconstitutional. But convenient for the government,” law blogger Glenn Harlan Reynolds posted earlier this year. For those who follow SEC enforcement, particularly adjudication by in-house administrative law judges, two recent cases from the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit may change all that. Michelle Cochran, a…

Imagine a dystopian world where Congress empowers a private corporation to secretly investigate and punish members of a particular profession — say, auditors. Think of a private version of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but with evergreen funding that never requires an appropriation from Congress and with lavishly compensated personnel who are exempt from laws designed…