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Chief Justice Roberts’s Two Landmark Opinions Turn Tide Toward Liberty

Published

2 years ago

July 3, 2024

Chief Justice Roberts’s Two Landmark Opinions Turn Tide Toward Liberty

UNITED STATES – JANUARY 30: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts listens to President Donald … [+] Trump’s State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on January 30, 2018. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)

CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Just in time for America’s 248^th birthday, Chief Justice John Roberts has gifted our nation two landmark decisions that turn the tables on unlawful administrative power and turn the tide toward liberty. These cases do more to save Americans from being dominated by bureaucratic overlords than anything else the Court has done in at least half a century. The decisions in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (decided alongside NCLA’s case Relentless v. Department of Commerce) do not just right two wrongs; they deliver a one-two punch for independence. In different ways, each case changes the direction in which our ship of state was headed and steers it back on a course that is far more compatible with individual liberty and self-government than the tyrannical trajectory onto which the Court veered a century ago. Together they establish a legacy for The Chief Justice of the United States as a loyal defender of the structural Constitution and an ardent foe of unlawful administrative power.

A fuller examination of these two opinions will reveal just how rejuvenating they are. As Chief Justice Roberts notes in his Jarkesy opinion, the right to a jury trial was protected in the Constitution (in more than one place) in no small part because the colonists had personal experience with the monarch’s use of jury-less courts under the king’s control to adjudicate their alleged transgressions. So, when Congress started sidelining the federal judiciary and allowing federal agencies to go after alleged rulebreakers in their own tribunals, it had a familiar—if foreboding—feel. That individual rights suffered under this regime was as predictable as it was pernicious.

For the SEC, it was the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 that dramatically increased the agency’s ability to herd regulated parties before biased in-house adjudicators. But whatever the legislative source of mischief, and sometimes there is not one (e.g., some of the adjudications at the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs are rooted in nothing more than an executive order), when agencies get to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury, they invariably abuse that combination of powers our Founders were so keen to separate and keep separate. For example, they bring cases that are marginal on the facts, on the law, or both. They pressure parties to settle rather than contest their innocence. They overcharge, they intimidate witnesses, they fail to turn over exculpatory evidence. Perhaps most outrageously—in part because SEC has been working feverishly to hide this grossly unethical conduct—they even have ‘control deficiencies’ whereby the prosecutorial staff downloads computer files from the adjudicative side of the agency. All those pathologies of administrative adjudication—and at least a couple dozen others—become much scarcer, and some nearly vanish, once the right to a jury trial in front of a real Article III court is restored.

Note that a mere ability to appeal to an Article III court of appeals, which has always been possible at least in theory, is not enough. By appeal time, the overwhelming majority of parties have already been forced into settlement—98% at the SEC. For those who do not settle, the administrative record is set. There is no jury at the court of appeals level to do fact-finding. So, only errors of law stand a chance of being corrected. But an ounce of jury-trial prevention on the front end stops a pound of factual problems that back-end appellate review cannot cure.

Critics of the Jarkesy decision complain that forcing agencies to bring enforcement actions in real courts will limit their ability to take wrongdoers to the woodshed. To be sure, it takes more resources to conduct a real trial than an ersatz in-house tribunal, so to the extent resources limit the enforcement actions agencies can bring, they will have to marshal their resources to go after the most deserving targets of enforcement now. But since when did respect for constitutional rights like jury trials or due process become an undesirable impediment to greater government control over Americans’ lives? And what happened to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty? Have administrative statists become so drunk with power or so smitten with statism that they presume every target of administrative enforcement is well chosen (and guilty) and that the efficiency gains from a rush to judgment outweigh the deliberative losses from jury trials?

Some jaundiced journalists have charged that big corporations are behind the campaign to restore jury-trial rights, as though honoring the Bill of Rights somehow provides cause to seek out suspect motives. In truth, George Jarkesy and his courageous counsel have been on a largely lonely campaign to fix multiple constitutional shortcomings with administrative adjudication. His fixation on jury-trial rights is explained by the simple fact that people with their proverbial backs up against the wall are motivated to try long-shot arguments and fight back hard enough to expose the cracks in what others mistook to be a rock-solid façade. Most voices in the appellate bar mocked Jarkesy’s counsel for trying this argument. Even when it succeeded at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, most of the Supreme Court bar remained skeptical at Jarkesy’s chances of winning with this argument on appeal.

Not only did Mr. Jarkesy prevail, but he secured a victory whose implications ripple to the furthest reaches of the administrative shoreline. The Chief Justice’s opinion for the Court holds that the SEC must honor jury-trial rights in fraud cases, a kind of charge that had a familiar common-law counterpart. But the opinion also sweeps broadly enough to encompass at least every federal agency that tries to mete out punitive financial penalties, not just the SEC. The opinion forthrightly observes that the Seventh Amendment extends to all cases except for those that the Constitution excludes, namely cases in admiralty and equity. And it focuses lower courts’ attention on the remedy that the government is seeking in a case. Where financial penalties are dispensed for punitive or deterrence reasons, most often jury trials will be required.

Public-Rights Exception to Jury-Trial Rights Narrowed

Much to the chagrin of the dissenters, the Court’s opinion also questions and ultimately cashiers much of the so-called public rights exception to Article III jurisdiction, which the Court had long used to justify denying jury trial rights pretty much any time Congress chose to entrust enforcement of a new statute to an administrative agency. Back in 1977, the Supreme Court in Atlas Roofing Co., Inc. v. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission held that the Seventh Amendment does not require a trial by jury in administrative proceedings to enforce civil violations of federal ‘public rights’ statutes. Worse yet, the scope of public rights was said to broadly include “cases in which the government sues in its sovereign capacity to enforce public rights created by statutes within the power of Congress to enact.” That had meant that pretty much every statutory prohibition could be enforced with civil penalties without a jury trial, if Congress so chose.

In tossing aside that flimsy doctrine, The Chief Justice gave notice that the government cannot turn jury-trial rights into options only exercisable at the government’s discretion. Congress does not have the power to take away jury-trial rights. That is, it is not just that agencies cannot do this on their own, they cannot even do it with Congress’s explicit blessing. Indeed, Americans’ right to trial by jury matters most in cases against the government, so the idea that jury-trial rights are limited to torts and contracts and other cases against private parties is wrong. This historically learned and deeply rooted decision seems destined to permanently secure Americans’ jury-trial rights against encroachment by the administrative state.

Practically-speaking that probably means pushing a bunch of cases back into Article III courts where they belong, i.e., not in front of administrative law judges. That might require appointing an additional handful of Article III judges, even though the agencies will not be bringing the same volume of cases as before. If so, that seems a small price for taxpayers to pay in exchange for the restoration of their jury-trial rights as a bulwark against aggressive agency enforcement tactics.

[NB: Chief Justice Roberts did not stop there. Stay tuned for the second half of the analysis, covering the Loper Bright and Relentless cases.]

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Video: Raising a Baby in Altadena’s Ashes

Published

5 hours ago

January 10, 2026

Press Room

Video: Raising a Baby in Altadena’s Ashes

“So, my daughter, Robin, was born Jan. 5, 2025.” “Hi, baby. That’s you.” “When I first saw her, I was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s here.’” “She was crying and immediately when she was up on my face, she stopped crying.” “I got the room with the view.” “But it wasn’t until way later, I saw a fire near the Pasadena Mountains.” “We’re watching the news on the TV, hoping that it’s just not going to reach our house.” “The Eaton fire has scorched over 13,000 acres.” “Sixteen people confirmed dead.” “More than 1,000 structures have been destroyed.” “And then that’s when we got the call. Liz’s mom crying, saying the house is on fire.” “Oh, please. No, Dios mio. Go back. Don’t go that way. It’s closed. Go, turn. Turn back.” “Our house is burning, Veli.” “Oh my God.” “It was just surreal. Like, I couldn’t believe it.” “There’s nothing left.” “Not only our house is gone, the neighbors’ houses are gone, her grandma’s house is gone. All you could see was ash.” “My family has lived in Altadena for about 40 years. It was so quiet. There’s no freeways. My grandmother was across the street from us. All our family would have Christmas there, Thanksgivings. She had her nopales in the back. She would always just go out and cut them down and make salads out of them. My grandmother is definitely the matriarch of our family. My parents, our house was across the street. And then me and Javi got married right after high school.” “My husband’s getting me a cookie.” “Me and Javi had talked a lot about having kids in the future. Finally, after 15 years of being married, we were in a good place. It was so exciting to find out that we were pregnant. We remodeled our whole house. We were really preparing. My grandmother and my mom, they were like, crying, and they were like, so excited.” “Liz!” “I had this vision for her, of how she would grow up, the experiences maybe she would have experiencing my grandmother’s house as it was. We wanted her to have her childhood here. But all of our preparation went out the window in the matter of a few hours.” “And we’re like, ‘What do we do?’ And then we get a phone call. And it was Liz’s uncle. He was like, ‘Hey, come to my house. We have a room ready for you.’” “In my more immediate family, nine people lost their homes, so it was about 13 people in the house at any given point for the first three months of the fire. It was a really hard time. We had to figure out insurance claim forms, finding a new place to live, the cost of rebuilding — will we be able to afford it? Oh my gosh, we must have looked at 10 rentals. The experience of motherhood that I was hoping to have was completely different. Survival mode is not how I wanted to start. “Hi, Robin.” “Robin — she was really stressed out. “She’s over it.” “Our stress was radiating towards Robin. I feel like she could feel that.” “There was just no place to lay her safely, where she could be free and not stepped over by a dog or something. So she was having issues gaining strength. So she did have to go to physical therapy for a few months to be able to lift her head.” “One more, one more — you can do it.” “All the stress and the pain, it was just too much.” “Then Liz got really sick.” “I didn’t stop throwing up for five hours. Javi immediately took me to the E.R. They did a bunch of tests and figured out it was vertigo, likely stress-induced. It felt like, OK, something has to slow down. I can’t just handle all of it myself all the time. My mom is so amazing and my grandmother, they really took care of us in a really wonderful way. So — yeah.” “We’ve been able to get back on our feet. “Good high-five.” “I think it has changed how I parent. I’m trying to shed what I thought it would be like, and be open to what’s new. Robin is doing much better. She’s like standing now and trying to talk. She says like five words already. Even if it’s not exactly home for Robin, I wanted to have those smells around. You walk in and it smells like home. For us, it’s definitely tamales. My grandmother’s house is not being rebuilt. I can tell she’s so sad. “Let me just grab a piece of this.” “So right now, where Javi’s standing is the front. One bedroom there, here in the middle, and Robin’s bedroom in the corner. My grandma will live with us versus across the street, which is silver linings. Yeah, and we did make space for a garden for her.” “What are you seeing? What do you think? What do you think, Robin?” “The roots of Altadena — even though they’re charred — they’re going to be stronger than before.” “How strong you can be when something like this happens, I think is something that’s really important for her to take on. And that I hope Altadena also takes on.”

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New video shows fatal Minnesota ICE shooting from officer’s perspective

Published

8 hours ago

January 10, 2026

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New video shows fatal Minnesota ICE shooting from officer’s perspective

People participate in a protest and noise demonstration calling for an end to federal immigration enforcement operations in the city, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026, in Minneapolis.

John Locher/AP

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John Locher/AP

MINNEAPOLIS — A Minnesota prosecutor on Friday called on the public to share with investigators any recordings and evidence connected to the fatal shooting of Renee Good as a new video emerged showing the final moments of her encounter with an immigration officer.

Minneapolis Public Schools families, educators and students hold signs during a press conference demanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement be kept out of schools and Minnesota on Friday, Jan. 9, 2026, at Lake Hiawatha Park in Minneapolis.

The Minneapolis killing and a separate shooting in Portland, Oregon, a day later by the Border Patrol have set off protests in multiple cities and denunciations of immigration enforcement tactics by the U.S. government. The Trump administration has defended the officer who shot Good in her car, saying he was protecting himself and fellow agents.

The reaction to the shooting has largely been focused on witness cellphone video of the encounter. A new, 47-second video that was published online by a Minnesota-based conservative news site, Alpha News, and later reposted on social media by the Department of Homeland Security shows the shooting from the perspective of ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who fired the shots.

This image from video made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross via Alpha News shows Renee Good in her vehicle in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026.

Jonathan Ross/AP/ICE

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Jonathan Ross/AP/ICE

Sirens blaring in the background, he approaches and circles Good’s vehicle in the middle of the road while apparently filming on his cellphone. At the same time, Good’s wife also was recording the encounter and can be seen walking around the vehicle and approaching the officer. A series of exchanges occurred:

“That’s fine, I’m not mad at you,” Good says as the officer passes by her door. She has one hand on the steering wheel and the other outside the open driver side window.

“U.S. citizen, former f—ing veteran,” says her wife, standing outside the passenger side of the SUV holding up her phone. “You wanna come at us, you wanna come at us, I say go get yourself some lunch big boy.”

Other officers are approaching the driver’s side of the car at about the same time and one says: “Get out of the car, get out of the f—ing car.” Ross is now at the front driver side of the vehicle. Good reverses briefly, then turns the steering wheel toward the passenger side as she drives ahead and Ross opens fire.

The camera becomes unsteady and points toward the sky and then returns to the street view showing Good’s SUV careening away.

“F—ing b—,” someone at the scene says.

A crashing sound is heard as Good’s vehicle smashes into others parked on the street.

Federal agencies have encouraged officers to document encounters in which people may attempt to interfere with enforcement actions, but policing experts have cautioned that recording on a handheld device can complicate already volatile situations by occupying an officer’s hands and narrowing focus at moments when rapid decision-making is required.

Under an ICE policy directive, officers and agents are expected to activate body-worn cameras at the start of enforcement activities and to record throughout interactions, and footage must be kept for review in serious incidents such as deaths or use-of-force cases. The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to questions about whether the officer who opened fire or any of the others who were on the scene were wearing body cameras.

Homeland Security says video shows self-defense

Vice President JD Vance and Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in posts on X that the new video backs their contention that the officer fired in self-defense.

“Many of you have been told this law enforcement officer wasn’t hit by a car, wasn’t being harassed, and murdered an innocent woman,” Vance said. “The reality is that his life was endangered and he fired in self defense.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has said any self-defense argument is “garbage.”

Policing experts said the video didn’t change their thoughts on the use-of-force but did raise additional questions about the officer’s training.

“Now that we can see he’s holding a gun in one hand and a cellphone in the other filming, I want to see the officer training that permits that,” said Geoff Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina.

The video demonstrates that the officers didn’t perceive Good to be a threat, said John P. Gross, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who has written extensively about officers shooting at moving vehicles.

“If you are an officer who views this woman as a threat, you don’t have one hand on a cellphone. You don’t walk around this supposed weapon, casually filming,” Gross said.

Ross, 43, is an Iraq War veteran who has served in the Border Patrol and ICE for nearly two decades. He was injured last year when he was dragged by a driver fleeing an immigration arrest.

Attempts to reach Ross at phone numbers and email addresses associated with him were not successful.

Young students march near Kenny Community School in Minneapolis a day after an ICE agent shot and killed a 37-year-old woman on Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026.

Prosecutor asks for video and evidence

Meanwhile, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said that although her office has collaborated effectively with the FBI in past cases, she is concerned by the Trump administration’s decision to bar state and local agencies from playing any role in the investigation into Good’s killing.

She also said the officer who shot Good in the head does not have complete legal immunity, as Vance declared.

“We do have jurisdiction to make this decision with what happened in this case,” Moriarty said at a news conference. “It does not matter that it was a federal law enforcement agent.”

Moriarty said her office would post a link for the public to submit footage of the shooting, even though she acknowledged that she wasn’t sure what legal outcome submissions might produce.

Good’s wife, Becca Good, released a statement to Minnesota Public Radio on Friday saying, “kindness radiated out of her.”

“On Wednesday, January 7th, we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns,” Becca Good said.

“I am now left to raise our son and to continue teaching him, as Renee believed, that there are people building a better world for him,” she wrote.

Protesters confront law enforcement outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026.

Adam Bettcher/AP

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Adam Bettcher/AP

The reaction to Good’s shooting was immediate in the city where police killed George Floyd in 2020, with hundreds of protesters converging on the shooting scene and the school district canceling classes for the rest of the week as a precaution and offering an online option through Feb. 12.

On Friday, protesters were outside a federal facility serving as a hub for the immigration crackdown that began Tuesday in Minneapolis and St. Paul. That evening, hundreds protested and marched outside two hotels in downtown Minneapolis where immigration enforcement agents were supposed to be staying. Some people were seen breaking or spray painting windows and state law enforcement officers wearing helmets and holding batons ordered the remaining group of fewer than 100 people to leave late Friday.

Shooting in Portland

The Portland shooting happened outside a hospital Thursday. A federal border officer shot and wounded a man and woman in a vehicle, identified by the Department of Homeland Security as Venezuela nationals Luis David Nico Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras. Police said they were in stable condition Friday after surgery, with DHS saying Nico Moncada was taken into FBI custody

DHS defended the actions of its officers in Portland, saying the shooting occurred after the driver with alleged gang ties tried to “weaponize” his vehicle to hit them. It said no officers were injured.

Portland Police Chief Bob Day confirmed that the two people shot had “some nexus” to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. Day said they came to the attention of police during an investigation of a July shooting believed to have been carried out by gang members, but they were not identified as suspects.

The chief said any gang affiliation did not necessarily justify the shooting by U.S. Border Patrol. The Oregon Department of Justice said it would investigate.

On Friday evening, hundreds of protesters marched to the ICE building in Portland.

The biggest crackdown yet

The Minneapolis shooting happened on the second day of the immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities, which Homeland Security said is the biggest immigration enforcement operation ever. More than 2,000 officers are taking part and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said they have made more than 1,500 arrests.

The government is also shifting immigration officers to Minneapolis from sweeps in Louisiana, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. This represents a pivot, as the Louisiana crackdown that began in December had been expected to last into February.

Good’s death — at least the fifth tied to immigration sweeps since President Donald Trump took office — has resonated far beyond Minneapolis. More protests are planned for this weekend, according to Indivisible, a group formed to resist the Trump administration.

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Trump administration can’t block child care, other program money for 5 states: Judge

Published

20 hours ago

January 10, 2026

Press Room

Trump administration can’t block child care, other program money for 5 states: Judge

A federal judge ruled Friday that President Donald Trump’s administration cannot block federal money for child care subsidies and other programs aimed at supporting needy children and their families from flowing to five Democratic-led states for now.

The states of California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York argued that a policy announced Tuesday to freeze funds for three grant programs is having an immediate impact on them and creating “operational chaos.” In court filings and a hearing earlier Friday, the states contended that the government did not have a legal reason for holding back the money from those states.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it was pausing the funding because it had “reason to believe” the states were granting benefits to people in the country illegally, though it did not provide evidence or explain why it was targeting those states and not others.

The programs are the Child Care and Development Fund, which subsidizes child care for children from low-income families; the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides cash assistance and job training; and the Social Services Block Grant, a smaller fund that provides money for a variety of programs.

The five states say they receive a total of more than $10 billion a year from the programs.

U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, who was nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden, did not rule on the legality of the funding freeze, but he said the five states had met a legal threshold “to protect the status quo” for at least 14 days while arguments are made in court.

The government had requested reams of data from the five states, including the names and Social Security numbers of everyone who received benefits from some of the programs since 2022.

The states argue that the effort is unconstitutional and is intended to go after Trump’s political adversaries rather than to stamp out fraud in government programs — something the states say they already do.

Jessica Ranucci, a lawyer in the New York Attorney General’s office, said in the Friday hearing, which was conducted by telephone, that at least four of the states had already had money delayed after requesting it. She said that if the states can’t get child care funds, there will be immediate uncertainty for providers and families who rely on the programs.

A lawyer for the federal government, Kamika Shaw, said it was her understanding that the money had not stopped flowing to states.