Free Republic

"The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom," said the great fictional lawyer Atticus Finch, hero of the beloved classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Finch maintained that: "Our courts have their faults as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal." Our courts are where people can freely exercise their rights by challenging what they believe is government overreach. What makes it work is our adversarial system in which lawyers zealously represent their clients—even if the case...

A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order ending the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship regardless of the parents’ immigration status. U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour ruled in the case brought by the states of Washington, Arizona, Illinois and Oregon, which argue the 14th Amendment and Supreme Court case law have cemented birthright citizenship.

A federal judge in Seattle blocked, temporarily, President Donald Trump’s attempt to rescind birthright citizenship — the idea spelled out in the Constitution that every person born in the United States is an American citizen. Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour on Thursday was blistering in his criticism of Trump’s action as he granted a temporary restraining order that blocks Trump’s executive order from taking effect nationwide. “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades, I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour, an...