In October, comedian John Oliver discussed the practice of civil asset forfeiture on his HBO program "Last Week Tonight." His bit closed with a parody of the show "Law & Order," featuring a police detective interrogating a pile of money and another running in dramatic slow motion with a seized toaster. Unfortunately, in real life civil forfeitu...

Jason Gay and Glenn Woods from Boldrepublic.com discuss the federal debt and whether the U.S. can continue to spend nearly $4 trillion annually without the debt finally crushing the economy. 

In late September I submitted comments to the Wyoming Department of Administration and Information ("A&I") opposing two proposed changes to the State of Wyoming Personnel Rules. My memo discussed two vague and overbroad provisions, one which could lead to unconstitutional abridgements of free speech and the other which unequivocally punished ap...

The state government's pending revenue problems, which I pointed to recently, are now beginning to make real headlines. On Sunday the Casper Star Tribune made its contribution: Dear rest of the country: Spare a thought for oil country. Your cheap gas comes at a cost. The national average gas price hit $2.75 a gallon last week, the lowest price for ...

As Wyoming and other states consider expanding the reach of campaign finance laws to capture "dark money," some consideration of what's happening in Chicago is helpful. Aggressive campaign finance regulations, touted as combatting corruption, allow for easy manipulation of the law. We learned last week that Rahm Emanuel pulled in $400,000 in campai...

Although not in the news for a while, the efforts to classify internet access as a utility are not nearly as benign as they may first appear. Net Neutrality, the innocuous, misleading name chosen by proponents of internet regulation, remains an ongoing issue. Recently, President Obama called for the FCC to act unilaterally. There is a major push on...

On November 26, 2014, the Wyoming Department of Health presented its SHARE report, a 32-page long argument for Medicaid expansion. The report makes a pro-expansion case that appears to sprawl in all directions, but perhaps the biggest selling point is that Medicaid expansion will create hundreds of new jobs and add millions of dollars to the state'...

In mid-November, Wyoming Attorney General Peter Michael joined an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief filed in a Maryland case that will soon be heard in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The case, Kolbe v. O'Malley, challenges a law recently enacted in Maryland that bans numerous semi-automatic rifles in the state and limit...

Our introductory blog on this topic focused on the premises of graduate criminal justice fellow Brice Hamack's recent article in the Wyoming Law Review. It is important to clarify that while Mr. Hamack's general concerns are well founded, Wyoming's juvenile justice system has uniquely entrenched problems unique from and, in many ways, worse than th...

For Wyoming parents wondering what really happens behind the scenes to push the direction of statewide education policy, they need look no further. A stunning video released this past week by the parent-led group, Wyoming Citizens Opposing Common Core, revealed minutes from an October meeting convened by an education bureaucracy-led group called th...