Every export control begins from a single, slightly unnerving proposition: that selling something can itself be a strategic act.

Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment on February 26, 1869, and it was ratified on February 3, 1870.

American law did not begin by asking how an image was made. It began by asking what an image did to whoever happened to see it, and it answered that question in its harshest possible form.

The federal government's first venture into the care of small children was not, in its own terms, about children at all.

Every American president for the past twelve decades has been able to do something that would have puzzled the men who wrote the Constitution: appoint a body of outsiders, or of hand-picked insiders, to go hunting…

Long before any legislature drafted a blasphemy statute, the offence existed, and it already carried a double character.

Today's stories and the historical context you need to understand them, in one audio briefing from AskWhy.News.

Minnesota wrote a law that makes the operator of an image tool liable the moment a user creates a synthetic nude, with no requirement that anything be published, and xAI is arguing that this is the one thing the Supreme Court has said a state may not do.

A federal judge in Mississippi has refused to authorize cell tower dumps, holding that sweeping up the phone records of everyone near a crime scene is the kind of general search the Fourth Amendment was written to forbid, though the ruling binds one district and no appeals court has agreed.

On April 29 the Supreme Court reconstructed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to require near-proof of intent; eight days later Tennessee enacted a map dividing Memphis across three districts, and a unanimous federal panel found nothing in the new standard that stopped it.