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Almost every public argument about federal finance founders on two numbers that sound alike and measure different things.

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.

American immigration law learned to sort people before it learned to welcome them.

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

The Second Amendment is twenty-seven words long, and scarcely one of them was new.

A judge has paused the compulsory parts of the new Postal Service ballot rule for fourteen days, and the deciding question has narrowed to a single one: where in the postal statutes did Congress give the agency power over elections?

A letter released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit contradicts what the health secretary told two Senate committees about his 2019 trip to Samoa, though the record neither shows he caused the measles epidemic there nor points to any prosecution.

The criminal conflict-of-interest statute imputes to a federal official the holdings of a spouse and a minor child, and exempts the President entirely, which is why a $620 million Pentagon loan, a 6 percent stake in a drone-defense startup and $900 million of federal settlement money can all be lawful at the same time.

Right to repair is a claim about permission. It holds that the owner of a product, or an independent shop the owner chooses, may fix that product without the manufacturer's authorisation.

Nearly every argument about who may lawfully build in the West Bank, and on whose ground, runs back to a statute promulgated by the Ottoman Empire in 1858.