The state of New York wants to make PR people register with the state as lobbyists if they want to try to get a journalist to write an editorial in favor of a client.

Zoning laws, governing how we use our land, are often thought of as mundane drudgery, or as opportunities for civic-minded people to help “Keep Our Neighborhood Beautiful.” In fact, they can also be a powerful driver of inequality.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could do more to damage public employee unions than anything the Republican party has done in decades.

The state of California issued a report this week on conditions at High Desert State Prison. It is a nightmare.

Since our nation executed nearly 100 people in 1999, the use of the death penalty has been on the decline. In 2015, executions became even more rare.

With the rise of the “gig economy” has come a debate over who is an employee, and who is truly an “independent contractor.” Do we need to create a new category of worker just for the Uber era?

The IRS—the department that collects all the money that funds everything the U.S. government wants to do—is being slowly gutted. What could go wrong?

In the weeks before a team of Navy SEALS killed Osama bin Laden in his Abottabad compound, a team of Obama administration lawyers secretly crafted a pre-emptive legal justification for his killing, a New York Times report alleges.

Americans tend to think of our Constitution as a hallowed source of wisdom that should be tampered with only in the most extreme circumstances. But what if it’s really just old—and dumb?

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that challenged the ability of unions to require everyone in a workplace to pay dues. Here is what is at stake in this case: the very existence of public unions.

Slowly but steadily, America is losing its taste for the death penalty. Yesterday’s Supreme Court dissent by Stephen Breyer may go down as a landmark on America’s path to the death penalty’s inevitable abolition.

Before it was hacked apart, leaving its thousands of employees vulnerable to a lifetime of identity theft risk, Sony made a conscious decision that cybersecurity just wasn’t that big of a deal. Now those employees are going to try to get some payback in court.

The great thing about America is you can say pretty much anything you want, if you pay a filing fee. Like this Georgia lady who was so dissatisfied with the outcome of her case, she filed a duly executed “Notice to Fuck This Court and Everything that it Stands For.”

Good news, substance-dependent lads and lasses: For a limited time only, possession of your favorite embarrassing club drugs—including meth, ecstasy and ketamine—is legal in Ireland.

It has become increasingly clear to mainstream America that our nation's decades-long experiment with mass incarceration is fundamentally a bad idea. And though state prisons loom large in the public mind, it's actually local jails where most of the (bad) action happens.

We periodically run letters from death row inmates. Our latest letter comes from an inmate who is now deceased. Arnold Prieto, Jr. wrote us this letter on January 14, one week before he was executed by the state of Texas.

Yesterday brought a new report on the awful solitary confinement practices of the state of Texas. Today, let us share another recent report on solitary confinement in the state of Arizona, and its "decaying and detrimental effect on human beings."

The death penalty is slowly losing prominence in America. Botched executions and problems with the supply of drugs has made lethal injection harder to carry out. Still, states are determined to balance out this trend with sheer bloodlust.

From time to time we publish letters from death row inmates. Today, we bring you a letter from Jeffrey Wogenstahl, who is scheduled to be executed by the state of Ohio in January of 2016.

If you use the internet, you should be opposed to the passage of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA. The bill was blocked last year, because it's a draconian privacy nightmare, but it's back, and feeding on Sony hacker paranoia.