Due process limits how government may act against individuals. Learn how notice, meaningful hearings, neutral decision-makers, evidence, and substantive protections help make government action fair.
Court-ordered community service is supposed to require actual service. But documented schemes have sold certificates claiming defendants completed hours they never worked, turning a sentencing requirement into a piece of paper.
An examination of America's mortgage default system, including nonjudicial foreclosures, loss mitigation, property valuations, HOA liens and nationwide legal services.
From the early web to smartphones, social media and computer databases, courts have repeatedly decided how old constitutional protections apply to technologies their authors could never have imagined.
From presidential orders to agency rules, some landmark cases began when government officials claimed authority the courts said they did not have. Here is what happens when judges draw that line.
The Supreme Court follows precedent, but precedent is not unchangeable. From segregation and economic regulation to privacy and abortion, some landmark rulings exist because the Court concluded an earlier Supreme Court decision should no longer control.
A mistaken identification, shared name, bad database entry or flawed investigation can put an innocent person in handcuffs. What happens when police arrest the wrong person—and the mistake is not discovered immediately?
A lawsuit can begin with one accident, one employee or one disputed transaction and uncover evidence of a much larger problem. Discovery can expose internal records, repeated complaints, hidden patterns and conduct nobody expected to find.
Two cameras can record the same event and make it look completely different. Angle, timing, sound, missing seconds and perspective can turn video evidence into the beginning of a courtroom dispute rather than the end of one.
Facial recognition is turning the human face into a searchable identifier used by phones, airports, businesses and law enforcement, raising lasting questions about privacy, accuracy and identity.
Social media posts can survive for years through screenshots, account records and other copies. When a lawsuit, criminal case or other dispute begins, an old post can become evidence with consequences its author never anticipated.
A confident eyewitness can be extraordinarily persuasive to a jury. But when that confidence developed—and what happened after the witness first saw the suspect—can matter as much as how certain the witness appears in court.
DNA can identify more than the person who provided it. Genetic genealogy can use biological relationships to generate investigative leads, raising lasting questions about crime solving, family privacy and genetic data.
A witness can look directly at a defendant and sincerely say, “That's the person I saw,” yet still be mistaken. Decades of wrongful-conviction cases have changed what courts know about eyewitness memory and certainty.
Hours of surveillance footage can matter less than a few decisive seconds. A brief recording can contradict a witness, establish a timeline, reveal what happened before an encounter, or completely change how a case is understood.
Photos, email, social media, cloud files and online accounts can survive long after their owner dies. The law increasingly has to decide who may access, preserve or control a person's digital life.
Phones and apps can create detailed records of where a device has traveled. In a criminal investigation, location history can place a phone near a crime scene—or help show that its owner was somewhere else.
A fence, tree, driveway, noise complaint or property line can turn two neighbors into courtroom opponents. Neighbor disputes show how small conflicts become expensive lawsuits—and why the original disagreement is often only the beginning.
