Transparency

I keep three federal dockets open, and I check them twice a day. That sentence needs defending, because it sounds like a hobby. It is not, or not only. Two of the three cases ask a question the same in kind, and it is the question that has mattered most in American law for four years: when a statute tells the executive branch to do something, what happens when the executive branch declines? ...

There is a kind of lawsuit that is not really a lawsuit about law at all. It is a lawsuit about whether the government will do the thing it said it would do. Phang v. Blanche is one of those, and it is worth following not because the legal question is hard, but because the legal question is easy and the government has spent five months finding ways not to answer it. ...