Was individual liberty strengthened or weakened during the Supreme Court’s monumental term? That’s the all-important question the Goldwater Institute’s top legal minds grappled with this week in a webinar exploring some of the term’s most interesting cases and their implications for Americans.
During the webinar, Timothy Sandefur, Goldwater’s Vice President for Legal Affairs, and Jon Riches, Vice President for Litigation, dug into the Court’s rulings on birthright citizenship, tariffs, gun rights, free speech, and the administrative state. They also weighed in on some of the gravest threats to liberty—Riches called the administrative state “a huge, huge threat”—discussed where courts should draw the line on presidential power and argued against the notion that the Court’s conservative majority is a monolith.
While the Court may have moved the ball in the direction of individual liberty this term, Sandefur said that standing up for freedom isn’t just the work of the nine justices: “Defending the Constitution is a job for every citizen.”
It will always be the Goldwater Institute’s job, too.
Georgia is the latest state to make a straightforward declaration: We deserve safe cities. That’s the message of the Goldwater Institute’s Brian Norman in a new Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed applauding the state’s leaders for enacting a law that enables citizens to hold government officials accountable when they let public nuisances grow unchecked.
Modeled after the Goldwater Institute’s Safe Neighborhoods Act, Georgia’s law lets property owners seek compensation when a local government repeatedly fails to enforce public safety laws involving things like illegal camping, loitering, and public intoxication. Georgia joins Arizona and Oklahoma in giving citizens a remedy when local officials allow homeless camps to take over their neighborhoods.
“Public order is not a luxury good,” writes Norman, Goldwater’s Director of State Affairs. “It should not depend on whether residents can afford private security, repeated cleanups, legal help, or constant property repairs.”
Goldwater’s Safe Neighborhood’s Act sends an important message: Americans do not have to sit quietly as their communities decline around them. Georgia was right to act, Norman writes. Other states should follow.
With the rise of AI and the need for modern infrastructure to support it, many people see just one thing: danger. It’s why New York Gov. Kathy Hochul imposed the nation’s first statewide data center moratorium and why so many others want to follow suit. But data centers are not speculative indulgences, the Goldwater Institute’s Carl Paulus writes in a new op-ed—they are the backbone of the digital economy.
To critics, data centers are “dangerous, alien intrusions on ordinary life,” Paulus writes in the Center Square New York. But the truth is, the modern world wouldn’t work without them. In addition to AI tools, data centers support everyday digital services Americans rely on. That doesn’t mean that concerns about electricity, water and land use should be dismissed; they should be answered with evidence, markets and clear rules, not moratoriums, retroactive zoning changes, and vetoes dressed as planning, Paulus writes.
Treating every emerging technology as guilty until proven harmless and every infrastructure project as a threat will not stop AI or roll back the digital economy. That’s why the Goldwater Institute backs free-market solutions.
The future will be built, Paulus writes. The question is whether America will build it here.
