Patients in West Virginia with rare and ultra-rare diseases have a new reason for hope. That’s because Gov. Patrick Morrisey signed a bill making West Virginia the 17th state to enact the Goldwater Institute’s Right to Try for Individualized Treatments—legislation that empowers patients to seek highly specialized treatments that are as unique as they are.
Right to Try for Individualized Treatments, or Right to Try 2.0, builds off Goldwater’s original Right to Try Act, which was passed in 41 states before it was signed into federal law in 2018. That law frees terminal patients to access some investigational treatments not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But medical advancements now allow treatments to be designed specifically for a patient based on their own genetics—treatments that just can’t make it through the FDA’s outdated regulatory process in a timely manner. Those are the treatments patients can access through Right to Try 2.0.
The Goldwater Institute will continue fighting in states around the nation—and in Washington D.C.—to ensure that no patient is denied potentially life-saving treatments because of red tape and bureaucracy.
Unstacking the Deck Against Average Alabamans
Americans who challenge the government in court should expect a level playing field, but far too often that simply isn’t the case. Now, a new law in Alabama—modeled on the Goldwater Institute’s Judicial Deference Reform Act—will ensure that average Americans will get a fair shake in court by making it clear that the scales will not automatically be tipped in the government’s favor.
Alabama Senate Bill 167, which Gov. Kay Ivey just signed, ends the practice of judicial deference to administrative agencies’ interpretations of the law and their own regulations. The legislation is important because when government agencies expand their power through expansive interpretations of the law—and those interpretations are then upheld by overly deferential courts—the legal deck ends up stacked in favor of unelected bureaucrats.
In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal Chevron doctrine, which required courts to defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws. But that decision didn’t apply at the state level, which is why the Goldwater Institute will continue working to ensure this misguided doctrine no longer holds sway anywhere.
A Burger Mural Free Speech Battle
The leaders of Salina, Kansas, love their murals—they invite in artists to paint them, they feature them on the city’s website, they even host an annual mural festival. So why then did those same leaders take aim at a mural painted on a local burger joint’s building? As the Goldwater Institute explains in a new brief, because they’re trying to ban business speech—and that’s unconstitutional.
The case involves the owner of the Cozy Inn burger joint who started painting a mural on his building featuring burger spaceships and inviting people in for a bite to eat. The problem, according to the city, is that the Cozy Inn’s mural isn’t a mural at all, but is instead a sign—the difference being that a sign “directs people’s attention” to things. But that’s not true at all; many of Salina’s murals direct attention to things. What the city is really trying to do is ban speech with a commercial motive.
The Goldwater Institute—joined by the Manhattan Institute—is urging the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold a lower court’s ruling that backed the free speech rights of businesses like the Cozy Inn. Business speech isn’t a trivial thing, which is why the Goldwater Institute will continue urging courts and governments around the nation to respect everybody’s right to speak freely.
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