The 13th Amendment is given credit for freeing an estimated 4 million enslaved people during the Civil War era. It also enabled a prison system of free labor and involuntary servitude.
Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, has been charged with seditious conspiracy over the attempted insurrection. A constitutional law scholar outlines why that may set a bad precedent.
The court appears split over the future of vaccination mandates, with conservative justices skeptical of the Biden administration’s authority to enforce requirements.
Diaries, visitor logs, handwritten notes and speech drafts are among the records Donald Trump has tried to keep from a Congressional committee investigating the Capitol riot of Jan. 6.
Like today, passions were strong and political discourse was inflamed in late 18th-century America. Angry mobs torched buildings. Virginians drank a toast to George Washington’s speedy death.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that you have a constitutional right to have a gun in your home. Now, the justices will consider how far outside of the home that right extends.
The Supreme Court is a leading player in enacting policy in the US. But it has no army to enforce its decisions; its authority rests solely on its legitimacy.
It’s easy to make fun of California politics. But a longtime scholar of those politics says the attempt to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom is part of a long-running attempt to hold government accountable.
New state laws in the US banning teaching about systemic racism raise the question: Does the Constitution protect public school teachers’ right to choose how and what to teach?
Religion was a common theme in some of the cases to come before the nine justices in the recently concluded Supreme Court term. Three experts help explain what is at stake.
A recent federal court ruling appeared to expand Second Amendment rights to private citizen militias, which a historian of early America explains is not what the founders intended.
Since Tyre Nichols’ death there are renewed calls for Congress to pass police reform legislation. But the federal government has almost no control over state and local police departments.
John M. Murphy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rep. Liz Cheney may have been exiled from her party’s leadership, but she’s after a bigger thing: the restoration of politically conservative values in the GOP and its voters.
The US Census Bureau has announced which states will gain and lose representation in Congress as a result of the 2020 census. Here’s how it makes the calculations.
As GOP-run statehouses across the country tighten voting restrictions, a bill in Congress would, its Democratic sponsors say, undo more than 15 years of moves to make voting harder.