💺First Class Rights

Each civil right sold separately.

📡 On my Radar

Picture this: The President signs a travel ban forbidding travelers from dozens of countries from entering the United States. Thousands of people with valid visas suddenly find themselves stranded at airports.

Until last week, a single person could sue for relief and a court could temporarily pause (e.g. issue a temporary injunction) the travel ban for everyone affected. No longer.

Temporary injunctions exist because sometimes a law can be so potentially problematic that it's better to pause it while the case gets decided, rather than let people suffer irreversible harm for years. A court’s temporary injunction of the 2017 travel ban allowed families to reunite even as the legal challenge proceeded.

Now, under the Supreme Court's Friday ruling in Trump v. CASA, federal judges can only issue broad temporary injunctions when it's absolutely necessary to give "complete relief" to the specific people who filed the lawsuit. That means its more likely that each stranded traveler would now have to find their own lawyer and argue individually that the travel ban shouldn't apply to them—even though every case challenges the exact same law on the same legal grounds.

Your rights may now depend not just on what the Constitution says, but on whether you live in the right place, can afford lawyers capable of navigating complex procedural requirements¹, and can survive ongoing harm while the legal system crawls forward.

But there's an even more insidious problem: while lawsuits drag on for years, a president gets to implement and normalize unconstitutional policies, creating facts on the ground that become incredibly difficult to undo. Businesses adjust their hiring practices, schools change their enrollment procedures, hospitals modify their patient intake systems. Government agencies build entire bureaucracies around the new rules.

After years of operating under an unconstitutional policy, reversing course becomes exponentially more expensive and disruptive—even when courts finally rule the policy illegal. This gives any U.S. administration enormous power to reshape American society simply by forcing people to live under unconstitutional rules long enough that overturning them seems impractical.

The Court has made constitutional protection more like a luxury good—something you have to buy individually rather than something that protects everyone equally.

📈 By the Numbers

Quick, someone make the dollar great again.

👊🏽 Make a Difference

17 jobs | 1 fellowship | 2 funding opportunities

JOB | The Max Foundation is hiring a Program Officer to lead programs delivering essential treatment, care, and support to patients in Asia & Eastern Europe.

JOB | Grande Lum shares an opening at Stanford University for Assistant Dean of Students in the Office of Community Standards.