The government should not be in the business of protecting preferred service providers from competition—it’s a key principle of economic liberty that the Arkansas Supreme Court just upheld in a key ruling in favor of Goldwater Institute client Steven Hedrick.
Steven started a trash-removal business to serve his Northwest Arkansas community—he rents roll-off dumpsters to customers and hauls them away when they’re full. But he was prohibited from serving clients in the city of Holiday Island after city leaders contracted with another provider for weekly residential trash-hauling, a service Steven doesn’t even provide. In October, Goldwater lawyers argued before the Arkansas Supreme Court that Holiday Island was violating the state constitution, which explicitly prohibits government-backed monopolies.
Now, the court has ruled in Steven’s favor, finding that state law doesn’t allow cities to ban businesses like Steven’s from providing supplemental trash-hauling services to clients. Business success should not be dependent on government favoritism, which is why the Goldwater Institute will continue to fight nationwide for the right to earn a living.
Read more here.
The Arizona Constitution is clear: the right to a jury trial is “inviolate.” Now, the Goldwater Institute is urging the Arizona Supreme Court to affirm that right and halt efforts by state bureaucrats to force people into juryless “administrative hearings.”
Goldwater this week filed a brief in the case EFG America v. Arizona Corporation Commission, which questions whether people accused by the state commission of securities fraud are entitled to a jury trial. The guarantee of a jury trial only applies to crimes that gave rise to a jury trial in 1912, when Arizona became a state. So, the commission argues that people accused of securities fraud aren’t entitled to a jury trial because the legislature didn’t pass a law against that specific form of fraud until after 1912.
But “fraud” has been against the law for centuries, and in its brief, Goldwater argues that the commission’s argument can’t work—lawmakers can’t simply take an old crime, rename it in a new statute, and rob people of their right to a jury trial.
Read more here.
“I just don’t have any confidence whatsoever that I’m going to get a fair shake”—that’s how one academic described the direction of a prestigious political science journal after it was hijacked by social justice radicals, according to a National Review article about the Goldwater Institute’s new report, Peer Review Gone Wild.
Goldwater’s report examines how a group of activists dubbed the “Feminist Collective” took over the American Political Science Review and remade it into a tool for their crusade against alleged systemic oppression, including a vow to institute race and sex discrimination in their submission process. Reputable academics were aghast, according to National Review. Many researchers started submitting their work elsewhere, one professor told NR, “because they realize that their work is disadvantaged by the racialized and gendered editorial process of the journal.”
National Review was not the only notable outlet to highlight the report. Prominent scholar and writer Steven Hayward called it a “terrific piece of work” in his newsletter. “APSR: RIP,” he wrote. “Even Woodrow Wilson (the first president of the APSA back in the 1890s) would be appalled.”
Read the National Review story here. Read Steven Hayward’s newsletter here. And read the whole Peer Review Gone Wild report here.
