The prisoners write in carefully lettered script or on old electric typewriters. There are sometimes grammatical errors or misspellings. But the language is direct. They describe facing Stage 4 cancer ...

In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of Supreme Court decisions and a new law sought to curb "frivolous" prisoner lawsuits and give more deference to prison officials. Together, they changed the legal ...

Christy and Darren Smith with a portrait of their late son, Joshua England, in front of their home in Fairview, Oklahoma. He died of a ruptured appendix while serving a one-year sentence at an ...

For years, FBAR litigants have made the commonsense argument that large willful FBAR penalties, which can exceed the value of the unreported foreign accounts themselves, violate the excessive fines ...

Editor's note: This is a regular feature on issues related to the Constitution and civics education written by Paul G. Summers, retired judge and state attorney general. The U.S. Constitution is the ...

Six years ago, in Timbs v. Indiana, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a majority opinion that pointed out the origins of the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause and the original ...

So far this year, three False Claims Act defendants have challenged judgments against them based on the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Remarkably, two were successful, as the District ...

We analyzed nearly 1,500 cases to obtain data on prisoner litigation. We found that constitutional protections have been dramatically weakened. In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of Supreme Court ...