Alma College’s Discriminatory ‘Campbell Scholars Program’ Challenged By Equal Protection Project

Local governments have a nasty habit of taking everything you’ve got and leaving you dry. That’s how Isabella County, Mich., treated the Pung family, whose case was heard on Wednesday, March 11, by the United States Supreme Court. The county foreclosed on the Pung family home for a tax debt of only $2,000. The kicker? Both the state’s Tax Tribunal and its Court of Appeals ruled that the Pungs didn’t even owe that tax in the first place. The response from the local tax assessor: “I don’t care.” The county took title to the Pungs’ home and auctioned it off for a fraction of its full value. The Pungs’ lawsuit doesn’t focus on whether the tax was actually owed. Instead, the case addresses what the county must do after it takes someone’s entire house over a paltry 2,000 bucks. The home itself was worth about $200,000 — 100 times the amount of the tax debt. But the county hawked the property at a fire-sale auction for just $76,000, deducted the $2,000 debt, and returned the excess $74,000 to the Pungs. That means that about $118,000 of the Pungs’ equity was just wiped out. Well — not quite. The auction purchaser quickly flipped the property for the $195,000 it was actually worth. For those keeping score: The government gets its $2,000, some private investor gets windfall profits, and the Pungs get shafted. At oral argument, several justices expressed incredulity about the fairness of taking an entire home over such a trivial debt. But this is not the first time Michigan counties have taken the whole farm over small potatoes. For example, Wayne County took a home owned by Erica Perez after she accidentally underpaid her 2014 property taxes by $144. Other than that one minor oversight, the Perez family had paid their taxes in full every year from when they purchased the property in 2013 until the county foreclosed on it in 2017. They even tried to pay their 2018 taxes, only to be told they no longer owned the home. They hadn’t realized that, because the government sent notice to the wrong address. The county then sold the property for $110,000 and kept every penny. The Perezes were left with nothing. Oakland County took Uri Rafaeli’s rental property after a slight miscalculation resulted in his underpayment of $8.41. That is not a misprint: his home was seized over a debt of eight dollars and 41 cents. That’s less than the price of a Chipotle burrito. When Rafaeli’s case reached the Michigan Supreme Court in 2019, Justice Richard Bernstein could hardly believe his ears: “You have a situation where people owed eight dollars, and they lost their house. How is that equitable?” In another case, Sixth Circuit Judge Raymond Kethledge put an even finer point on it: “In some legal precincts, that sort of behavior is called theft.” Rafaeli’s case was a landmark in Michigan. The state Supreme Court ruled, as a matter of state law, that the government’s confiscation of surplus equity after a tax sale violates the Takings Clause of the Michigan Constitution. Like its federal counterpart, that provision guarantees that the government cannot take property without paying just compensation. It would take nearly four more years before federal law would catch up. In the 2023 decision in Tyler v. Hennepin County, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, as in Michigan, so it is everywhere: when the government takes more property than it is owed, it has to pay back the surplus — just like in every other debt collection context (imagine if the bank repossessed your car over eight bucks). But in Tyler, the court did not consider what exactly must be paid back. The Constitution requires “just compensation,” which usually means the fair market value of the property at the time it was taken. But some courts have measured the value of the property by whatever the government manages to get from selling it, even if the sale price is far below the property’s actual value. That’s the question at issue in the Pung case. The government has a legitimate interest in levying taxes. And when taxes go unpaid, it has several tools available to collect. But there is simply no reason why property owners should lose the equity in their homes over a small, simple mistake. As the Supreme Court said in Tyler, taxpayers must render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s — but no more. The Constitution is ill-served by any rule that lets the government off the hook for reimbursing the full value of the property they’ve taken. And any regime that permits windfall profits to governments or investors creates a perverse incentive for tax collectors to maximize their bounty at the expense of homeowners. Again and again, local governments have proven that if you give them an inch, they’ll take your home.   This op-ed was originally published in Fox News on March 13, 2026. The post <em>Fox News</em>: Give the government an inch and they’ll seize your $200k home for a $2k debt appeared first on Pacific Legal Foundation.

Every November, students vying for a spot at one of New York City’s eight Specialized High Schools take the admissions exam that will determine their academic trajectory. The notoriously rigorous Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) spans three hours and assesses a student’s abilities in English language arts and mathematics. Admission is highly competitive. There are around 4,000 to 5,000 seats available across all eight of the nine schools each year, and anywhere from 25,000 to 30,000 students take the SHSAT. For years, this intense, merit-driven admissions process has helped build these schools into behemoths of academic excellence. Seats are reserved for the city’s best and brightest, whose test scores show that they can handle the advanced curriculum these schools provide. Despite the SHSAT’s tried-and-true record for identifying gifted students, recent changes to the Discovery program have weakened the city’s longstanding merit-based admissions system. A seat at Stuyvesant A major draw for students interested in attending one of the Specialized High Schools is the focus on Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). In total, there are nine Specialized High Schools, and the majority are devoted to STEM. Only one, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, does not require its students to take the SHSAT. The cutoff scores for each of the eight SHSAT schools vary each year based on seat availability, applicant preferences, and SHSAT scores Upon registering for the exam, students are asked to rank their school preferences. When the time came for Yi Fang Chen’s son, M.P., to rank his school preferences ahead of the 2025 exam, there was no doubt that his first choice would be Stuyvesant High School. Of all the city’s Specialized High Schools, many consider Stuyvesant to be the crown jewel. Stuyvesant is the oldest of the nine schools. Since 1904, it has cultivated a tradition of excellence, with multiple alumni going on to win Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, economics, and medicine-related fields. For the Chen family, Stuyvesant also had the added benefit of being just a short subway ride from their home, making it the ideal choice all around. M.P. has already demonstrated a deep commitment to his studies. He attends one of the city’s gifted and talented middle schools and has a strong background in mathematics. After spending years preparing for the test, he and his parents were hopeful that his SHSAT scores would earn him a spot at Stuyvesant. In March 2026, his results came in. M.P. received an impressive score of 558, placing him in approximately the 95th percentile. One year prior, his score would have been high enough to secure a spot at Stuyvesant. But for the 2026/27 school year, he was just three points below the cutoff score. Meanwhile, thanks to changes in the Specialized High Schools admissions system that de-emphasized individual merit, students who scored at least 63 points lower than M.P. on the SHSAT were granted admission to Stuyvesant. How merit built an American Dream Yi Fang has raised her children to understand that merit—and nothing else—should determine their opportunities in education. She doesn’t just preach this philosophy—she’s lived it. Both Yi Fang and her husband are immigrants to this country, hailing from China and Hong Kong respectively. As children from working-class families, they both understood that education was the key to building a prosperous life with financial security. Yi Fang was a teenager when her family moved from China to New York City. Her parents were focused on doing what they could to make ends meet, so her dedication to her education was a self-driven pursuit. During those first few years, she had to navigate starting high school in a new country where she didn’t speak the language. And while English was foreign to her, she took comfort in the universal language of numbers. She excelled in mathematics and within a few years had gotten a good grasp on the English language. When she wasn’t studying, she was pouring herself into extracurricular activities and volunteer work. While other teens enjoyed their summer freedom, Yi Fang was volunteering at Bellevue Hospital Center as an interpreter, helping medical staff communicate with Chinese-speaking patients. Her years of volunteer work combined with her academic record helped her earn a scholarship from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which funded both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. Yi Fang attended NYU, starting as a chemical engineering major and then switching to mathematics. She then earned her Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford, where she met her husband. The pair then moved back to New York City, where they are now raising their three children. Yi Fang is proud of what she has been able to achieve, telling PLF that “through my hard work, taking exams, and then getting involved in extracurricular activities, I was able to go to a good school. I was able to achieve what my parents came to this country for.” It is important to her that her children understand the importance of earning accomplishments through their own merit. Unfortunately, while she is trying to instill these morals in her children, merit is under attack by the city of New York. The seat that was set aside Yi Fang was understandably disappointed that her son was just a few points shy of attending Stuyvesant. It would have been easier to accept the situation if her son had truly not done enough to earn a spot. But there was more to the story than simply missing the cutoff by three points. For years, state law has specified that admissions to NYC’s Specialized High Schools be based “solely and exclusively by taking a competitive, objective and scholastic achievement examination, which shall be open to each and every child in the city of New York.” But the law had also historically allowed for a small carveout via the Discovery program, which set aside some open seats—typically less than 5 percent of the total admissions across all schools—for low-income students whose SHSAT scores were just below the cutoff. In 2019, former Mayor Bill de Blasio and former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza revamped the Discovery program without legislative approval. Under the restructured program, each of the Specialized High Schools was required to reserve 20 percent of their incoming seats for Discovery-eligible students—the definition of which was tweaked. Rather than being open to all low-income students, the Discovery program is now available only to low-income students from middle schools with an “Economic Need Index” of 60 percent or higher. And these qualifying students are held to a lower SHSAT standard than everyone else who is admitted to the Specialized High Schools. A New York Department of Education analysis using 2019 SHSAT data concluded that Discovery’s 20 percent set-aside rule increased Stuyvesant’s cutoff score for those students who are admitted based just on SHSAT score and not Discovery by ten points—from 552 to 562. It is likely that the rule had a similar effect for the 2025 SHSAT scores. Stuyvesant’s incoming class for 2026 is expected to be at least 800 students, and under the revamped Discovery program, approximately 160 of those seats will be given to students who received SHSAT scores below the overall cutoff—which for 2026 was 495 (over 60 points below M.P.’s score). Basing admissions primarily on SHSAT scores has helped mold these schools into the respectable institutions they are today. Why change a system that yielded such remarkable results? Designed to discriminate The architects and supporters of Discovery’s changes cite equity as their motive. They have been explicit not only about their intent to racially engineer the student body to include more black and Hispanic students, but also to decrease the number of Asian American students granted admission. Nearly three-quarters of the city’s Asian American students come from low-income families. But many of these students attend schools that do not meet the Discovery program’s new Economic Need Index threshold. While their economic need may be the same, their race has locked them out of opportunity. The racial discrimination at play here is not just speculation—supporters of Discovery’s changes have made public statements admitting to the desire to limit Asian American and white students. Specialized High Schools exist specifically to provide opportunities to students who have demonstrated their aptitude and ability to thrive in fast-paced, academically rigorous environments. Merit—not race—should be the only factor that determines whether a student is admitted to a Specialized High School. The Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause prohibits the government from discriminating against individuals based on their race. Whether direct or by proxy, governments cannot create admissions standards that tip the scales in favor of one race over another. Yi Fang has partnered with Pacific Legal Foundation to challenge New York City’s discriminatory admissions policy in court. For Yi Fang, this case is bigger than M.P. and even her other children who will one day be old enough to take the SHSAT. Yi Fang wants every student in New York City to have an equal opportunity to attend a Specialized High School based on their SHSAT score and not on their race. Merit created a pathway for Yi Fang to build the life she dreamed of when she immigrated to America years ago. Everyone deserves that chance, and Yi Fang is more than willing to fight for that right. The post One mother’s fight to restore merit-based admissions in NYC’s Specialized High Schools appeared first on Pacific Legal Foundation.

The Calm Before the Avalanche But first… Guys, your new favorite podcast is out! I love a good Supreme Court dissent—so I created a podcast about them. In the first season, we get meta; we talk about America’s first great dissent—The Declaration of Independence—through the lens of Supreme Court dissents. We trace the Declaration’s promises from parchment to the Constitution to Supreme Court doctrine. We explore how the Declaration’s ideals have been defended by some of the Court’s greatest dissents, and how, at times, they’ve been hollowed out by the Court itself—and we do it all through vivid storytelling and interviews with Pulitzer Prize-winning historians and authors. I’m excited for you to hear it. Streaming now: https://pacificlegal.org/in-dissent/! (Feel free to subscribe and to offer glowing reviews.) Opinion day: Kind of meh It was an opinion day yesterday at the Court. Unfortunately, the Court is still clearing its docket of the snoozers before getting ready for the constitutional bombshells—so nothing much of note. But with June around the corner, here’s a look at the cases that lie ahead. The Trump Docket: Executive power everywhere, all at once The Court still has several Trump-related cases pending, including Trump v. Slaughter and the related Trump v. Cook, involving limitations on the president’s ability to fire people in the executive branch. Trump v. Slaughter asks the Court to revisit its famous case of Humphrey’s Executor, which said that Congress can limit the president’s removal power when related to “quasi-judicial, quasi-legislative” officials. For years, critics have said that this blurs the lines of political accountability; people in the executive branch must be accountable to the chief executive, so that the people know who to vote out if those bureaucrats behave in ways that the public doesn’t like. Supporters say that Congress should be able to insulate executive officials from political influence so that they can be “independent.” But if too independent, the officers become a Fourth Branch of government, free of accountability altogether. Trump v. Cook is interesting because it involves the Federal Reserve, which has long been treated as something close to sui generis—independent enough that even the administration itself didn’t contend that the president should be able to fire members of the Federal Reserve at will. Instead, the question is whether the president abided by the current limitations on his firing power, and whether courts can review his decisions at all. Speaking of a lack of accountability… Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections has shocking facts. The government forcibly shaved a Rastafarian man’s dreadlocks in violation of his religious beliefs, despite him holding a physical copy of a court decision affirming his right to keep them. The prisoner sued for damages under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which prohibits the government, in certain situations, from imposing a substantial burden on religious rights. The question is whether the statute authorizes money damages, as opposed to injunctive relief—and that question is incredibly important here, because 1) the man’s head was already shaved, and 2) he left prison shortly thereafter. Damages are the only meaningful remedy left. Cases like this often expose the tension between immunity doctrines and basic notions of fairness. Even justices who strongly defend immunity sometimes struggle when confronted with facts this severe. But Landor is also armed with strong legal precedent: Just a few terms ago, the Court ruled that RLIUPA’s sister statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, does, in fact, allow money damages. The question is whether the fact that RFRA was based on Congress’ commerce power and RLIUPA was based on Congress’ spending power should make any difference. Culture war cases: Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ These culture war cases of the term involve transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, and they sit at the intersection of Title IX and equal protection. In short, 27 states have passed laws limiting sports by biological sex; Idaho and WV were among the first. Transgender athletes sued under the Equal Protection Clause and Title IX. A few years ago, in Bostock, Justice Gorsuch wrote an opinion saying that Title VII (which prohibits sex-based discrimination in the workplace) means there can be no discrimination based on transgender status. The question is how those same principles play out in Title IX and women’s sports, where women have a competing interest. Obviously the most important case of the term: Pung v. Isabella County Didn’t mean to bury the lead: In case you haven’t heard, PLF has a case pending at the Court! After seizing a family’s home over a relatively small and contested tax debt, a Michigan county kept not just the debt, but also the surplus value that the family had in equity—taking far more than what was owed. The Supreme Court already ruled in Tyler v. Hennepin County, another PLF case, that keeping surplus equity violates the Takings Clause. So a lower court ruled that the Pungs were entitled to the surplus. But the court held that the County only had to hand over the surplus proceeds from a poorly run auction, even though the home was worth nearly double what the County sold it for. We’re arguing that the Pungs deserve payment for what was taken—a $200,000 home minus any “debt,” not the $76,000 the County drove the price down to under poor auction processes minus the debt. Birthright citizenship and Trump v. Barbara Here, the plaintiffs are challenging Trump’s executive order that purported to narrow birthright citizenship. The Citizenship Clause was primarily concerned with granting birthright citizenship to recently freed slaves after the Civil War. It was a response to Dred Scott, which said that slaves or their descendants did not have citizenship, but the Framers used expansive language that broadly granted citizenship upon birth. The Framers couldn’t have contemplated the phenomenon of widescale illegal immigration, so the question is, how do we apply that language to modern circumstances? As the Chief Justice said at oral argument, it’s a different world, but same Constitution. Is the text’s underlying principle something more narrow, like protecting people who are domiciled in the United States, or was it intended to apply broadly with few exceptions—children of ambassadors and enemy occupiers? The longstanding view has been the latter. At oral argument, several justices appeared unwilling to accept an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that would dramatically depart from longstanding historical practice and precedent. So the more interesting legal fight may ultimately become procedural: What’s the scope of the injunction, as well as judicial review. Not 1 but 2 2nd Amendment cases: United States v. Hemani and Wolford v. Lopez To understand these cases, you need to understand Bruen. In 2022, the Court junked the old “means-ends” balancing test—where courts weighed the government’s interest against the burden on gun rights—and replaced it with a history-and-tradition test. If a firearms regulation doesn’t have a historical analogue rooted in the founding era, it’s presumptively unconstitutional. Simple enough in theory. Absolute chaos in practice. And I happen to think overly reliant on history, because the Constitution protects principles, not practices. Lower courts have applied the test in different ways. Some demand near-identical historical twins—a specific 18th-century law that did exactly what the modern one does. Others accept broader regulatory traditions that merely echo the challenged law. Hemani and Wolford are helping shape the fallout. United States v. Hemani involves a gunowner who was charged under 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(3), which makes it a felony for anyone who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” to possess a firearm. The Fifth Circuit threw out the charge, finding no adequate historical analogue for disarming someone who was sober at the time of arrest, even if he possessed marijuana and cocaine at home. The government, however, points to early American laws providing for the imprisonment of “habitual drunkards.” Wolford v. Lopez involves a Hawaii law that made it presumptively illegal to carry a concealed firearm on private property open to the public absent explicit permission. The Supreme Court has previously said that Bruen left the “sensitive places” doctrine intact, but the effect of switching the presumption here and expanding the scope of sensitive places was to effectively ban concealed carry on 97 percent of the landmass, including beaches, shopping malls, and many other public places. Watch for Justice Thomas (the Bruen author) to defend his framework’s rigor, and for Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett to search for a more administrable middle ground. More exciting legal nerdery: APB trying to get to SCOTUS, speaking on TV, and defending winemakers I asked the Supreme Court to take up our case on compelled speech—a case that elicited dissentals from Judges Bumatay, VanDyke, and Tung at the Ninth Circuit—and which has vast implications for freedom of thought. It involves a California law requiring all continuing medical education (CME) courses—no matter the topic—to include lessons on “implicit bias.” Even highly technical lectures (like retinal tumors) must carry CA’s message that implicit bias (unconscious racism) leads to disparities in care. Our clients are Dr. Azadeh Khatibi, who fled Tehran at age six to escape the repression of revolutionary Iran for the promise of freedom in America, and Do No Harm. Both disagree that implicit bias is the main driver of disparities and object to being forced to teach it. Stay tuned to see if the Court takes it up. Another client, Hoopes Winery, has come out with a wine in honor of our lawsuit! You may recall the family winery is being slapped with millions of dollars in fines and fees for allegedly allowing the public to taste the same wine they may legally purchase. Now they are releasing an “Eighth Amendment” wine, noting that it’s “wine without the excessive fining.” That’s especially clever because they’re not only referring to the Excessive Fines claim we made in the lawsuit, but to the fact that “fining” is a term in winemaking, and means mixing in non-wine materials with the wine. Wanna read a fascinating tale about Supreme Court intrigue? Read my SCOTUSblog column on Hugo Black, John Marshall Harlan II, and strange judicial bedfellows. I spoke with Jesse Weber about the Supreme Court’s recent mifepristone decisions. Buckle up. June is coming. The post The Calm Before the Avalanche appeared first on Pacific Legal Foundation.