Hollywood has never lacked war stories. But it has often lacked veteran storytellers telling them.For years, military narratives on screen have gravitated toward spectacle or trauma. Either elite raids and explosions, or the aftermath: PTSD, divorce, isolation. What gets squeezed out is the middle ground — bureaucracy, boredom and dark humor — where most service members actually live.Three veterans now working in television say that changes when people who have worn the uniform are inside the writers’ room, shaping the story from page one.Greg Cope White, a Marine veteran and longtime television writer, built a decades-long career after leaving active duty. His memoir, “The Pink Marine,” later became the basis for the Netflix coming-of-age series “Boots,” about a closeted gay teenager enlisting in the Marine Corps in the ’90s.Veterans are often misunderstood in writers’ rooms, White told Military Times in a recent interview.“One of the things veterans might fear about going into the writers’ room is that that’s all the experience people are going to want from them,” he said. “Just give me the military stuff and shut up.“That’s not what I have found at all.”For White, the value of veterans extends far beyond accuracy. “Our worldview is instantly expanded the day we enlisted,” he said. “We saw things, and we’re exposed to people and situations that a normal college-age student wouldn’t be exposed to.”That exposure influences tone and informs how characters handle pressure. It shapes what feels authentic when a unit fractures or rallies on screen.When working on “Boots,” authenticity mattered, but not as trivia. “You don’t want something like someone in their dress blues with scruff. That’s going to take a lot of people out right there,” White said.For “Boots” story editor Megan Ferrell Burke, a Marine veteran who served from 2007 to 2011 and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a direct air support officer, authenticity debates often collide with visual storytelling.Hollywood is a visual medium, noted Burke, who, after leaving the Corps, worked her way through assistant roles on “Army Wives,” served as a writers’ assistant on the World War II drama “Manhattan” and was staffed on “Outlander.” Sometimes what is correct is not what reads best on camera.In “Boots,” for example, recruits were scripted to sit on their packs during a break, as they would in real life. On set, production placed them on logs.“In any sort of universe, recruits would not be sitting on logs and talking,” Burke said. “But who cares? It’s so much better visually.”For her, the issue is not perfection; it is intention. “I’m very okay with being inaccurate,” she said. “I just want to know when we’re being inaccurate, and I want to make that choice actively.”Burke said she braced for backlash from veteran viewers over creative choices in “Boots,” including decisions about timeline accuracy. Instead, she found that many viewers accepted the show’s choices once they understood they were deliberate.Over her 15 years in the industry, Burke said she has seen shifts in how military stories are framed. Early portrayals often defaulted to stoic archetypes. Later, she said, many projects focused almost exclusively on trauma.“If you look out on the landscape and look for the stories of well-adjusted veterans, they’re a little bit harder to come by,” she said.Burke does not dismiss PTSD narratives. “It is incredibly important to advocate for the very real experiences of service members dealing with trauma,” she said. But she believes the picture is incomplete.“I feel like I’m the best version of myself because of the experience that I had,” she said.Joshua Katz, a Navy veteran who served from 1999 to 2003 as a gunner’s mate and missile technician, entered the industry through multiple avenues, including stunt work, tactical consulting and writers’ room support. He worked as a showrunner’s assistant on the CBS sitcom “United States of Al” and later founded Katzmar Tactical Consulting with his spouse, also a Navy veteran.Katz offered a more direct assessment of Hollywood’s priorities.“They care about one thing, and that’s making a profit,” he said.In his experience, veteran status may help secure a meeting, but it does not guarantee advancement. “It will never be because you’re a veteran,” he said. “It opens the door, but it doesn’t necessarily push you through it.”Still, Katz credited certain showrunners with fostering supportive environments and taking veteran perspectives seriously when storylines demanded it.He also pointed to story gaps he believes remain underexplored.“You don’t see below decks,” he said of Navy life. “It’s almost always from an officer’s perspective.”He would like to see more character-driven stories set in military environments without defaulting to combat or scandal. He also cited the VA hospital as a compelling setting where veterans from different eras intersect.Across all three writers, humor emerged as a defining difference. Veterans understand that laughter often exists alongside stress, not in spite of it.“It’s the only way I can tell my story,” White said of using comedy to frame his experience.Humor, he argued, allows audiences unfamiliar with military life to enter the world without being overwhelmed. “There’s nothing more hilarious than that frailty of the human condition,” he said.For those considering the leap from the uniform to the writers’ room, none of the three offered easy encouragement.“It is not a career for the faint of heart,” Burke said. “The good times are great, and the bad times are really hard.”White urged writers to focus on craft. “Write the story you want to tell,” he said, rather than chasing what seems marketable.Katz emphasized persistence and preparation. “You’ve got to have the writing sample to go with it,” he said. “It’s never going to be just because you’re a veteran.”When veterans become writers, war stories shift. The story moves toward lived ambiguity, and service is not reduced to a single narrative.The difference is not cosmetic. It is tonal. And audiences, especially those who have served, can tell.

Foundlings – babies born of unknown parentage – loomed large in the imagination of mid-19th century Americans, who dutifully read their Bibles and thought about baby Moses in a basket. Americans in the Civil War era also read novels both comic and dramatic, featuring eponymous foundlings such as Henry Fielding’s delightful Tom Jones and Charles Dickens’ virtuous Oliver Twist. It is thus fitting and proper that several of the best briefs in the pending birthright-citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, contain interesting discussions of foundlings, who featured prominently in conversations about a Civil War amendment – the 14th – that pivoted on the word “born.” Foundlings also featured prominently in a landmark 20th-century statute that aimed to build on 14th Amendment concepts of birthright citizenship. In what follows we shall quote extensively from four notable Barbara briefs that highlight foundlings. Each brief illuminates a slightly different aspect of the foundling question. Together, these four briefs show that the foundling issue alone – above and beyond all other aspects of Barbara – is a sufficient basis on which to reject the Trump administration’s outlandish claim that, with small exceptions, a birthright citizen must be able to point to a citizen parent or a permanent-resident parent. *** When the 14th Amendment was pending, its advocates powerfully reminded their fellow Americans that birthright citizenship would attach equally to all babies born on American soil and under the American flag, whether these babies’ parents were Black or white, married or unmarried, Jewish or Gentile, slave or free, citizen or non-citizen, residents or sojourners – or, indeed, known or unknown. A baby in a basket on a church doorstep would be born an equal citizen, no different in law than a baby born to the president and first lady in the White House.  Indeed, this is exactly how Indiana’s acting governor Conrad Baker – himself a college-educated minister’s son, and doubtless familiar with Moses, Jones, and Twist – explained the 14th Amendment in a prominent speech delivered in Evansville during the summer of 1866, when the amendment was pending before the nation. A “foundling … at your doorstep” who “may never know who gave him birth,” Baker intoned, was “just as much an American citizen as the Chief Magistrate of the nation.” This moving passage appears prominently in a very fine friend-of-the-court brief filed last week by the Constitutional Accountability Center on behalf of a distinguished cadre of scholars: UCLA’s Ahilan Arulanantham and Hiroshi Motomura; the University of Michigan’s Sam Erman; the University of Virginia’s Amanda Frost; Stanford’s Lucas Guttentag; the University of San Diego’s Michael D. Ramsey; George Mason-Scalia Law School’s Ilya Somin; and University of California-Berkley’s Leti Volpp. Another powerful foundling passage – perhaps the single best passage in another very fine Barbara brief – appears in an amicus filing by Yale’s Keith Whittington: If a newborn infant an hour removed from its mother’s womb were left at a fire station, the state would not ask for the immigration status of the parent before protecting the child. If a neighbor reported that a newborn infant was being neglected or abused in the house next door, the state would not require the parent’s immigration status before extending protection to the child. If a mother were to die in childbirth, the state would not question the immigration status of the mother before undertaking protection for the child. The child in these circumstances is within the jurisdiction of the United States regardless of the immigration status of the parent, and because the child is within the jurisdiction of the United States the government owes the child a duty of protection. That is the natural duty of a sovereign in actual possession of a territory. Under the common law embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment, the correlative to a state fulfilling that duty is birthright citizenship. And here is yet another powerful foundling passage in yet another powerful Barbara brief – this one filed by University of Minnesota’s Linus Chan, Wayne State University’s Jonathan Weisberg, and private lawyers Douglas Jensen and Michael Bass at Sher Tremonte, LLP, on behalf of leading congressional amici curiae including, among countless others, Senators Michael Bennet, Cory Booker,  Mark Kelly, Amy Klobuchar, Patty Murray, Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and Sheldon Whitehouse; and Representatives Maggie Goodlander, Eleanor Holmes, Norton, Nancy Pelosi, and Jamie Raskin: The irrelevance of parentage to the citizenship of children born in the United States is further demonstrated by the 1940 Nationality Act’s “foundling” provision. Section 201(f) of the Act, as enacted, conferred citizenship on a “child of unknown parentage found in the United States, until shown not to have been born in the United States.” Nationality Act of 1940 § 201(f). That provision is still in force with minor changes, see 8 U.S.C. § 1401(f). Under this provision, the foundling child was “presumed to have been born in the United States.” 1940 House Hearings, at 57 (State Department Assistant Solicitor Flournoy); Revision and Codification, at 13. The presumption was rebutted if the child was “shown not to have been born in the United States.” Nationality Act of 1940 § 201(f). That was because birth in the United States established U.S.  citizenship. Notably, the provision did not say “until shown not to have been born in the United States or to have been born to parents in the United States only temporarily or without authorization.” Compare, e.g., Nationality Act of 22 June 1913 [Germany] § 4 (“A child found in the territory of a federal State (a foundling) shall be deemed to be a child of a citizen of that State until the contrary is proved” (emphasis added)). Oh, and in case anyone missed it: In Akhil’s amicus brief, filed last Monday by Counsel of Record Vik prior to and without knowledge of any of the above-quoted briefs, the foundling issue also appears prominently: Parentage opens a Pandora’s box, and implicates devilish questions not always defined by uniform federal law operating in other contexts. Who are a baby’s parents? What if a mother is married to one man, but another man is the biological progenitor? What if there are disputes about biological parentage? What if a baby’s biological father is unknown? What about foundlings? In today’s world, what about a baby born from Woman A’s egg and Man B’s sperm, who issues from the womb of Woman C and is also claimed by Humans D, E, and F (A’s, B’s, and C’s respective lawful spouses)? Note how each of these four excerpts emphasizes something the other three excerpts do not, quite. The Constitutional Accountability Center nicely draws our eye to how the 14th Amendment was understood by ordinary Americans in the 1866 ratification process as a powerful promise of birth-equality. Whittington links the foundling issue to common-law concepts of government protection and citizen allegiance that helped lay the foundation for the 14th Amendment’s first sentence. The congressional brief adds that, above and beyond the 14th Amendment, the plain letter and spirit of a landmark twentieth-century statute still on the books guarantees birthright citizenship to native-born babies, regardless of parentage. It also folds in a subtle and elegant comparative point: Early 20th-century German law focused on blood, not soil, essentially denying the citizenship of German-born ethnic Turks. America on the cusp of World War II pointedly rejected this approach – and hooray for us! Last but (we hope) not least, Akhil’s brief stresses that a parentage rule would have raised all sorts of questions in the 1860s that never arose in debates over the amendment, precisely because the amendment was in fact not about parents. It was about the baby.    *** Today’s column is our second on Trump v. Barbara. Our first, co-authored with Samarth Desai, ran last Monday – the same day that Vik filed Akhil’s brief. We will be running many more Barbara columns in the run-up to oral argument on April 1. Our next column, which will run later this week, will be co-authored by Amad Ross. In it, we will examine the Barbara briefs from a different angle: Which ones best compiled and analyzed the originalist evidence surrounding the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause? In particular, which briefs best focused on the amendment’s precise words, on the Lincoln administration’s precipitating citizenship policies, on the looming background issues of slavery and Black rights, on the crucial election of 1866 that determined the amendment’s fate, and on the adjoining 13th and 14th Amendments? Stay tuned. The post Birthright citizenship: A note on foundlings and comments on four complementary amicus briefs appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

Over the objections of the court’s three Democratic appointees, the Supreme Court on Monday morning declined to hear a case involving the payment of filing fees by indigent prisoners. The announcement was part of a list of orders released on Monday from the justices’ private conference on Friday, Feb. 27. The justices did not add any new cases to their docket for the 2026-27 term. In Johnson v. High Desert State Prison, the justices turned down a petition for review asking them to decide whether indigent prisoners who file joint lawsuits can share the amount of the filing fee, or whether each prisoner must instead pay the full fee – even if that is more than other litigants in a similar scenario would have to pay. The issue arose from a federal civil rights lawsuit brought by three men who, while incarcerated at the High Desert State Prison in Susanville, California, were left standing in “dirty, urine-covered 2.5’x2.5’ holding cages with their arms handcuffed behind their backs.” They filed a motion for permission to proceed as indigent, which under the Prison Litigation Reform Act would allow them to pay the $350 filing fee in installments. The PLRA also provides that “[i]n no event shall the filing fee collected exceed the amount of fees permitted by statute for the commencement of a civil action.” The lower courts ruled that the PLRA required each of the plaintiffs in the case to pay his own $350 filing fee. Two of the men –Topaz Johnson and Ian Henderson – came to the Supreme Court in October, asking the justices to weigh in. (The third plaintiff continued to litigate his case separately.) After considering the petition for review at five consecutive conferences, the justices rejected that request on Monday. Justice Elena Kagan indicated, without more explanation, that she would have granted review. Calling the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit “likely incorrect,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the denial of review. She stressed that in normal circumstances, the default rule is that “when multiple prisoners file one lawsuit, the prisoners together must pay $350.” When it enacted the PLRA, Sotomayor wrote, Congress did not deviate from that default rule. “In fact,” she suggested, the law “says the exact opposite: ‘In no event shall the filing fee collected exceed the amount of fees permitted by statute for the commencement of a civil action.’” The lower court’s rule, she said, “also produces unfair results” because it requires poor prisoners to pay more. The other factors that the Supreme Court often consider when deciding whether to grant review also militate in favor of the plaintiffs, Sotomayor wrote. The courts of appeals are squarely divided on this question, which is “an important, recurring” one. “The ability to split fees matters,” she said, “because $350 is a significant amount of money, particularly to indigent prisoners. … Paying the full $350 fee … requires prisoners to work for hundreds, if not thousands, of hours.” In other orders, the Supreme Court turned down requests to weigh in on the constitutionality of a federal law that bans the possession of guns by people who have been convicted of felonies, after repeatedly considering petitions for review from a woman convicted of check fraud 17 years ago for passing a fake check for $498.12 at a grocery store and a man who had a gun with him when he was attempting to sell drugs. The court did not, however, rule on petitions seeking review of bans on assault rifles and large-capacity magazines. The justices also turned down, after considering for the first time at last week’s conference, petitions for review involving a challenge to baseball’s antitrust exemption, a First Amendment challenge to Alabama’s ban on begging, and a dispute over whether Michigan failed to make sufficient efforts to remove dead voters from the voting rolls. The justices will meet again for another private conference on Friday, March 6. Orders from that conference are expected on Monday, March 9 at 9:30 a.m. EST. The post Court turns down several cases, including on filing fees for indigent prisoners and ability of felons to possess guns appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

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