Welcome to “The Racket,” our weekly newsletter designed to provide insight into what the day-to-day work of litigating cases that are designed to protect people from government and corporate abuses of power actually looks like. As we watch the country free fall into a fully fascist state, we think it’s important to provide context that explains how the really extreme conduct at the highest levels of federal government has been seeded and primed by seemingly innocuous decisions that get made in lower level state and federal courts every day. In other words, we want to talk about how regular lawyers and regular judges (as in, people who are pretty much never in the news) have been working to lay the foundation for the annihilation of the rule of law in this country for decades, at least. This is, for the most part, the non-SCOTUS blog.

Years ago, when I was litigating almost exclusively prisoners’ rights cases, I was watching the extreme deference that courts would give to executive branch officials—including in cases of torture, physical and psychological abuse, restrictions on freedom of speech, and other equally important fundamental rights—and I kept saying, “first they came for the prisoners.” What I meant by that was that the general apathy to the rights of prisoners (because they are “others”—bad guys, criminals, moral deviants) was inevitably going to lead to a trampling of the rights of people we do care about in this society. And now here we are with “good white people” being shot in the streets while people with power and voices clutch their pearls and express their dismay at how it can be possible that there are no legal remedies for such a brazen act.

The reality is that the U.S. in 2026 is the result of decades of work of judges who are actively setting out to protect and insulate heinous conduct by government officials. We did not just wake up like this. Our hope here at Vanguard Justice LLC (and our sister innovation lab, The Vanguard Collective LLC) is that by showing you what litigating regular cases for regular people who are harmed by government and corporate corruption actually looks like, it will help you better understand what is going on in the world around you. This greater understanding is the first step of empowerment so that we can start to take our country back.

If you ever have any questions for us, please reach out to me at lisi@vanguardlawandpolicy.com!