Season 2
No Right to a Lawyer: Asylum from Inside Detention
A visitation room in a private detention facility in rural Louisiana. Cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights, two plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Elena is on one side. A lawyer who drove three hours from New Orleans is on the other. They have ninety minutes. Elena has eight months until the heari...
700 Judges, 3.2 Million Cases: The System That Decides Asylum Cases
Two asylum seekers cross the southern border six months apart. Same country, same persecution, same statute. A clerk neither of them has ever met routes one to the regular docket and the other to an expedited docket. One gets heard in eight months. The other is waiting until 2028. That single routin...
The Framework That Decides Disability
Until June 2024, the Social Security Administration was denying disability claims on the grounds that applicants could work as pneumatic tube operators — a job that functionally disappeared decades ago. The agency's catalog of occupations hadn't been updated since 1991. Congress noticed. Courts comp...
Nobody Said Deny More Cases: How Agency Preferences Reach the Hearing Room
In the final episode of a three-part series on how agencies actually produce outcomes, Gwen and Marc trace the mechanisms that did the work — all of them upstream of the hearing room and mostly invisible from outside: Case completion targets that measure speed but not thoroughness — and a Seventh Ci...
The Review Layer Doesn't Fix It — Three Things Agency Review Does Instead
In 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reached into a single immigration case, certified it to himself, and overruled the precedent that had let domestic violence survivors qualify for asylum. In 2021, Garland certified it back. In 2025, Bondy certified it away again. Three reversals on the same do...
The Forty-Six Point Spread: Why Your Outcome Depends on Who You Get, Who Represents You, and Where You Live
A 2017 GAO study found that Social Security disability outcomes could swing by forty-six percentage points based solely on which ALJ heard the case. Same claimant, same record, same hearing office, different judge. Individual ALJ approval rates range from under ten percent to over ninety. That's not...
Same Evidence, Different Outcomes: How Credibility and Burden of Proof Decide What Happens in the Hearing Room
Two claimants walk into two hearing rooms in the same building on the same day. Same herniated disc, same imaging, same attorneys, same legal standard. One walks out with benefits. The other doesn't. The difference isn't the evidence — it's that one ALJ believed her claimant and the other didn't. In...
The Lifecycle of an Administrative Case: How the Record Gets Built Before You Walk Into the Room
An insurance adjuster spends thirty minutes on your roof, photographs what they photograph, and writes "minor cosmetic damage" instead of "structural compromise." That characterization is now in the record — and every reviewer after that is seeing the damage through that adjuster's eyes. Gwen and Ma...
Jarkesy Jumps to the FTC
Less than two years after the Supreme Court's decision in SEC v. Jarkesy , the Fifth Circuit has applied the same constitutional logic to the FTC — and the implications are far bigger than one agency. In Intuit v. FTC , the court vacated a cease-and-desist order against TurboTax's "free" advertising...
The Right to a Jury: SEC v. Jarkesy and the Limits of Agency Enforcement
The parents leave a rule: milk with dinner. The babysitter enforces it — no problem. But when one kid hits the other, does the babysitter handle that too? She saw the whole thing, she knows the context, and she's been managing exactly these situations for years. But hitting was wrong before she ever...