The legal battles shaping the future of liberty often unfold behind the scenes, yet their impact resonates across society. This episode of Giving Ventures explores how public interest law firms like Liberty Justice Center are leveraging strategic litigation to reinforce constitutional rights and curb government overreach. Sara Albrecht, chairman of the Liberty Justice Center, joins Peter to dissect landmark LJC wins at the Supreme Court like Janus v. AFSCME, which banned mandatory union dues for public-sector employees, and VOS Selections v. Trump, which ruled the Trump administration’s tariffs unconstitutional.
These cases reveal the intricate, multi-year process of securing a public interest legal win, from identifying plaintiffs to preparing for trial. Sara shares how the organization’s success hinges on disciplined messaging, careful plaintiff selection, and unwavering dedication to constitutional principles. For strategic donors interested in long-term impact, this conversation illustrates how targeted legal action can protect individual freedoms by establishing important precedents.
Note: This transcript was generated and cleaned by AI.
Peter Lipsett: Public interest law is a fascinating sector of the nonprofit economy. These nonprofit law firms focus less on making money — and because that’s not their job, they’re nonprofits after all — their job is to establish legal precedent that expands freedom, protects freedom, and protects our constitutional rights. That’s the currency of the realm in the nonprofit public litigation world.
A lot of these institutions — your Pacific Legal Foundations, Institute for Justice, some of the state-based or regional ones like Mountain States Legal Foundation or Southeastern Legal Foundation — a lot of these came around in the 1970s. But over the past decade or so, there has been a resurgence of new organizations that have popped up on the scene. And one of the ones that has flexed its muscle more than most is the Liberty Justice Center. Based in Chicago, but working around the country, it really made its name several years ago with the Janus case. We’re going to get into that here in a little bit. But more recently, it has been making news for pushing back on the tariffs that this administration has been promoting. I am so pleased to have Sara Albrecht joining us. She is the chairman of the Liberty Justice Center, and has been a terrific voice for the growing organization. This organization has really done some remarkable things, made some noise, maybe made some enemies along the way, but most importantly, it has really established some important precedents. Sara, so good to see you.
Sara Albrecht: Thank you, Peter.
Peter Lipsett: As I said at the top, there are a lot of public interest law firms out there. And to a certain extent, we need them because there are also a lot of bad actors out there trying to undermine our constitutional rights. But how did Liberty Justice Center come about in the first place? With so many other organizations out there, how did you find a lane that was worthy of saying, we need a new group?
Sara Albrecht: There is a lot of work that needs to be done.
We were founded in 2011. So this year we’re starting the first of our two-year, 15th anniversary celebration — because we didn’t get our tax ID number until 2012, and I always love a good chance to extend a celebration. We were based in Chicago at the time and were working only in Illinois. And as you know, Illinois has more than its fair share of problems. That’s where we originated the Janus case. Mark Janus lived in Springfield at the time, and we signed him on as a client in 2015. We ended up at the Supreme Court in 2018. Then in 2019, we filed our first case outside of Illinois. Now we are in 36 states and Puerto Rico.
We have attorneys based in eight states. We’re now operating as a virtual office. We recently changed our incorporation to Texas because one of our donors said, “We’re not giving money to organizations based in Illinois.” So, Texas it is. But I’m still in Illinois. This is my home, and there is a lot of work that needs to be done here.
Peter Lipsett: So the launch — was it just opportunistic because you had this case and you said, we need an organization around it? Or was there a particular gap that you didn’t think was being addressed?
Sara Albrecht: We launched before the Janus case closed.
We were started as part of the legal arm of Illinois Policy Institute, which was needing some legal advice. So they hired one attorney and an intern. That intern is still with us today as the director of our staff attorneys. They were just doing what you do — there’s a bad law that gets passed and we need to stop it.
One of our early cases, we fought for a food truck that couldn’t get licensed in Evanston. It’s called Beaver’s Donuts. The city was putting them through a lot of startup and licensing hurdles they shouldn’t have had to face, so we fought for their rights to operate and run their business as they see fit. The city also started to implement a plan to tax Netflix — very early on — and we challenged that. Certainly there were a number of union matters that came up as well. Our governor elected around 2015, Bruce Rauner, was very intent on breaking the power of the unions. So we had this idea: let’s find a plaintiff. We were literally cold-calling people who had voted Republican and who we thought were probably employed by a school system. That’s how we found Mark and two other plaintiffs in that case.
Peter Lipsett: All right, so let’s talk about the Janus case, because this really put you on the map, quite literally. A big deal case that launched a thousand ships. A lot of people took credit for it, but it was Liberty Justice Center’s case, and it was really important. Talk to us about the Janus decision, what it was — I’m sure we’ve touched on it on the show before and people have some understanding of it — but more importantly, what did that victory do for Liberty Justice Center?
Sara Albrecht: So prior to Janus, you were essentially forced to join a union if you were a public sector employee. Post-Janus, you are not compelled to join a union as a condition of employment in the public sector. So you can opt out of the union, not pay your $1,000 to $1,500 in annual dues, put that money back in your pocket, still be represented by the union, still have all the benefits — but you keep more of your money.
And you’re not forced. It was really a free speech case, because we argued that it was compelled speech. Unions have become increasingly political and vocal. If you don’t agree with their positions, you shouldn’t have to pay to fund that speech.
It was also something of an accidental case. At the time, we were not expected to be the ones in front of the Supreme Court. There was another case called Friedrichs, out of California, that had been heard at the Supreme Court. Then, tragically, Justice Scalia died suddenly. That case ended in a four-four tie. Then we got bumped up, and they said, okay, this is the same issue — this needs to be decided. And they brought Janus up.
That’s one of the reasons groups like ours file multiple cases in multiple circuits, because you never know when a situation like that happens and you need another case to step in and carry the argument forward. That’s the origin of Janus. And now the work that so many other amazing organizations do is helping employees actually get out of the union. You would think that after winning a case like that — where the court said you don’t have to join — there would be a mass exodus. What we found is that public sector unions lie. They narrowly define the windows in which you can exit. Four days in August, if it’s a full moon and your name starts with A, you can leave the union. I’m exaggerating a little, but they make it very difficult. That’s why so many groups are out there doing post-Janus work — helping people exercise their rights.
Peter Lipsett: And to me, that’s what public interest law firms do: so much heavy lifting to get to a point — and then it opens the door for all these other organizations to step in and do what they’re good at. It’s a multi-step process. But sticking with Janus for a second — so many people see only the final result. They say, wow, you went to the Supreme Court. You are suddenly the overnight success that took years to build. Help our listeners understand what it really takes to get a Janus-type case from idea to Supreme Court — both in time and in sweat equity and financial resources.
Sara Albrecht: I have two extremes because we can switch to tariffs in a second. It really just takes an idea and a team dedicated to that idea. One of the things groups like ours struggle with is finding plaintiffs — citizens or businesses willing to step forward and serve as the voice or face of an issue. And certainly in Mark Janus’s case, he turned out to be everything you could hope for. He’s still on staff at LJC as our senior fellow. He travels the country speaking about unions and is working on a book right now. But you need someone committed, because it’s not easy. He would have unions following him around the state, putting up that inflatable rat wherever he was speaking. I think they had an intern whose sole job was carrying the rat from engagement to engagement. He received death threats. He had someone show up at his house one day. We had to get him security for a while. And certainly we also experienced threats as the attorneys and the organization on the case.
So it takes a lot. In that case, we partnered with National Right to Work, who were amazing partners, and Bill Messenger argued it at the Supreme Court with us. In terms of resources, it took a lot — but it didn’t take the amount the tariff case took, because I hired high-powered outside counsel to help shape that argument. There were too many moving parts. Every case we take, we like to have a path to the Supreme Court, because we’re not just providing pro bono legal services. We’re trying to set good precedent and advance constitutional rights for everybody.
Peter Lipsett: The left does this too. They’ve got their own public interest law firms. How does the approach on the left differ from what Liberty Justice Center, Institute for Justice, Civic Legal, and the others on the more libertarian-conservative side do — other than the outcomes? Maybe it’s just the outcomes. I’m genuinely curious.
Sara Albrecht: Maybe it is just the outcomes. We try to message our cases and our work as grounded in the Constitution — not in policy preferences or political preferences. It doesn’t matter who’s in office. If they’re breaking the law and violating people’s rights, we are going to sue them. So I think maybe that’s the biggest difference. They tend to use the media in more extreme ways than we do.
Peter Lipsett: Your answer tees us up nicely to talk about the tariffs case, because you’re right — it doesn’t matter who’s in office, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. The Constitution is the Constitution, and that’s what you’re out to protect. So you took on President Trump and his tariff policy. Why? Why did you launch into that?
Sara Albrecht: “What were you thinking?” Yeah, that’s a question I ask myself every morning.
I think I’ve been very public about this. I voted for the president three times. This had nothing to do with the president personally. Nobody at Liberty Justice Center suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome. It was about the Constitution and the separation of powers. We saw this statute — the IEEPA statute — being used to levy these tariffs in a way it was not intended for, in our opinion. And clearly our opinion was right.
Also, this opened the door for unbounded executive power. The next administration, whether Democrat or Republican, could use the same authority in even more extreme ways. If we didn’t stop it now, it’s really hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Once a precedent is set, it becomes, “Well, he used it for this, so why can’t we use it for these three other things that are even worse?”
So it was a constitutional issue. I don’t think we fully grasped the enormity of the underlying case — the effects on the world — at the time, because the tariffs were all new. We didn’t know what was going to happen. We didn’t know if it was just a negotiating tactic, that maybe in a month he’d pull them off. Anything could have happened. We had this idea, we thought: this is wrong, and it’s actually a beautifully clean separation-of-powers argument that we can present. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So we basically had the briefs written, and then the question was, we need plaintiffs. You have to find people willing to say, “Sure, I don’t mind suing Donald Trump — how bad could that be?”
Peter Lipsett: And how do you find them? I mean, you don’t put an ad in the paper…
Sara Albrecht: No. It was actually a funny story. We were in a strategic planning process, and Jeff, our lead attorney and director of litigation, and I were carpooling out to the strategic planning location. On the way, I just started calling businesses — donors, or people I knew, or people someone else knew — talking to them about our idea. Hey, we’re thinking about filing this case. How are you seeing this issue? How would you view being a plaintiff? What are the concerns from your side of the equation? That really helped inform who we were going to need to look for.
As we did that, it also helped us think about media messaging. We’ve got all these complications: tariffs that people think foreign countries are paying (which is not true at all), a court we’re filing in that nobody’s ever heard of, and the leader of the free world who is going to be very unhappy when we file. And just to give you a sense of how quickly this moved — a lot of people thought it took a long time, but in legal terms, it was lightning speed. We went from April 14th, 2025 to a Supreme Court decision on February 20th, 2026. We were having these conversations April 1st. Tariffs started April 2nd. We filed on April 14th. We had our court date on May 13th. Just a very quick progression.
We posted some things on social media. There was also a constitutional law professor — Ilya Somin at George Mason — who was talking about the same issues. Unbeknownst to us, he put up a blog post saying, hey, Liberty Justice Center wants to file this case if you’re a business that’s been affected.
Peter Lipsett: So he kind of put out an ad for you.
Sara Albrecht: Pretty much. All of a sudden my phone is blowing up. We’re in the strategic planning meeting. Jeff’s phone is blowing up. We’re like, what is going on? We’re getting emails from businesses saying, hey, we’d love to help. We thought, wow, this is easier than we expected — and then we realized the Twitter post was out there.
So we compiled a list and split it up among our team members. Then it’s an interview process, because you also need someone who can speak to the media, who’s going to stick with the case for the long haul — and even though this was only about a year, these are small business owners. It’s hard enough to run your business in the best of times, let alone being a lead plaintiff in a case the entire world is watching, where the most powerful person in the world is your adversary. So we looked for people who were going to see it through. We needed stories that were easy to tell. We wanted a diverse group in terms of the countries they imported from, not just China, because China isn’t necessarily the most sympathetic import source.
Also, people who hadn’t made aggressive comments against the administration on social media — things like that. We probably spoke to a couple hundred people, kept detailed notes, and then we all met and pitched who we thought would be the best plaintiffs and why. We settled on a group of five.
Peter Lipsett: Wow. And I guess a cynic could say, well, you’re just shopping for your perfect plaintiff. But what I’m hearing you say is you want plaintiffs that almost aren’t too perfect — you need them to be genuinely representative of what the case really is. If you just had somebody importing from Vietnam, all of a sudden the case becomes about imports from Vietnam. It can distract from the real issue at hand, I’d imagine.
Sara Albrecht: Exactly. What made Victor so compelling is that I could explain it to my mother in 30 seconds. She’s a Republican too, so she was very conflicted by what was going on. I said, look, the president is talking about bringing manufacturing back to the United States, and the tariffs are supposed to do that. Well, Victor Schwartz imports wine from other countries. How do you manufacture Spanish wine in the United States? You can’t. Why should that American business — a third-generation family business — be penalized? And she said, “I never thought about it like that.”
Everybody on the call is probably familiar with our lead plaintiff, Victor Schwartz, who runs VOS Selections. He turned out to be better than anyone could have hoped for. Two of our five businesses did eventually say, no, this has become too much — we don’t want any media, we’re getting a lot of blowback, we’ll stay in the case but we don’t want to be the public face of it. That’s fine. We had three others who could carry that. That’s one of the reasons you see multiple plaintiffs in a case.
Peter Lipsett: The messaging component of this is something I think about a lot. It’s not just a Liberty Justice issue. I talk to a lot of think tanks. Some of them are in Republican-leaning states where you’d think they’d always be on the right side of the governor — but they’re not. Sometimes you’ve got to push back on your friends. How did you, as a team, mentally prepare for that?
Sara Albrecht: Honestly, I don’t know if we did. It was all happening so quickly. I think I assumed it was so obvious that we were on the right side of the law that everyone would see it the same way, and there would be no blowback. I did not anticipate the pushback from friends — friends in the network, friends in the movement, donors. I lost a significant number of donors over this who probably will never come back. But I’d do the same thing all over again. We made a good decision.
One comment I heard — which was very fair and I hadn’t thought of — came from a foundation that had funded us in the past. I asked if they’d be interested, and they said, “Why would we put right-of-center money toward challenging a Republican president?” I said, well, because I feel we can message this differently than if the left had taken it up. They would have made it all about the president. We never made it about the president. We made it about the executive — about the office, not the man in the office. And I think we did a really good job of staying on message. Our plaintiffs stayed on message. Our appellate attorneys — who clearly had different political views than some of us — they all stayed on message. This was not about President Trump. When he engaged with us publicly, we didn’t engage back, because we were never going to win that battle.
The hardest thing was probably when our case got consolidated with twelve states — three of which we were actually in active litigation against. We had state AGs saying, “We want to be in the press conference after the hearing.” I said I really didn’t think that was a good idea. They said, oh, it’ll be fine. I shared some of our social media posts with them, and they said, “How about you go first and we’ll go separately afterward.”
Peter Lipsett: As you said earlier — the real enemy is the issue on the table. The precedent you’re trying to set means this doesn’t become an issue later, because you’re right, the next administration could have taken this further. There’s a lot of short-term thinking in the political world. That’s why I appreciate being in the nonprofit and philanthropic space — we get to think a little more long-term.
Take us behind the curtain for just a minute. You’re preparing to go before the Supreme Court — those chambers, that moment. What’s that like?
Sara Albrecht: I’m going to get chills just hearing you say it, Peter — it was so extraordinary. So, what was your question?
Okay — well, I want to take you back a step. After we won with a unanimous decision at the lower court, the government appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. There we were heard in front of what they call an en banc panel — meaning all the judges at the federal circuit sat to hear the case. Normally you would have to request en banc review. Normal process is a three-judge panel; then, if you lose or win, the other side can appeal and request en banc. Sometimes en banc just reviews the briefs; sometimes there’s an additional hearing. In this case, the Federal Circuit said, we know this is going to the Supreme Court, so we’re going to skip the interim level and go straight to en banc. So we had eleven judges we had to argue in front of — and these judges hear trade cases all the time. It was very technical. You’re absolutely right that we got about three words out before the questions were firing right and left.
Our attorney had all their names written down so he could address them personally — judges like to be called by name. So it was, “Yes, Judge Moore, Judge Clark, Judge Toronto…” That was good practice. Then getting ready for the Supreme Court, we had to get our briefs done and corral our amicus support, and then we did really intensive moot courts — bringing in other attorneys and constitutional scholars who fired questions at us, and not easy ones. The idea is to be the worst possible judge so you’re ready for anything.
What was really fun is that Georgetown has a moot courtroom set up to look like a mini Supreme Court — even down to the carpeting. We sat in there with a room full of law students. It was probably four hours of grilling. We did five of those sessions.
Peter Lipsett: I’ve been in the Supreme Court chamber — not during litigation, just an empty courtroom — and it’s still an extraordinary room to be in. I can only imagine the pressure when the stakes are real. You’ve got 30 minutes, your attorney may get out a handful of words, and the justices are just throwing questions from every direction. It’s the final exam, the doctoral dissertation, the ballgame.
Okay, you win. There’s finally a victory. Now, being something of a glutton for punishment, you seem to be continuing the tariff pursuit even after winning. The legal precedent has been established, but now there’s a refund question. If it was unconstitutional, there must be some recourse required. You’re taking that mantle up too, is that right?
Sara Albrecht: Yes, we won — and this goes back to what I was saying about Janus. It’s one thing to win, but the second part — often the hardest part, and the part a lot of people forget — is making sure the ruling actually gets executed.
In our case, the Supreme Court didn’t address refunds directly because we didn’t ask them to. If the tariffs are declared unconstitutional, they should not have been paid, and therefore they should be paid back. We had a permanent injunction sitting at the Court of International Trade that had been set aside. So we had to get the case back down there — file a motion to go back to the Federal Circuit, which then passed it back to the Court of International Trade, and there we sit.
In the meantime, corporations and small businesses had been filing their own cases to get refunds. By the time we got back to the Court of International Trade, about 1,500 cases had been filed. All of those were set aside, because the court needed to decide on the refund mechanism — one that would apply to everybody. There’s one judge in charge of all of these cases, working with CBP, Customs and Border Protection, on a 45-day plan set to start April 20th.
In theory, the refund should be largely automatic. You do simple paperwork; you should not have to file another lawsuit to recover your money. It will be paid back with interest, because interest is statutory in tariff refund cases. Here’s how it works: you pay your tariff upfront when goods arrive at port. Then, roughly 314 days later, you go through a process called liquidation — where CBP verifies you paid the correct amount, and any difference is trued up. In the case of the IEEPA tariffs, they will be liquidated as if IEEPA never existed. So that code — the “9903” tariffs — gets removed, and the refund flows back to the importer of record. Not to consumers or citizens who may have experienced price increases, but only to the importer who actually paid the tariffs at origination.
Peter Lipsett: Is this something that will go back to the Supreme Court, or — because you’ve put the legal wheels in motion — should it in theory be on autopilot?
Sara Albrecht: It should be on autopilot. I am definitely in watchdog mode. When we were first heard back at the Court of International Trade, Judge Eaton — who is remarkable — was listening to CBP, the government, and attorneys from another case serving as a representative of the class of cases. He was making rulings and suggestions. The government said, “But we haven’t had a chance to submit our briefs on the merits.” And the judge said, “Merits? There are no merits. You lost at the Supreme Court. You have to pay this back.” Then the government attorney started scrambling to file motions to slow the process down. Denied, denied, denied. He understands the enormity of this.
I mean, it’s $166 billion. That money goes back to American businesses that employ American people who buy American machinery. A lot of decisions had been put on hold — we can’t buy this machine because we spent the money on tariffs. Hopefully now they can. They can hire that person. They can pay bonuses they weren’t able to pay last Christmas.
I think these are going to be paid. I think 80% of the refunds will be in the pockets of businesses by the end of the year. It shouldn’t have to go back to the Supreme Court. The government can try to make it difficult, but I think they have other things to worry about right now.
Peter Lipsett: So what’s next for Liberty Justice Center? What’s the next big case? And not to diminish the smaller cases — they’re all big cases because they all set precedent.
Sara Albrecht: They’re all big cases.
Well, after we won the tariff case, five hours later the administration instituted a new round of tariffs using Section 232. So we filed a case against that. We felt we needed to finish what we started. We were just heard at the Court of International Trade on April 10th, and we expect that to go to the Federal Circuit and possibly the Supreme Court — or maybe the government will just stand down again. Probably not going to happen.
After that, we’re done with tariffs. We’re not a trade law firm; we’re a constitutional law firm. But if you’re going to pull out these dormant statutes — rummage around the kitchen drawer and find an old statute nobody has used and decide, oh, we can now use this for tariffs — we’re going to tell you that you can’t do that.
Next big cases: we are still working on public sector unions. We’ve got an interesting project we’re developing with Philip Howard. At the end of the project, in a perfect world, public sector unions are unconstitutional. Full stop. That probably won’t happen entirely, but I think we can make some interesting precedent and chip away at their power. Post-Janus, some estimates say we’ve removed a billion dollars annually from public sector union coffers since the 2018 decision. If we can build on that, great.
And then there are always free speech issues, different types of government overreach. We also work in educational freedom. Right now we’ve got a case in Vermont — which has the oldest school choice program in the country — where they’re trying to chip away at and eliminate that program. We’re trying to expand it. We have one case filed against a law that was restricting town tuitioning, and the follow-on case would expand eligibility for that program. Just little things like that.
Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of work.
Peter Lipsett: That’s great. And unfortunately you’re right — there’s no shortage of things to push back on when you consider how many state, local, municipal, and federal governments there are, across all their branches and changing administrations. We’re glad to know that Liberty Justice Center, along with this broader landscape of public interest law firms — which I know you collaborate with rather than compete against — are out there. Sara Albrecht, thank you so much.
Sara Albrecht: Yeah, we’re not competing. We’re all working together. I would love nothing more than for us to have no work and to go out of business — that would mean the world is an amazing place to live. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening.
Peter Lipsett: Not yet, but you keep chipping away. Sara Albrecht, thank you so much.
Sara Albrecht: Thank you, Peter.
Peter Lipsett: Well, I am not a lawyer — and I’ve probably made that pretty evident in this conversation — but I am really glad there are smart legal minds getting up every day to advance pro-freedom issues. Liberty Justice Center is a welcome addition to the pantheon of good public interest law firms working to serve and protect the Constitution, along with some other newer groups such as New Civil Liberties Alliance, America First Legal, and Fairness Center.
As we heard, these cases can take years to work their way from idea to the Supreme Court. A lot of them never make it that far. Those are the big, high-profile cases we often hear about, but a lot of really important work is happening at lower appellate levels, circuit courts, and state Supreme Courts — and those matter too. These same groups, the old guard and the newer ones alike, are taking up these issues every day to preserve our liberties.
If you’d like to learn more about the Liberty Justice Center, you can find links to their website in the show notes of this podcast. And if you’re looking for a partner to be smarter, more strategic, effective, and principled in your philanthropic giving, that’s what we do at DonorsTrust. We would love to be helpful to you. Go to DonorsTrust.org and take a peek at our new website. The promise of our work is unchanged: we are still helping conservative and libertarian donors to simplify, protect, and grow their charitable giving. We’re built to preserve donor intent and help this movement grow. Thank you for tuning in, for being part of this conversation, and we look forward to having you join us for the next one. Until then, thank you for being a giver. Talk more soon.
