This paper argues that as the boundary between human cognition and machine computation dissolves, attention—the foundation of thought and autonomy—has become the new site of exploitation. Modern platforms treat attention as data to be extracted, optimized, and sold, yet American law still assumes users can meaningfully choose where to direct their focus. Tracing analogies to nuisance and privacy law, from Olmstead to Carpenter, the paper proposes recognizing a legal right to attention—one that treats manipulative digital design as a form of intrusion upon the mind. By reframing doctrines like time, place, and manner restrictions in First Amendment jurisprudence, it shows how courts could distinguish between persuasion that respects agency and systems that erase it. If the industrial era required clean air and fair labor, the algorithmic era demands protected mental space. Without it, freedom of thought risks becoming just another data stream.

This paper examines how Trump v. V.O.S. Selections may force the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to confront the limits of its own textualism. President Trump’s sweeping tariffs, imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), stretch a statute meant to restrict emergency powers into a tool for economic nationalism. At stake is whether the Court will apply its own doctrines—the nondelegation and major questions doctrines—consistently, or bend them to politics. Tracing the IEEPA’s Cold War origins, its statutory language, and the constitutional allocation of tariff power to Congress, this paper reveals how Trump’s reading of the law represents not originalism, but opportunism. If “history, not policy, is the proper guide,” as Justice Kavanaugh insists, the Court must decide whether that principle binds everyone—or only its opponents.