- Can a treaty increase the power of Congress? Cato files amicus in latest round of Bond v. U.S. [Nick Rosencranz, Ilya Shapiro/Trevor Burrus]
- SCOTUS denies certiorari, ending closely watched Kivalina climate change nuisance case [Jenner & Block, Foley Hoag, earlier]
- Jim Huffman on Arlington v. FCC, the Court’s new decision widening deference to agencies [Daily Caller, earlier] Mike Rappaport critique of Chevron deference doctrine in administrative law [Liberty and Law, more, yet more] Split among conservative justices on Arlington not free of cattiness [Tamara Tabo]
- Mixed-motive retaliation case University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar hasn’t gotten much press notice but will affect plenty of real-life litigation [ABA Journal]
- Town of Greece v. Galloway: “Roberts Court to Wade into Debate Over Religion’s Place in Public Square” [Jeremy Leaming, ACSBlog; SCOTUSBlog]
- Among key New Deal cases we’re allowed to object to Wickard and even Lochner but not Carolene or Erie. Why? [Michael Greve]
- Walden v. Fiore, DaimlerChrysler AG v. Bauman: “The Supreme Court Again Revisits (And May Rein In) Personal Jurisdiction” [Grant Esposito and Brian Matsui (Morrison & Foerster), JD Supra]
- “What’s the Most Important Supreme Court Case No One’s Ever Heard Of?” [symposium, The Atlantic]
Tagged as:
administrative law,
constitutional law,
Supreme Court
By a 6-3 vote yesterday, the Supreme Court decided that agencies deserve deference in determining the scope of their own jurisdiction. Bad move, argues Ilya Shapiro at Cato:
…why should courts defer to agency determinations regarding their own authority? … Whether a government body uses its power wisely or not, it cannot possibly be the judge of whether it has that power to begin with. Yet Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, essentially says that there’s no such thing as a dispute over whether an agency has power to regulate in a given area, just clear congressional lines of authority and ambiguous ones, with agencies having free rein in the latter circumstance unless their actions are “arbitrary and capricious” (what lawyers call Chevron deference, after a foundational 1984 case involving the oil company).
That makes no sense. As Cato explained in our brief, since the theory of deference is based on Congress’s affirmative grant of power to an agency over a defined jurisdiction, it’s incoherent to say that the failure to provide such power is an equal justification for deference. Furthermore, granting an agency deference over its own jurisdiction is an open invitation for agencies to aggrandize power that Congress never intended them to have. One doesn’t need a doctorate in public choice economics to recognize that we need checks on those who wield power because it’s in their nature to husband and grow that power.
Read the whole thing here.
Tagged as:
administrative law,
Supreme Court
- “David Marcus on The History of the Modern Class Action” [Andrew Trask]
- Ted Frank profiled [American Lawyer] Related: “Expert in legal-fee fight blasts ‘make believe’ game over cost of contract lawyers to do doc review” [ABA Journal; CCAF on games case]
- “Statutory Penalties and Class Actions: Social Justice or Legalized Extortion?” [Paul Karlsgodt, DULR Online]
- Lawyers in Ford Explorer case claimed $500M benefit to class, on way to pocketing $25M fee; actual coupon redemptions $74,000 [Lawrence Schonbrun, American Thinker]
- Genesis Health Care Corp. v. Symczyk: can defendant moot class action by settling lead plaintiff’s complaint? [Karlsgodt, Trask, Fed Soc]
- Incentive problems of cy pres: a mini-roundup [Jennifer Johnston comment, JLEP, via Trask, Alison Frankel/Reuters on Ben & Jerry's case, PoL on U. of South Carolina, Daniel Fisher on Facebook case]
- Reactions to SCOTUS ruling in Comcast v. Behrend [Richard Epstein, Point of Law; Max Kennerly with a plaintiff's view; Fed Soc podcast with Ken Lee (Jenner & Block); Manhattan Institute podcast with Ted Frank]
Tagged as:
class actions,
cy pres,
South Carolina,
Supreme Court,
Ted Frank
Is ICWA, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, unconstitutional, bad policy, both, or neither? Does it impermissibly hand out rights in domestic relations disputes based on forbidden grounds of race and lineage? My new Reason piece on SCOTUS’s adoption heartbreaker is now out. ICWA advocates have argued that the law should be read generously as an effort to remedy a long earlier history in which Indian kids had been improperly been taken out of their homes. More on the case: SCOTUSBlog (I recommend in particular the amicus brief on behalf of family law experts Joan Heifetz Hollinger and Elizabeth Bartholet), ABA, oral argument transcript. And for a viewpoint extremely different from mine, Matthew Fletcher and Kate Fort write up the case at the Indian law blog Turtle Talk (first, second).(& SCOTUSBlog, How Appealing)
Tagged as:
adoption,
Indian tribes,
Supreme Court
This morning’s big Supreme Court decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum was a huge win for good sense. While splitting 5-4 on reasoning, the nine justices unanimously rejected the lefty view of the Alien Tort Statute that had been popular on campus, in the foundation world, and so forth. Here’s my Cato take:
Just as the United States should not play policeman to the world, so our courts should not play tort-suit venue to the world. Today the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously and decisively buried the misguided, decades-long hope of some lawyers and academics that they could turn the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) into a wide-ranging method of hauling overseas damage claims into American courts. All nine Justices agreed with the Second Circuit that the statute does not grant jurisdiction for our courts to hear a controversy over alleged assistance in human rights violations outside the U.S. against non-U.S. plaintiffs by a non-U.S. business. A majority of five justices reiterated and relied on our law’s strong traditional presumption against extraterritoriality, that is to say, presumption against applying the law to actions that take place in other countries. While parting from this reasoning, four concurring justices nonetheless endorsed a view of ATS as applicable extraterritorially only to very extreme misconduct comparable to piracy, and also as sharply limited by considerations of comity with foreign sovereigns.
It is a good day for a realistic and modest sense of what United States courts of justice can successfully do, namely: do justice within the United States.
Notably, all nine Justices sidestepped the issue that had caused extensive angst among many popular commentators, namely whether the statute could be applied to corporations as distinct from natural persons. Other views: Ilya Shapiro, Cato (“an exceedingly complicated case with a relatively simple solution”); SCOTUSBlog; Julian Ku/Opinio Juris (“this means that the ATS wars over corporate liability are almost over…. A theory that the ATS can be justified in universal civil jurisdiction cases has been rejected, 9-0.”) and more (death of “universal civil jurisdiction” idea, and speculation that Breyer’s shift of ground to a narrower ATS rationale was an unsuccessful attempt to pick up Kennedy); Sarah Altschuller (reading opinions, “struck by amount of time that must have been dedicated to debate re: pirates and shipdecks”); Josh Blackman (getting all nine justices to agree on a personal jurisdiction question isn’t easy, but it happened here); Hans Bader; Roger Alford (ATS “as we know it is dead… [Kiobel] has destroyed an entire cottage industry”; transnational state-court torts and choice of law likely to rise in importance as replacement); Eugene Kontorovich (academics scoffed when “foreign-cubed” ATS lawsuits were called into question, yet all nine justices have now embraced that position); earlier here; Cato’s amicus brief. Disapproving reactions on the left from Alliance for Justice, Center for Constitutional Rights (which unsuccessfully invoked the ATS to sue bulldozer maker Caterpillar Tractor over the death of anti-Israel protester Rachel Corrie, a story mentioned in Schools for Misrule, which discusses law-school and foundation enthusiasm for the ATS), and Human Rights First. More on the recent ATS defense by Judge Pierre Leval, cited by Justice Breyer in his concurrence for the four liberals.
Tagged as:
Alien Tort Claims Act,
Supreme Court
- The 173rd, maybe? “This is not the first time [Linda] Greenhouse has misrepresented the views of her opponents” [Ilya Somin; more from ABA Journal on federalism argument against DOMA as supposed anti-federal-power "Trojan horse"] Was it improper for trial judge Vaughn Walker and appeals judge Stephen Reinhardt not to have recused themselves from Prop 8 case? Legal Ethics Forum bloggers weigh in [John Steele, Richard Painter, etc.] Funny graphic by Cato social media team about Cato’s “odd couple” joint brief with Constitutional Accountability Center [CAC] “Right and Left Continue to Change Where they Stand on Standing” [Ilya Somin] And if you’re going to be on Capitol Hill this Friday and are interested in the DOMA and Prop 8 cases, be sure to attend the panel discussion at which I’ll be joined by Ilya Shapiro and Mary Bonauto;
- On courts’ role in advancing liberty [Roger Pilon exchange with Ramesh Ponnuru] Incidentally, Cato’s “Mr. U.S. Constitution” is now on Twitter at @Roger_Pilon; and he discusses Cato’s high-profile SCOTUS amicus program [here]
- Cook County official has creative theories about federal supremacy [Illinois Watchdog]
- Amicus brief: Congress can’t assert perpetual jurisdiction over anyone and everyone, and that goes for ex-sex offenders too [Trevor Burrus]
- “What are the Weirdest Constitutional Arguments Ever Asserted in Court?” [Orin Kerr and Volokh readers]
- As Court considers voting act in Shelby County case, Chief Justice Roberts sees problem with pretending it’s still 1965 [Ilya Shapiro; more on VRA, 2010 Abigail Thernstrom backgrounder, National Affairs]
Tagged as:
constitutional law,
recusals,
same-sex marriage,
Supreme Court,
Voting Rights Act
An inmate filing pro se gets certiorari, then follows through with a unanimous nine-Justice SCOTUS win, Thomas, J., correcting the Third Circuit. Credit Justice Alito? [Max Kennerly]
Tagged as:
prisoners,
pro se,
Supreme Court
On Tuesday and Wednesday the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on Hollingsworth v. Perry, the challenge to California’s Proposition 8, and U.S. v. Windsor, the challenge to Section 3 (federal definition of marriage) of the Defense of Marriage Act. A Ninth Circuit panel, with liberal Judge Stephen Reinhardt writing, had invalidated Prop 8 on relatively narrow grounds; a Second Circuit panel, with conservative Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs writing, had invalidated Section 3 of DOMA on Equal Protection grounds.
The range of possible outcomes for the two cases is quite wide. At one end, the Court could reverse both appellate decisions, restoring the California ban on gay marriage and confirming the legal definition of marriage as opposite-sex-only for purposes of federal programs such as taxation (at issue in Windsor) and federal employee pensions. At the other end, the Court could apply Equal Protection Clause principles to declare that marriage licenses must be available in all states to all otherwise qualified couples regardless of sex. In between are many intermediate outcomes. Both cases, especially Perry, raise issues of litigant standing that might enable or require the Court to set aside the ultimate merits and render a decision with little or no precedential impact on future cases.
[click to continue…]
Tagged as:
constitutional law,
federalism,
same-sex marriage,
Supreme Court
Justice Scalia and the Ninth Circuit, cats and dogs lying down together? The conservative justice was the only dissenter the other day in a 7-1 Supreme Court decision overturning the Ninth Circuit in the consolidated cases of Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center and Georgia-Pacific West, Inc. v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center. In doing so, the Court upheld (as the Ninth Circuit had not) the entitlement of the Environmental Protection Agency, and by implication other federal agencies, to deference in interpreting the meaning of its own regulations — so-called Auer deference, as distinguished from Chevron deference in the interpretation of Congressionally enacted statutes. Roger Pilon at Cato sorts it out and concludes that there is nothing paradoxical about the line-up: Scalia is distinctively vigilant against the dangers of excessive delegation of legislative power to executive-branch regulators, and deference tends to intensify the effects of such delegation. (Update: omitted link included now)
Tagged as:
administrative law,
Environmental Protection Agency,
Supreme Court
The decision in Standard Fire Insurance Co. v. Knowles was 9-0, Justice Breyer writing for the Court, and signals’ Justices’ impatience with lawyerly gamesmanship intended to evade CAFA (the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005). I’ve got a short commentary at Cato, which filed an amicus brief on the side that prevailed [decision in PDF, background at SCOTUSBlog, earlier here etc., my new Cato post; more on stage hooks](& SCOTUSBlog, Ted Frank/PoL (“Miller County [Arkansas] trial lawyers had collected hundreds of millions of dollars of legal fees from forum-shopped class-action settlements; the class members whom they purportedly represented likely didn’t even get 10% as much.”))
More: Andrew Trask (“The Supreme Court is envisioning the class action as a procedural aggregation device, rather than a corporate deterrent or a trust-like entity. This is good news for defendants.”); Alison Frankel, Reuters. And I’m quoted on the case in Alex Daniels’ account in the March 20 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (sub-only).
Tagged as:
Arkansas,
Class Action Fairness Act,
Supreme Court
Max Boot, who has written a new book on the history of guerrilla movements, tells how Shamil, firebrand leader of a celebrated 19th-century Muslim insurgency in Chechnya and Dagestan, began to lose the allegiance of “many ordinary villagers who balked at his demands for annual tax payments amounting to 12 percent of their harvest.” Instead, they switched their allegiance instead to the rival Russian czar, whose demands were more modest.
Compare the pending case of Horne v. U.S. Department of Agriculture, where, as my Cato colleague Ilya Shapiro explains,
the USDA imposed on the Hornes (long-time California raisin farmers Marvin and Laura Horne) a “marketing order” demanding that they turn over 47% of their crop without compensation. The order — a much-criticized New Deal relic — forces raisin “handlers” to reserve a certain percentage of their crop “for the account” of the government-backed Raisin Administrative Committee, enabling the government to control the supply and price of raisins on the market. The RAC then either sells the raisins or simply gives them away to noncompetitive markets—such as federal agencies, charities, and foreign governments—with the proceeds going toward the RAC’s administration costs.
The U.S. government denies that it owes anything to the Hornes under the Takings Clause, and also says that to contest the legality of what has been done to them, the Hornes are obliged to pay the USDA what it demands — $438,000 for the raisins not handed over, plus $200,000 or so in penalties — and then sue in the Court of Federal Claims to get it back. The Supreme Court has granted certiorari and will hear oral argument March 20.
Tagged as:
agriculture and farming,
Supreme Court
- Court hears oral argument in Standard Fire Insurance Co. v. Knowles, the CAFA evasion case [transcript in PDF, Civil Procedure & Federal Courts Blog rounding up links, Federalist Society podcast with Brian Fitzpatrick, earlier here, here]
- Shelby County case invites SCOTUS to revisit Voting Rights Act [Ilya Shapiro, Cato; Eric Posner and Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Slate] But does Jeffrey Toobin understand the VRA? [Derek Muller, Prawfs]
- Speaking of that New Yorker writer, Toobin’s account of the Heller Second Amendment case is definitely not one for the history books [Tim Lynch, Cato]
- On gay marriage cases, jurisdiction/standing issues could leave Court fractured like Turkish taffy [Art Leonard] Best result for gays, argues Jonathan Rauch, might be narrow or mixed decision [TNR] Beyond the Court, idea of local option could offer national GOP a graceful retreat from its current untenable position [Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle quotes me arguing to that effect]
- SCOTUS asked to consider tribalism-trumps-adoption Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 [NYT]
- Despite amicus urgings from various good guys, Supreme Court declines to review Hettinga, the economic liberty case with the blazing Janice Rogers Brown/David Sentelle concurrence [Ilya Shapiro/Cato, Damon Root, Tim Sandefur/PLF, earlier here and here]
- Is the Sixth Circuit replacing the Ninth as perennial SCOTUS reversee? [Adler]
Tagged as:
adoption,
Class Action Fairness Act,
guns,
Indian tribes,
same-sex marriage,
Sixth Circuit,
Supreme Court,
Voting Rights Act
