Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Hobby Lobby and Harris

I wrote two posts at Cato on yesterday’s major Supreme Court decisions:

* Why Harris v. Quinn is a bigger deal than Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (spoiler: constitutional vs. statutory interpretation).

* if you like what today’s Supreme Court conservatives just did, thank yesterday’s liberals, and vice versa. By the way, I suspect the abortion buffer-zone cases also fit this pattern. For several decades (down through the 1990s, maybe?) liberals would have generally been the ones relatively sensitive to the rights of street protesters, while conservatives were relatively sensitive to the case for a legitimate police-power role in protecting property owners/tenants from ongoing sidewalk occupation that might deprive them of peaceful enjoyment of their premises.

Earlier on Hobby Lobby here, etc., and on Harris v. Quinn here, etc. Welcome readers from SCOTUSBlog, Steve Stanek/Heartland, etc. And Virginia Postrel makes the case for making contraception over-the-counter, which would largely remove employers from the equation while widening access greatly.

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Hobby Lobby prevails

The Court has ruled that under RFRA, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Congress cannot require closely held corporations to provide contraception coverage as part of ObamaCare when there are readily available alternatives to serve the government’s objectives that would not tread on conscience rights. So said a five-Justice majority led by Justice Alito, including a whittle-it-down concurrence by Justice Kennedy emphasizing the narrowness of the ruling. Why narrow?

* “Closely held” is important — private corporations like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga are closer to surrogates for the owning family than are publicly traded corporations.

* The available alternatives are important — in many closely related situations it won’t be as easy to devise a workaround that serves the government’s policy objectives, and in those situations the claims of conscience may lose out.

* And the basis of the decision in RFRA, that is to say, statutory rather than constitutional law, is important. Congress is free to tinker with RFRA, Obamacare law, or both if public opinion is dissatisfied with the outcome. Although objectors may later raise First Amendment arguments, today’s decision in no way decides those issues.

Earlier coverage here. Cato’s brief is here, and Ilya Shapiro is out with a statement for Cato (“Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate had to [fail under RFRA] because it didn’t show – couldn’t show – that there’s no other way of achieving its goal without violating religious beliefs.”)

P.S. My colleague Julian Sanchez argues that the outcry against Hobby Lobby had almost nothing to do with whether any actual female employees will gain or lose access to contraception, and was instead was almost entirely a matter of cultural signal-sending.

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Guest post, “Harris v. Quinn: A Win for Workers’ First Amendment Rights”

Cross-posted from Cato at Liberty, a guest post from my Cato colleague Andrew Grossman:

Enough is enough, the Supreme Court ruled today in Harris v. Quinn regarding the power of government to force public employees to associate with a labor union and pay for its speech. Although the Court did not overturn its 1977 precedent, Abood, allowing states to make their workers contribute to labor unions, it declined to extend that principle to reach recipients of state subsidies—in this case, home-care workers who receive modest stipends from the state of Illinois’ Medicaid program but are not properly considered “employees” of the state.

The Court is right that Abood is “something of an anomaly” because it sacrifices public workers’ First Amendment rights of speech and association to avoid their “free-riding” on the dues of workers who’ve chosen to join a union, the kind of thing that rarely if ever is sufficient to overcome First Amendment objections. But Abood treated that issue as already decided by prior cases, which the Harris Court recognizes it was not–a point discussed at length in Cato’s amicus brief. Abood was a serious mistake, Harris concludes, because public-sector union speech on “core issues such as wages, pensions, and benefits are important political issues” and cannot be distinguished from other political speech, which is due the First Amendment’s strongest protection. A ruling along those lines would spell the end of compulsory support of public-sector unions, a major source of funds and their clout.

It was enough, however, in Harris for the Court to decline Illinois’ invitation “to approve a very substantial expansion of Abood’s reach.” Illinois claimed that home-care workers were public employees for one purpose only: collective bargaining. But these workers were not hired or fired by the state, supervised by the state, given benefits by the state, or otherwise treated as state workers. And for that reason, Abood’s purposes, which relate only to actual “public employees,” simply do not apply. Were the law otherwise, the Court observed, “a host of workers who receive payments from a governmental entity for some sort of service would be candidates for inclusion within Abood’s reach.”

While Harris is not a watershed opinion that remakes labor law consistent with First Amendment principles, it does put an end to the forced unionization of home-based workers, a practice that has spread to nearly a dozen states and had provided a substantial number of new workers to the labor movement in recent years. Harris also lays the groundwork for a challenge to what it calls “Abood’s questionable foundations.” If recent Roberts Court precedents like Shelby County and Citizens United are any guide, Harris is a warning shot that the Abood regime is not long for this world and that the next case will be the one to vindicate all public workers’ First Amendment rights.

In January Andrew published a thorough preview of the issues of the case. Earlier coverage here.

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Pharmaceutical roundup

  • “Report: Government warnings about antidepressants may have led to more suicide attempts” [Washington Post]
  • Celebrity doc known for touting diet-health snake oil told off by Senators known for touting socio-economic snake oil [NBC, Business Week]
  • Physicians’ prescription of drugs off-label may “seem odd to the uninitiated, but it is called the practice of medicine, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with [it].” [Steven Boranian/D&DLaw, Sidley, Steve McConnell/D&DLaw (False Claims Act angle, with much background on that law generally)]
  • “23andMe Closer to FDA Approval” [Matthew Feeney/Cato, earlier]
  • FDA guidance could foreclose most use of tweets, Google ads and other character-limited vehicles in pharmaceutical promotion [Jeffrey Wasserstein/FDA Law Blog, Elizabeth N. Brown/Reason]
  • Average wholesale price (AWP) litigation: “Pennsylvania High Court Joins Judicial Stampede That’s Trampling State Attorneys-General/Plaintiffs’ Bar Alliances” [WLF, Beck, earlier]
  • California infant’s death opens window on lucrative (for some prescribers) intersection of workers’ comp and compounded pharmaceuticals [Southern California Public Radio]

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“It is the role of good lawyers to identify and exploit [loopholes]”

Justice Scalia on statutory interpretation, dissenting in Aereo [via Legal Ethics Forum]:

It is not the role of this Court to identify and plug loopholes. It is the role of good lawyers to identify and exploit them, and the role of Congress to eliminate them if it wishes. Congress can do that, I may add, in a much more targeted, better informed, and less disruptive fashion than the crude “looks-like-cable-TV” solution the Court invents today.

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Riley’s best line

“The United States asserts that a search of all data stored on a cell phone is ‘materially indistinguishable’ from searches of [a wallet or purse] … That is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon. Both are ways of getting from point A to point B, but little else justifies lumping them together.” — Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court in Riley v. California, in which the Justices unanimously disallowed warrantless police searches of arrestees’ cell phones.

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