The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday overturned a 40-year-old legal precedent regarding state sovereignty, leading Justice Stephen Breyer to question in a dissenting opinion which longstanding rulings the court may choose to toss out next.

Monday’s decision pertained to Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, a tax dispute involving inventor Gilbert P. Hyatt who was accused of lying about when he moved from California to Nevada in order to escape the former state’s income taxes.

In 1998, Hyatt sued the California board in a Nevada state court over what he argued were extreme measures it had taken to prove its claim, including sending an auditor to sort through his trash, enlisting estranged family members against him and releasing his address and Social Security number to newspapers.

A jury awarded Hyatt $490 million in damages, reduced to $1 million by the Nevada Supreme Court. The board then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Nevada v. Hall, a 1979 decision that allows individuals to sue a state in the courts of a different state. The high court split 4-4 over the matter, leaving Nevada v. Hall intact for the time being.

But in a 5-4 decision on Monday, the Supreme Court overturned the 40-year-old decision, arguing that “states retain their sovereign immunity from private suits brought in courts of other states.”

In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Breyer argued that the majority shouldn’t be so quick to overturn longstanding decisions that have provided “legal stability” in the U.S. for decades.

“Each time the Court overrules a case, the Court produces increased uncertainty,” Breyer wrote. “To overrule a sound decision like Hall is to encourage litigants to seek to overrule other cases; it is to make it more difficult for lawyers to refrain from challenging settled law; and it is to cause the public to become increasingly uncertain about which cases the Court will overrule and which cases are here to stay.”

“It is far more dangerous to overrule a decision only because five Members of a later Court come to agree with earlier dissenters on a difficult legal question,” Breyer wrote.

Thomas, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel Alito Jr., Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, “surrendered to the temptation to overrule Hall even though it is a well-reasoned decision that has caused no serious practical problems in the four decades since we decided it,” Breyer said.

Breyer didn’t mention Roe v. Wade in his dissent, but the implications were clear. The justice cited portions of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a case that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade while also upholding certain provisions of Pennsylvania’s abortion law. The portions Breyer cited in his dissent on Monday specifically discuss why Roe should be upheld.

And he has good cause to sound the alarm. State legislatures in portions of the Deep South and Midwest are slowly enacting more and more restrictive measures that could essentially spell the end of the constitutional right to abortion, granted by Roe, in those states.

Alabama is close to approving a bill that the state’s lieutenant governor admitted is a direct attempt to get Roe v. Wade overturned. The bill, called the Human Life Protection Act, would make it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia this month signed a controversial “heartbeat bill” that bans abortion as soon as a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat, which usually happens at around six weeks into a pregnancy and before most women are aware that they’re pregnant.

Mississippi, Ohio and Kentucky have also passed heartbeat laws. The Louisiana legislature is halfway toward passing one, and Missouri’s GOP-controlled legislature is considering one. The Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit reproductive health care research group, has said such legislation is “part of a deliberate strategy” to challenge Roe v. Wade “in hopes that an increasingly conservative Court will undermine or even overturn” it in inevitable court challenges. President Donald Trump has successfully appointed two conservatives justices to the high court ― Gorsuch and Kavanaugh ― and has filled over 100 federal judgeships, including nearly 40 circuit appeal court positions. Vice President Mike Pence told The Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, at a conference over the weekend: “They are all conservatives who are committed to the principles enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.” And for Pence and conservatives of his ilk, a key tenet is that the right to an abortion does not enjoy constitutional protection. </s> WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is ruling that one state cannot unwillingly be sued in the courts of another, overruling a 40-year precedent.

The justices are dividing 5-4 Monday in ending a long-running dispute between California officials and Nevada inventor Gilbert Hyatt.

Hyatt is a former California resident who sued California’s tax agency for being too zealous in seeking back taxes from him. Hyatt won a judgment in Nevada courts.

But Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court’s conservative justices that the Constitution forbids states from opening the doors of their courts to a private citizen’s lawsuit against another state. In 1979, the high court concluded otherwise.

Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. </s> Supreme Court Says 1 State Can’t Be Sued in Another State’s Courts

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Supreme Court is ruling that one state cannot unwillingly be sued in the courts of another, overruling a 40-year precedent.

The justices are dividing 5-4 Monday in ending a long-running dispute between California officials and Nevada inventor Gilbert Hyatt.

Hyatt is a former California resident who sued California’s tax agency for being too zealous in seeking back taxes from him. Hyatt won a judgment in Nevada courts.

But Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court’s conservative justices that the Constitution forbids states from opening the doors of their courts to a private citizen’s lawsuit against another state. In 1979, the high court concluded otherwise. </s> The Supreme Court decided Monday that one state cannot unwillingly be sued in the courts of another, overruling a 40-year precedent.

The justices voted 5-4 to end a long-running dispute between California officials and Nevada inventor Gilbert Hyatt.

Hyatt is a former California resident who sued California’s tax agency for being too zealous in seeking back taxes from him. Hyatt won a judgment in Nevada courts.

But Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court’s conservative justices that the Constitution forbids states from opening the doors of their courts to a private citizen’s lawsuit against another state.

In 1979, a more liberal Supreme Court concluded otherwise.

However, Thomas said the case four decades ago, Nevada v. Hall, “is contrary to our constitutional design and the understanding of sovereign immunity shared by the States that ratified the Constitution.”

The four liberal justices dissented, saying they would have left alone the court’s decision in Nevada v. Hall.

Justice Stephen Breyer said there are good reasons to overrule an earlier case, including that it is no longer workable or a vestige of an otherwise abandoned legal doctrine.

But Breyer said justices should otherwise adhere to the principle of stare decisis, Latin for to stand by things decided.

“It is far more dangerous to overrule a decision only because five members of a later court come to agree with earlier dissenters on a difficult legal question,” he wrote.

He included a reference to the court’s 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey that reaffirmed the right to abortion the court declared in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

The future of abortion rights at the court is a matter of intense interest as several states have enacted increasingly restrictive abortion laws in the hope that a more conservative Supreme Court majority will uphold them.

In his majority opinion, Thomas cited other Supreme Court precedent that held “stare decisis is not an inexorable command.”

The Hyatt case had been to the Supreme Court twice before. In 2016, the justices split 4-4 over the same question that was finally answered Monday.

RELATED: Trump Vows To Take Democrats’ Potential Impeachment Attempt to Supreme Court

The case is Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, 17-1299.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards. </s> WASHINGTON — Overruling a 40-year-old precedent, the Supreme Court said on Monday that states may not be sued in the courts of other states.

The vote was 5 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members in the majority. The ruling itself will probably not be particularly consequential, as most states already grant sovereign immunity to other states, shielding them from lawsuits. By one count, there have been only 14 cases in the past 40 years in which one state allowed another to be sued in its courts.

The decision was more important for its discussion of when precedents may be overruled. In dissent, after repeatedly citing a 1992 decision that reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he feared for the future.

“Today’s decision can only cause one to wonder which cases the court will overrule next,” he wrote.

Monday’s decision, Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, No. 17-1299, resolved a long-running dispute involving Gilbert P. Hyatt, who had made money from technology patents, and California’s tax authorities. In 1991, Mr. Hyatt, who had lived in California, told the authorities that he had moved to Nevada, which collects no personal income tax. </s> WASHINGTON (CN) – Divided 5-4 Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned 40-year-old precedent that allowed states to be sued in the courts of another state.

The case began when the Franchise Tax Board of California began auditing inventor Gilbert Hyatt in the early 1990s, suspecting that Hyatt had moved out of the state later than he claimed in an attempt to skip out on tax payments.

After California hit Hyatt with a $6 million tax bill, Hyatt sued the board in Nevada, ultimately securing a $490 million judgment that said California had violated Hyatt’s privacy by snooping through his trash and sending his Social Security number to people as part of the audit.

California spent another several years whittling that judgment down down, but Nevada’s high court said a Nevada law capping tort liability for its own state agencies at $50,000 did not apply to California.

The U.S. Supreme Court vacated this holding in 2016 and held another hearing this past January on whether California’s sovereignty should have foreclosed Hyatt’s suit against in Nevada from the beginning,

Justice Clarence Thomas penned Monday’s reversal, which says the 1979 ruling Nevada v. Hall unconstitutionally impacted the sovereign immunity of states.

“The Founders believed that both ‘common law sovereign immunity’ and ‘law-of-nations sovereign immunity’ prevented states from being amenable to process in any court without their consent,” Thomas wrote. “The common-law rule was that ‘no suit or action can be brought against the king, even in civil matters, because no court can have jurisdiction over him.’”

Thomas called interstate sovereign immunity “integral to the structure of the Constitution.”

“Like a dispute over borders or water rights, a state’s assertion of compulsory judicial process over another state involves a direct conflict between sovereigns,” he wrote. “The Constitution implicitly strips states of any power they once had to refuse each other sovereign immunity, just as it denies them the power to resolve border disputes by political means.”

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined a dissent meanwhile by Justice Stephen Breyer.

“The court in Hall observed that an express provision of the Constitution undermined the assertion that states were absolutely immune in each other’s courts,” he wrote. “Unlike suits brought against a state in the state’s own courts, Hall noted, a suit against a state in the courts of a different state ‘necessarily implicates the power and authority of’ both states.”

Breyer also identified what he called an “obvious” problem with the majority saying that the Constitution altered interstate relationships by offering immunity they didn’t possess before unifying.

“No provision of the Constitution gives states absolute immunity in each other’s courts,” he wrote. “The majority does not attempt to situate its newfound constitutional immunity in any provision of the Constitution itself. Instead, the majority maintains that a state’s immunity in other states’ courts is ‘implicit’ in the Constitution.”

WilmerHale attorney Seth Waxman argued for Franchise Tax Board of California, and Erwin Chemerinsky, a Berkeley School of Law professor, argued for Hyatt. Neither lawyer has returned a request for comment.

Hyatt is still contesting his tax penalty in administrative proceedings. </s> WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court decided Monday that one state cannot unwillingly be sued in the courts of another, overruling a 40-year precedent and perhaps, foreshadowing an argument over the viability of other high court decisions.

The outcome left one dissenting justice wondering “which cases the court will overrule next.”

The justices divided 5-4 to end a long-running dispute between California officials and Nevada inventor Gilbert Hyatt.

Hyatt is a former California resident who sued California’s tax agency for being too zealous in seeking back taxes from him. Hyatt won a judgment in Nevada courts.

But Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court’s conservative justices that the Constitution forbids states from opening the doors of their courts to a private citizen’s lawsuit against another state. In 1979, the high court concluded otherwise.

The four liberal justices dissented, saying they would have left alone the court’s decision in Nevada v. Hall. Justice Stephen Breyer said there are good reasons to overrule an earlier case, including that it is no longer workable or a vestige of an otherwise abandoned legal doctrine.

But Breyer said that justices should otherwise adhere to the principle of stare decisis, Latin for to stand by things decided.

“It is far more dangerous to overrule a decision only because five members of a later court come to agree with earlier dissenters on a difficult legal question,” Breyer wrote. He included a reference to the court’s 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey that reaffirmed the right to abortion the court declared in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

The future of abortion rights at the court is a matter of intense interest as several states have enacted increasingly restrictive abortion laws in the hope that a more conservative Supreme Court majority will uphold them.

In his majority opinion, Thomas cited other Supreme Court precedent that held “stare decisis is not an inexorable command.”

The Hyatt case had been to the Supreme Court twice before. In 2016, the justices split 4-4 over the same question that was finally answered on Monday.

The case is Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, 17-1299. </s> Precedents are falling, and with state legislators eating away at any middle ground, it’s probably time to worry about Roe v. Wade.



On Monday, the Supreme Court made a monumental decision on a fairly bland case. In ruling on Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, the Court’s five conservatives overturned the precedent set by the 1979 decision Nevada v. Hall, in which the Court established that individuals can sue a state in a state court outside of the defendant state. The example in this long-winding case was millionaire Gilbert Hyatt’s legal fight against the state of California’s Franchise Tax Board; until Monday, the courts had honored Hyatt’s ability to sue the state via Nevada’s courts.

But in the majority opinion penned by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court’s conservatives decided to side with the state board and dump four decades of precedent, declaring that states have sovereign immunity from private lawsuits brought against them in state courts outside of their own.

In dismissing Hall, Justice Thomas—he loves breaking precedent—spent just three paragraphs explaining his constitutional reasoning, ultimately concluding that the 1979 ruling, “failed to account for the historical understanding of state sovereign immunity.”

That is not the news, not the news that matters anyways. The reason this is important is found in the Court’s decision to forgo precedent simply because they don’t personally agree with it. No legal loopholes were deployed, and no grand research effort was undertaken to disqualify Hall. Thomas and his fellow conservative cohorts simply disagreed with the precedent-setting ruling, finally had the votes to change it, and did just that.



As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his dissent, there now exists a very real possibility that such a decision being made—without a specific prior case or constitutional issue cited—will give way to other precedents being overturned. Given he cites from Planned Parenthood v. Casey in his dissent, this paragraph is as close to a Justice ringing the warning bell for Roe v. Wade as one can get.

To overrule a sound decision like Hall is to encourage litigants to seek to overrule other cases; it is to make it more difficult for lawyers to refrain from challenging settled law; and it is to cause the public to become increasingly uncertain about which cases the Court will overrule and which cases are here to stay.

In recent months, state governments have begun outlawing abortions in practice by drafting and passing a recent rash of what are known as “heartbeat bills,” which make abortions following the presence of a fetal heartbeat illegal. As the Associated Press pointed out this morning, four states have such legislation in place, and three more are on the cusp. In the very near future, one of these states is going to come for Roe.

And if the Supreme Court’s actions today are any harbinger of the decision to come, the justification to overturn the one law protecting women’s right to seek an abortion could be shorter than this blog. </s> July 10 (UPI) -- A federal appeals court on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit by the attorneys general of Washington, D.C., and Maryland accusing President Donald Trump of violating emoluments clauses.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the two attorneys general didn't prove their case, which argued that Trump violated the Constitution by accepting money from domestic and foreign governments through his hotels and other businesses.

The panel also said the attorneys general couldn't show that Trump's ownership of the hotels created competition with other similar businesses like convention centers.

"The District and Maryland's interest in enforcing the Emoluments Clauses is so attenuated and abstract that their prosecution of this case readily provokes the question of whether this action against the president is an appropriate use of the courts, which were created to resolve real cases and controversies between the parties," Judge Paul Niemeyer wrote in the opinion.

The three-judge panel ordered the lower court to dismiss the lawsuit.

The suit said the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., diverts customers away from businesses the District of Columbia and Maryland own, license or tax, causing those governments direct financial harm. The Trump International Hotel competes with convention facilities owned by the city's government, as well as with a resort in Prince George's County that generates tax revenue for Maryland.

The suit contended it wasn't clear whether Trump is making decisions in the country's best interest or out of "self-interested motivations grounded in the international and domestic business dealings in which President Trump's personal fortune is at stake."

Trump increases business from foreign diplomats and others doing business at his family's hotels and the restaurants, the suit alleged.

This wasn't the only lawsuit accusing Trump of violating the emoluments clause. A group of some 200 Democrats sued him on similar grounds. On Tuesday, they issued dozens of subpoenas seeking documents from Trump's private businesses.
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) rules in Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, that a state cannot be sued in another state's court, overturning a 40-year-old precedent. The 5-4 decision overrules the Nevada v. Hall stare decisis set in 1979 which allowed private suits from one state to be brought in another state's court.