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Page Number: 9

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VIRGINIA HOUSE OF DELEGATES v. BETHUNE-HILL 

Opinion of the Court 

(2018)—does  not  bear  the  weight  the  House  would  place 
upon  it.    In  Vesilind,  the  House  intervened  in  support  of 
defendants in the trial court, and continued to defend the 
trial  court’s  favorable  judgment  on  appeal.    Id.,  at  433–
434,  813  S. E.  2d,  at  742.    The  House’s  participation  in 
Vesilind  thus  occurred  in  the  same  defensive  posture  as 
did the House’s participation in earlier phases of this case, 
when the House did not need to establish standing.  More-
over,  the  House  has  pointed  to  nothing  in  the  Virginia 
courts’ decisions in the Vesilind litigation suggesting that 
the  courts  understood  the  House  to  be  representing  the 
interests of the State itself. 
  Nonetheless,  the  House  insists,  this  Court’s  decision  in 
Karcher v. May, 484 U. S. 72 (1987), dictates that we treat 
Vesilind as establishing conclusively the House’s authority 
to  litigate  on  the  State’s  behalf.    True,  in  Karcher,  the 
Court noted a record, similar to that in Vesilind, of litiga-
tion by state legislative bodies in state court, and concluded 
without extensive explanation that “the New Jersey Legis-
lature  had  authority  under  state  law  to  represent  the 
State’s interests . . . .”  484 U. S., at 82.  Of crucial signifi-
cance, however, the Court in Karcher noted no New Jersey 
statutory  provision  akin  to  Virginia’s  law  vesting  the 
Attorney General with exclusive authority to speak for the 
Commonwealth  in  civil  litigation.    Karcher  therefore 
scarcely  impels  the  conclusion  that,  despite  Virginia’s 
clear  enactment making  the  Attorney General  the  State’s 
sole  representative  in  civil  litigation,  Virginia  has  desig-
nated the House as its agent to assert the State’s interests 
in this Court. 
  Moreover, even if, contrary to the governing statute, we 
indulged the assumption that Virginia had authorized the 
House to represent the State’s interests, as a factual mat-
ter the House never indicated in the District Court that it 
was  appearing  in  that  capacity.    Throughout  this  litiga-
tion,  the  House  has  purported  to  represent  its  own  inter-