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Page Number: 11

6 

WHOLE WOMAN’S HEALTH v. JACKSON 

Opinion of the Court 

United  States,  219  U. S.  346,  361  (1911).    Private  parties 
who  seek  to  bring  S. B. 8  suits  in  state  court  may  be  liti-
gants adverse to the petitioners.  But the state-court clerks 
who docket those disputes and the state-court judges who 
decide them generally are not.  Clerks serve to file cases as 
they arrive, not to participate as adversaries in those dis-
putes.  Judges exist to resolve controversies about a law’s 
meaning or its conformance to the Federal and State Con-
stitutions, not to wage battle as contestants in the parties’ 
litigation.  As this Court has explained, “no case or contro-
versy” exists “between a judge who adjudicates claims un-
der a statute and a litigant who attacks the constitutional-
ity  of  the  statute.”    Pulliam  v.  Allen,  466  U. S.  522,  538, 
n. 18 (1984). 
  Then there is the question of remedy.  Texas Rule of Civil 
Procedure 24 directs state-court clerks to accept complaints 
and record case numbers.  The petitioners have pointed to 
nothing in Texas law that permits clerks to pass on the sub-
stance of the filings they docket—let alone refuse a party’s 
complaint based on an assessment of its merits.  Nor does 
Article  III  confer  on  federal  judges  some  “amorphous” 
power  to  supervise  “the  operations  of  government”  and 
reimagine from the ground up the job description of Texas 
state-court clerks.  Raines v. Byrd, 521 U. S. 811, 829 (1997) 
(internal quotation marks omitted). 
  Troubling, too, the petitioners have not offered any mean-
ingful  limiting  principles for  their  theory.    If  it  caught  on 
and federal judges could enjoin state courts and clerks from 
entertaining  disputes  between  private  parties  under  this 
state law, what would stop federal judges from prohibiting 
state courts and clerks from hearing and docketing disputes 
between private parties under other state laws?  And if the 
state  courts  and  clerks  somehow  qualify  as  “adverse  liti-
gants”  for  Article  III  purposes  in  the  present  case,  when 
would  they  not?    The  petitioners  offer  no  satisfactory  an-
swers.