Source: https://www.llrx.com/2015/04/amicus-curiae-information-in-the-service-of-justice/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 22:29:30+00:00

Document:
“Amicus curiae occupy a unique place in the courts: non-parties who are nevertheless advocates, who are not bound by rules of standing and justiciability, and who can present the court with new information and arguments. Amicus participation has increased dramatically in recent years, and threatens to alter the adversarial process. Yet scholars and courts treat amicus curiae as a single category, not fully recognizing that this friendly term actually covers several very different types, ranging from court appointed advocates of a particular position, to friends of a party (sometimes paid by the party), to persons or groups who just missed qualifying as interveners.
To understand the reality of amicus practice, this article develops a taxonomy of amicus based on the relationship to the court and the parties. The article supports this taxonomy with a look at the history of amicus, and a survey of the rules and judicial attitudes in different jurisdictions. I [Helen A. Anderson] also explore the persistence of a myth that amicus should be “disinterested,” a myth that has led to confused reasoning about the proper role of amicus.
“Forty-three times since 1954 – approximately twice every three Terms – the Supreme Court has heard a case in which no party argued one side of the issue before the Court, generally because the party who prevailed in the lower court refused to defend its victory below. When faced with this unusual, nonadversary posture, the Court has tapped an attorney to brief and argue the case as an amicus curiae in support of the orphaned argument. This practice raises a number of questions: First, at the most basic descriptive level, why has it been necessary? If the respondents themselves did not wish to defend their victories below, then whom were the appointed amici representing? Second, did these uncontested cases run afoul of Article III’s limitation of federal jurisdiction to “cases” and “controversies,” or the American tradition of adversarial litigation? And third, even if the invitations were constitutionally permissible, was it prudent for the Court to spend its scarce certiorari grants on them rather than waiting for more traditional cases to present the same issues?
“The number of amicus curiae briefs filed at the Supreme Court is at an all-time high. Most observers, and even some of the Justices, believe that the best of these briefs are filed to supplement the Court’s understanding of facts. Supreme Court decisions quite often turn on generalized facts about the way the world works (Do violent video games harm children? Is a partial birth abortion ever medically necessary?) and to answer these questions the Justices are hungry for more information than the parties and the record can provide. The consensus is that amicus briefs helpfully add factual expertise to the Court’s decision-making.
“Preview is an eight-issue subscription publication that provides, in advance of oral argument, expert, plain-language analysis of all cases given plenary review by the Supreme Court. Preview Issues 1-7 precede the Court’s seven argument sessions from October to April. Published in July following the close of the Court’s term at the end of June, Preview Issue 8 reviews the term using a combination of charts, statistics, case summaries, and essays.” The web site features links to briefs from the current term and the preceding ten years.
1 See Genesis 18:16-33 (KJV).
2 See Ken Armstrong, Broken on the Wheel, The Marshall Project, Mar. 12, 2015 (“For Voltaire, the Calas case was but the beginning of his life’s last chapter. In his twilight years he became an 18th Century version of the Innocence Project, taking on, and prevailing in, one case after another. For so long a darling of high society, he became a champion of the people.” Id.); Voltaire –Father of the Innocence Campaign, Justice Denied, Winter 2007, at 29.
3 See Donald E. Wilkes, Jr., “J’accuse …!” Emile Zola, Alfred Dreyfus, and the Greatest Newspaper Article in History, Flagpole Mag., Feb. 11, 1998, at 12. See also Douglas G. Morris, Chp. 8 “A German Dreyfus Affair: The Rule of Law, Reaction, and Honor in the Fechenbach Case” in Justice Imperiled: The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany (U. Mich. Press 2005)(“Thus, the Dreyfus Affair and the Fechenbach case involved convictions of persons with claims of different types of innocence, but to actual innocence nonetheless—whether because the crime was pinned on the wrong person, as with Dreyfus, or because innocent acts were criminalized, as with Fechenbach.” Id. at 187).
4 Indeed, the concept of collective responsibility for justice likely began with the question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” See Genesis 4:9 (KJV). See generally Eyal Benvenisti, Sovereigns as Trustees of Humanity: On the Accountability of States to Foreign Stakeholders, 107 A.J.I.L. 295 (2013); Paul Mertenskotter, National Courts as “Trustees of Humanity”?, 46 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 291 (2013).
5 The friends of justice come from many walks of life. See generally John Dugdale, Facts and Fictions: Literary Advocates of Justice, The Guardian, June 17, 2009.
6 See generally Padideh Ala’i, Judicial Lobbying at the WTO: The Debate Over the Use of Amicus Curiae Briefs and the U.S. Experience, 24 Fordham Int’l L.J. 62 (2000)(“The use of amicus curiae briefs dates back to Roman law. “The function of the amicus curiae at common law was one of oral ‘shepardizing'” or “the bringing up of cases not known to the judge.” Amicus curiae also included testimony by those who had been involved in the legislative process and in cases where the meaning of a statute was at issue. Any bystander, including non-lawyers, was allowed to appear as amicus curiae if they possessed either a knowledge of the fact or the law that was deemed by the court to be relevant in achieving a just result. Historically an amicus curiae “did not even have to be an attorney to intervene, and the general attitude of the courts was to welcome such aid, since ‘it is for the honor of a court of justice to avoid error.'”” Id. at 84-85 (footnotes omitted).); Michael K. Lowman, The Litigating Amicus Curiae: When Does the Party Begin After the Friends Leave, 41 Am. U.L. Rev. 1243 (1992) (“[T]he amicus curiae has a long lineage extending from Anglo-American common law, from as far back as the 14th century, and Roman law. Traditionally, the amicus curiae was not a party to the litigation, but served as an impartial assistant to the judiciary, providing advice and information to a mistaken or doubtful court. . . . No longer a mere friend of the court, the amicus has become a lobbyist, an advocate, and, most recently, the vindicator of the politically powerless. As federal courts confronted ever more complex cases and sought innovative techniques to manage judicial resources and secure fair representation of interests outside their jurisdiction, the amicus curiae device provided a potential solution. . . . As evidenced in recent litigation, the amici performed various roles normally reserved for party participants.” Id. at 1243-1246).
7 Posthumous case investigations are another species of amicus addressed to present and future generations. See, e.g., Paul C. Giannelli, Junk Science and the Execution of an Innocent Man, 7 N.Y.U. J.L. & Liberty 221 (2013) (“Cameron Todd Willingham was tried and executed for the arson deaths of his three little girls. The expert testimony offered against him to establish arson was junk science. The case has since become infamous, the subject of an award-winning New Yorker article [David Grann, Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?, The New Yorker, Sept. 7, 2009], numerous newspaper accounts, and several television shows.”); James S. Liebman et al., Los Tocayos Carlos, 43 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 711 (2012) (“The Wrong Carlos and this accompanying website help to answer these haunting questions. Based on one of the most thorough investigations of a criminal case in U.S. history, the groundbreaking book by Columbia Law School Professor James Liebman and a team of his former students: Shawn Crowley, Andrew Markquart, Lauren Rosenberg, Lauren Gallo White and Daniel Zharkovsky, uncovers evidence that Carlos DeLuna, a poor Hispanic man with childlike intelligence who was executed in Texas in 1989, was innocent.” See also James S. Liebman and the Columbia DeLuna Project, The Wrong Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution (Colum. U. Press 2014)); Paul Finkelman, U.S.-Dakota War of 1862: ‘I Could Not Afford to Hang Men for Votes.’ Lincoln the Lawyer, Humanitarian Concerns, and the Dakota Pardons,” 39 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 405 (2013) (“In 1862 there was a short war in Minnesota initiated by some members of the Dakota (Sioux) Nation. The Dakota fought against settlers in central Minnesota, and ultimately against the Minnesota militia and U.S. Army elements. After the War was over the Army tried nearly 400 Dakota soldiers by military commissions, and sentence 303 to death. President Lincoln, acting under the militia act of 1862, refused to sign the warrants of execution for 87 percent of those sentenced to die. In the end Lincoln reprieved 265 of the condemned men. The remain 38 were eventually hanged. This even was both the largest mass hanging in American history and also the largest mass pardon of my people sentenced to death.”). See also Mary Kelly Tate, Temporal Arbitrariness: A Back to the Future Look at a Twenty-Five-Year-Old Death Penalty Trial, SSRN (2015)(“This essay grapples with a previously unexamined feature of the death penalty: temporal arbitrariness. How does the circumstance of time affect capital defendants? What might this mean for the stability of our notions of justice? I [Mary Kelly Tate] explore these questions using a 25-year-old death penalty trial as a case study, examining the procedural and factual highlights of the case and situating it in its temporal milieu. I then explore how the roles of doctrine, policy, and cultural attitudes would dramatically alter the nature and probable outcome of the case today, illustrating how temporal arbitrariness further exposes the death penalty’s unsteady administration and indeed, its crumbling legitimacy.”).
8 See, e.g., First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic (UCLA Law); Robert S. Chang, The Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality and Its Vision for Social Change, 7 Stan. J. C.R. & C.L. 197(2011) (“I [Robert S. Chang] present the Korematsu Center’s approach to its work that integrates research, advocacy, and education. I discuss two of our major initiatives, our Civil Rights Amicus Project and our efforts to address racial disproportionality in Washington State’s criminal justice system. Both of these efforts show how our integrated approach that combines research, advocacy, and education can provide a model for how a center located within a law school can help to achieve durable social change.” Id. at 200.).
9 Indeed, the role of amicus can approach the status of parties, third party intervenors, public advocates, class actions, compulsory joinder or consolidation, private attorney generals, jus tertii, special masters and conceptually resemble standby counsel, second prosecutors, trustees, guardians, magistrates and law clerks, without the encumbrances of procedural or jurisdictional boundaries. See Lowman, supra note 6, at 1246 (“[S]ome federal district courts have permitted the amicus to actively engage in oral argument, to introduce physical evidence, to examine witnesses, to conduct discovery, and even to enforce previous court decisions upon party-participants to the litigation.” Id.).
10 There is the subtle problem of amicus facts entering into the content of judicial opinions without sufficient screening, a collateral consequence of “cut-and-paste” opinion writing and the vagaries of independent judicial research. See Pamela Corley et al., Influence of Amicus Curiae Briefs on U.S. Supreme Court Opinion Content, SSRN (2013)(methodology included use of “plagiarism detection software”); Matthew Laroche, High Court Studies: Is the New York State Court of Appeals Still “Friendless?” An Empirical Study of Amicus Curiae Participation, 72 Alb. L. Rev. 701 (2009)(citation study). See generally Ken Strutin, Case Law in an Era of Heightened Scrutiny, LLRX, Aug. 18, 2014 (citing cut-and-paste studies). Thus, overreliance on amici without sufficient vetting of their facts and hidden biases might dilute impartial fact-finding. See Allison Orr Larsen, Trouble with Amicus Facts, 100 Va. L. Rev. 1757 (2014).
11 See Brian P. Goldman, Should the Supreme Court Stop Inviting Amici Curiae to Defend Abandoned Lower Court Decisions?, 63 Stan. L. Rev. 907 (2011).
12 See Larsen, supra note 10.
13 See, e.g., R. Sup. Ct. U.S. Rule 37; Fed. R. App. Proc. Rule 29.
14 See Bruce A. Green, Gideon’s Amici: Why Do Prosecutors So Rarely Defend the Rights of the Accused?, 122 Yale L.J. 2336 (2013)(“In Gideon v. Wainwright, [372 U.S. 335 (1963)] twenty-three state attorneys general, led by Walter F. Mondale and Edward McCormack, joined an amicus brief on the side of the criminal accused, urging the Supreme Court to recognize indigent defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to appointed counsel in felony cases. This was a unique occurrence.”).
15 See, e.g., Davis v. United States Sentencing Comm’n, 716 F.3d 660 (D.C.C. 2013) (Pro se prisoner, appellant Brian A. Davis, challenged federal sentencing laws on grounds of equal protection. To explore and further explain the habeas-channeling rule raised by his motion for declaratory relief, the Circuit court appointed amicus counsel. “Davis appealed, and we appointed an amicus to brief and argue the case on his behalf.” Id. at 662. The dismissal of his complaint was reversed.). See generally Brian P. Goldman, Should the Supreme Court Stop Inviting Amici Curiae to Defend Abandoned Lower Court Decisions?, 63 Stan. L. Rev. 907 (2011).
16 See generally Ken Strutin, Post-Conviction Representation, Pro Se Practice and Access to the Courts, LLRX, Feb. 19, 2013.
17 See Ken Strutin, Realignment of Incarcerative Punishment: Sentencing Reform and the Conditions of Confinement, 38 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 1313 (2012); Ken Strutin, Justice Without ‘Bounds’ and the Poverties of Confinement, N.Y.L.J., Sept. 23, 2014, at 5. Indeed, some commentators have suggested that attorneys would benefit from consulting with super-litigants, akin to amici, based on their expertise in knowledge, formats and forums. See, e.g., William C. Kinder, Putting Justice Kagan’s “Hobbyhorse” Through Its Paces: An Examination of the Criminal Defense Advocacy Gap at the U.S. Supreme Court, 103 Geo. L.J. 228 (2014). See also Tyler J. Buller, The Effect of Counsel on Criminal Appeals, SSRN (2015). Notably, a prisoner’s ability to express their position and concerns is circumvented by the limited right to file a supplemental pro se brief and sometimes the opposition of an Anders brief [Anders v. California, 386 U.S. 738 (1967)] filed by appellate counsel, which can indirectly reduce an imprisoned petitioner to an amicus in their own case. See generally Eric B. Schmidt, A Call to Abandon the Anders Procedure that Allows Appointed Appellate Criminal Counsel to Withdraw on Grounds of Frivolity, 47 Gonz. L. Rev. 199 (2011); Martha C. Warner, Anders in the Fifty States: Some Appellants’ Equal Protection Is More Equal than Others’, 23 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 625 (1995-1996).
18 See Jeffrey C. Dobbins, New Evidence on Appeal, 96 Minn. L. Rev. 2016, 2052 (2012); Ellie Margolis, Beyond Brandeis: Exploring the Uses of. Non-Legal Materials in Appellate Briefs, 34 U.S. F. L. Rev. 197. (2000); Ellie Margolis, Teaching Students to Make Effective Policy Arguments in Appellate Briefs, Perspectives, Winter 2001, at 73. In addition, clemency clinics offer an example of how such a program might take shape. See Ken Strutin, Clemency Clinics: A Blueprint for Justice, LLRX.com, June 17, 2012. See generally Ken Strutin, Clemency: A Remedy in Need of Revival, N.Y.L.J., Aug. 21, 2013, at 4; Ken Strutin, Clemency: Justice to the Nth Degree, N.Y.L.J., Apr. 20, 2012, at 4. What is more, such a clinic would open the door to addressing systemic issues such as forensic evidence reform. See Ken Strutin, Forensic Clemency: Using Science to Bend the Arc of Justice, N.Y.L.J., Sept. 25, 2012, at 5. And they would offer the opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration. See, e.g., Ken Strutin, Allied Learning Experiences: Multidisciplinary Internship Collaborations, AALS Sect. on Teach. Methods Newsl., Winter 2011-2012, at 21. See generally Robert R. Kuehn and David A. Santacroce, 2013-14 Survey of Applied Legal Education (Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education 2015).
19 See generally Ken Strutin, Post-Conviction Justice in the Information Age: The Trial Never Ends, N.Y.L.J., Nov. 19, 2013, at 5. An example of amicus interest in prisoner cases is the filings in the long running litigation that resulted in the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Plata, 131 S.Ct. 1910 (2011). See Schwarzenegger, Gov. of California v. Plata, Docket No. 09-1233 (ABA Sup. Ct. Preview); Plata v. Brown / Coleman v. Brown Three-Judge Court (Civ. Rts. Litigation Clearinghouse). On the other hand, it is sometimes necessary for a potential amicus to join such litigation as a full-fledged party in interest. See, e.g., CRIPA Investigation of the New York City Department of Correction Jails on Rikers Island (U.S. Atty S.D.N.Y. Aug. 4, 2014)(“The Department [of Correction] is currently the subject of a class action lawsuit brought by current and former inmates at Rikers alleging system-wide, unconstitutional use of force by staff against inmates. See Nunez v. City of New York, 11 Civ.5845 (LTS) (THK).” Id. at 3 n. 5); Benjamin Weiser et al., U.S. Plans Suit Over Conditions at Rikers Island, N.Y. Times, Dec. 19, 2014, at A1 (“Instead of filing a separate lawsuit against the city, Mr. Bharara’s office asked a federal judge in Manhattan on Thursday for permission to join in an existing class-action lawsuit over brutality at Rikers, Nunez v. City of New York, that had been filed by the Legal Aid Society and two private law firms, Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady and Ropes & Gray. In contrast to Mr. Bharara’s investigation of the treatment of adolescent inmates, the Nunez case focuses on all Rikers inmates, regardless of age.”); John F. Wagner Jr., Validity, Construction, Application, and Effect of Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act [CRIPA], 42 U.S.C.A. SS 1997-1997j, 93 A.L.R. Fed. 706 (1989).
20 The legislatures’ role in amicus work, an extension of interpellation, is beyond the scope of this article. See, e.g., Judithanne Scourfield McLauchlan, Congressional Participation as Amicus Curiae before the U.S. Supreme Court (American Legal Institutions 2005).
21 This is only a select list of resources. Amicus briefs can be found on official court sites, on the web pages of the parties themselves, and in the brief banks of law libraries, academic centers and legal publishers.
22 This site includes a very useful guide for constructing web searches and an insightful observation about the limits of amicus collections: “NOTE:—Experience has shown that maintaining a collection of links to amicus curiae briefs is impractical (for a small staff, at least). Briefs are numerous and transitory on the internet, and finding new links is inordinately time-consuming. Therefore, while the links on this page will be preserved for as long as they are viable, new links will not be added.” And with the advent of the Internet, electronic court filing, and legal databases, the search for amicus briefs can go well beyond the collections of courts, parties and law libraries.

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